Lovecraftian Horror
October 29, 2010 - Books
I've got book club tonight, and the book my friend Mark chose for Halloween is The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. I've read plenty of Lovecraft before, and my favorite story of his is The Horror at Martin's Beach, but there were a number of his more popular works with which I'd been previously unacquainted.
The odd thing is that I cannot recall whether I'd previously read Call of Cthulhu, Lovecraft's most popular tale. The story and the characters therein are appallingly difficult to follow, as the tale itself tells of a man recounting a tale of someone telling a tale. Its horrifically recursive nature causes the facts of the story to swim and fade from my memory like phantoms. But should your constitution prove a match to the task, the 2005 silent film adaptation of Lovecraft's most famous tale is available for streaming on Netflix.
I also read and enjoyed for the first time The Colour out of Space, The Shadow over Innsmouth, Dagon, Nyarlathotep, and The Picture in the House, and re-read The Rats in the Walls. I intend in the future to read Pickman's Model, At the Mountain of Madness, The Dunwich Horror, and Herbert West: Reanimator. These stories give me new appreciation for the video games Eternal Darkness and Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, the latter of which was actually based on The Shadow over Innsmouth.
H.P. Lovecraft can be a difficult author to read. He uses intentionally archaic language, and I suppose this is a large part of what makes his work "gothic horror". Furthermore, all his characters seem to faint or go insane at the drop of a hat. See a hideous monster? Go insane. Catch a glimpse of an inhuman hand? Go insane. Cockroach scuttles across the floor? Go insane.
But all in all, I do enjoy Lovecraft. The odd thing is that in a few months, I'll forget most of his stories, and when I re-read them next, it will be as if I'm reading them for the first time. Let me leave you with one of my favorite paragraphs of Lovecraft's, from Celephais.
Screamingly sentient, dumbly delirious, only the gods that were can tell. A sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead nations with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low. Beyond the nations vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen columns of unsanctifled temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness.