I just read The Call of Cthulhu by HP Lovecraft. I’ve read a number of his stories, and find them compelling. This is my first meeting with Cthulhu. I’m a bit dissatisfied.
Of course I have absorbed some understanding of Cthulhu because the, er, character has cultural currency. The name resonates. Lovecraft’s mythos seems rather mushy when you look but carries weight for some. I mean people ‘take it seriously’, beyond the parameters of storytelling. I guess one could.
The story shows Lovecraft’s ability to create mood. The narration edges towards breathless. It runs on a similar hurried foreboding as some of the Sherlock Holmes tales display. Both writers were writing for lucre. This story, however, disappoints. It did not satisfy my anticipation.
The story suffers because of POV. The narrator isn’t really involved in the action, he merely pieces the story together from the narratives of other characters. This drives immediacy from the story. Poe’s story Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym has the benefit of the narrator being involved in the action. In the almost apocalyptic ending, the narrator essentially disappears in the frantic rush of the (unfinished?) conclusion. It is as if the writer could not sustain his distance from the narrative.
Here, the narrator recites the stories of other people. He even loses interest in Cthulhu after a chapter ends. That was weird.
For all the mythos of the Ancient Ones, their arrival on Earth from space reminded me no more than of cheesy 50s horror and sci-fi movies. I mean cheap costumes and poor special effects. And it’s not like that must kill the story. The Thing (50s version) was a vegetable from space—a murdering carrot—and convincingly scary.
Cthulhu may look like a kraken, which struck me as unimaginative, but the threat offered seems more about strangeness and foreignness. I glean no point to the malevolence beyond the usual Monster versus Us. And monster is just Other. The Ancient Ones are illegal immigrants on a cosmic scale, screwing with our paradise. Cthulhu personifies that terrible One that ain’t us. Lovecraft’s sense of the world’s decay sets on that foundation. Which may sound familiar because the GOP has been feverishly pressing that button. You have probably noticed.
So I do admire Lovecraft’s narrative gift and the relentlessness of his vision. In the end, tho, he seems more fussy than visionary in this story. He was a racist Bozo, you know. That’s inevitably part of the judgment.
