On the Call of Cthulhu

First off, my collection from Penguin Classics contains the following stories:

1. Dagon
2. The Statement of Randolph Carter
3. Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family
4. Celephaïs
5. Nyarlathotep
6. The Picture in the House
7. The Outsider
8. Herbert West - Reanimator
9. The Rats in the Walls
10. The Festival
11. He
12. Cool Air
13. The Call of Cthulhu
14. The Color Out of Space
15. The Whisperer in Darkness
16. The Shadow Over Innsmouth
17. The Haunter of the Dark

Before reading this collection, I didn’t know anything about Lovecraft other than that he was “the Cthulhu guy.” I know that some far-right activists love his aesthetic, but that’s the end of my knowledge of him. Now that I’ve read some of his work, and I’m glad that I did, I’ve found that my opinion of his writing is really mixed. On one hand, some of the stories are boring or just outright bad. I did not care at all for He or The Haunter of the Dark, for example. On this point, a lot of his stories are simply redundant, and some of them feel like you’re reading the same thing over and over.

On the other hand, some of his stories are absolutely fantastic. I was gripped throughout my entire reading of the Shadow Over Innsmouth, and I think this story alone should bring him fame. I also really appreciated the Whisperer in the Darkness, the Festival, and the Rats in the Walls. To me, the real power of Lovecraft is not so much in his plots (which are quite dull), but the atmosphere he evokes. In the footnotes of my edition, it often says that ideas for these stories came to Lovecraft in dreams, and it makes a lot of sense. In spite of horrifying elements, the beauty of his writing is in the grotesque-ness that can only really be found in our dreams. I almost want to classify his work with Surrealist artists and writers, who were active at the same time he was, but who he almost certainly would have rejected.

However, the Lovecraft’s dream world has a serious weakness: So often, he falls back on tropes like “X was so ugly that it is impossible to describe.” This does not help paint an image in my mind, and I’m sure that it doesn’t in the minds of others’ either. Because of this lack of description of the seemingly most grotesque elements, Lovecraft’s stories generally become rather forgettable. Take another oft-quoted line, for instance: “He dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces—surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He had said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours.”

To me, this doesn’t mean anything. Perhaps mathematicians or physicists or those better versed in STEM understand this better than I do, but I don’t know what it means for something to be “non-Euclidean.”

Lovecraft’s themes, however, are truly fascinating. Throughout this work, you can find his views on the importance of inheritance (social, biological, and cultural) as well as his sense that science is a powerful discipline that can truly become lethal (Herbert West - Reanimator reminded me a lot of both Frankenstein and Jekyll & Hyde). As his scientific theme is commonly discussed elsewhere, I’d like to focus a bit instead on his conception of inheritance. To Lovecraft, we inherit the sins of our ancestors. No matter what, we are held responsible for what those before us did. This shows most brightly in both the Shadow Over Innsmouth and Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn in his family. These two stories, perhaps unsurprisingly, are also where Lovecraft is most racially prejudiced. In short, both of these stories deal with miscegenation between species: Arthur Jermyn’s ancestor married a “white ape” from the Congo, and the protagonist of Innsmouth’s ancestor was wed to a fish-god-thing. As part of the deal between the Gods (presumably Dagon) and the people of Innsmouth, all children born to unions like this are destined to be born fully human, but become fish-like as they age (although, they are immortal except for violent death). The protagonist of Innsmouth’s uncle responded to this revelation by shooting himself, whereas the protagonist seems to embrace his fate. When discussing these themes, Lovecraft is not subtle in the implication that he offers for human races. Frankly, this is reprehensible, even for his time.

Lastly, Lovecraft’s pantheon is a really interesting one—his pantheon, indeed, is why he is so popular today. With gods like Dagon, Nyarlathotep, and Cthulhu and places like R’yleh and Celephaïs, who can help but be fascinated? Further, one refrain echoes throughout a number of Lovecraft’s stories: “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn” [“In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”]. This is the stuff at nightmares, especially as the view of Cthulhu offers us awe. Nyarlathotep also seems infinitely powerful, especially in what seems to be his role in the Whisperer in Darkness. Yet, we don’t get the sense that the gods are evil, although they inspire us with awe and dread. They don’t seem good either. Rather, they seem to be much like older mythologies depicted gods—the Greeks, the Romans, the Sumerians and Babylonians—self-interested and neutral to the affairs of humans. However, Lovecraft’s gods seem much more powerful than the Greek or Roman pantheons could ever be.