AMF Book Club #1 - The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft

[ordinaryperson]

"One of the feature stories of the Cthulhu Mythos, H.P. Lovecraft's 'the Call of Cthulhu' is a harrowing tale of the weakness of the human mind when confronted by powers and intelligences from beyond our world." - GoodReads

This is the official discussion thread for our first book club selection The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft. Post anything you want in related to discussion of this short story in this thread.

Since this selection is a short story, we'll be voting for a full length novel in another thread.

[mileswide]

For anyone without the book (like me), the full story can be found here: https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/te ... on/cc.aspx

[Schüttelbirne]

Some loose thoughts (don't have time and/or inspiration for a full coherent review):
I've never read anything by Lovecraft before, but I was aware of the existence of the "Ctulhu Mythos" and its fame. So going into the story, I was interested to see how a single text could lay the foundation for something resembling a "modern mythology". The things I heard about it and the fact that the entire thing has a lot of followers contributed to my expectation of finding something that could accurately be described as horror.
The end result is horror, of course, but in the sense of the literary genre, not in the sense of the feeling it invokes in me. Admittedly, there are very few things I actively find creepy (King's It being one of them), but what Call of Ctulhu left me with was a pretty standard romantic tale with a monster.
Romantic some may ask (and rightfully so, because that term is one of the weirdest terms to use when talking about literature). It does not refer to any sort of love story (although there must surely be some Japanese fanfiction about Ctulhu's love life), but rather to Romanticism, which tried, among other things, to look into the depths of the human psyche and towards things outside of human perception. I've only read one story by Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and I found myself reminded of it when reading Lovecraft's story (even if Lovecraft is not part of Romanticism, obviously).
There's a large amount of strange creatures found in literature. But the description of Ctulhu is actually one of the weirdest. Aside from the name which is horrifying in its atonality, the look of it is described as absolutely horrifying and I can understand that from the description, but then I googled illustrations of it and... it looks pretty ridiculous. Especially Lovecraft's own illustration:

Source: Wikipedia

It looks like a bearded, overweight angel on the toilet, when it should look pretty scary. I actually expected to be at least a little bit scared but for most of the story I wasn't. That doesn't mean it's a bad story, it's not, but I feel like the "horror" part of Lovecraft is maybe a bit overused in public perception (or maybe that's just me, I don't know).
There's this paragraph where Lovecraft uses a certain word that's been used since at least the 12th century to refer to pogroms and mass murder refering to the goals of the cultists:

The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.

I really don't know what to make of this. One the one hand it's probably my favorite part of the story, where the entire cult around Ctulhu actually takes shape, but it being described in these terms also doesn't seem entirely good to me, if that makes sense.
That whole part about the cult sacrificing people for their beliefs is actually far more terrifying than the arrival of the actual monster, which makes the finale seem rather anticlimactic.

Maybe I'll write some more after I've thought about it more. Definitely curious to see other people's opinions.

[styrofoamboots]

First off, I definitely agree with most of what Schüttelbirne had to say.

I guess I'll start with what I saw as the negatives. The story's structure was not the most engaging– it seemed like Lovecraft had a cool idea but didn't know how to convey it in a natural way– and the prose was kind of quaint to read even though it was written under 100 years ago. The ending scene was also somewhat bathetic after the huge buildup. More significantly, what I'd heard about Lovecraft being a racist (even for his time: he called lynchings "ingenious" and necessary in the mid-30s) was pretty clear to see in the story. The fact that all of the cultures other than his own happen to be populated by mentally ill demon-worshippers gives off a pretty strong white nationalist vibe.

With that stuff out of the way... the positives. Lovecraft does clearly have a good grasp on how to use imagery to build the story and make Cthulhu seem more fiendish than the proto-Flying Spaghetti Monster image from the sketch above. Also, the rhyming couplet

“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”

sounds extremely cool, and the section prior to it seems like the most interesting part of the story. On the whole, not bad.

My rating: 3/5 (I liked it overall)

[ordinaryperson]

I finally got around to reading the story, I have never read Lovecraft before. What stood out the most to me, was how influenced by esoteric works that were published around the 1920s. I have a small interest in mysticism that I'm trying to expand more of and the first part of this short story reminded me of some of those works, particularly Manly P. Hall's The Secret Teachings of All Ages. Looking at the Wikipedia for The Call of Cthulhu mentions a book on Atlantis as an influence that think I may listened to before. The other, more negative, thing that stood out to me was the rampant racism throughout the story. I knew Lovecraft was a racist (because of his cat) but I wasn't expecting it to be all over one of his best known works.

As for the horror of this story I feel comes from portraying Cthulhu as something that humans can't comprehend. Something so other worldly that we would die from shock just by seeing it. This effect has been watered down by time, as most people know what Cthulhu looks like and other worldly creatures are more common in our popular culture than they were in the 1920s. The only modern day example that gives off this feeling would be Giygas from the 1994 video game EarthBound.

[whuntva]

Good thing our first tale is in the public domain. And one of my favorites.

I am a child of Lovecraft. Having grown up with his work and having a fascination with psychological horror. Though I always found it interesting his body of work is the "Cthulhu Mythos" despite Cthulhu himself appearing in exactly ONE of these stories.

Nonetheless, this is a great mystery, a compelling read, and has some great ideas with the design of his characters. While some of the verbose prose can be a struggle to get through, I was able to get into it. It was my first Lovecraft after all, so I had to start somewhere.

It's not my favorite of his (Shadow over Innsmouth grabbed me more), but it is a good primer for the mythos and quite shocking if you are reading it fresh.

[mileswide]

In the opening passages of The Call, I actually liked that Lovecraft is florid in his use of adjectives; it all creates a world that is distinct and clearly imaginable, though how much of that can be accounted to Cthulhu's passage into collective memory is up for debate.

Towards the end as we are presented with yet another depiction of the beast, his wordiness (ironic coming from me) comes across as an increasingly desperate attempt to convince us of its supposedly "indescribable abnormality", adding to the anticlimactic nature of the ending as noted by others, which also isn't helped by the narrative device (the protagonist is of course never in danger).

For all the extraneous detail at times, there is a complete acceptance by all observers in the story of the veracity of the Cult that would be alien in any modern fiction of this type, be it horror, fantasy, sci-fi. There are no sceptics here and no one appears to make any effort to find a logical cause for the deaths attributed to the title character. Lovecraft only talks of characters having doubts steeped in rationalism for them to be dispelled within the same sentence.

When it comes to the author's racism, it seems not only to inform, but to partially motivate, the story- from my admittedly limited exposure to the genre in literature and in film, the fear of the Other is the leitmotif running through all horror but rarely is it applied to demonise real people as it is here. In this respect, Lovecraft is as successful in creating discomfit today as he would've been for readers of the time, just not in the way he intended. That said, there is enough substance in the narrative aside from his worldview to overlook this perspective and take the tale on its own terms.

While The Call lacks the same power to scare us as it surely once did, it kept me intrigued throughout, even if I can no more than recognise the influence of its eldritch abomination. Like styrofoamboots, I'm giving it a 6/10 (I just prefer the 10 point scale).

[DaveC]

Human beings have always been overconfident of our understanding of the world around us. Each generation looks with varying levels of distain at the clearly misguided beliefs of our ancestors whilst failing to recognise that future generations will inevitably find that we have our own unacknowledged faults. Meanwhile we confidently predict the future and worry about what we imagine may happen while history tries to tell us that we really don’t know what will happen. The Vogons might destroy the earth and all life on it tomorrow to make way for their hyperspace express route despite all our unhappy pessimistic forecasts or the good news might outweigh the bad news even if our newspapers don’t print it (as has been the case over the last 60 years).

Lovecraft wants us to broaden our perspective, to be less sure and less complacent. Unfortunately there are problems: the overuse of adjectives, sometimes repetitively; his own unquestioned assumptions, particularly regarding race; the fact that his story is ultimately not disturbing – the Vogons played straight would be more plausible and more terrifying.

I didn’t particularly enjoy this so 4/10.