Reviews - Los mitos de Cthulhu

919 reviews for:

After reading "The Colour Out of Space" and being enticed by several other friends to read more Lovecraft AND staring at an untouched copy of some random collection of his shorts I had picked up at a used book store, I resolved to slake my dreadful curiosity and read this one (recommended and borrowed from a friend).

I liked them for the most part. Predictably, the shadow over innsmouth and the call of Cthulhu were my favorites, but I also liked the whisperer in darkness just because it had so many weird elements in it and the haunter of the dark because it was nice and contained.

I wasn't a huge fan of the "family degeneration" stories or the rats in the walls (Oh the rats drive the dude crazy, whoa ho!). I'm so-so about the witch house one.

Otherwise I liked the style Lovecraft went for, but towards the end I did find my interest waning. I think reading them all in succession was a mistake because they have such obvious similarities.

Overall worth reading, I think. (Oh and I skipped the one about Charles Dexter Ward)

the_witch_queen_of_tsamra's review against another edition

5.0

The writing was purple but the stories were imaginative and unputdownable. Lovecraft's Racism aside his mythos is utterly fascinating and you owe it to yourself to read his work at least once in your life.

teo_lex's review against another edition

1.0

dark

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

ahunt2494's review against another edition

3.5

adventurous challenging dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

illiteratewench's review against another edition

3.75

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories by H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) is a collection of 18 short stories written by Lovecraft and edited by S. T. Joshi. The stories range in length from very short (6 pages) to novella lengths (68 pages). 5 of these stories were assigned in my Gothic Literature class but I’ve gone on to finish the collection as for my final essay I wrote about Lovecraft’s use of the past and how it built on the foundations laid in the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, with a focus on eugenics. But firstly let’s look at how Lovecraft’s racism and xenophobia bleeds into his work. To me there is no Barthes-death-of-the-authoring Lovecraft, no way of saying that you can separate him from his fiction, despite its fantastical nature when you look between the lines and read them how I have.

Lovecraft is from a long line of New Englanders and grew up in Providence, Rhode Island. In his letters and diary entries, he expressed the sentiment of feel like he belonged to or in an earlier time like the 18th century. He’s an antiquitarian and often uses obscure words and archaic spellings in his work. For example, he uses “shew” as show, “connexion” and “reflexion” for connection and reflection respectively, “Esquimeaux” for eskimo (referring to Inuit peoples), “sartain” for certain, and he adds the umlaut in words like coërce and coöperate. All this is to create and bask in an Old World feel, and we have to ask what is it about the past that he romanticizes so much? And also, what is it about his present that makes him feel a disconnect to it?

To put it bluntly, I think that Lovecraft is romanticizing the white supremacy of the past in England and early American colonization, and he feels threatened by the changes happening in his present. For example, America is becoming more diverse as immigration rises: “Between 1900 and 1915, more than 15 million immigrants arrived in the United States. That was about equal to the number of immigrants who had arrived in the previous 40 years combined. In 1910, three-fourths of New York City's population were either immigrants or first generation Americans (i.e. the sons and daughters of immigrants).” (Source: Library of Congress).

In his letters, Lovecraft shows a great dislike of the Irish immigrants coming to Providence. It’s important to note here that the Irish, having been colonized by the British, were seen as a lesser class and for a time, not even seen as white. Lovecraft’s Anglo-Saxon New England is being threatened by the influx of immigrants, and he displays lots of xenophobia and nativism, a political ideology around protecting the interests of native-born and established inhabitants over immigrants. There is then, of course, inherent hypocrisy in his Nativism as America is built on the invasion and genocide of Native Americans, as well as the displacement and enslavement of African Americans during the Atlantic Slave Trade and further institutional racism and disadvantages even now. His sense of ownership of and entitlement to America leads to him becoming threatened by change and defensive of White America. He likely feels troubled that his dominant role and power as a white man is being challenged.

The short story He is only 10 pages but showcases a few of things I’ve talked about. Lovecraft, through his unnamed first-person narrator, mourns that New York lacks the Old World wonder of European cities:

“the throngs of people that seethed through the flume-like streets were squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eyes, shrewd strangers without dreams and without kinship to the scenes about them, who could never mean aught to a blue-eyed man of the old folk, with the love of fair green lanes and white New England village steeples in his heart. // So instead of the poems I had hoped for, there came only a shuddering blankness and ineffable loneliness; and I saw at last a fearful truth which no one had ever dared to breathe before—the unwhisperable secret of secrets—the fact that this city of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life.”

Then, he meets a mysterious man, the titular He as we never learn his name.

“[His face] was a noble, even a handsome, elderly countenance; and bore the marks of a lineage and refinement unusual for the age and place.”

The mysterious man takes the protagonist underground and tells us a story about a squire from 1768 who learnt mystical secrets from Native Americans before slaughtering them. Our storyteller is that very same squire, having learnt dark magic and necromancy to stay alive, until the souls of the murdered Native Americans come for revenge. Through He we can see that Lovecraft may be aware of the injustices America is built on, ones he benefits from as a white man, and he is anxious about how America’s dark past can threaten his present life particularly in times of radical political change .

Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family, The Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Rats in the Walls were short stories where I noticed an emphasis on genes and bloodlines, so I was very validated when I found that Fiona Price also examines them in her 2016 article “Prosthetic Pasts: H. P. Lovecraft and the Weird Politics of History” (highly recommended reading). All three have characters digging into their family histories and uncovering some unsavoury things. But the past is not just the past, it directly affects them in the present as they inherit certain traits from their ancestors. The present day characters are helpless against the sins of their ancestors, and either perish (Arthur Jermyn), become monstrous (Innsmouth, Rats) and/or are institutionalised (Rats). This is really problematic when you consider Lovecraft’s own eugenicist views. From Wikipedia: “Eugenics is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have attempted to alter human gene pools by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or promoting those judged to be superior.” Lovecraft creates horror from the powerlessness of his characters when they uncover the flaws in their own genetics. It suggests that our genetics determine who we are and that therefore some family backgrounds and breeding are good while others are undesirable, and this quickly becomes racial.

Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family has an unnamed narrator telling us that Arthur Jermyn burned himself alive after unboxing an object from Africa. Arthur’s great-great-great-grandfather Wade was an explorer who explored the Congo region. Wade’s wife was a mystery and he had claimed she was the daughter of a Portuguese trader he met in Africa. Comparing the family portraits of the Jermyn family before and after Wade, there’s notable something off about them now. Arthur becomes interested in Wade’s findings of a white tribe of people in Africa who worshipped the statue of a white Ape-goddess until it was stolen by a another tribe. He eventually gets the statue sent to him, and upon seeing it he sets himself on fire. Why? Because he sees himself in the mummified ape and realizes he is descended from this monkey. The myths we’re told suddenly make sense as we realize Wade’s mysterious wife was actually this monkey.

“The ape-princess, it was said, became the consort of a great white god who had come out of the West. For a long time they had reigned over the city together, but when they had a son all three went away. Later the god and the princess had returned, and upon the death of the princess her divine husband had mummified the body and enshrined it in a vast house of stone, where it was worshipped. Then he had departed alone. The legend here seemed to present three variants. According to one story nothing further happened save that the stuffed goddess became a symbol of supremacy for whatever tribe might possess it. It was for this reason that the N’bangus carried it off. A second story told of the god’s return and death at the feet of his enshrined wife. A third told of the return of the son, grown to manhood—or apehood or godhood, as the case might be—yet unconscious of his identity. Surely the imaginative blacks had made the most of whatever events might lie behind the extravagant legendry.”

Earlier we were told that Arthur’s great-grandfather Robert was an anthropologist who also made expeditions to Africa to look into the white tribe and later became suicidal, likely because he came to the same realization that Arthur does. The fact that, while no one can put their finger on it, something is just off in the Jermyn family after Wade takes his wife points to the idea that she tainted their bloodline. The fact that she’s a literal monkey from Congo should speak for itself. If we substitute in the African woman she is obviously a stand-in for, Arthur Jermyn essentially kills himself after finding out he is mixed race. The monkey and animal imagery are, to me, so clearly reminiscent of the way Europeans have treated and dehumanized African peoples. In the early 19th century (and much much earlier), British men who defended slavery pulled out all sorts of pseudo-science rhetoric to defend their white supremacy as something natural due to biology, that the white body was more refined than the black body. Or they appeal to the idea that Europe was more technologically and socially advanced than Africa, thus making their colonization a good thing, without dissection that the European lens will always judge itself as the greatest under its own criteria. For the Guardian, David Olusoga writes:

“Of the many ideas and theories that seeped out of the debates around slavery, the one that still casts a shadow over the image of Africa is the notion that tyranny, war and chaos are the natural condition of the continent. Long asserted that Africa was so barbaric and chaotic that Africans were better off as slaves, since slavery saved them from the worse fates that, he claimed, would otherwise have consumed them in their homelands. // That idea was generated by men who were attempting to justify their trade in human beings, yet today there are still well-meaning, progressive-minded people, in Europe and in Africa, who speculate as to whether democracy, the rule of law and human rights can ever properly take root in Africa. Such views are testimony to the power of history and the potency of the race idea.” While we are seeing efforts to decolonialize curriculums and how we view knowledge, there is still an incredible amount of misunderstanding of older civilizations and first nations peoples as being “behind” when colonization and its violence continues to damage these communities. This has many effects but in education we see the Deficit Discourse discussion, where a teacher may see a struggling student of a certain background, and believe in negative stereotypes, and will then put less effort into that student, and thus that marginalized group continues to fall behind and receive less opportunities. Lovecraft’s white monkey goddess from Congo and the tribes that surrounded her is an incredibly stereotyped and racist depiction of Congo and the African continent, and one that suggest that Africans are closer to animal than Europeans are (again, a very real sentiment held by racists).

Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn also shows the belief that once the white gene pool has been polluted, it will always be tainted. While Wade is five generations apart from Arthur, and the rest of his family have (presumably) been white, there is just something about him that once you know, you cannot unsee. Once Arthur discovers the truth, he goes mad because the truth is unbearable. To someone interested in preserving white purity, his suicide would even be noble.

A similar theme of genetic tainting is clear in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, which tells the tale of a young university student exploring New England and tracing his family history along the coast of Massachusetts. He arrives in Newburyport on the way to his destination, Arkham, where his grandmother hailed from. Between these two towns in the titular Innsmouth. The narrator becomes curious about this town, despite many warnings against it. By the end of the story, we learn that Captain Marsh of Innsmouth had sailed to the Caroline Islands (Pacific Ocean, north of New Guinea) where he met a Kanak tribe in Pohnpei who worshipped the Deep Ones, a race of immortal fish-like humanoids. He traded with this tribe until they were killed by their neighbors, who were horrified to discover what was going on. Needing to be attached to a human settlement to breed and take human sacrifices, the Deep Ones went with Captain Marsh back to Innsmouth and now the town exists for them. The Deep Ones can breed with humans and their offsprings will first appear as normal humans, but slowly they will always transform into Deep Ones as well and join their people living in the ocean. The main character survives a harrowing time in the town, eventually able to escape to Arkham. Unfortunately he cannot leave Innsmouth behind as he soon discovers that his grandmother was the daughter of Captain Marsh (The Deep Ones forced Marsh to breed with them) and married off to an Arkham man, meaning that he too is a Deep One despite the three generations between them. No matter how “normal” (white) he was before, now that he knows the truth he is slowly starting to turn fishy. Through his internal dialogue, we see his thoughts completely transform as he does. He accepts his fate as a Deep One but it feels as though he has lost himself to a sort of mind control and mental change that comes with his transformation. The story tells us that it doesn’t matter who you are, if you are a Deep One your genes will take over and you will soon join your people below the see, waiting for the return of Cthulhu and the destruction of mankind. Combined with the prejudiced language (“South Sea cannibals and Guinea savages”) and imagery of animals used (“the bestial abnormality of their faces and the dog-like sub-humanness of their crouching gait. One man moved in a positively simian way”), the prejudice against the people of Innsmouth held by people of the surrounding towns can clearly be read as racist and nativistic.

Monsters in the Cthulhu mythos are both of our world and not – while they come from the stars, they have been on this earth longer than humanity. The existence of human civilization is, and will be, but a blip in their immortal lives. It may seem difficult to connect their monstrous other with race, but, with Lovecraft’s own anti-immigration sentiments in mind, let’s look at how the text and it’s characters talk about the Deep Ones and their time in the Caroline Islands. While this is not their true origin, it was their home before they arrived in Innsmouth, and these monsters are often found in “exotic” locations.

A ticket agent in Newburyport says the following:

“His mother seems to’ve ben some kind of foreigner—they say a South Sea islander… I s’pose you know—though I can see you’re a Westerner by your talk—what a lot our New England ships used to have to do with queer ports in Africa, Asia, the South Seas, and everywhere else, and what queer kinds of people they sometimes brought back with ’em… it’s pretty clear that old Captain Marsh must have brought home some odd specimens.”

This characters attitudes are pretty clearly xenophobic, and in Lovecraft’s world he is right to be afraid. Captain Marsh’s working relationship with the Kanak tribe and his attempts to get closer to them is what draws the Deep One’s attention. He brings home jewelry from the tribe, jewelry that we are told is “strange” and is a key cultural marker of Innsmouth. “One of the Marsh daughters was a repellent, reptilian-looking woman who wore an excess of weird jewellery clearly of the same exotic tradition as that to which the strange tiara belonged.” Eventually, his trade leads to the Deep Ones following him home and taking over the town. His contact with the racial other has brought the monstrous other to American shores. Additionally, these foreign invaders are destroying America – they’ve completely taken over Innsmouth and are lying dormant, immortal under the ocean waves, waiting for their time.

Like Arthur Jermyn, once the narrator finds the truth, he cannot unsee what “the Innsmouth look” in himself and his family. The inhabitants of Innsmouth are described as having "queer narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, stary eyes" and smelling of fish. These inhabitants who still live in the town, some even interact with other humans, have these traits but have not fully transitioned into their Deep One final form. At the end the narrator pieces things together. His grandmother was the daughter of a deep one. Her eldest son, the narrator’s uncle Douglas, had looked a lot like her. Douglas, like Arthur’s great-grandfather Robert, finds out the truth about his heritage and shoots himself. The narrator’s cousin Lawrence also looks like their grandmother and has been committed to an asylum. Once the narrator’s mind succumbs, the story ends with him going to break Lawrence out so that the two may both jump into the sea.

“One night I had a frightful dream in which I met my grandmother under the sea. She lived in a phosphorescent palace of many terraces, with gardens of strange leprous corals and grotesque brachiate efflorescences, and welcomed me with a warmth that may have been sardonic. She had changed—as those who take to the water change—and told me she had never died. Instead, she had gone to a spot her dead son had learned about, and had leaped to a realm whose wonders—destined for him as well—he had spurned with a smoking pistol. This was to be my realm, too—I could not escape it. I would never die, but would live with those who had lived since before man ever walked the earth. …That morning the mirror definitely told me I had acquired the Innsmouth look.”

The Rats in the Walls has its protagonist, the American Delapore, returning back to his family roots in England where they had lived as the de la Pores and had their estate granted to them by Henry the Third. He finds a part of the house blocked off, and with some help he finally descends down, finding a huge settlement under the earth. Turns out, his family was a cannibal cult raising people like cattle to eat. Once the pieces click the narrator goes mad, he blacks out in a frenzy and commits cannibalism himself, killing and eating one of the men who had accompanied him. He also starts speaking in ancient tongues that he had not learnt. This all suggests that some things are hereditary and we can “revert” at any time – we are helpless to our DNA. This huge focus on DNA brings up this train of thought: if, in Lovecraft’s world, our DNA is this powerful and significant, then why shouldn’t we be defined by it? And this is where the issues are raised. DNA and biology can determine who is good and who is bad. Even when the narrators resist, they cannot change who they are. For a eugenicist, this means there are desirable and undesirable genes, and superior and inferior genes. For white supremacist eugenicist, this means that their white genes are superior, and inferior genes deserve to be either kept down or eradicated.

The Rats In the Walls seems to also be reflecting on slaver as the power between the de la Pores and their livestock is a pretty clear metaphor. Additionally, there is also the tension between the aristocratic de la Pores and the townspeople nearby who feared them (they knew about the cannibalism) but were powerless to stop them. Fiona Price notes that given the story’s timeline, the de la Pores were likely Norman invaders, and that while the family’s role as colonisers, classists and royalists is never explicitly addressed, anxieties around power and oppression are present. Is Lovecraft reflecting on his own heritage as a white American? Is he afraid that, like the native American spirits in He, eventually he will be punished for his past? When Delapore goes mad he wonders “Why shouldn’t rats eat a de la Poer as a de le Poer eats forbidden things?” This sentence blurs lines around who holds the power, and “hints at the potentially revolutionary consequences of oppression (Price, 151).”

Another theme in Lovecraft is the dangers of curiosity. These narrators bring about their own demises by looking into their family history. The main character of The Call of Cthulhu is Francis Thurston, whose grandfather was killed for digging into the Cthulhu cult. By investigating his grandfather’s death, Francis also becomes a target: “Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.” Additionally, The Necronomicon is a fictional grimoire appearing in multiple stories, it is the ultimate evil magic book, and it is authored by “the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.” Knowledge, particularly foreign knowledge (like the Kanak tribe’s relationship with the Deep Ones), is dangerous, furthering the xenophobic undercurrent of his texts. For Lovecraft’s heroes, blissful ignorance is a privilege that they regret throwing away by seeking knowledge and leaving their little bubbles. The narrator of He literally leaves New York to return home and forget everything:

“I never sought to return to those tenebrous labyrinths, nor would I direct any sane man thither if I could. Of who or what that ancient creature was, I have no idea; but I repeat that the city is dead and full of unsuspected horrors. Whither he has gone, I do not know; but I have gone home to the pure New England lanes up which fragrant sea-winds sweep at evening.”

My introduction was so long ago now, but if you recall, The Castle of Otranto is considered the first gothic novel. Lovecraft acknowledges the influence of the gothic and on his work in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, writing about Otranto: “What it did above all else was to create a novel type of scene, puppet-characters, and incidents; which, handled to better advantage by writers more naturally adapted to weird creation, stimulated growth of an imitative Gothic school which in turn inspired the real weavers of cosmic terror.” But Otranto’s relationship with the past is much different than what we see in Lovecraft. Otranto tells the story of a noble family who hold the land and title of Otranto, but they have wrongfully gained their nobility through foul play generations ago. The two children of the usurpers line die by the end of the story and the patriarch surrender, and the rightful heir reclaims his land and title. Similar to Lovecraft, the actions from generations ago still affect the present and decide the fates of the character. The two children who die did nothing to deserve their young deaths but it was out of their control, and necessary to correct the wrongs of the past. In He, the revenge of the Native American spirits is very Otranto-esque and even reads as anti-colonial, but while the squire is killed, no power is restored to the dead souls. They can have revenge, but not reparations.

The world is bleak in Lovecraft – there is no running from the past, and either way, one day Cthulhu will come overthrow everything anyway. There are many ways to interpret his work but I’m not surprised that they were produced by a man who fears his position in the world is slipping away. He clings to the past but what if the past isn’t as pretty as he would like the think it is? What will he see when the rose tinted glasses come off? It’s hard to end all of this with a concise conclusion, ultimately literature will always be up to interpretation to a degree, but I would say my main takeaway is that Lovecraft seems anxious about the changing world and his place in it. He seems anxious about the place of White America moving forward. The Deep Ones of Innsmouth are not just invading violently through human sacrifice and their takeover of the town, but silently breeding and spreading across America. The narrators grandmother was able to be married off to an Arkham man because at the time she had not started looking too weird. The covert invasion of the Deep Ones could represent a variety of anxieties (anti-immigration, fear of Russia, fear of China, etc.) who “infiltrate” and change America from the inside, disrupting the world Lovecraft romanticizes. Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born only 30 years after the Civil War, an event that radically changed America, but unfortunately was not a fix-all solution to the racism that still exists. While slavery was ended, many slaves had no property or wealth upon being freed and had to stay in servitude for many years after. One of Lovecraft’s heroes, Edgar Allan Poe, who was pro-slavery, had witnessed the Civil War in his own lifetime and was forced to reckon with the aftermath. Some people read his short story The Fall of the House of Usher, where after the remaining members of the Usher family die, the house splits in half and crumbles away, as representing Poe’s anxieties about the changing America. Lovecraft’s stories never truly resolve, they are meant to inspire horror and leave you with lingering unease.

Sources Mentioned

Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-history-primary-source-timeline/progressive-era-to-new-era-1900-1929/immigrants-in-progressive-era/

Lovecraft, H. P. ”Supernatural Horror in Literature.” Wikisource, 2023, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Supernatural_Horror_in_Literature/The_Early_Gothic_Novel

Olusoga, David. (2015) “The roots of European racism lie in the slave trade, colonialism.” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/08/european-racism-africa-slavery

Price, Fiona. (2016). Prosthetic Pasts: H. P. Lovecraft and the Weird Politics of History. Genre (Norman, Okla.), 49(2), pp. 135–158. https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-3512297