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spacestationtrustfund 's review for:
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
by H.P. Lovecraft
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.Ironic, considering the man's own beliefs.
A mountain walked or stumbled.These stories live up to the hype. Lovecraft was a vastly hateful and bigoted man, but also deeply talented at portraying a looming, cosmic horror, lurking at the edge of one's vision... or perhaps not but; perhaps and consequently. Much of Lovecraft's beliefs strongly influenced his writing. Even divorcing his racism, misogyny, and homophobia from the interpretation of the text, the text itself is still seeped in prejudice and the sallow stink of fear. It's easy to get caught up in the casual inclusion of slurs, snake-oil race science, and other harmful ideologies, but then Lovecraft hits you with something like this:
A sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low. Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness. And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods—the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.and his mastery of horror is once again settled. The "thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes"; "ghastly midnights of rotting creation"; "corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities"; "dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods."
Obviously Lovecraft's writing has been incredibly influential to me. It's strange, reckoning with my love of Lovecraftian horror while also living as a person whose very existence would have shaken Lovecraft to his core. A lot of my friends who are also queer, or not white, or not male, also really enjoy these stories and this universe. "The abnormal," Lovecraft wrote, in this very book, "always excites aversion, distrust, and fear." By defining normality as a mirror of himself—heteronormative, patriarchal, cisgender, white—the justification for his hatred and fear of the "abnormal" could be rationalised.
Anyway, I don't believe that not reading or adapting Lovecraftian horror stories will help anything or anyone. If anything, the mere fact that so many of the most ardent fans of the Cthulhu mythos are people whom Lovecraft himself would quake in his boots upon meeting is the best fuck-you that can be achieved. The author is dead, literally in this case; he's not receiving any of our money, accolades, or support. He's dead in the ground, and all that remains is to study and to transform his work into something beautiful.
I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago. The general tension was horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night. I recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places. There was a daemoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons—the autumn heat lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown.