The Call of Cthulhu - Review
All reviews are spoiler free.
Why is The Call of Cthulhu so important to horror literature? You can see in the first paragraph. I want you to read this paragraph, the first one in the story:
Quote:
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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 infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
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Can you see what this story did? In one paragraph, in one story, he advanced horror past all previous stories. Lovecraft writes the first, what I call large scale horror story.
Previous horror stories involves a guy getting bricked behind a wall or a group of friends fighting a vampire in London, or a guy discovering that the woman he was engaged to was actually his sister or an evil plant actually being a harginger of a murdered corpse or a ghost haunting a army troop.
This story launches past that. This story creates the basic Cthulhu Mythos concept that we are insignificant little creatures who are beneath the notice of beings significantly more powerful than ourselves.
This story has a macro scale. It is concerened with things much bigger than a vampire, a ghost, a murderer, or a wierd death. This is concerned with the nature of existance. The term Lovecraft coined for this was cosmic horror.
This is cosmic horror on a major plane. This story not only advanced horror but it also was Lovecraft's wake up story. This allowed him to fully realize his own voice, his own world, and his own ideas. It's a very lonely place.
Lovecraft's philosophy has come to be known as Cosmic Indifference. Nobody cares about us, nothing. We aren't even worth noticing. In the scheme of existance, we are lower than ants.
This sense of loneliness goes beyond being hunted by a werewolf. We are alone in the cosmos. Throughout dimensions and space, nobody cares about us, unless they need something from us, just as we might occasionally need something from bacteria.
All we are is tools to powers greater than our entire race combined, and as soon as we've outlived our usefulness, we'll be discarded with no more though that you or I would give to discarding a used match.
That's why Lovecraft is so great. That's why writers are still emulating his concepts 80 years later. That's why writers great and tiny are still writing in his world. He is a genius that pushed a genre beyond the pervious boundaries, and scared people with what was discovered.
I'd give this a 4.5 stars out of 5. It can be a little uneven at times, but it is amazing for the most part, and well ahead of its time.