The Call of Cthulhu and Other Dark Tales

Marked as Did Not Finish

I picked three short stories by HP Lovecraft to read in book club this week, so I took those ebook out from the library thinking I would start with at least those stories and read maybe more.

I made it through The Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Call of Cthulhu, and I started The Dunwich Horror, but early into that one I gave up.

I feel similar about reading this as I do with something like Tolkien. I respect the influence of the work and I think the broad stories/worlds and some specific moments are great, but I just can't get into the writing.

This is all aside from Lovecraft himself being a garbage person that certainly comes through in at least the casual racism throughout these stories, though I actually found it interesting to think about whether certain tropes that are prevalent throughout horror (fear of the other/the unknown being the big one) is inherently racist, or if just combining that with this writer makes it feel worse (though there often is clear racist terminology used in the writing, though not always directed at the monsters).

Anyways, glad I tried this out even if it's not for me.

I enjoyed it. It's weird, because there's virtually no characterization in his work, his narrative structure nearly always hews very closely to the junior high school essay “tell me what you're going to tell me, tell me, tell me what you just told me” paradigm, and the horrifying twists are easy to see coming from miles away, but his writing is atmospheric enough to make up for all that.