The Call of Cthulhu

H.P. Lovecraft is, and always will be, a staple of horror writing. There are several very good reasons for this, but for my money the chiefest among them is his masterful use of the concept of mystery.

I'll take a few words here to talk about mystery, because while it sounds really good to just kinda say "it's mysterious" like that's a good thing in and of itself and move on, that's uh... just not true. JJ "The-Human-Lens-Flare" Abrams' apparently-Ted-talk-worthy "Mystery Box" is my favorite example of just how wrong a writer can get this.

It's also my favorite example to throw out when people suggest that just because something is in a Ted talk that means it's worthwhile.

In summary, the "Mystery Box" is the idea that audiences don't actually want to know what's going on, and they'll engage much better with questions than they will information dumps.

Which is true at the beginning of any story. But as a story progresses, you need to be providing payoff to those questions or engagement will wane. You can raise new questions as you go, that's fine, but you must also provide some answers. This is why JJ's insistence that answers don't matter is what I consider the biggest compositional fallacy a writer can ascribe to, and is also the reason I can most easily identify as to why he's incapable of providing a satisfying conclusion to... anything.

As of this writing I haven't seen The Rise of Skywalker yet. I don't have particularly high hopes for a satisfying conclusion. But all I'm really expecting is great action, so I'm sure it'll work out.

So mystery, as a tool, can be misused, and just because something is obfuscated doesn't mean it's good. But mystery can also be employed to encourage magnificent engagement from your audience. For good examples of how to do this, take a look at something like Jaws, or basically anything by Agatha Christie.

Or, to swing this back around to the actual topic at hand, H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos.

I listened to an audiobook of The Call of Cthulhu, among several other Cthulhu-based short stories, and to say Lovecraft uses mystery masterfully honestly feels like a gross understatement. I want to be clear; this is not a mystery. It's horror of the eldritch variety, and so the story structure is very different than something like Doyle's Holmes stories. The clues are not all present, and each tale ends just short of drawing conclusions for you, because it's trying to leave you unsettled.

But the way Lovecraft uses unknown quantities in his narrative is very similar to the way someone like Doyle or Christie would as well. The end result is magnificently creepy and disturbing. It succeeded at horrifying me at a personal level without stooping to a reliance on excess gore or anything of that nature. It's the quintessential concept that the idea of your monster is always going to be scarier than the monster you create, which is the self-same concept that lends stuff like Jurassic Park, Jaws, and Alien the staying power they have in cinema.

I don't need to provide details here, because in this format they'll be ineffective. It's enough to state that I was unsettled, and I think any serious reader of Lovecraft's short stories would be similarly unsettled. And because of the master-class of composition on display here, I would highly recommend The Call of Cthulhu to anyone who wants to study as well as anyone who's just looking for some good literary chills.

I do feel like I should probably also address the fact that H.P. Lovecraft was, evidently, insanely racist. At least, if the way his narrators all talk about colonialism is any basis to go off of, which, y'know... is usually pretty reliable. But if you've read any of my other reviews of classic literature on this blog, you're well aware by now that this is not surprising. Basically everyone writing in the western world in that time period was racist, because the only people in the western world writing in that time period were rich white men.

So maybe don't put too much value on the racial views in Lovecraft's stories just because the writing is really good, m'kay? He may have done a lot of stuff right but that bit... wasn't.