It still amazes me how influential some people, organizations, and events can be, and yet be obscured, disregarded, and even forgotten. For instance, it surprises me how much of an impact Eli Whitney and the cotton gin had on the economic development of the South, even though most people now would not remember Whitney at all. I am also somewhat alarmed at how crucial Nicola Tesla was to the widespread use of alternating electrical current, yet it is only now that his name is receiving the recognition. A third name that has come to my attention is Howard Phillips Lovecraft, also known as H.P. Lovecraft, whose influence in horror and science fiction has largely gone unnoticed by all but the die-hard fans of a character and mythos called Cthulhu.
Cthulhu is a character from a short story written by Lovecraft in 1926 called
The Call of Cthulhu, which tells the tale of a young intellectual turned investigator who learns more about a mysterious being called Cthulhu, the cult of dangerous individuals who worship it, and the madness that strikes anyone who dares to investigate this eldritch, alien horror. As the story progresses, the protagonist, whose thoughts and words are conveyed in first-person voice, discovers stories of strange effigies, weird dreams, mysterious deaths of those who also sought to uncover Cthulhu, and of a group of sailors who escaped the ravenous attack of South Pacific cultists to wash up on a non-Euclidean nightmare of an island harboring the legendary city of R'yleh, where Cthulhu supposedly resides (unbeknownst to the group of sailors). Not to reveal much more, the story ends with an ominous warning of insanity to those who choose to follow the author's footsteps. Indeed, for its time,
The Call of Cthulhu must have been jarring... for those who happened to read it.
For much of his literary career, Lovecraft toiled in semi-obscurity, all the while churning out story after story, creating a fantastic tapestry of odd alien beings, ancient space conflicts, hidden invasions onto Earth, and the insanity that can only come from beholding creatures beyond human comprehension. I must admit that my knowledge of the Cthulhu realm is spotty, but I have come to realize that Lovecraft had intentionally or somewhat inadvertently developed a striking world of fiction that came to be regarded as a mythos of Cthulhu. Even a cursory scan of Lovecraft's bibliography suggests an impressive output of fiction even tangentially related to Cthulhu. As I have found, Lovecraft, though prolific in his fiction writing, garnered little financial gain from his work and died poor.
However, just as Van Gogh's work was more widely appreciated after his death, Lovecraft's work seemed to find an audience as knowledge and discussion of Cthulhu has crept ever so slightly into the mainstream as the years have passed. Even before now, the influence of Lovecraft's blend of the horror of the unknowable and of scientific inquiry and fiction can be found in television shows like Kolchak: The Night Stalker, The X-Files, and Fringe; in horror movies that involve insanity and cosmic monstrosities; and, of course, in written fiction, as Stephen King himself has noted Lovecraft as a major influence. Furthermore, in the last several years, Cthulhu, and the intellectual property associated with that character, has steadily gained popularity in board gaming, which is one of my main hobbies. Much like the cultists in
The Call of Cthulhu, Lovecraft's intellectual property is gaining social momentum, even seventy years after his death.
Cthulhu has become so prevalent in gaming that my interest was inevitably piqued regarding it. In the board gaming world, several games related to Cthulhu have garnered positive reviews and recommendations, such as
Elder Sign and
Mansions of Madness, but, until recently, I knew little about Lovecraft or his work. All that I had known about Cthulhu was based on what I had read about those board games. This led me to investigate what Cthulhu was (much like the hapless protagonists of Lovecraft's work), so I began at an odd point: I downloaded the card game
Cthulhu Realms to my cell phone. The game was designed by Darwin Kastle, who used almost the exact same system of deck-building as in Star Realms, except that the art and terminology was changed to reflect Cthulhu. As I played this virtual card game (which is also available as a physical card game), I encountered character names, such as Dagon, Wilbur Whatley, and even The Shadow of Cthulhu. Knowing nothing of these characters, I proceeded to research on Wikipedia, which most people do, I'm sure. Then, I decided to go back to the source material: I found a free version of
The Call of Cthulhu and downloaded it to my Kindle Fire tablet. Because it was a short story, it took only a couple of hours of reading to finish it. Unexpectedly, my interest has been further piqued and I am now reading
The Mountains of Madness, which is another short story in the same world as Cthulhu, apparently.
As an aside, I should mention my impressions of
The Call of Cthulhu as a literary work. Being an English as a Second Language instructor and a linguist, I can speak with some experience and authority about this short story, at least from a diction standpoint. In my opinion, Lovecraft's sentence constructions are outstanding with complex clauses, an extensive vocabulary, and a writing style that is both grammatically sound and lyrically pleasing. I reveled in his diction, as if I have been starved of this level of erudition for so long. Sure, some of his writing is, shall I say, outdated compared to current speech and writing patterns, but his work from a mechanical standpoint is beautiful.
Regarding the content, Lovecraft wrote the story in first-person voice, so the reader's connection with the material is immediate, as if someone were conveying a life event directly to the reader. Yet, there is a detachment that comes from Lovecraft's choice to recount tales of Cthulhu through second-hand stories shared with the protagonist. This detachment augments the mystery of the ever-increasingly horrific Cthulhu. However, though the story is told from a first-person perspective, there is a disjointed quality to the narrative in which time seemed to advance days, weeks, and even months with little more transition than a passing sentence. Conversations are also portrayed not as dialogue, but as reported speech. Because of this and the aforementioned detachment, characters are mostly name labels on victims and agents that advance the plot. Even the narrator, through whom the reader can sense and feel the curiosity and fear so inherent to current horror fiction, is a caricature, at best, who does not stand out as a living, breathing person with traits and tendencies beyond his inexorable inquisitiveness. Thus,
The Call of Cthulhu is plot-driven, despite the first-person narrative.
Despite my criticism, I can understand how attractive the Cthulhu mythos is because of the mystery of the unknown and the imagined insanity of beholding an incomprehensible terror. There is something oddly exciting about imagining oneself as a paranormal investigator researching in libraries, interviewing eyewitnesses, piecing together creepy accounts, and globetrotting in pursuit of truth. Much like Mulder and Scully or the Ghostbusters or even a Van Helsing character type (which predates Cthulhu, of course), the danger and intrigue of the hunt for absolute evil is enthralling, engendering chills down one's spine and a general sense of foreboding.
As I finished The Call of Cthulhu and read more about Lovecraft, I started pondering some points that are directly relevant to Lovecraft's world in comparison to our world. One point that occurred to me was the godlessness of the Cthulhu world. In
The Call of Cthulhu, Cthulhu and his minions are extraterrestial, ancient beings from another part of the galaxy, another dimension, or both, with the near-godlike ability of instilling preternatural fear into a sad cadre of sailors. These beings are uncaring, ominous creatures that disregard humanity, maybe treating them as slave fodder, at best. These beings are somewhat analogous to Satan and his demons, except that Satan is hellbent to snatch souls while the Cthulhu demi-deities are only disdainful towards humanity. Another point that I considered was the godlessness of the character and how fright and hopelessness engender an ambient sense of doom. In
The Call of Cthulhu, I felt that doom in the prose with the main character inexorably descending into a kind of self-conscious madness, as if he was perfectly aware of how his grasp of reality was becoming more and more tenuous, yet he was powerless to stop it. It caused me to think about people in the world today and how existential and nihilistic they tend to be, which in turn is reflected in a selfish, "you only live once" mentality. A third point that crossed my mind was how there was no sense of victory in the prose; there is not even a false dawn, so to speak. The force and pulse of the narrative is typified by a contrast between undying curiosity and impending, undeniable defeat at the hands of insanity. In other words, Lovecraft's work is neither joyous nor hopeful, which is what the world resembles when there is no sense of God.
Considering that Lovecraft was an atheist, it is understandable that the atmosphere that he creates and the characters in the narrative are driven by a thirst for knowledge and a latent kind of righteous indignation that seems to come from the feeling that Earth is being invaded. However, these characters are equally draped with a hopeless darkness that is exacerbated by the looming danger of rabid cultists and otherworldly visages with no regard for humanity. As I read
The Call of Cthulhu, I experienced all of these feelings, and this is where Lovecraft was successful; his prose envelopes the reader in the story. Though the narrative is a distant kind of first-person perspective, I am in the room with the main character, looking through his eyes, yet fully myself. I imagine that this is the appeal of Lovecraft's work, and what makes horror as popular as it is. Yet, there is a melancholy that is repulsive to me, probably because Jesus is about a faith, hope, and love that conquers the darkness, and Lovecraft's world is the opposite: faithless, hopeless, and gloomy.
I am not sure if I am a Lovecraft or Cthulhu fan, and I am not sure how a Christian can reconcile his or her faith with Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos except that his writing, which is wonderfully descriptive and eloquent, speaks into the deepest, darkest parts of our souls. His writings remind me that without God, the world is bereft of hope and purpose; without God, our demons are ultimately unknown and unknowable, yet there are "cultists" in our world that elevate those demons -- demons of consumerism, hedonism, selfishness, greed, meglomaniacal power, and so on. In Christian circles, people talk of "idols" as anything that draws us away from God. Anything can be an idol, but in Lovecraft's world the idols are extraterrestrial beings who, at best, want to subjugate humanity or, at worst, sweep humanity aside to occupy our space for their own ends. That draws me to Lovecraft's prose because it elucidates me regarding the spiritual battle that rages around us each day, yet goes on ignored with a demonically-motivated misinformation campaign that dulls unwitting souls into a lifeless sleep riddled with personal ambition and acquisition of things. We are told everyday that God is dead, that self is everything, and that we should concern ourselves with our hobbies, our careers, and the betterment of ourselves, even despite others. We live in a world in which there are other-level events happening, yet we, as humanity, disregard it and focus on our own daily lives and desires. To me, Lovecraft weaves these frailties of the self into his narrative tapestry. When I read
The Call of Cthulhu, the thought that dominated my mind was the desire to share Christ with others lest we all descend into a kind of Cthulhu-lite insanity, intrigued by the curiosities in the shrouded corners of this world to the point that we are obsessed with them until we are lost forever. If anything, I believe that, quite unintentionally, Lovecraft shows us a Satanic world which should compel us to look at our world and pray that our world would never go down that path.
