Book Review - 'The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales' by HP Lovecraft

I don’t know why, but I feel a little embarrassed to admit I’ve not read many Lovecraft tales. I’ve always been interested in them, just never got around to it, I guess.

The reason I’ve started reading them now is the fault of Berthold Gambrel. He kindly pointed me in the direction of Audrey Driscoll’s blog. I like the look of her ‘Herbert West’ series and was about to read her short story, ‘Dreams of the Witch House’. Instead, I decided to, first, immerse myself in Lovecraft’s writing so I could better appreciate her stories.

I bought this beautiful copy from the British Museum bookshop a couple of years ago. It came with a poster, ‘Cthulhu Rising’ by John Coulthart.

Back cover

‘Cthulhu Rising’ ~ John Coulhart

The 23 stories, listed in ‘date of publication’ order from 1923 to 1936, are:
Dagon
Nyarlathotep
The Nameless City
Azathoth
The Hound
The Festival
The Call of Cthulhu
The Colour out of Space
History of the ‘Necronomicon’
The Curse of Yig
The Dunwich Horror
The Whisperer in Darkness
The Mound
At the Mountains of Madness
The Shadow over Innsmouth
The Dreams in the Witch House
The Man of Stone
The Horror in the Museum
The Thing on the Doorstep
Out of the Aeons
The Tree on the Hill
The Shadow out of Time
The Haunter of the Dark

I’m not going to go through each story, but I’ll pick the ones I particularly enjoyed.

The majority of the stories are told in first-person, usually in the form of manuscripts, letters or diary entries; I think it adds to the sense of mounting horror.

‘Dagon’ sets the tone well with its opening lines:
“… I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below… When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realise, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or death.”

I liked that it wasn’t ‘in-your-face’ horror but more psychological with just enough description to be unsettling with so much left to the reader’s imagination. The way it ends adds to the disquiet.

‘The Hound’… oh my gosh, the hound! Again, the opening lines really fed my imagination. I admire Lovecraft’s ability to hook the reader and make them want to read more, feeding their morbid curiosity.
“In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping, and a faint, distant baying as of some gigantic hound… St. John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and such is my knowledge that I am about to blow out my brains for fear I shall be mangled in the same way.”

At just over 6 pages, I couldn’t read this story fast enough!

Even though ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ is one of the few stories I’ve read before, it does not suffer from repeated reading.

Lovecraft’s use of language is one of the things that stuck with me after reading this story way back when. The way he weaves his choice of words together is almost poetic as seen in the opening lines:
“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… 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 deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

The story is told in first person by Francis Wayland Thurston and, despite being short, is divided into 3 parts.

While going through the papers of his recently deceased grand-uncle, he comes across an awful-looking sculpture and a manuscript detailing his grand-uncle’s findings with regards to the sculpture.

Thurston reads of “an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror.”

In the 2nd part of the story, Thurston discovers more about the sculpture and a religion no sane man has heard of, one which repeats a roughly translated chant:
“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

The first time I read that, all I could think was, how can something that’s dead be dreaming??

Into the third part, we see Thurston’s investigation take him further than what his grand-uncle had set down, to the waters beyond New Zealand and even to Greenland where he finds more than he believed could ever be possible…
“The Thing cannot be described – there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy…”

Although Lovecraft describes Cthulhu in full in the form of a figurine, the mind struggles to imagine such a thing as a living being. In this instance, the description does nothing to diminish the horror.

‘The Whisperer in Darkness’ starts slowly, gradually increasing the narrator’s suspicion that things aren’t as they should be yet not quite able to put his finger on that wrongness.

I’m not usually one for too much description in world-building, but Lovecraft’s beautiful use of language makes for easy visualisation, as in, “pushed aside curtaining vines”.

As the narrator travels further into “older New England”, away from inhabited towns and villages, his growing sense of disquiet is conveyed in how he views the surrounding countryside:
“Gradually the country around us grew wilder and more deserted. Archaic covered bridges lingered fearsomely out of the past in pockets of the hills, and the half-abandoned railway track paralleling the river seemed to exhale a nebulously visible air of desolation…”

The narrator’s discovery at the end of the story made my skin crawl.

‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’, for me, is one of the creepiest stories, taking the sort of horror I’m used to reading and adding to it. I was genuinely worried for the narrator, a young man taking “a tour of New England… and had planned to go directly from ancient Newburyport to Arkham, whence my mother’s family was derived.”

Careful not to overspend, he decides against taking the train, instead taking a bus that’s barely used by the people of Newburyport because it stops in the town of Innsmouth, a place he’s never heard of before. His curiosity piqued, he takes the bus to spend the day in the town, knowing he won’t have to spend the night as the bus then carries on to Arkham in the evening.

He finds the bus driver’s appearance repellent, “… with odd, deep creases in the sides of his neck… dull, expressionless face. He had a narrow head, bulging, watery blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly undeveloped ears.” When he arrives in Innsmouth, he realises, from the few townsfolk he sees, that this is the ‘Innsmouth look’. That plus a lingering fishy smell.

I liked the touch of the youth’s logical explanations to override any possible superstitious beliefs:
“… I noticed dead stumps and crumbling foundation-walls above the drifting sand, and recalled the old tradition quoted in one of the histories I had read, that this was once a fertile and thickly settled countryside. The change, it was said, came simultaneously with the Innsmouth epidemic of 1846, and was thought by simple folk to have a dark connexion with the hidden forces of evil. Actually, it was caused by the unwise cutting of woodlands near the shore, which robbed the soil of its best protection and opened the way for waves of wind-blown sand.”

Before he’d even exited the bus, it was obvious “rumour-shadowed Innsmouth” had seen much better days, but he was determined to explore and ended up experiencing more than he’d bargained for. And yet, there’s more to the story than just his time in Innsmouth.

‘The Dreams in the Witch House’ is one of the few not told in first person, but this doesn’t diminish the horror-element. Although there are connections to the overall mythos, this, for me, felt very much like a good, old-fashioned horror story.

The story revolves around a brilliant young student, Walter Gilman, who attends the college in Arkham…
“He was in the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham, with its clustering gambrel roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches hid from the King’s men in the dark, olden days of the Province. Nor was any spot in that city more steeped in macabre memory than the gable room which harboured him – for it was this house and this room which had likewise harboured old Keziah Mason, whose flight from Salem Gaol at the last no one was ever able to explain. That was in 1692 – the goaler had gone mad and babbled of a small, white-fanged furry thing which scuttled out of Keziah’s cell, and not even Cotton Mather could explain the curves and angles smeared on the grey stone walls with some red, sticky fluid.”

The mention of Salem and Cotton Mather underlines the witch-element of this story, which is married with science. Very cleverly done, in my opinion.

‘The Tree on the Hill’ is a succinct little tale, told in first person. Like most of Lovecraft’s stories, the narrator is telling of events that have already happened when he and his friend stayed in “Hampden in the summer of 1938.”

While there, he visits a region “known as Hell’s Acres… There are no roads linking this inaccessible locality with the outside world, and the hillfolk will tell you that it is indeed a spot transplanted from his Satanic Majesty’s front yard… Natives will not venture within its mysterious depths, for they believe stories handed down to them by the Nez Perce Indians… according to them, it is a playground of certain giant devils from the Outside.”

While exploring, he comes across an area totally devoid of any kind of vegetation; it “looked terribly scarred and seared, as if some gigantic torch had blasted them… And yet there was no evidence of fire…” He also notices how silent it is.

He sees a tree, the only one and approaches for a closer look. Although it resembles an oak, its like no tree he’s ever seen.

After taking some photos of the tree and the area, aware of a growing reluctance to leave the place, he settles down and falls asleep.

And has one humdinger of a nightmare.

The weirdness increases when he awakens and increases again with the way his friend reacts when he recounts what he’d experienced.

I particularly like what his friend says in answer to his questioning the existence of other, inexplicable things:
“You reason in terms of this tiny earth… Surely you don’t think that the world is a rule for measuring the universe. There are entities we never dream of floating under our very noses. Modern science is thrusting back the borderland of the unknown and proving that the mystics were not so far off the track…”

The ending wasn’t what I was expecting but the understated way its written, in my opinion, made it even more unnerving.

Having said I’d be picking the stories I particularly enjoyed, I have to mention the one I did not, ‘The Shadow out of Time’.

It’s one of the longer stories and one of the last ones Lovecraft wrote. It’s more sci-fi than horror. Told in the first person, it starts out well and I’m sure there’s a gripping story in there somewhere. But it’s weighed down by so much description. I got to the point of wanting to weep at yet more descriptions of fronds!

By the middle of the story, it felt to me as if the narrator was just rambling. And he had the annoying habit of asking himself myriad questions, whole paragraphs of questions.

I approached the last story, ‘The Haunter of the Dark’, reluctantly but with the consolation that, if it was as disappointing as ‘The Shadow out of Time’, at least it was shorter.

My worries were unnecessary. The story is one of my favourites and a return to the creepy horror of ‘The Hound’ and ‘The Dreams in the Witch House’.

This is another that’s not told in first person and centres around a young writer, Robert Blake. The window by his desk in his study gives him a good view of “the spectral hump of Federal Hill, bristling with huddled roofs and steeples whose remote outlines wavered mysteriously, taking fantastic forms as the smoke of the city swirled up and enmeshed them. Blake had a curious sense that he was looking upon some unknown, ethereal world which might or might not vanish in dream if ever he tried to seek it out and enter it in person.”

As time passes, he becomes increasingly fascinated by a huge, dark church in that area. Eventually, his curiosity gets the better of him and he decides to find the church and explore it. The closer he gets to it, the more he notices how fearful the people who live close by are. Despite veiled warnings to stay away from the church, he’s determined to explore it.

It’s obvious it’s been long abandoned…
“The colossal nave was an almost eldritch place with its drifts and mountains of dust over box pews, altar, hourglass pulpit, and sounding-board, and entwining the clustered Gothic columns. Over all this hushed desolation played a hideous leaden light as the declining afternoon sun sent its rays through the strange, half-blackened panes of the great apsidal windows.”

From about the halfway point to the end of the story, the suspense and horror intensifies with no respite; I read it all in one sitting. A suitable end to the collection.

One of the things I enjoyed was the way Lovecraft describes the monsters; he gives just enough detail and leaves the reader to fill in the rest. It reminded me of the first ‘Alien’ film where we were only given glimpses of the alien. As the narrator says in ‘The Mound’ – “to imagine such a horror is one thing, but to see it is another thing.”

In the stories where he describes the monster to the full, sometimes it works, as in ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, other times it doesn’t as in ‘The Shadow out of Time’.

If I have a complaint, it’s to do with the way Lovecraft writes some dialogue. Depending on where the story is set, he writes the dialogue exactly as the locals speak, complete with changes in spelling to convey the dialect differences. There were times that took me out of the story as I tried to work out what was being said.

At the end of the day, that’s quite a minor complaint.

I was pleasantly surprised that, out of a collection of 23, there is only 1 story I did not enjoy; I think that says a lot about this collection.

Having developed a taste for Lovecraft’s writing, I’m planning on getting a complete collection of all his stories. I know that will mean I’ll be doubling up on some of the stories, but that’s ok – this volume can sit beautifully on the bookshelf and the other can be the well-thumbed one.