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Written in 1926 and first published in the magazine Weird Tales two years later, The Call of Cthulu is almost certainly H.P. Lovecraft's best known short story. Drawing inspiration from Alfred Tennyson's sonnet 'The Kraken' as well as one of Lovecraft's own dreams, the story sees a police officer from New Orleans ask the American Archaeological society for help identifying an idol carved in a mysterious green-black stone that was seized in a raid on a supposed voodoo cult. However, learning about the cult of Cthulu might not be the best of ideas...This version of H.P. Lovecraft's classic tale has received minor edits to ensure suitability for a modern audience.… (plus d'informations)
An okay book, but not what I was expecting from this "cult" author. Frankly, nothing happens to the main character. The real story is all told through his research, which is not a very engaging technique. I would skip this for your first Lovecraft read. ( )
I see why this is his most famous story, because so far of what I have read, it's his best. The writing in this one was amazing. Creepy atmosphere, that just gets slowly more creepy and mysterious. Great prose. Impeccable pacing that continuously builds until the end.
Favorite quote:
"Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse's men as they ploughed on through the black morass toward the red glare and muffled tom-toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other. Animal fury and orgiastic license here whipped themselves to daemoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstacies that tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less organized ululation would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in sing-song chant that hideous phrase or ritual:
Hoo boy. Lovecraft was a big old ball of crap, of course, and lo, his writing matches his personality. Cripes almighty, was this bad. The story is silly (not in a good way), and the language is so flowery and overwrought. It reads like someone gave a goth high school kid a thesaurus, told them every noun is better with at least one adjective and verbs are useless without two adverbs, and send them on their way with a creative writing assignment. (My apologies to goth kiddos everywhere - you deserve better than this association, you adorable weirdos.) Reading this has only confirmed my loathing for all things Lovecraft. Call of Cthulhu? More like call of trash can.
NB: I read this in the original English alongside a Latin translation written by a friend who wanted me to edit it for him, and as much as I dislike the original, I can easily say that he did a fantastic job translating it. ( )
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
(Found Among the Papers of the Late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston)
"Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival… a survival of a hugely remote period when… consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity… forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds… ."
- Algernon Blackwood
(Found among the papers of the late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston).
Citations
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
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.
They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.
That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.
There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other.
Derniers mots
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come - but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
This is the short story, do NOT combine with the various collections it is included in.
Directeur de publication
Courtes éloges de critiques
Langue d'origine
DDC/MDS canonique
LCC canonique
▾Références
Références à cette œuvre sur des ressources externes.
Wikipédia en anglais
Aucun
▾Descriptions de livres
Written in 1926 and first published in the magazine Weird Tales two years later, The Call of Cthulu is almost certainly H.P. Lovecraft's best known short story. Drawing inspiration from Alfred Tennyson's sonnet 'The Kraken' as well as one of Lovecraft's own dreams, the story sees a police officer from New Orleans ask the American Archaeological society for help identifying an idol carved in a mysterious green-black stone that was seized in a raid on a supposed voodoo cult. However, learning about the cult of Cthulu might not be the best of ideas...This version of H.P. Lovecraft's classic tale has received minor edits to ensure suitability for a modern audience.
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▾Description selon les utilisateurs de LibraryThing
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I would skip this for your first Lovecraft read. (