call of cthulhu

The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft Analyzed

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Somehow I went my whole life without reading a single thing by H.P. Lovecraft. Since we’re still doing short fiction from the early 20th century, I decided to rectify that.

I’m not much of a reader of horror, but there’s certainly a lot any writer can learn by studying the genre. And let’s face it, The Call of Cthulhu is one of the most important works of horror to every be written both from a literary and cultural perspective.

There is a joy in experiencing this story with little knowledge of the plot, so I’ll word things in a vague way to keep the secrets untold.

call of cthuhlhu lovecraft

Prose Style

The first thing to jump out at me was the dense prose style. The first two sentences already indicate this is not your average pulp genre writing:

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.

I had to look up a few words in the first pages, though some of these might have been more standard back when it was written (e.g. bas-relief).

These opening lines set up much to come. The main character has to piece together various found stories to get the full picture (i.e. “correlate all its contents”). Later we will get a scene set on infinite black seas. So these lines had full intention behind them to set up later parts of the story.

Realism

I was a little surprised by how real it was.

One might say it is written in a hyperrealist style. The level of detail provided is almost distracting. At times, it was hard to remember the story was fiction instead of reading actual travel logs and notes by people.

There are many names, and each of these people have precise degrees and jobs and even full addresses (7 Thomas St., Providence, R.I) associated with them.

In other places, we’re given exact coordinates of various sightings: S. Latitude 34° 21′, W. Longitude 152° 17′. This gives the reader precise information about the settings of various events, but at the same time, it’s kind of useless unless you pull yourself out of the story to Google it (as I did). These details mostly serve the purpose of making everything as real as possible.

Denseness in The Call of Cthulhu

This story really hits upon one of the things I wanted to encounter when I started this series on short fiction. There’s close to a full novel’s worth of material in it, but it’s somehow packed tightly into a single short story.

This hyperrealism is part of what makes this possible. Instead of getting lots of lengthy “show don’t tell” descriptions that usually flesh out a single moment into a full short story, Lovecraft presents several detailed fragments that the reader must piece together on her own.

In this way, we get years of events in a few pages, and it all feels natural since we’re just reading a few primary sources along with the main character.

This makes it hard to tell exactly what is happening, but this is done to give the reader the same experience as the narrator, who also doesn’t know what’s happening.

Horror as Genre

And now we’re in horror. It’s often said that the most suspenseful and horrifying things are those things we can’t see or understand. The structure of the story brilliantly puts you in the unsettled feeling of the unknown. It opens with a vague description based on a symbolic representation of the monster:

If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing.

This cleverly lets the reader’s mind run wild over the first half of the story about what exactly this Cthulhu is. Lovecraft proceeds to add mystery upon mystery: sudden deaths, cults, people going mad, and conspiracy.

It’s somewhat brilliant in how it continuously adds suspense without resolving earlier mysteries.

Lovecraft keeps you guessing with that unsettled feeling:

  • Is the main character interpreting this correctly?
  • Is he putting together a set of unrelated things?
  • Is he going mad?
  • Or maybe, worst of all, he’s right, and all of this has been hidden from the rest of us.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I think a lot can be learned from studying this story. The dense and flowing prose style is impressive on its own.

I may have to do a whole “Examining Pro’s Prose” on it. Moreover, the tension and forward motion Lovecraft creates through mystery and hidden information is excellent.

Lastly, he brilliantly packs in so much information through the use of non-linear structure.

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