Maybe someone here can explain H.P. Lovecraft to me
When I saw the book on the shelf, I knew what I had to do. H.P. Lovecraft is one of the most famous authors of horror ever, listed together with Edgar Allen Poe and Steven King (which is flattery more to King than to Lovecraft I think). So when I saw the anthology The Call of Cthulhu and other Weird Tales on the library shelf, I knew that if I was man at all I would have to pick it up and read it.
After only reading a handful of the stories in the book, I think I've apprehended enough of a random sample to say that I don't get the attraction. OK, yes, the concept of Cthulhu is interesting. (And you may wish to stop reading here if you don't want some story elements given away.) He's this interstellar demonic creature made up of a different form of matter than any we know, more like a wicked God than a typical monster, and powerful beyond human conception. He's not evil so much as indifferent, and he sleeps in the city of R'yleh under the sea. When the stars are right he will wake and enslave and slaughter the entire human race. And he's actually one of the more likable members of his species compared to, for example, Azathoth.
But as far as the writing and story-telling go, it did not compel me. The cast of the stories are typically men with interest in the occult, in old languages, histories, and strange occurrences -- that is, unlikable, weird men. Of the five stories I read, most had men like these doing the kinds of things you would expect them to do -- like visiting grave yards past midnight -- and finding things you might not expect -- like Cthulhu. Lovecraft uses adjectives of abomination extensively thought his writing. It seemed to me that he exhausted within the first few paragraphs of each story every way to express disgust, horror, or other-worldliness that our language offers. He did this to an extent that he repeated words like "hellish" and "horrible" in neighboring paragraphs.
Apt descriptions aside, this can only do so much for me. The concept can take me a long way, but it's hard to feel something for weird men pursuing weird ideas who are themselves so strange that I can barely view them as human. None of these characters were likable in the least -- to me they invoke a picture of a man sitting in his library in the early part of the century, pontificating about pseudo-science. They are too different from me to get my empathy. So there is no way for me to even begin to care what happens to them.
The biggest problem with the stories is the combination of characters like these and their heavy reliance on "horrors that the human mind cannot conceive." But if the horrors are inconceivable, by definition I cannot conceive of them. And when the litany of these horrors grow long enough I'm liable to discard the line of thought altogether and just abstract it away. "OK, something bad is happening but I'm not sure what and I don't want to try to guess any more," is the conclusion my mind reaches, and in the same instant the story loses all its power.
So here comes the rule: if you want to tell a story of an inconceivable horror, you must first actually conceive of a horror that no one else would conceive of. Then you must reveal it to me slowly and make me conceive of it. What's more, you can't simply create this horror and expect me to read about it. To hold my attention on the horror you will also need to create something or someone I care about upon which your horror is being visited. That is what the few stories I've read from the Cthulhu mythos failed to do, and why I don't plan to read any more.
