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The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories

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Feels like a more fleshed out and intense version of The Lurking Fear. Much of the same elements are borrowed such as the family house with a terrible history, deformed, human-like monstrosities and a very subtle reference to a creature from the Cthulhu Mythos. The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories is Penguin Classics' first omnibus edition of works by seminal 20th-century American author H. P. Lovecraft. It was released in October 1999 and is still in print. The volume is named for the Lovecraft short story, " The Call of Cthulhu". The story overall has an intensely mysterious vibe with an exciting buildup, but what could have been an incredible twist ended up being something that had no merit and was rather degrading. Yup, the good old classic. And like most classics, it has quite a few flaws, mercifully balanced with enough imagination and silliness that one can still enjoy these short stories despite some truly off-putting elements.

tumsā” – Karkosa un Hastūrs te ir pieminēti tikai kā vārdi šausmonīgos rituālos, par kuru patieso dabu mēs varam nojaust tikai no trakā arāba Nekronomikona un Pnekotiskajiem manuskriptiem. Bet stāsts ir labs, pa Senajiem, kas mums līdzās dzīvo jau no senseniem laikiem. Par to, kā cilvēces izplešanās ASV mežonīgajos apgabalos ir radījusi sadursmi starp Senajiem un cilvēkiem. Zinātnieki kā vienmēr ir apbrīnojami naivi un lētticīgi, vietējais novadpētnieks izpilda episku last stand pret citdimensiju ordām, viņa liktenis paliek neskaidrs. Viņa līdzinātājs paliek, lai pastāstītu stāstu. Plutona atklāšana ir liela kļūda. 10 no 10 ballēm. Has all the essential elements of a good Hammer Film Productions piece. It’s gritty and gross, cheesy yet fun and verbose. Feels like a skeletal frame of Frankenstein, just not nearly as long and emotionally complex. Frankenstein is the better book in my opinion, but I gotta give Lovecraft credit for whipping up something that’s pretty damn morbid. Collecting uniquely uncanny tales from the master of American horror, H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories is edited with an introduction and notes by S.T. Joshi in Penguin Modern Classics. In saying all of that I did enjoy visiting some of the locations I've seen in Lovecraft-based games, such as Arkham and the Miskatonic university. I enjoyed some of the stories, such as The Colour From Space, and really liked The Shadow over Innsmouth- a story with a bit more description and action than many of Lovecraft's other works. Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937), born in Providence, Rhode Island was self-educated and lived in his birthplace all his life, working as a freelance writer, journalist, and ghostwriter. Using many pen names, he contributed his supernatural/horror and science fiction/fantasy stories to various pulp magazines but his reputation as a writer rests mainly on the 60 or so stories he published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales starting in 1923.

Every protagonist is exactly the same. “It was very horrible but my own scientific curiosity for the horrible made me very curious as to what lay forward.” Sometimes the narrators are completely unnecessary, with an obvious case of this being in The Call of Cthulhu, where the narrator summarizes other people’s actions or journal entries, when it would have been much more effective to just show the journal entries or articles themselves.

I love the creeps, gore and the all-around horror in books. I watch American Horror Story religiously, I live by the code of The Slayers that Joss Whedon laid out for us in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I research serial killers and studies of their psychological states and look forward to the month of October all year round. So as someone who would rather watch a scary movie or go through a museum filled to the tip of mass murder and corruption than go on some overly-dramatic, romantic date filled with dozens of roses and walks in the park, why doesn’t Lovecraft and King’s story telling agree with me? These days writers are told to show, not tell, but Lovecraft is the king of telling, resisting every temptation to show the reader anything much at all, in favour of repeated extended circumlocutions around the awfulness or terror induced by seeing something that is so awful that it cannot be described. Monsters are so horrifying as to be beyond description. Horrifying artifacts are so horrifying as to beyond description. Ancient rituals are... you get the gist. As a storytelling technique this might work once, but it is a common feature in many of the stories in this collection and I grew very, very tired of the paucity of description. Frequently imitated and widely influential, Howard Philips Lovecraft reinvented the horror genre in the 1920s, discarding ghosts and witches and instead envisioning mankind as a tiny outpost of dwindling sanity in a chaotic and malevolent universe. S. T. Joshi, Lovecraft's preeminent interpreter, presents a selection of the master's fiction, from the early tales of nightmares and madness such as "The Outsider" to the overpowering cosmic terror of "The Call of Cthulhu." More than just a collection of terrifying tales, this volume reveals the development of Lovecraft's mesmerizing narrative style and establishes him as a canonical- and visionary-American writer. An unnamed protagonist encounters a fishy god-like entity, drives him batty of course. This is a very short and atmospheric story. People who encounter the Lovecraftian creatures do not usually get to keep their marbles. Although not my favorite of the Cthulhu Mythos tales, it certainly does the best job of encompassing all of the primary and lovable elements of weird tales and cosmic horror.If you enjoyed The Call of Cthulhu, you might also like Arthur Machen's The White People and Other Weird Stories, available in Penguin Classics.

Foreboding and mysterious. The plot is extremly simple yet one of the most effective Lovecraft has ever written. A strange meteorite from another realm crashes into Europe and buries itself into the soil, contaminating everything in its circumference. The process of contamination is simple. It poisons the soil, it poisons the water, it kills the animals and it drives people mad. Eventually, the place becomes so corrupt that it transforms into an eldritch nightmarescape. To make things even more unsettling, the strange meteorite appears to have sentience and can move freely as it pleases. Perhaps it was never a meteorite in the first place, but something far more sinister? HPL at his most verbose, I would have gone with “Me and Johnny got bored with the same old crap, so we looked for some weird stuff to do”. Anyway, a couple of tomb raiders steal an amulet from an ancient corpse in a Dutch cemetery. A lot of hounding ensues. Not a bad story, nice brooding atmosphere. The pacing is distractingly inconsistent. While Lovecraft will never miss an opportunity to describe the scenery and archaic architecture at length, long voyages and passages of time will be handwaved with a few words mid-sentence. Lovecraft plays with the idea of unsolved mysteries a lot, which is his biggest strength. I love how he created an entire universe and embedded it seamlessly into ours - in his stories, he introduces us to Arkham, a fictional city and location of many of his stories; the Old Ones, a powerful supernatural entity and he is also the inventor of the Necronomicon as well as the Cthulhu myth. His imagination is rich, integral and unlike anyone else's. I can totally see why his writing was a real game-changer for the genre. The dread and tension as the protagonist explores the dark corridors of the wretched house’s forbidden depths smothers you with its intensity. The decrepit tragedies lurking within its violent and disturbing history were passed down through the ages, giving the dreadful impression that the very foundation of the world is built upon such horrors.

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I don't need to see a knife slowly cutting through someone's carotid artery in all its bloody detail, but for goodness sake, at least show me what sort of knife it is, and the approximate appearance of the person it is going to be used on. I just don’t feel like a story actually happened. I feel like an old man sat down and told me this horrible thing that he saw once or read about in a documentation his uncle left him, but not the how, the when, the where or the why. Just the what.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft, of Providence, Rhode Island, was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction. urn:lcp:callofcthulhuoth0000love:epub:b0d8136c-cdd2-42d5-b4d3-04a6d8580ab8 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier callofcthulhuoth0000love Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t1zf0gd4b Invoice 1652 Isbn 0141182342 Lccn 99019100 Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-beta-20210815 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9728 Ocr_module_version 0.0.13 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-WL-1200054 Openlibrary_editionBut there are definitely some highlights. I think his work shines best in a very short form. The shorter stories like "The Outsider" and "The Music of Eric Zahn" are great because they showcase his excellent creativity in establishing an aesthetic and crafting an atmosphere, but it stays very vague and mysterious. The stories end before his shortcomings in character development and pacing start to show. Another unnamed protagonist goes to visit his ancestral village, there he is invited to join a bizarre festival at a secret shore. Fun times (for the readers, not so much for him).

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