One lazy Saturday evening, I happened to be wasting time, sitting on my computer, dreary-eyed, scanning through numerous statuses and stupid links on my news feed. I hadn’t gone out to play cricket because that stupid silver Maruti SX4 happened to be parked downstairs, right in the middle of our playing area. It had a motion sensor, so it would start wailing loudly and endlessly even if a leaf happened to fall onto it from the tall shrubs at its side. I had planned on repeatedly throwing thin sticks at it from the neighbouring building to create a continuous ruckus which would force the guy to move his car to another parking space and allow us to play! But my placid, docile friends had highly disapproved of this simple idea of mine and said they’d give me away if I ever attempted such a stunt. We couldn’t play anywhere else as the cars have invaded our playing spaces everywhere else.
So, while whiling away my time, I happened to look at a facebook status of a friend of mine which was raving about a Metallica song. One which I hadn’t heard.
That was enough to catch my attention. I’ve heard most Metallica songs and I’m quite a fan, myself so, after liking the status, I looked up the song on YouTube immediately and began listening to it. The name of the song is, ‘The Call of Ktulu.’
The song was brilliant. (In my opinion, of course…) I really liked the way the clean electric guitar lines had built up to something far more sinister after completely exploding into an out and out thrash riff. The song was long enough to completely express the potential of the sinister introduction and I really liked the tone of Kirk Hammett’s ‘grab you by the collar and shake the teeth out of you’ guitar solo. The video was a bunch of classy still pictures which alluded to a greenish, bluish, sea monster resembling an Octopus. The octopus looked nice and evil. There were quite a few pictures depicting him to be of gigantic size and in one sinister frame, he seemed to lurk and flash silently over the horizon! My imagination was cranked up on overdrive and I could just about imagine this monster destroying city after city, and greenish-bluish misty nights while clones of the octopus monster ravaged everything in its path! I was having a whale of a time as I knew things were simply about to get better! I wanted to know all about this weird entity called ‘Ktulu’ and I wanted to know what it was. Pop Culture? Manga? A book? A famous song I had forgotten to discover?
Google is your best friend! (Insert evil smile).
I’ve always been blessed with a hyperactive imagination, this being a consequence of my being a very enthusiastic reader and I always like listening to all kinds of good music. This helps fuel my imagination and my curiosity and acts as a drug in some cases. I just begin thinking about (and doing) the one thing I really want to do, which, in this case, was wanting to know all that is to be known, about ‘Ktulu’. (Insert wisecrack about me getting good marks if I can channel this enthusiasm into my studies…)
In Wikipedia, I figured out it was a series of books written by a weird chap called H.P Lovecraft and a few of his associates which together constituted the Ctulhu Mythos or the ‘Lovecraftian Mythos’. He was quite a strange fellow, apparently, quite sickly and irritable, and used to suffer from consistent, lucid nightmares, which became another topic of his horror fiction. The genre associated with the Ctulhu Mythos is called, ‘cosmic horror’.
Wow! That sounds incredible! It reeks of mystique and fantasy! Horror, on a cosmic scale! Monsters of incomprehensible size able to colonize and devour worlds! Senses of emotions and extra-sensory feelings which we can’t even begin to comprehend! Metallica wrote a very good song about some extremely vivid fiction!
I call that being cool on a cosmic scale.
I told my parents I wanted to buy one book by H.P Lovecraft. The first impression of the whole idea was fantastic. But there were doubts creeping in. I was very afraid of being disappointed. I knew that fellow (Lovecraft) seemed to be quite an erratic individual. As a rule, such people are very good writers, such as Edgar Allan Poe, but that might not necessarily be the case. With the topic the writer has selected, he might just have bitten off more than he could chew which would be a darned shame as the idea had so much potential. However, I’d have to read to find out (!) and getting the book turned out to be quite a task. (Ya-boo)
Well, it should have been easy. Landmark, which is bigger than Crosswords, was just a little distance away from my piano classes in Juhu. So, just after my piano classes were finished, my mom and I would go to Landmark and enquire about the book (which was sadly not available.). Two weeks later, I got increasingly agitated. It seemed the book was extremely obscure. This served to increase my frustration as I didn’t find the book in a single Crosswords store either. We waited with the Landmark book order for three weeks but they didn’t manage to get it. I began getting more and more determined to read the book (and more and more helpless as none of the employees or computers seemed to know who H.P. Lovecraft was.)
Flipkart is so awesome!
We found out about Flipkart when my dad told me his book was up for sale (before extensive publication) by an online store called Flipkart. I was extremely determined to get my hands on at least one Lovecraft book (though I was very demoralized) and my mom and I decided to give Flipkart a try.
Flipkart is so awesome!
We managed to get our hands on that book at last (In three working days, as promised. Very prompt) and the book turned out to be as good as I expected.
The book (The Call of Ctulhu and Other Weird Tales) started off with a few clichéd themes in its first story (The Rats in the Walls). Dark, mysterious house, people hearing things which don’t exist (the twist being that they do, of course!) and a gruesome ending for the protagonist and a few supporting characters. The narration is extremely cohesive and clear and the descriptions are very vivid. They are probably the best descriptions I’ve ever read by an author.
The second story (The Picture In The House) was about a man who was forced to stay in a house (assumed uninhabited) which appeared very curious to the author as well as an extremely strange, frightening old man, who was the inhabitant of the house. The other important features are the building storm and a picture in a book. The author uses these elements very cleverly to create an extremely descriptive horror tale. The build-up to the climax was very well panned out and the author didn’t rush the climax or leave the story hanging for too long.
The third story (The Nameless City) involved a hidden, shunned, Arab city. This one was the first which seemed to be involved in the Ctulhu Mythos, quoting a fictional ‘Mad Arab’ called Abdul Alhazred. The story contains descriptions that are common with many of the Ctulhu Mythos, namely, references to cities being constructed in ‘strange dimensions and proportions’ and references to the Mad Arab. There is also a couplet written by the Mad Arab:
“That is not dead which can eternal lie.
And with strange aeons even death may die.”
He certainly succeeded in making the Mythos seem mystical. True, the couplet is heavily quoted but it still makes for a good read, especially with the mystique of the theme.
The rest of the stories mainly show how much the author excels at descriptions and subtle horror. The protagonists are usually curious and are rendered almost (or usually) delirious due to a horror that they have experienced. The New England setting begins getting a trifle monotonous.
Two stories stand out, though, and are in my opinion the best of the entire lot. ‘At The Mountains of Madness’ and ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’. In the edition, I have bought, the two stories came one after the other, which made it better. The first is set in Antarctica, and the setting is gloriously described. The story is unfolded gradually and though the story is long, the writer takes his time to gradually describe the sequence of events. There are a few plot twists and the descriptions are immaculate. Lovecraft excels at describing alien races, and their history and culture. His gradual description of the history of an entire alien race, The Elder Ones as well as the fate of the members of the protagonist’s expedition to Antarctica coupled with the encounter at the end is one of the best examples of thrilling science fiction I’ve ever read. The horrifying sight revealed to Danforth (the protagonist’s companion) beyond to the higher mountain ranges is left ambiguous to the reader, leaving the reader in enthusiastic speculation. Lovecraft proves to be a true master of suspense in this one. The only point of criticism could be the length. It was originally meant to be a novella and it was also originally rejected by a magazine, when submitted by Lovecraft, on grounds of length. Although, I have no problems with the style of the stories, with the author taking his time over the description, the prose is verbose and readers with a short attention span might find Lovecraft a little too tedious at times.
In The Shadow over Innsmouth, which is one of my favorites, the writer is journeying through a fictional town in New England. The town, as well as its inhabitants, looks a little queer. The highlights of this story are the narrative of the protagonist as well as the adventures and sights experienced. The transformation of the protagonist and the narrative in the end is quite chilling.
H.P. Lovecraft’s style quite resembles Edgar Allan Poe, whose works Lovecraft himself must have extensively read. He is a master of descriptive narration and is very good at creating different atmospheres and locations. He is verbose, and usually takes his time describing everything, often describing extra-terrestrial races and cultures in great detail. He paces his stories very nicely and can pick up the pace and suspense quite easily, whenever he wishes (as demonstrated in At the Mountains of Madness). His greatest strength is his exact, atmospheric descriptions. His weaknesses however, lie in the vast cosmic range he covers in the Mythos. To get a complete idea about the Ctulhu Mythos, you need to read many stories to know all the races, all the different beings and all the different backgrounds and cultures. Lovecraft is possibly a bit too liberal with his own fictional references, using the alien languages and references to his other fictional races a bit too liberally. If, and wherever possible, he could have used more allusions to other famous fictional or non-fictional references. The stories are a good read, but due to the obscurity of the stories and the inaccessibility, you might need to look it up (Ctulhu Mythos) on Wikipedia before buying it.
That’s why it’s so moody. Anyway, 1K views! 
Not bad. I never thought… Anyway, hope you like it.
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