Article by Sean Wilkinson,
a.k.a. The Pagemaster.
If there are any three words or phrases that I find myself using on repeat lately (not counting the copypasta method I have used for my
Time Drops posts since their inception), they would be "aristocratic," "I'm in charge here, so I can do whatever I want," and "to be brutally honest." Now, the last one I think I've only used once in recent memory, but it
feels like more than once, and not only am I about to say it again, but I was so aware that I'm about to say it again that I opened this post by drawing attention to it.
With that said, to be brutally honest, I didn't want
this to be the subject of my tenth-ever issue of
Cover Charge (so named to keep in the theming of tickets, admission fees, movies, and stagecraft that I have mostly built the blog around since before it existed in the form you see today), but since I promised to deliver it as a slightly delayed companion piece to my
Call Of Wonderland review (I was also torturing myself with
the I Know What You Did Last Summer miniseries that Tuesday, hence the [insert C-word spelling joke here] delay), here we are.
I've mentioned Lovecraft's unsavory views on race many times in the
Call Of Wonderland post and my
Cover Charge review of
The Colour Out Of Space, and while they are kept mostly to subtext in
that narrative,
we get a full spectrum of pure (pun
definitely intended) textual racism in 1926's
The Call Of Cthulhu, ranging from polite toxicity and tamely dated race terms to vehement slurs, all given literary deniability by the first-person unreliable narrator device we last experienced in
Colour Out Of Space.
Here (according to Wikipedia, at least), we have the written equivalent of a found footage anthology horror movie (the
V/H/S entries, for example), with the narrator being the deceased Francis Wayland Thurston (so although the middle name is spelled slightly different, we can probably now add
H.R. Giger,
Ridley Scott, and
James Cameron to the list of Lovecraft inspirees because the
Alien franchise is literally cosmic horror). Following the death of his elderly uncle (it appears to have been natural causes, but Thurston comes to believe it was the doing of "mongrel," "half-cast" sailors who belong to a globalized murder cult hell-bent on awakening the titular Great Old One from its death-sleep in an Atlantis-like city
somewhere between Australia, Chile, and Antarctica. Through his late uncle's notes, Thurston interviews Henry Wilcox, an artistic polymath who sculpted Cthulhu after seeing the creature in his dreams ("The Horror In Clay," which was based on one of Lovecraft's own dreams, and seems to be the main inspiration for the journal segments of
Call Of Wonderland), then reads "The Tale Of Inspector Legrasse" (you might recognize
that name from
Call Of Wonderland, as well) where Legrasse, Thurston's uncle Professor Angell, Professor William Webb (the nominal inspiration for one of the men whom the fictionalized Lovecraft witnessed summoning the toad monster in
Call Of Wonderland), and others comment on global instances of Cthulhu idolatry and worship, including Alaska, Africa, the Middle East, India, and Legrasse's home city of New Orleans (so now we're reading a Lovecraft story that's a dead man's interpretation of another dead man's notes about several people's second-hand accounts of a fictional conspiracy theory, and I can't wait for
the top to fall over so I can wake up from this dry, racist rabbit hole of a sensory colonoscopy and do something decent with my life like glory-holing the beaches of
Fyre Island or shaving my scrotum with a live jellyfish). The racism reaches its zenith of anti-heterogeneous contempt (but also something happens that could be said to approximate the climax of a horror story) in "The Madness From the Sea." I almost instantly drew parallels to
Bram Stoker's
Dracula (specifically the portion that inspired
The Voyage Of the Demeter) because this third part of the
Cthulhu story has Thurston read of the discovery of a derelict ship that was attacked by Cthulhu-worshipping pirates (I think; the narrative gets less inception-y but more convoluted by the commandeering of the pirate vessel, the discovery of an uncharted island, and accidentally combining these two memes
to resurrect Cthulhu because Lovecraft didn't believe in
non-Euclidian geometry), leaving only one survivor (who later died under mysterious circumstances because
Call Of Cthulhu is apparently the
Ringu tape of the 1920s and
hentai dreams will cause a mass inbreeding event where all intelligent white people are sacrificed to wake tentacle porn Godzilla from the sunken floating city of immortal death in the middle of the south Pacific...or something). Thankfully, it happened on April Fool's Day.
Like Colour Out Of Space, Call Of Cthulhu features a lot of arid academic prose (including outdated math theory), and descriptions of that which defies description. Unfortunately, between his persistent writing tendencies and the more blatant expression of his problematic personal tendencies, Lovecraft fails to make Call Of Cthulhu feel scary. Despite trying to put multiple fictional layers of deniability between art and artist (I don't know if that was Lovecraft's intention, but it literally reads that way), he also fails at the divide, which means that neither could I continue to make the same separation. Call me biased or media-illiterate or scream "hot take!" until the cows come home with extra appendages after they drank from that blighted well in the Gardners' backyard, but as a modern American of non-aristocratic virtue, I'm in charge here, so I can do whatever I want, and I have to be brutally honest.
F
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Pagemaster,
Out.
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