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The Call of Cthulhu: Classic Tales Edition
The Call of Cthulhu: Classic Tales Edition
The Call of Cthulhu: Classic Tales Edition
Audiobook1 hour

The Call of Cthulhu: Classic Tales Edition

Written by H. P. Lovecraft

Narrated by B.J.Harrison

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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About this audiobook

A savage earthquake shakes the world, waking a horror from the bowels of the earth. An ancient cult is discovered who worships an ancient demon whose name is Cthulhu.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 14, 2010
ISBN9781950524549
The Call of Cthulhu: Classic Tales Edition
Author

H. P. Lovecraft

Renowned as one of the great horror-writers of all time, H.P. Lovecraft was born in 1890 and lived most of his life in Providence, Rhode Island. Among his many classic horror stories, many of which were published in book form only after his death in 1937, are ‘At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels of Terror’ (1964), ‘Dagon and Other Macabre Tales’ (1965), and ‘The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions’ (1970).

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Reviews for The Call of Cthulhu

Rating: 3.8050397877984086 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Oh, the horror!
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Hoo boy. Lovecraft was a big old ball of crap, of course, and lo, his writing matches his personality. Cripes almighty, was this bad. The story is silly (not in a good way), and the language is so flowery and overwrought. It reads like someone gave a goth high school kid a thesaurus, told them every noun is better with at least one adjective and verbs are useless without two adverbs, and send them on their way with a creative writing assignment. (My apologies to goth kiddos everywhere - you deserve better than this association, you adorable weirdos.) Reading this has only confirmed my loathing for all things Lovecraft. Call of Cthulhu? More like call of trash can. NB: I read this in the original English alongside a Latin translation written by a friend who wanted me to edit it for him, and as much as I dislike the original, I can easily say that he did a fantastic job translating it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    So the audiobook is 1.5 hrs. Not an 1hr. There are a few instances that should have been edited out, but honestly, I can forgive that because it is read well. Also, it's not B.J. fault, more on the company.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I want to read more Lovecraft. He's kind of hard to read at first but once you get into it he starts making sense.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    ”I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them upon the world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.”Mercy. I feel very divided about this one. Those ceaselessly lurking horrors are well nigh irresistible, but the nightmare cult is a bit problematic. Part of me imagines that this story would be So Much better if one only removed the awful racism and xenophobia, but I'm not sure it could be done. Lovecraft's loathing and suspicion of the “other” – those who are non-European – seems pretty central. A key driving force. The guy even hates Eskimos, for goodness sake! Who hates Eskimos (Inuits)? (In fairness, his hating was astonishingly wide in scope – he also seems to have disliked Christianity. And women. Easier than making a list of his prejudices is making a “list” of the sort of people he approved of. A very short list – pasty white, slender men of northern European descent. Hmmm.) Obnoxious racism, etc. aside, though, Lovecraft's evocation of vast, patient evil is so spectacularly, deliciously baroque that one may feel inclined to tolerate the muck in order to luxuriate (wallow) in his crazy visions.There's not a tremendous lot of plot here. A guy learns that there is a monstrous, powerful evil biding its time beneath the sea, served (not very effectively, it seems) by an ancient, world-wide cult of fiendish minions. What makes the story such fun are Lovecraft's wildly over-the-top descriptions of mad voodoo orgies in the swamps of Louisiana, sinister cabals haunting seaports, primordial monsters rising from the ocean depths, etc. Yummy stuff!”The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings. The odour rising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heart a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when it lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of the poison city of madness...The Thing cannot be described – there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God!”Happy sigh. The anti-Hemingway.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Excellent. HPL is not the easiest writer to get into, but once you get past all the archaic language and British affectations you find some genuinely weird concepts...along with a wickedly understated sense of humor. Of course, he is a complete racist and you can't forgive him that...but then he appeared to dislike anything that wasn't New England or British. Also he was a genuine weirdo who died of malnutrition because he lived on a diet of mashed potato sandwiches. But still, those wild concepts!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This was a nice mix of H.P. Lovecraft stories I'd read and ones I was less familiar with. My favorite in the collection is "The Colour Out of Space," which is a fantastically chilling science fiction story that by all rights should have been an episode of "The Twilight Zone."A couple of warnings about this book: Firstly, if you're unfamiliar with H.P. Lovecraft, you may want to jump around in the collection some. The stories are arranged in the order they were written, so a lot of the earlier stories are much weaker than those that come later in the collection. The other warning is that while H.P. Lovecraft is justifiably considered a master of the weird fiction genre and should definitely be read, he was also quite racist. I don't know if he was more racist than his peers during the time these stories were written (1920's and 30's, mostly), but he seems to have been more than a little phobic of miscegenation and that comes out in many of his stories. I still think the stories are worth reading, but it seems disingenuous to discuss Lovecraft without acknowledging his faults.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    What a very strange story this is! H P Lovecraft is a name that comes to mind immediately, of course, when one thinks of the horror genre, but I'd never read any of his work.In The Call of Cthulhu, perhaps Lovecraft's most famous story, he adopts a kind of faux-documentary approach. The first-person narrator has discovered certain documents that recount the manifestations of garbled but deeply disturbing information about a kind of primal monster that has walked the Earth in the depths of time; that has been buried away since time immemorial, but whose time now may again have come nigh. This all sounds terribly hokey when one tries to summarize, but it's surprisingly disquieting in the story itself. Lovecraft draws on deep-seated fears of monsters, of implacable gods, of the strangeness of the extraterrestrial, and indeed of demons themselves in his speculations. Recommended.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    After the mysterious death of his anthropologist uncle, a man goes looking into a mysterious and terrifying cult that worships Cthulhu, a tentacle headed creature with a scaly human-like body and massive wings.This story was more readable than some of Lovecraft's other stories, but oh, my, the racism. The evil cult is followed by mostly African and other native cultures, along with mix-blooded people, which the narrator calls degenerates. It's very clear that white folk are the good guys and other races are the wicked ones with their voodooism and pagan worship and sacrifice. (I was going to give this four stars, but can't bring myself to do so, because of the racism.)It's easy enough to follow the story and it was kind of cool to read the story that sparked the Chtulhu mythology. The Old Ones are interesting and frightening creatures and the "wrong" angles and up is down insanity aspects are certainly creative.But I think I prefer the pop-culture versions of Cthulhu that have spawned from Lovecraft's originals far more than I enjoy the originals. There is such delightful play surrounding Cthulhu now with plushies and new books and games and videos and fun all around, which fills me with joy.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Can someone please tell me how to pronounce this?!?
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I’m a fan of H.P. Lovecraft. He never wastes a word and his descriptions are awesome. Cthulhu is one of my favorite creations, the mythology behind it is intriguing. Lovecraft is unparalleled for his gothic tales. Could read his work for hours.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Two instances in the recording that should have been edited out. Mispronunciation and self correction, and an utterance to himself to sit up straight. Story is fine, Lovecraft was invetive of course and his impact can't be understated... but he was, as always, a roaring racist coward of a human. This shouldn't be overlooked for comfort.

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