Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.
#Lovecraft call of cthulhu free#
the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from his tomb to revive His subjects and resume his rule of earth Then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. ~ HPL: " The Call of Cthulhu", Castro on the Cthulhu Cult The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented them from making an initial move. When the stars have come right for the Great Old Ones, "some force from outside must serve to liberate their bodies. ~ HPL: " The Call of Cthulhu", Castro on the nature of the Old Ones They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R'lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. They had shape but that shape was not made of matter. They were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. ~ HPL: "The Call of Cthulhu, Abdul Alhazred The cover is embossed with a mystical design by Hillier, while a monstrous eye stares blankly from the slipcase.And with strange aeons even death may die. The edition itself shimmers with Lovecraft’s ‘unknown colours’, bound in purple and greens akin to both the ocean depths and mysteries from outer space. By splicing Victorian portraits and lithographs with cosmic and Lovecraftian symbolism, each piece – like the stories themselves – pulls apart the familiar to reveal what lies beneath. Hillier’s six mesmerising, portal-like illustrations embrace the alien realities that lurk among the gambrel roofs of Lovecraft’s landscapes. Yet, despite his prejudices and parochialisms, he ‘possessed a voice and a perspective both unique in modern literature’. In his beautifully crafted new preface, Moore finds Lovecraft at once at odds with and integral to the time in which he lived: ‘the improbable embodiment of an estranged world in transition’. This edition, based on its sister limited edition, marries Lovecraft’s best-known fiction with two modern masters of the macabre, the acclaimed artist Dan Hillier and author Alan Moore.
This fictional universe, built in large part by his friend and most ardent supporter, August Derleth, has in the years since been reimagined in myriad forms, and continues to act as a haunted playground for countless illustrators, fans and authors. The extra-terrestrial ‘gods’ and cursed histories that would emerge from these stories now form the cornerstones of Lovecraft’s unique mythology: the Cthulhu Mythos. In later tales, such as the iconic ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ and ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’, Lovecraft reaches into the cosmos, bridging the divide between horror and science fiction. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far
Another early piece, ‘The Outsider’ – a tragic and emotive evocation of loneliness and desolation – follows a man’s escape from his castle in a desperate search for human contact, but the loathsome truth he discovers destroys his mind. ‘“Great God! I never dreamed of THIS!”’ screams occultist Harley Warren in ‘The Statement of Randolph Carter’, as he begs his companion to bury him alive. Through their investigations into the unexplained, they tug at the thin threads that separate our world from another of indescribable horror.
In stories written in the gothic tradition, narrators recount their descent into madness and despair. This collection spans Lovecraft’s literary career, and charts the development of his ‘cosmicist’ philosophy the belief that behind the veil of our blinkered everyday lives lies another reality, too terrible for the human mind to comprehend.
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