| Re: And your first Lovecraft tale was ....?
Well, I think my first was "The Colour out of Space" but at such an early age it didn't make that much of an impression, really. Then I picked up a copy of the old Beagle 2-vol. Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos at the library when I was about 12, and read "The Call of Cthulhu"...
And how did I feel? It was a strange blending... scared the bejeezus out of me, as a kid, but also I found myself feeling as if this were something that had some reality to it... it could be real. It's a fantastic story, yet done with care for the verisimilitude, and it avoids any of the usual supernatural trappings... the most of that being Cthulhu's influence on dreams; the rest is a supernormal, but still meets a rational explanation. Yet it made me feel as if a whole new world that felt like the spiritual world had opened up to me there....
Lovecraft himself called it "a form of non-supernatural cosmic art" that he was trying to achieve... that sense of awe, terror, wonder, the supernal, almost mystical feeling for the vastness and mystery of the universe that is very closely akin to the religious feeling at root... and I'd say he accomplished it admirably. |