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. 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. Yummy stuff!”The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. 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. 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. 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 very short list – pasty white, slender men of northern European descent. Easier than making a list of his prejudices is making a “list” of the sort of people he approved of. 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. Lovecraft's loathing and suspicion of the “other” – those who are non-European – seems pretty central. 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. Those ceaselessly lurking horrors are well nigh irresistible, but the nightmare cult is a bit problematic. ”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.
0 kommentar(er)
