I started listening to audiobooks last month. I’ve always been principally against them, I guess I thought of them as an improper way of reading; “reading for the lazy”. But, I’ve had a change of heart. It’s just a different way of consuming the same media, you still absorb what the author is conveying and you can still talk about the books as if you had read them.
Listening to audiobooks has made it so that I can read more. I don’t have to sit at home in my couch with a physical book in my hands, I can just put my Airpods in during lunch, when I’m out walking, or in bed before going to sleep.
Besides this, what I have liked most about it is that it has removed the time between interest in a book being sparked, and me actually getting my hands on the book. I’ve felt in the past that I’ve gotten inspired to read a certain book, ordered it, but once it arrives a week later I’m not so keen any more or I’m reading something else and it gets put on the ever-growing pile of books to read. Because of how audiobooks are distributed, I can buy the book and listen to it just seconds later.
(Ethically I still think audiobooks and e-books are inferior to regular printed books, I wrote about this last year if you’re interested in some of those thoughts.)
One of the authors I’ve had my eyes on for a long time is H.P. Lovecraft. I read “The Call of Cthulhu” in middle school, but left it at that. I’m of course familiar with a lot of his other works, it’s almost impossible not to be seeing how much he has influenced, and how many adaptations of his novels and short stories there are.
So, getting into audiobooks I decided to finally explore Lovecraft proper, and I’m glad I did.
I began with the “The Dunwich Horror” and quickly worked my way through “The Call of Cthulhu”, “At the Mountains of Madness”, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and the Penguin audiobook “The Colour Out of Space”, which, along with the titular story, also contained “The Whisperer in Darkness” and “The Shadow Out of Time”.
Lovecraft is synonymous with the esoteric, with the strange and the unknowable. His stories deal with ancient, cosmic horrors; intelligent life predating humanity by millions of years, and of the humans who come into contact with this.
Most of the stories take place in the same universe, and are laced with reoccuring objects and places, such as the city of Arkham, the Miskatonic University, and the “dreaded Necronomicon” (the mention of which must be followed by the phrase “written by the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred”). It creates familiarity, you recognise what you’ve seen before, you’re able to place what you’ve read in other stories into other contexts and maybe you’re given new understandings or perspectives of it.
“At the Mountains of Madness” is the story that gripped me the most, and it has all of the classic Lovecraft elements that make his stories so unique. The premise itself is so quintessentially Lovecraftian: modern scientists exploring the Antarctic in the early 1900s, with all the primitive technology and gear that comes with that. The most unexplored continent on the earth just makes for such an excellent setting, it almost makes the scientists' discoveries believable.
I also found “The Whisperer in Darkness” to be particularly gripping. I loved its somewhat unconvential narrative style, being told mainly through the narrator’s remembering of letters. We, the readers, are kept at an arms' length from the horrors he describes. The narrator (at least not until later in the story) has no influence over the events of the story, he is only able to convey what he has been told.
“Shadow Over Innsmouth” is a fine story, and probably one of Lovecraft’s most well known ones. Perhaps it was for this reason I didn’t find it all that exhilerating. I knew it too well already from other media.
I had similar feelings for “The Dunwich Horror”, although it held my interest a lot more as I listened to it.
Lovecraft died quite young, at 47, yet in those years he wrote a lot. I’ve only just scratched the surface of what Lovecraft has to offer, and I’m sure to continue my venture into his strange world going forward.