The Art of Darkness

There are only two books I have ever deliberately thrown away, or burned - in my whole life, and recently I have (think I may have...!) relented about one of them:

I eventually had to cast out 'The Call of Cthulhu' because every time I even just merely thought of the word Cthulhu, weird things started to happen. 

Our young detective hero is driving around in this,
going up to Gothic mansions to pick up his girl...

And being a gambler with all of the superstitions that are attendant on this occupation, I simply had to do something severe.

And the other 'book' of course, was the Generous Quran; it isn't 'holy, as you know by now of course, the words used by Muslims themselves to describe the work as: 'Al Quran Ul Kareem' - which means 'generous,' not 'holy.' There is simply nothing holy about it.

It - the Quran - is a mixed up piece of disjointed gibberish full of repetitive phrases and some of the most crude language you can imagine, it's just that when various 'translators' (such as the disaffected Anglican cleric Marmaduke Pickthall) render it into English, you have all of these diacritics turn up that were not there in any original document, and the subsequent version heavily laden with parentheses explaining in the translator's own words, what is meant by whatever the actual verse is.

The Quran stays in my 'bin it' category.

Cthulhu however, I have always considered, contained some nice interesting turns of phrase early on, almost straight detective-fiction style writing, before the writer became affected by whatever 'bad trip' he was on later in the work. There is a certain modern-ish - at least if you consider the Twenties, modern - wallowing in gleaming black paintwork and chrome and steel, and glorying in new silk and satin dresses by the damsels... This is all before the Cult of the other-dimensional 'Cthulhu' starts to be visited upon the innocents.

As far as honest literary history goes, we have to say that the Alien Predator creature in the Schwarzenegger/Glover series, is very much based on Lovecraft's Cthulhu.

I feel there is a gap in the market though, so-to-speak, in today's world of literature (although, hardly, can 'the Quran' in any sense be termed literature; fiction yes, literature no).

They drink some Silesian-owned Cognac, whereupon,
not long afterwards, inter-dimensional monsters
beset them!

The kind of atmospheric literature about which I am thinking, thrives on mystery of some kind - and for me, how much of the world even survives these days is a very big mystery to me. Although, truth be told, I am not very interested in solving that mystery. I am by no means a sort of altruistic type of person by nature, I have to say. Hillary Clinton has nothing on me as far as cold distant responses to the pain and suffering of people at large goes.

And that is because to a large extent I view the pain and suffering of people on the whole as a logical inevitability. Whereas what worries me about Cthulhul is the sheer appeal to outright chaos that H. P. Lovecraft made in his books. The monster is from chaos, carries out chaos, and its followers (acolytes, as Lovecraft called them) possess some inner and personal and deep commitment to chaos - for whatever reason I do not know. Lovecraft's ideas unfortunately, may have some basis in facts about humankind though...

'Chaos' for humans in actual human society, results from the deliberate misapplication or failure to allow words to have their actual meanings. The Quran is one of the most categorical examples of this: for instance, the word 'ransom' is used in the original text, and Muslims fundamentally have no idea of what this word means. The word 'soul' is used, because it is lifted straight from an earlier Hebrew source, and in today's renderings, the phrase in which it ought to be used is this: 'if someone kills a person, then it would be like they killed the whole world...' The actual verse says, 'For We decreed to the Children of Israel, that whosoever seeks to destroy a soul from among them, it would be like unto as though they had been responsible for murdering the whole world of Mankind.' 

In the Quran, Allah ransoms Isaac with a mighty sacrifice (which is not detailed) when earlier it appeared that Abraham was about to slaughter his son. Who does Allah give ransom to?

Who is so powerful, that he can extract ransom from Allah?

This we will never know from Muslims because they are an absurdity.

I personally feel however, that Allah is paying ransom to...

CTHULHU!