Customer Reviews

Cthulhu Tales Vol. 2: Whispers of Madness

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I went into this book expecting to see illustrated versions of Lovecrafts classic horror stories but instead found completely original stories apparently inspired by Lovecraft. Actually it would be more correct to say that they are leaching off of Lovecraft. What made H.P. Lovecrafts stories so amazing was his ability to merge science, horror and arcane into a completely new genre. He was a master of building suspense and most of the stories contained twist or shocking endings. By contrast these stories are completely obvious with nary a swerve. They are not scary and the science doesn't have nearly the depth that Lovecraft was able to achieve. Unlike Lovecraft who wrote using a very formal first person perspective most of these stories are written in the third person so they just don't feel very Lovecraftian. There was an oldness to Lovecrafts stories given that they were written in the 1920's but these take place in modern times which again hurts rather then helps the tales. The art is very bland and the dialogue is low rent. As an homage to Lovecraft it fails because Lovecraft fans are the ones who will probably hate it the most.

The book has Mark Waid's name attached as editor and he writes one story but he's really slumming it here. In fact I have to wonder about the publisher BOOM! Studio's in general. My guess is they didn't use actual Lovecraft stories because the stories are copyrighted but the mythos is not. The books just reek of making a buck off of Lovecrafts name. The title of the book, `Whispers of Madness', seems like a mash up of the stories "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Whisperer in Darkness" which seems specifically designed to confuse fans into thinking these are actual Lovecraft stories. At the end of the book were some advertisements for other BOOM! books including X ILES which uses a title font the looks eerily similar to a certain science/horror/thriller that ran on Fox in the 90's. The comic write up makes it sound like a rip-off of X-Files and Lost. My recommendation is to avoid BOOM! comics (I mean for God's sake how can you take a published series that includes an exclamation point in it's name). The only good thing is that I didn't actually pay for this book. Oh, and the binding of the book is weak. Avoid.