The Call of Cthulhu
Going through his dead great-uncle's papers, a young man finds a strange clay carving, a policeman's report about a swamp cult, and a sailor's diary from the South Pacific. Pieced together, they point to something ancient that is only sleeping. By H. P. Lovecraft (1928). A public-domain classic.
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How it begins "Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival ... a survival of a hugely remote period when ... consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity ... forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds...."--Algernon Blackwood. Keep reading →About this story
Going through the papers of his dead great-uncle, a young man finds a strange clay carving, a policeman’s report about a swamp cult, and a sailor’s diary from the South Pacific. Pieced together, they point to something ancient that is only sleeping.
H. P. Lovecraft, an American writer, published it in 1928, in the magazine Weird Tales. It is the story that introduced Cthulhu, and it is the foundation of what is now called Lovecraftian horror: fear of something so large and old that human beings do not matter to it. Lovecraft’s writing also contains racist ideas, which readers should be aware of.
- Themes
- Cosmic horror, the limits of knowledge, insignificance
- Good for
- Readers who like horror and weird fiction
- Worth noticing
- How the three pieces of evidence are put together, one at a time.