The Call of Cthulhu

The Call of Cthulhu

Complete short story

The first seed of the story’s first chapter The Horror in Clay came from one of Lovecraft’s own dreams he had in 1919,which he described briefly in two different letters sent to his friend Rheinhart Kleiner on May 21 and December 14, 1920.
The story’s narrator, Francis Wayland Thurston, recounts his discovery of various notes left behind by his great uncle, George Gammell Angell, a prominent professor of Semitic languages at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who died during the winter of 1926 after being jostled by a sailor.The first chapter, “The Horror in Clay”, concerns a small bas-relief sculpture found among the notes, which the narrator describes: “My somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature.

• Lovecraft holds a unique position in the literary world; he has grasped, to all intents, the worlds outside our paltry ken.
• Lovecraft scholar Peter Cannon regarded the story as “ambitious and complex…a dense and subtle narrative in which the horror gradually builds to cosmic proportions”,
• French novelistMichel Houellebecq, in his bookH. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, described the story as the first of Lovecraft’s “great texts”.
• E. F. Bleilerhas referred to “The Call of Cthulhu” as “a fragmented essay with narrative inclusions”.
• Canadian mathematician Benjamin K. Tippett noted that the phenomena described in Johansen’s journal may be interpreted as “observable consequences of a localized bubble ofspacetime curvature”, and proposed a suitable mathematical model.

Contents

1. THE HORROR IN CLAY
2. THE TALE OF INSPECTOR LEGRASSE
3. THE MADNESS FROM THE SEA