The Call of Cthulhu

"The Call of Cthulhu" is a cosmic horror short story by American writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written in the summer of 1926, it was first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in February 1928.

The story is a founding document of the Cthulhu Mythos, a mythopoeia and shared fictional universe expanded upon by Lovecraft and successors.

The deceased narrator, Francis Wayland Thurston, recounts his discovery of notes left behind by his grand-uncle, Brown University linguistic professor George Gammell Angell, after his death in the winter of 1926–27. Among the notes is a small bas-relief sculpture of a scaly creature which yields "simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature." The sculptor, a Rhode Island art student named Henry Anthony Wilcox, based the work on delirious dreams of "great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths." Frequent references to Cthulhu and R'lyeh are found in Wilcox's papers. Angell also discovers reports of mass hysteria around the world.

More notes discuss a 1908 meeting of an archeological society in which New Orleans police official John Raymond Legrasse asks attendees to identify a statuette of unidentifiable greenish-black stone resembling Wilcox's sculpture. It is then revealed that the previous year, Legrasse and a party of policemen found several women and children being used in a ritual by an all-male cult. After killing five of the cultists and arresting 47 others, Legrasse learns that they worship the "Great Old Ones" and await the return of a monstrous being called Cthulhu. The prisoners identify the statuette as "great Cthulhu." One of the academics present at the meeting, Princeton professor William Channing Webb, describes a group of "Esquimaux" with similar beliefs and fetishes.

Thurston discovers a 1925 article from an Australian newspaper which reports the discovery of a derelict ship, the Alert, of which second mate Gustaf Johansen is the sole survivor. Johansen reports that he was originally aboard a second vessel, the Emma, when it was attacked by the Alert, a heavily armed yacht. The crewmen of the Emma killed those aboard the Alert, but lost their own ship in the battle, commandeered the Alert, and discovered an uncharted island in the vicinity of co-ordinates of 47°9′S 126°43′W / 47.150°S 126.717°W / -47.150; -126.717 (R'lyeh fictional location (Lovecraft)). With the exception of Johansen and another man, the remaining crew died on the island. Johansen does not reveal the manner of their death.

Upon traveling to Australia, Thurston views a statue retrieved from the Alert which is identical to the previous two. In Norway, he learns that Johansen died suddenly after an encounter with "two Lascar sailors". Johansen's widow provides Thurston with her late husband's manuscript, wherein the uncharted island is described as being home to a "nightmare corpse-city" called R'lyeh. Johansen's crew struggled to comprehend the non-Euclidean geometry of the city and accidentally released Cthulhu, resulting in their deaths. Johansen and one crewmate fled aboard the Alert and were pursued by Cthulhu. Johansen rammed the yacht into the creature's head, only for its injury to regenerate. The Alert escaped, but Johansen's crewmate died. After finishing the manuscript, Thurston realizes he is now a target of Cthulhu's worshippers, and hopes in vain that it will be destroyed following his death.

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. In the dream, Lovecraft is visiting an antiquity museum in Providence, attempting to convince the aged curator there to buy an odd bas-relief Lovecraft himself had sculpted. The curator initially scoffs at him for trying to sell something that was recently made to a museum of antique objects. Lovecraft then remembers himself answering the curator:

Why do you say that this thing is new? The dreams of men are older than brooding Egypt or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon, and this was fashioned in my dreams.