First published in 1928 in the pulp magazine Weird Tales, "The Call of Cthulhu" is a short story by American author H.P. Lovecraft, an early twentieth-century short-story writer famous for his works of horror and science fiction. Farnsworth Wright, the editor of Weird Tales, initially rejected the story, and only published it later at the subtle suggestion of Lovecraft's friend Donald Wandrei. The story originates a fictional mythology that Lovecraft's correspondent and protege August Derleth would later expand into the "Cthulhu Mythos."
Literary critics who regard "The Call of Cthulhu" as one of Lovecraft's major achievements have praised the story's marvelously suggestive ability to build a complex cosmological world, which strikes genuinely fearful and wondrous chords in the heart of the reader. In his 1991 biography H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, Michel Houellebecq calls "The Call of Cthulhu" Lovecraft's first "great text," influenced by the collected works of Algernon Blackwood and Alfred Lord Tennyson's 1830 sonnet "The Kraken."
The plot centers around a man named Francis Wayland Thurston who discovers a series of manuscripts left behind by his grand-uncle, a recently deceased distinguished linguistics professor at Brown University. Within these manuscripts, he finds a clay bas-relief of a strange creature exhibiting aspects of an octopus, a dragon, and a human. As Francis delves into the mystery of this creature, he encounters a litany of mysterious and intriguing horrors that lead him all over the globe, and test the limits of his own sanity. Although the story impressed critics after its initial publication, Lovecraft himself called it "rather middling—not as bad as the worst, but full of cheap and cumbrous touches."
Lovecraft composes "The Call of Cthulhu" in the epistolary format, written as a series of documents. Specifically, Lovecraft's story follows a recursive epistolary structure of letters, and letters-within-letters, and so forth. First and foremost there is Thurston's document, which is the primary organizing document of the entire tale, and which we encounter after Thurston has died. Then there are the many manuscripts within Thurston's document—for example, Wilcox, Webb, and Legrasse's accounts in Angell's papers, the Sydney Bulletin article, and Johansen's diary. The further Thurston delves into these manuscripts and the reported memories and dreamscapes they unfold, the more tenuous his grip on his own sanity becomes. Lovecraft's fiction imagines reading and writing as cursed acts, and represents the theme of the human quest for forbidden cosmological knowledge to be at once irresistible to a certain kind of intellectual seeker, and a cursed enterprise.
Like any worthy work of horror or science-fiction, Lovecraft eschews lengthy descriptions and manipulates the power of suggestion to raise a certain kind of fantastical image in the reader's mind—not unlike the sort of "bas-relief" outline that Wilcox endeavors to transcribe from his dreams. What makes Lovecraft's monsters unique is that they simply defy human comprehension, which explains why the many fumbling attempts by the story's characters to ascribe detail to them via oral and written forms of communication inevitably fail. Indeed, what pours out of Cthulhu's monolith is described as "a darkness almost material"—a literalization of something unknown and insensible to the human mind. The audacious descriptions of the alien Cthulhu as a miles-high cephalopod beast have undoubtedly influenced a legion of science-fiction films and franchises, including Godzilla, Alien, The Thing, The Abyss, Cloverfield, and more. Given its sophisticated structure, suspenseful pacing, and particularly evocative passages, "The Call of Cthulhu" is now a widely anthologized classic of twentieth-century horror literature.
