The Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft

Weird_Tales_February_1928.jpg"The Call of Cthulhu" is one of H. P. Lovecraft's best-known short stories. Written in the summer of 1926, it was first published in Weird Tales, February 1928. It is the only story written by Lovecraft in which the extraterrestrial entity Cthulhu himself makes a major appearance.


It is written in a documentary style, with three independent narratives linked together by the device of a narrator discovering notes left by a deceased relative.


The narrator pieces together the whole truth and disturbing significance of the information he possesses, illustrating the story's first line: "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity; and it was not meant that we should voyage far."


"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 consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity...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..."


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The Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft

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