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.

Plot

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 earlier 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. Legrasse had obtained the sculpture the previous year, when he led a party of policemen on a raid into a swamp which surprised a bizarre cult holding a bacchanal ritual with human sacrifice. 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 archaeologists consulted at the meeting, Princeton professor William Channing Webb, had once encountered a group of "Esquimaux" with similar beliefs and fetishes.