The Call of Cthulhu

"The Call of Cthulhu"
Short story by H. P. Lovecraft
Country	USA
Language	English
Genre(s)	Horror short story
Publication
Published in	Weird Tales
Media type	Magazine
Publication date	February, 1928

Cthulhu with the insane city R'lyeh in the background.

"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."

Plot summary

The story is presented as a manuscript "found among the papers of the late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston". In the text, Thurston recounts his discovery of notes left behind by his grand-uncle, George Gammell Angell, a prominent professor of Semitic languages at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who died suddenly in "the winter of 1926–27" after being "jostled by a nautical-looking negro".

"The Horror in Clay"

The first part of the story, "The Horror in Clay", concerns a small bas-relief sculpture found among the papers, which the narrator describes: "My somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature.... A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings."

The sculpture turns out to be the work of Henry Anthony Wilcox, a student at the Rhode Island School of Design who based the work on his dreams of "great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror." These images are associated in the dreams with the words Cthulhu and R'lyeh.

Wilcox's dreams began on March 1, 1925, culminating in a period from March 23 until April 2 when Wilcox was in a state of delirium. During the same period, Angell's research reveals, there were cases of "outre mental illnesses and outbreaks of group folly or mania" around the world — from Paris and London, Africa and South America, Haiti and the Philippines, western Ireland and India. In New York City, "hysterical Levantines" mob police; in California, a Theosophist colony dons white robes to await a "glorious fulfillment."

"The Tale of Inspector Legrasse"

In the second part of the story, "The Tale of Inspector Legrasse", Angell's notes reveal that the professor had heard the word Cthulhu and seen a similar image much earlier. At the 1908 meeting of the American Archeological Society in St. Louis, Missouri, a New Orleans police official named John Raymond Legrasse had asked the assembled antiquarians to identify a statuette, made of an unidentifiable greenish-black stone, that "had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting." The "idol, fetish, or whatever it was" closely resembled the Wilcox bas-relief:

It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters.

On November 1, 1907, Legrasse had led a party in search of several women and children who disappeared from a squatter community. The police found the victims' "oddly marred" bodies being used in a ritual that centered on the statuette, about which roughly 100 men — all of a "very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type" — were "braying, bellowing, and writhing", repeatedly chanting the phrase, "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."

After killing five of the participants and arresting 47 others, Legrasse interrogated the prisoners and learned "the central idea of their loathsome faith":

They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died...hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.

The prisoners identified the statuette as "great Cthulhu", and translated the chanted phrase as "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming." One particularly talkative cultist, known as "old Castro", named the centre of the cult as Irem, the City of Pillars, in Arabia, and points out a relevant passage in the Necronomicon:

That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die.

One of the academics queried by Legrasse, William Channing Webb, a professor of anthropology at Princeton, points out that he had encountered, "high up on the West Greenland coast", a similar phenomenon on an 1860 expedition: "a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Esquimaux whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness." Webb said that the Greenland cult had both the same chant and a similar "hideous" fetish.

Thurston, the narrator, notes that at this point in his investigation, "My attitude was still one of absolute materialism, as I wish it still were."

"The Madness From the Sea"

In the third part of the story, "The Madness From the Sea", Thurston extends the inquiry into the "Cthulhu Cult" beyond what Professor Angell had discovered. He discovers by chance an article from the Sydney Bulletin, an Australian newspaper, for April 18, 1925, that reported the discovery of a derelict ship in the Pacific Ocean with only one survivor — Norwegian sailor Gustaf Johansen, second mate on the schooner Emma out of Auckland, New Zealand, which on March 22 encountered a heavily armed yacht, the Alert, crewed by "a queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes" from Dunedin, N.Z. After the Alert attacked without provocation, the crew of the Emma fought back and, though losing their own ship, managed to board the opposing ship and kill all their attackers.

The article went on to say that the survivors encountered an island the next day, in the vicinity of 47° 9' S, 126° 43' W, even though there are no charted islands in that area. Most of the remaining crew died on the island, but Johansen is said to be "queerly reticent" about what happened to them.

Thurston realizes from the article that the crew of the Alert was connected to the Cthulhu Cult, and travels, first to New Zealand, then to Australia (where he sees a statue retrieved from the Alert with a "cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal") and finally to Oslo, where he learns that Johansen died suddenly after an encounter with "(t)wo Lascar sailors".

When Johansen's widow gives Thurston a manuscript written in English that her husband left behind, the narrator learns of the crew's discovery of the uncharted island which is described as "a coast-line of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less the tangible substance of earth's supreme terror — the nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh." Exploring the risen land, which is "abnormal, non-Euclidian, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours", the sailors manage to open a "monstrously carven portal", and from

the newly opened depths...It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway.... The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.

Thurston (or Johansen) writes that "(T)he Thing cannot be described", though the story does call it "the green, sticky spawn of the stars", and refers to its "flabby claws" and "awful squid-head with writhing feelers". Hinting at its scale, the story says, "A mountain walked or stumbled." Johansen manages to get back to the yacht; when Cthulhu enters the water to pursue the ship, Johansen rams the creature's head, which bursts with "a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish" — only to immediately begin reforming as Johansen and a sole companion (insane, and soon dead) make their escape.

After reading this manuscript, Thurston ends his own narrative on a pessimistic note: "Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men." He assumes that he will soon meet the fate of Angell and Johansen: "I know too much, and the cult still lives." He also thinks that Cthulhlu, whilst restoring his broken head, was dragged down again with the sinking city, thus keeping humanity safe untill the next time, when the stars are right.

Characters

George Gammell Angell

(1834–November 23, 1926)

Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages at Brown University who was "widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums." He died suddenly after being bumped by a black man (possibly a sailor) while returning from the Newport boat. At the time of his death, at age 92, he was a childless widower. His research notes on the worldwide Cthulhu cult were discovered after his death by his nephew, Francis Wayland Thurston.

Angell is an old Providence family name; Angell Street was Lovecraft's childhood address. He had an uncle named Gamwell, whose name was pronounced with a silent W.

Francis Wayland Thurston

A Bostonian anthropologist who died mysteriously on the waterfront near Providence, Rhode Island. He was the grand-nephew of George Angell and the sole heir and executor of his estate. While going through the late Professor Angell's papers, he discovered the secret of the Cthulhu Cult, a revelation that probably sealed his doom.

Thurston is another old Providence name. Francis Wayland was the fourth president of Brown University, who did much to build up the institution. Thurston's name appears only in the story's subtitle, which originally appeared in Weird Tales but was dropped from later reprints until the 1981 Arkham House edition.

Henry Anthony Wilcox

He is described, in terms that somewhat recall Lovecraft himself, as a

thin, dark young man of neurotic and excited aspect.... The youngest son of an excellent family...who had latterly been studying sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design and living alone at the Fleur-de-Lys Building near that institution. Wilcox was a precocious youth of known genius but great eccentricity, and had from chidhood excited attention through the strange stories and odd dreams he was in the habit of relating. He called himself "psychically hypersensitive", but the staid folk of the ancient commercial city dismissed him as merely "queer".

"Wilcox" is a name from Lovecraft's own family tree.

The Fleur-de-Lys Building is an actual building that still stands in Providence. Bernard K. Hart, a Providence Journal columnist who lived in the building, took mock-offense at its appropriation by Lovecraft, and threatened in print to send a ghostly visitor to Lovecraft's own address. Lovecraft's sonnet "The Messenger" is his response to this threat.

John Raymond Legrasse

A New Orleans police inspector who led the raid on the Cthulhu cult on November 1, 1907. Described as "a commonplace-looking middle-aged man".

Horror writer C. J. Henderson wrote a series of short stories with Legrasse as their protagonist, which were collected under the title The Tales of Inspector Legrasse.

Castro

An "immensely aged mestizo...who claimed to have sailed to strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of China." Arrested on November 1, 1907 during a New Orleans police raid on a cult ceremony.

Robert M. Price believes that Castro's name is based on that of Adolphe DeCastro--born Adolph Danziger--an author of "unbelievably bad fiction" who hired Lovecraft as a ghostwriter. Joshi and Schultz, however, report that Lovecraft did not become acquainted with DeCastro until late 1927.

William Channing Webb

A professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and "an explorer of no slight note". When Inspector Legrasse conferred with a meeting of the American Anthropology Society about the Cthulhu Cult, Professor Webb was the only member of the assembly to be familiar with an idol found during the raid and the ritualistic chants used by the cult, based on his investigation of a "singular tribe or cult of degenerate Esquimaux" he encountered "high up on the West Greenland coast" in 1860.

Gustaf Johansen

A Norwegian sailor "of some intelligence", the second mate of the Emma out of Auckland, whose home address was in Oslo's Old Town. He died shortly after his return from the South Pacific in 1925; his papers, found posthumously, provide the only first-hand account of Cthulhu in Lovecraft's fiction. His report was written in English to spare his wife from learning the horror of Cthulhu.

Price suggests that Johansen's nationality is a tip of the hat to the Kraken, a creature from Norwegian folklore, for helping to inspire Cthulhu.

Cthulhu

While not strictly a character, The god does play a key role in the story as the antagonist. Cthulhu is the lord of R'lyeh, and the ancient evil being that came from the stars thousands of years ago, to destroy the elder beings on our world. After the task was completed, the god retreated to R'lyeh and became trapped in his sunken tomb.

At the end of the story, Cthulhu is awakened by the fishermen, and proceeds to slaughter them. As two escape to their boat, the god gives chase, wading into the ocean after them. The fisherman then rams the boat into Cthulhu's head; it immediately starts to reform, but whilst the god is confused, he is trapped in the sinking city and is sent once more, to the ocean floor.

Inspiration

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

The Call of Cthulhu

Cthulhu Mythos scholar Robert M. Price, in his introduction to The Cthulhu Cycle, points to Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem "The Kraken" as a major inspiration for Lovecraft's story. The poem depicts the Kraken—elsewhere described as a giant octopus or squid—sleeping "Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea/His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep":

There hath he lain for ages and will lie,

Battening on huge seaworms in his sleep;

Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;

Then once by man and angels to be seen,

In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

Price points to the parallels with Lovecraft's creature: a huge, octopoid sea monster, sleeping for ages at the bottom of the ocean (either "dreaming" or "dreamless"), and destined to emerge from his slumber in an apocalyptic age.

Price also considers the work of Lord Dunsany to be a major source for Lovecraft's dreaming god. Lovecraft himself noted that he read some Dunsany, an author he greatly admired, on the day that he conceived the plot of "Call of Cthulhu"; Price points in particular to "A Shop in Go-by Street", which talks of "the heaven of the gods who sleep", and notes that "unhappy are they that hear some old god speak while he sleeps being still deep in slumber". Another Dunsany work cited by Price is The Gods of Pegana, which depicts a god who is constantly lulled to sleep, because if he should awaken "there will be worlds nor gods no more."

S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz point to a different set of literary inspirations: Guy de Maupassant's "The Horla", which Lovecraft described in "Supernatural Horror in Literature" as concerning "an invisible being who...sways the minds of others, and seems to be the vanguard of a horde of extra-terrestrial organisms arrived on earth to subjugate and overwhelm mankind"; and Arthur Machen's "The Novel of the Black Seal" (1895), which uses the same "piecing together of disassociated knowledge" (including a random newspaper clipping) to reveal a horrific ancient survival.

Other inspirations for Lovecraft's story are referenced in the story itself--for example, James Frazer's The Golden Bough, Margaret Murray's Witch-Cult in Western Europe, and W. Scott-Elliot's Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria, a work based on theosophy.

Literary significance & criticism

Lovecraft himself called "The Call of Cthulhu" "rather middling—not as bad as the worst, but full of cheap and cumbrous touches." It was originally rejected by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright, who only accepted it after writer Donald Wandrei, a friend of Lovecraft's, talked it up to Wright and falsely claimed that Lovecraft was thinking of submitting it elsewhere.

When it was published, however, some hailed it as a remarkable achievement. "Mr. Lovecraft's latest story, 'The Call of Cthulhu', is indeed a masterpiece, which I am sure will live as one of the highest achievements of literature," Robert E. Howard (the creator of Conan) wrote in a letter to Weird Tales. "Mr. Lovecraft holds a unique position in the literary world; he has grasped, to all intents, the worlds outside our paltry ken. His scope is unlimited, and his range is cosmic."

Lovecraft scholar Peter Cannon calls the story "ambitious and complex...a dense and subtle narrative in which the horror gradually builds to cosmic proportions." It is, he adds, "one of [Lovecraft's] bleakest fictional expressions of man's insignificant place in the universe."

French novelist Michel Houellebecq, in his book H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, describes "The Call of Cthulhu" as the first of Lovecraft's "great texts".

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

The story was adapted as an audio book by Landfall Productions in 1989. It was narrated by Garrick Hagon.

The story was adapted as a silent movie of the same name in 2005 by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society.

Legacy

The "Cthulhu Mythos", a story-cycle developed by Lovecraft, takes its name from the titular creature of the story. Other authors, many of whom were early friends or acquaintances of Lovecraft, have penned their own stories in this milieu. Call of Cthulhu is the title of a popular role-playing game based on the Cthulhu Mythos.

For references to Cthulhu in music and film, see Cthulhu in popular culture.

See also

• Arkham Horror
• Cthulhu
• Cthulhu Mythos in popular culture
• Call of Cthulhu (role-playing game)
• Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth (video game)
• Call of Cthulhu Collectible Card Game
• Cthulhu Dawn is the name of a song by black metal group Cradle of Filth.
• The Call of Cthulhu (film)
• "The Call of Ktulu" (Metallica song)
• Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem (video game)

References

• Lovecraft, Howard P. (1984) [1928]. "The Call of Cthulhu". In S. T. Joshi (ed.) (ed.). The Dunwich Horror and Others (9th corrected printing ed.). Sauk City, WI: Arkham House. ISBN 0-87054-037-8. {{cite book}}: |editor= has generic name (help) Definitive version.

• Lovecraft, Howard P. (1999) [1928]. "The Call of Cthulhu". In S. T. Joshi (ed.) (ed.). More Annotated Lovecraft (1st ed.). New York City, NY: Dell. ISBN 0-440-50875-4. {{cite book}}: |editor= has generic name (help) With explanatory footnotes.

• Price, Robert M. (1996) [1928]. "The Call of Cthulhu". In Robert M. Price (ed.) (ed.). The Cthulhu Cycle: Thirteen Tentacles of Terror (1st ed.). Oakland, CA: Chaosium, Inc. ISBN 1-56882-038-0. {{cite book}}: |editor= has generic name (help) A collection of works that inspired and were inspired by "The Call of Cthulhu", with commentary.

External links

• The Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft
• "The Kraken", Alfred Lord Tennyson; complete text
• "A Shop in Go-By Street", Lord Dusany; complete text at litrix.com
• The Gods of Pegana, Lord Dunsany; complete text at Wikisource
• "The Horla", Guy de Maupassant; complete text at Wikisource
• "The Novel of the Black Seal", Arthur Machen; complete text at Project Gutenberg of Australia
• Cthulhu Lives, movie version of "The Call of Cthulhu"