Mysterious deaths. Strange tales. Cults in fear. People temporarily driven mad. Going through his deceased uncle's papers, Francis Thurston stumbles across a strange object and mystifying accounts of an ancient horror that may explain it all: Cthulhu sleeps under the waves . . . and some seek to awaken him.
The Call of Cthulhu is a short story by H.P. Lovecraft. It's an American horror classic, and rightfully so. I enjoyed the tale and experienced "a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers" that Lovecraft argued should be present in all so-call 'weird tales.' He also said that stories in this mold must contain "a hint . . . [of] a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space . . ." We see that here.
Lovecraft wrote many stories, mostly appearing in pulp fiction magazines. In her biography of the author, Charlotte Montague states that scholars name eight Lovecraft tales as the 'great texts':
The Call of Cthulhu
The Color Out of Space
The Dunwich Horror
The Whisperer in Darkness
At the Mountains of Madness
The Dreams in the Witch House
The Shadow over Innsmouth
The Shadow Out of Time
I'll have to check a few more of these out.
Rating: A
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