The Call of Cthulhu is an internationally renowned horror masterpiece by H. P. Lovecraft. Three independent narratives linked together by the device of a narrator discovering notes left by a deceased relative. Piecing together the whole truth and disturbing significance of the information he possesses, the narrator's final line is ''The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.'' The narrator, Francis Wayland Thurston, recounts his discovery of notes left behind by his grand-uncle, Brown University linguistic professor George Gammell Angell, after his 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 are found in Wilcox's papers. Angell also discovers reports of mass hysteria around the world. Lovecraft regarded the short story as "rather middling-not as bad as the worst, but full of cheap and cumbrous touches.
" Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright first rejected the story, and only accepted it after writer Donald Wandrei, a friend of Lovecraft's, falsely claimed that Lovecraft was thinking of submitting it elsewhere.[11] The published story was regarded by Robert E. Howard (the creator of Conan) as "a masterpiece, which I am sure will live as one of the highest achievements of literature. Mr. Lovecraft holds a unique position in the literary world; he has grasped, to all intents, the worlds outside our paltry ken.
" Lovecraft scholar Peter Cannon regarded the story as "ambitious and complex...a dense and subtle narrative in which the horror gradually builds to cosmic proportions," adding "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 (1991), described the story as the first of Lovecraft's "great texts.
"[14] Canadian mathematician Benjamin K. Tippett noted that the phenomena described in Johansen's journal may be interpreted as "observable consequences of a localized bubble of spacetime curvature," and proposed a suitable mathematical model.
E. F. Bleiler has referred to "The Call of Cthulhu" as "a fragmented essay with narrative inclusions"
Description:
The Call of Cthulhu is an internationally renowned horror masterpiece by H. P. Lovecraft. Three independent narratives linked together by the device of a narrator discovering notes left by a deceased relative. Piecing together the whole truth and disturbing significance of the information he possesses, the narrator's final line is ''The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.'' The narrator, Francis Wayland Thurston, recounts his discovery of notes left behind by his grand-uncle, Brown University linguistic professor George Gammell Angell, after his 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 are found in Wilcox's papers. Angell also discovers reports of mass hysteria around the world. Lovecraft regarded the short story as "rather middling-not as bad as the worst, but full of cheap and cumbrous touches.
" Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright first rejected the story, and only accepted it after writer Donald Wandrei, a friend of Lovecraft's, falsely claimed that Lovecraft was thinking of submitting it elsewhere.[11] The published story was regarded by Robert E. Howard (the creator of Conan) as "a masterpiece, which I am sure will live as one of the highest achievements of literature. Mr. Lovecraft holds a unique position in the literary world; he has grasped, to all intents, the worlds outside our paltry ken.
" Lovecraft scholar Peter Cannon regarded the story as "ambitious and complex...a dense and subtle narrative in which the horror gradually builds to cosmic proportions," adding "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 (1991), described the story as the first of Lovecraft's "great texts.
"[14] Canadian mathematician Benjamin K. Tippett noted that the phenomena described in Johansen's journal may be interpreted as "observable consequences of a localized bubble of spacetime curvature," and proposed a suitable mathematical model.
E. F. Bleiler has referred to "The Call of Cthulhu" as "a fragmented essay with narrative inclusions"