The Call of Cthulhu

H. P. Lovecraft wrote "The Call of Cthulhu" during the summer of 1926, and it first appeared in the February 1928 issue of the pulp magazine Weird Tales. This short story of cosmic horror is a foundational text for the Cthulhu Mythos, a shared fictional universe that Lovecraft and later writers expanded.

The story is told by Francis Wayland Thurston, who is already dead at the time of narration. He describes finding the papers of his grand-uncle, George Gammell Angell, a Brown University linguistics professor who died in the winter of 1926–27. Among the notes is a small bas-relief sculpture of a scaly creature that looks like a combination of an octopus, a dragon, and a distorted human. The sculptor, a Rhode Island art student named Henry Anthony Wilcox, created it based on delirious dreams of immense Cyclopean cities made of titan blocks and towering monoliths. Wilcox's papers frequently mention the names Cthulhu and R'lyeh. Angell also uncovers reports of mass hysteria occurring worldwide.

Other notes describe a 1908 meeting of an archeological society where New Orleans police official John Raymond Legrasse asked attendees to identify a statuette of unidentifiable greenish-black stone, which resembles Wilcox's sculpture. Legrasse obtained the statuette the previous year during a raid on a swamp cult. His party killed five cultists and arrested 47 others, learning that the cult worshipped the "Great Old Ones" and awaited the return of a monstrous being called Cthulhu. The prisoners identified the statuette as "great Cthulhu." One archaeologist at the meeting, Princeton professor William Channing Webb, had previously encountered an Eskimo group with similar beliefs and fetishes.

The significance of these notes becomes clear when Thurston finds a 1925 Australian newspaper article about a derelict ship, the Alert, whose sole survivor is second mate Gustaf Johansen. Johansen originally sailed on the Emma, which was attacked by pirates aboard the Alert, a heavily armed yacht. The Emma's crew killed the pirates but lost their own ship, then commandeered the Alert and discovered an uncharted island near specific coordinates. Except for Johansen and one other man, the rest of the crew died mysteriously on the island.

Thurston travels to Australia and sees a statue from the Alert identical to the previous two. In Norway, he learns that Johansen died suddenly after an encounter with two Lascar sailors. Johansen's widow gives Thurston her husband's manuscript, which reveals the true story. The uncharted island was a nightmare corpse-city called R'lyeh. Johansen's crew struggled with its non-Euclidean geometry and accidentally released Cthulhu, causing their deaths. Johansen and one crewmate fled in the Alert, ramming the creature's head, but its injury regenerated, allowing them to escape. The crewmate died, and Johansen died soon after returning home. After reading the manuscript, Thurston realizes he is now a target of Cthulhu's worshippers and hopes his discoveries will never be made public.

The first chapter, "The Horror in Clay," originated from a dream Lovecraft had in 1919, described in letters to his friend Rheinhart Kleiner on May 21 and December 14, 1920. In the dream, Lovecraft visits a Providence antiquity museum and tries to convince an aged curator to buy a bas-relief he sculpted. The curator scoffs, and Lovecraft's reply mirrors what the character Wilcox tells the narrator's uncle when showing his bas-relief and seeking help reading hieroglyphs from his dreams. Lovecraft used this for a story synopsis in his Commonplace Book in August 1925, developing the bas-relief idea. He added a footnote to his dream: "Add good development & describe nature of bas-relief."

Scholars S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz cite other literary inspirations. Guy de Maupassant's "The Horla" (1887), which Lovecraft described in Supernatural Horror in Literature as concerning an invisible being that sways minds and seems the vanguard of extraterrestrial organisms subjugating humanity. Arthur Machen's "The Novel of the Black Seal" (1895) uses a similar method of piecing together disassociated knowledge, including a random newspaper clipping, to reveal a horrific ancient being.

Joshi also cites A. Merritt's novella The Moon Pool (1918), which Lovecraft frequently praised. Joshi notes that Merritt's "moon-door," which when tilted leads characters into a region of wonder and horror, resembles the huge door whose inadvertent opening by sailors causes Cthulhu to emerge from R'lyeh. Lovecraft likely drew inspiration from William Scott-Elliot's The Story of Atlantis (1896) and The Lost Lemuria (1904), which he read in 1926 shortly before starting the story.

Cthulhu Mythos scholar Robert M. Price claims Alfred Tennyson's 1830 irregular sonnet "The Kraken" was a major inspiration, as both reference a huge aquatic creature sleeping eternally at the ocean bottom, destined to emerge from its slumber.