by Benjamin Lomax

Created on: December 01, 2010   Last Updated: December 02, 2010

“Call of Cthulhu” is perhaps the most popular short story written by the creator of the Cthulhu mythos, second only to Edgar Allen Poe as the master of macabre short fiction, H.P. Lovecraft. It was written in the summer of 1926 and originally published in Weird Tales Magazine in February of 1928 and reprinted in The Lurking Fear and other stories collection in 1971 among many other reprints. It was adapted in several low budget editions for audiobooks, audio theatre, and even a silent film.

The story is made up of three elements linked by a narrator, all three of which are made up of found elements of a relative’s journal the narrator describes as he discovers them. The first part is called “Horror in Clay” wherein an art student named Henry Wilcox found an image in his dreams, that of horrific R’lyeh and sculpted what he found, a terrible tentacled monster. The attunement to the supernatural via your dreams is a Lovecraft staple.

The second part is “The Tale of Inspector Legrasse” about a professor who saw a similar image to that created by Wilcox. He is contacted by New Orleans police officer John Raymond Legrasse who has found a “voodoo” statue with the same monstrous image in a bayou swamp and in order to solve the murder/disappearance of several people who were sacrificed by a mongrel bayou culture in their worship of “the Old Gods”.

The third part “The Madness from the Sea” concerns the narrator Thurston following another Cthulhu lead, this time a solitary shipwreck survivor named Gustaf Johansen, whose ship was attacked by cultists aboard the heavily armed ship Alert. They manage to kill the attackers but lose their own ship in the process, boarding the Alert which finds its way to an uncharted island. On the island most of the crew died but Johansen dies himself before he can reveal what happened there.

His wife regales Thurston with the story from her husband’s diary, that they found the ruined city of R’lyeh upon which the horror Cthulhu itself was waiting, passing through a monstrous portal and devouring the men. Johansen manages to aim the prow of the ship and break Cthulhu’s head, sending him back to his slumbering depths. But Thurston becomes aware that now he has little time left as he knows too much. And perhaps it is better, as he knows sooner or later Cthulhu will emerge again and this time will not be stopped.

This story is the only one written by   himself where the monster Cthulhu himself significantly appears. It was reportedly inspired by Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem The Kraken, which slept far underground. Several other similar stories about horrific gods sleeping whose awakening would destroy mankind have also been cited as potential inspiration.

This narrated story is disturbing as all of Lovecraft’s strong fiction is. The appearance of the great monster for which the author became best known is not truly horrifying as he is relatively easy disposed of, but the followers and their devotion including their causing the death of several characters in the story does speak to the curious attraction such a cult might offer. A curious tale to found a whole mythos on, but a must read for anybody who is curious about Lovecraft’s iconic monstrous mythology.

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