"The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft

2 years ago
14

(Found Among the Papers of the Late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston)

"Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival . . . a survival of a hugely remote period when . . . consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity . . . forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds. . . ." -Algernon Blackwood.

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The picture used is "The Madness from the Sea" by Sofyan Syarief, used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en)

To follow along: https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/pm.aspx

Some fascinating explanation of the pronunciation of the name Cthulhu, but I opted to go with a more conventional and common pronunciation (i.e. the Chaosium one), if only because it is easier to say, and to say consistently.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIgpcr-6q0w

Regardless, it is worth nothing Lovecraft's comment that all these names and words were not meant to be spoken by human tongues, that indeed humans lack the necessary physiology to correctly pronounce them at all, so in the end, it doesn't matter if we agree on how a word should be pronounced, we're ALL wrong :-P

Apparently Lovecraft thought this story was "rather middling". I actually have to agree. It's got some interesting elements, but he's definitely got more horrifying, dreadful, and intense stories than this one, but definitely he wrote other much weaker stories, so yeah, middling.

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