The Call Of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft, 1928
The magic trick:
Creating an entire world of imaginary history
This story has captured people’s imaginations for a century, so I assume there must be something wrong with me when I say that it bored me to tears.
But that’s OK. I can still salute its world-building. I associate this kind of writing with the genre of fantasy, another batch of fiction that many others seem to enjoy far more than I do.
This is a story that doesn’t stop at creating one scene of the supernatural. We don’t simply have one creature or one conflict. It’s an entire hidden universe of terror that gets unearthed meticulously and relentlessly in great detail over the course of 12,000 words.
If that sounds like something you would enjoy, by all means…
And that’s quite a trick on Lovecraft’s part.
The selection:
The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of press cuttings, in Professor Angell’s most recent hand; and made no pretension to literary style. What seemed to be the main document was headed “CTHULHU CULT” in characters painstakingly printed to avoid the erroneous reading of a word so unheard-of. This manuscript was divided into two sections, the first of which was headed “1925—Dream and Dream Work of H. A. Wilcox, 7 Thomas St., Providence, R. I.”, and the second, “Narrative of Inspector John R. Legrasse, 121 Bienville St., New Orleans, La., at 1908 A. A. S. Mtg.—Notes on Same, & Prof. Webb’s Acct.” The other manuscript papers were all brief notes, some of them accounts of the queer dreams of different persons, some of them citations from theosophical books and magazines (notably W. Scott-Elliot’s Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria), and the rest comments on long-surviving secret societies and hidden cults, with references to passages in such mythological and anthropological source-books as Frazer’s Golden Bough and Miss Murray’s Witch-Cult in Western Europe. The cuttings largely alluded to outré mental illness and outbreaks of group folly or mania in the spring of 1925.
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