Leonard Gaya's Reviews > The Call of Cthulhu

The Call of Cthulhu is, to all appearances, a rather short and negligible story (little more than 30 pages long). And yet, it’s undoubtedly one of the most iconic novellas by H.P. Lovecraft, and one of his significant early achievements (with, perhaps, The Rats in the Walls). A novella which has spurred the imagination of countless fans, artists, writers, game designers and triggered many imitations.

In this story, we find the first mentions (to my knowledge) of nightmarish cyclopean corpse-cities, resurfacing like non-Euclidean mammoth monoliths from the unfathomable depths of time; the invention of strange and evil tongues (the repeated sentence: "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.”); the description of horrific squid-like entities; the mention of the mysterious Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.

The story is in the form of an archaeological enquiry, piecing sinister clues together: from the discovery of a series of disturbing statuettes, an investigation around a sort of depraved voodoo cult, to a shipwreck in the South Pacific, finally to uncover an endless dark horror of apocalyptic proportions. Perhaps one of the major achievement of this short story is the blend of realistic background (narrated in first-person without any dialogue) with demonic details which, for the most part, are characterised as indescribable, and left to the reader’s weirdest imaginings.

Lovecraft drew his inspiration from the Greek myths of Atlantis, of the Gorgon, of Polyphemus (The Odyssey) and the Scandinavian legend of the Kraken, possibly also from Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Melville’s Moby-Dick and Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The Cthulhu story has had a significant influence on late 20th-century sci-fi and horror genres, especially in the visual arts, from Druillet and Mœbius graphic novels to movie franchises such as Alien, Indiana Jones and Pirates of the Caribbean.