The Call of Cthulhu

A short story that launched a whole mythology of cosmic dread, presented as the assembled papers of a man piecing together a secret his late grand-uncle stumbled upon. From a sculptor’s fevered dreams, a police raid on a swamp cult, and a sailor’s account of a drowned city risen from the Pacific, a picture emerges of Cthulhu, a vast alien god sleeping beneath the waves and waiting for the stars to align. Lovecraft’s horror lies less in gore than in scale: the terror of realizing how small and accidental humanity is against forces older than the world itself. The tale gave weird fiction its most enduring monster and named a genre. This free PDF and EPUB edition makes the original story available to read.