Horror Weird Fiction Gothic Fiction Cosmic horror The unknown Madness The fragility of human knowledge The insignificance of humanity
The Call of Cthulhu is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft, first published in 1928. It inaugurates what later became known as the Cthulhu Mythos, a shared cosmos of ancient forces far beyond human comprehension.
The tale unfolds as a dossier compiled by a cautious narrator who assembles notes, letters, and testimonies in the exact order of his discovery. As the fragments cohere, they reveal how forbidden knowledge spreads through scattered clues rather than a single revelation.
One thread follows a deceased professor’s papers detailing a police raid and a ritual, exposing a clandestine cult with global echoes and intimations of an immemorial, inhuman purpose. The records suggest that what appears as superstition masks a deeper, older reality.
The other thread cites a sailor’s log describing a city risen from the Pacific when the stars align: R’lyeh, where a vast entity lies dreaming. In these pages, cosmic order briefly falters, hinting that human reason is a fragile lantern against the abyssal scale of the universe.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. "
#7 in Horror (this month)
#10 in Short Stories (this month)
The The Call of Cthulhu book is available for download in PDF, ePUB and Mobi:
Copyright info
The Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft is believed to be in the public domain in the United States only. It may still be copyrighted in other countries. If you are not in the United States, please check your local laws to ensure this eBook is in the public domain in your country before downloading The Call of Cthulhu in PDF or ePub.
Files, rumors, and a statue point to something too big for sanity. Lovecraft invents modern cosmic horror: the dread of patterns we can’t unsee and aren’t built to bear.
Conspiracy charts and internet rabbit holes love this blueprint. It’s a caution about meaning-making—how curiosity, evidence, and fear braid into systems that swallow their makers.
Connecting dots, losing sleep.
Awe that edges into dread.
Inquiry with side effects.
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Cosmic horror and a shared mythos that reshaped modern weird fiction and pop culture.
We have 24 books by H. P. Lovecraft in the AliceAndBooks library