the call of cthulhu and other weird tales

That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things-in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden eons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. 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. If you enjoyed The Call of Cthulhu, you might also like Arthur Machen's The White People and Other Weird Stories, available in Penguin Classics.T he most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. Using many pen names, he contributed his supernatural/horror and science fiction/fantasy stories to various pulp magazines but his reputation as a writer rests mainly on the 60 or so stories he published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales starting in 1923. Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937), born in Providence, Rhode Island was self-educated and lived in his birthplace all his life, working as a freelance writer, journalist, and ghostwriter.

Including the definitive corrected texts, this collection reveals the development of Lovecraft's mesmerising narrative style and establishes him as a hugely influential - and visionary - American writer. This selection of short stories ranges from early tales of nightmares and insanity such as 'The Outsider' and 'The Rats in the Walls' through the grotesquely comic 'Herbert West - Reanimator' and 'The Hound', to the extraterrestrial terror of 'The Call of Cthulhu', which fuses traditional supernaturalism with science fiction. Discarding ghosts and witches, and instead envisaging mankind at the mercy of a chaotic and malevolent universe, Lovecraft's unique works would prove to be a huge influence on modern horror writers such as Stephen King. Lovecraft remade the genre in the early twentieth century.

Joshi in Penguin Modern Classics.Ĭredited with inventing the modern horror tradition, H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories is edited with an introduction and notes by S.T. Collecting uniquely uncanny tales from the master of American horror, H.P.

The call of cthulhu and other weird tales