Published: February 1928
Author: H. P. Lovecraft
Genres: Classic, Fantasy, Fiction, Horror, Literature, One-Hour, Science Fiction, Short Reads, Short Stories, Suspense, Thrillers
Check out the review of this book here:
Useful Search Related Words & Keywords:
Angell, Australia, Cephalopod, Daemoniac, George Angell, Greenland, H.P. Lovecraft, Horror In The Clay, Johansen, Legrasse, Nahum, Norway, Prodigious, Rhode Island, R'lyeh, Runic, St.Louis, Theosophists, Thurston, W.C. Webb, Wilcox
Summary:
Francis Wayland Thurston, the story's narrator, recounts his discovery of various notes left behind by his great uncle, George Gammell Angell, a prominent professor of Semitic languages at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who died during the winter of 1926, suspecting eldritch goings-on after being bumped into by a "nautical-looking negro."
The very first chapter, "The Horror in Clay," a small bas-relief sculpture discovered among the notes, is described by the narrator as "my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature... A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings." Henry Anthony Wilcox, a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, created the sculpture based on a delirious dream of his "vast Cyclopean cities of gigantic blocks and sky-scraping monoliths, oozing with green slime and ominous with latent terror." Letters sent by Wilcox contain references to both Cthulhu and R'lyeh.
Angell also found worldwide accounts of "outre mental disorders and breakouts of collective folly or insanity" (in New York City, "hysterical Levantines" mob police; in California, a Theosophist colony dress in white robes while awaiting a "glorious fulfillment").
"The Tale of Inspector Legrasse," the second chapter, describes the first time the Professor heard the name "Cthulhu" and saw a comparable vision. A New Orleans police official called John Raymond Legrasse requested the gathering of antiquarians to identify an idol carved from a strange greenish-black stone at the 1908 conference of the American Archaeological Society in St. Louis, Missouri. Legrasse had unearthed the artifact months previously in the marshes south of New Orleans while raiding a rumored voodoo coven.
The idol is similar to Wilcox's sculpture and represents a "being, which looked instinct with a terrible and unnatural malignancy, was of a slightly bloated corpulence, and sat evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable inscriptions."
On November 1, 1907, Legrasse joined a group of fellow cops in the search for numerous women and children who had gone missing from a squatter community. Police discovered the victims' "oddly damaged" bodies being used in a ceremony in which 100 men, all of a "mentally abnormal kind," were "braying, screaming, and writhing" and continuously chanting the phrase "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn." Legrasse interviewed the guys after murdering five of the participants and detaining 47 others before obtaining "the core principle of their vile faith":
"They worshiped the Great Old Ones, they said, who lived ages before there were any men... and... formed a cult that had never died... hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, would rise and bring the earth back under his sway. When the stars aligned, he'd phone, and the hidden cult would always be there to free him."
The inmates identify the stolen idol as Cthulhu himself, and their strange statement is translated as "In his abode at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming." Old Castro, a particularly chatty cultist, called the heart of their cult Irem, the City of Pillars in Arabia, and referenced to a line in the Necronomicon: "That is not dead which can eternally lay, And with weird eons, even death may die."
William Channing Webb, a Princeton anthropology professor, stated at the meeting that during an 1860 expedition to the western coast of Greenland, he encountered "a singular tribe of degenerate Eskimos whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness." Webb argues that the Greenland cult had the same cry as well as a "hideous" obsession. The narrator, Thurston, observes, "My mentality was still one of pure materialism, as I wish it was still."
Thurston reads a story from the Sydney Bulletin, an Australian newspaper, dated April 18, 1925, in the third chapter, "The Madness from the Sea." The article describes the finding of a sunken ship in the Pacific Ocean with only one survivor: a Norwegian sailor called Gustaf Johansen, second mate on board the Emma, a schooner that departed from Auckland, New Zealand. On March 22, the Emma came into contact with the Alert; a highly armed boat crewed by "a strange and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes" from Dunedin.
The crew of the Emma slaughtered everyone aboard after being assaulted without provocation by the Alert, although they lost their ship in the conflict. The surviving crewmembers continue on, commanding their opponent's vessel, and reach at an undiscovered island at 47°9′S 126°43′W. The remaining crewmembers perish on the island, with the exception of Johansen and a fellow sailor (who perished on their way back to Auckland, New Zealand due to insanity after witnessing whatever was on that undiscovered island). Johansen never explains the circumstances surrounding their deaths.
Thurston visits New Zealand and later Australia, where he sees a statue salvaged from the Alert with a "cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal" at the Australian Museum. Thurston hears in Oslo that Johansen perished unexpectedly in a confrontation with two Lascars near the Gothenburg docks. Thurston is given a book written by Johansen's wife that details the fate of everyone on board Emma.
The unknown island is characterized as "a shoreline of mixed muck, slime, and weedy Cyclopean architecture that can be nothing less than the physical material of earth's greatest terror—the nightmarish corpse-city of R'lyeh." The crew is having difficulty grasping their surroundings' non-Euclidean geometry. When one of the sailors inadvertently creates a "monstrously carven gateway," Cthulhu emerges:
"It lumbered into view slobberingly and gropingly squeezed its slimy green enormity through the dark doorway. The stars had aligned once more, and what an age-old sect had failed to achieve on purpose, a gang of innocent seamen had done by chance. After vigintillions of years, Great Cthulhu was free and ravenous for pleasure."
Johansen depicts Cthulhu as "a mountain [that] moved or stumbled" before escaping with his crew, virtually all of them are slain. Before sailing away, Johansen and a sailor called Briden jump on board the boat. Cthulhu, on the other hand, dives into the sea and follows their escaping vessel. Fortunately, Johansen swings his boat around and crashes it into the creature's head, which explodes with "the mushy ugliness of a cloven sunfish"—only to begin regenerating instantly. Briden has gone crazy and died shortly after the Alert flees from R'lyeh. Thurston thinks he's now a prospective target after finishing the manuscript, reasoning, "I know too much, and the cult still survives."
Rating: 100/100
Recommended: 100/100 Yes.
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