The Call of Cthulhu: H.P. Lovecraft a la Carte No. 1

By H. P. Lovecraft

This legendary 11,000-word novelette is the first piece of writing to come off H.P. Lovecraft’s pen after settling into his new home in his old home town of Providence, after his failed attempt to establish himself in New York the previous year. By the time he finished it, he had fully drafted his "master's

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pulp-Lit Productions
• Release date: Sep 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781635910629

H. P. Lovecraft

Renowned as one of the great horror-writers of all time, H.P. Lovecraft was born in 1890 and lived most of his life in Providence, Rhode Island. Among his many classic horror stories, many of which were published in book form only after his death in 1937, are ‘At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels of Terror’ (1964), ‘Dagon and Other Macabre Tales’ (1965), and ‘The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions’ (1970).

Book preview

The Call of Cthulhu:

H.P. Lovecraft a la Carte No. 1

H.P. LOVECRAFT

Copyright ©2016, 2019 Pulp-Lit Productions.

All rights reserved, with the exception of all text written by Howard Phillips (H.P.) Lovecraft and his collaborators, and on all text and art originally published in pulp magazines, on which copyright protections have expired worldwide. In the spirit of good stewardship of the public domain, no copyright claim is asserted over any of H.P. Lovecraft’s original text or any magazine art as presented in this book, including any and all corrections and style changes made to the originals. 

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Second e-book edition

ISBN: 978-1-63591-062-9 

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The CALL of CTHULHU.

11,000-word novelette

1926.

This legendary novelette is the first piece of writing to come off H.P. Lovecraft’s pen after settling into his new home in his old home town of Providence. By the time he finished it, he had fully drafted Supernatural Horror in Literature and was mostly just fine-tuning it; but the insights he had gleaned in the course of his researches were finding more and more full expression in his fiction. At the same time, his profound sense of relief at being away from New York, of joy at being home again, and of focus at having had his social calendar cleared of all the Kalem Club activities, were combining to set him up for the most productive and satisfying phase of his writing life. In the following 12 months Lovecraft would produce more than 150,000 words, including some of his most iconic works — starting, of course, with this one.

The Call of Cthulhu was conceived and planned out a year earlier, when Lovecraft envisioned making a short novel out of it. He appears to have put it away, saving it for a time when he would have the emotional resources to do it justice; in New York, of course, he did not. Now, happily installed at 10 Barnes Street, The Call of Cthulhu was the first order of literary business.

Lovecraft finished the story in August of 1926. Famously and inexplicably, Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright rejected the story when it was first submitted; but later, after one of Lovecraft’s friends mentioned to him that Lovecraft was shopping it around at other places, he wrote to ask for it back, and published it in the February 1928 issue.

I. 

THE HORROR IN CLAY.

Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival . . . a survival of a hugely remote period when . . . consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity . . . forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds . . . 

— Algernon Blackwood

(Found Among the Papers of the Late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston)

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. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of