| Title | : | The Call of Cthulhu (Unabridged) |
|---|---|---|
| Author | : | H. P. Lovecraft |
| Release | : | 2025-01-16 |
| Kind | : | audiobook |
| Genre | : | Fiction |
| Preview Intro | |||
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| 1 | The Call of Cthulhu (Unabridged) | H. P. Lovecraft |
| H. P. Lovecraft was never appreciated in his lifetime, but achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction. Today he is now widely seen as one of the most significant 20th century authors in his genre. The Call of Cthulu was written in the summer of 1926 and was first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales, in February 1928. It concerns a terrifying cosmic entity that is described from several points of view. Cthulhu is described as "a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. It is a mix between a giant human, an octopus, and a dragon, and is depicted as being hundreds of meters tall, with human-looking arms and legs and a pair of rudimentary wings on its back. The head is depicted as similar to the entirety of a giant octopus, with an unknown number of tentacles surrounding its supposed mouth. It is able to change the shape of its body at will, extending and retracting limbs and tentacles as it sees fit. This tale is not for the faint of heart. The story was regarded by Robert E. Howard (the creator of Conan the Barbarian) as "a masterpiece, which I am sure will live as one of the highest achievements of literature...Mr. Lovecraft holds a unique position in the literary world; he has grasped, to all intents, the worlds outside our paltry ken." Lovecraft scholar Peter Cannon regarded the story as "ambitious and complex...a dense and subtle narrative in which the horror gradually builds to cosmic proportions", adding "one of Lovecraft's bleakest fictional expressions of man's insignificant place in the universe." |
