Jul 16, 2012

Call of Cthulhu II: The Tale of Inspector Legrasse

"They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, 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, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him."




In which we learn of the global reach of the sinister Cthulhu cult and their hideous plans to usher in a blasphemous Second Coming. They ain't all Baptists down in New Orleans...

"The Call of Cthulhu" was written in 1926 and first published in Weird Tales in 1928. In  the excellent H.P. Lovecraft: Against The World, Against Life ,French novelist Michel Houellebecq notes it as the first of Lovecraft's "great texts" which he lists as follows:

The Call of Cthulhu
The Colour Out of Space
The Dunwich Horror
The Whisperer in Darkness
At the Mountains of Madness
The Dreams in the Witch House
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
The Shadow Out of Time 


“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.” was rather difficult to pronounce.



No comments:

Post a Comment