The Call of Cthulhu

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an American writer, poet, literary critic and essayist, recognized as one of the greatest writers of horror literature together with Edgar Allan Poe and considered by many to be one of the precursors of Anglo-American science fiction. His works, a contamination between horror, soft science fiction, dark fantasy and low fantasy, have often been described, even by himself, with the term weird fiction (where weird stands for "strange"), being recognized among the main origins of the modern literary genre of the new weird.

The cosmic horror story The Call of Cthulhu is one of Lovecraft’s most famous works. Written in the summer of 1926 and first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in February 1928, it is considered the cornerstone of the celebrated "Cthulhu Mythos", a mythopoeia and shared fictional universe expanded upon by Lovecraft and successors.

The story is a seminal work of cosmic horror, a subgenre that emphasizes the insignificance of humanity in the face of vast, ancient, and incomprehensible forces. Unlike traditional gothic horror, which often focuses on human-centric morality, ghosts, or demons, Lovecraft’s terror stems from the realization that the universe is cold, indifferent, and populated by entities that defy our understanding of physics and reality.