Cthulhu

Literary invention
Scritto estate 1926 · «Weird Tales», vol. 11 n. 2, febbraio 1928

Cthulhu — a creature sleeping in the sunken city of R'lyeh, described as a mixture of octopus, dragon and human caricature.

First appearance

Short story The Call of Cthulhu, pp. 159-178 and 287.

What is told

A creature sleeping in the sunken city of R'lyeh, described as a mixture of octopus, dragon and human caricature. It is not the chief of the Great Old Ones: in the text it is their «high-priest». The distinction is ignored practically always.

In the corpus

It is the story that founds the method: documents, newspaper cuttings, cross-checked testimony, an inquiry that reconstructs the horror instead of showing it. The structure matters more than the creature.

Publication data

«Weird Tales», vol. 11 no. 2, February 1928.

Caution

Cthulhu is not «the god of evil». In Lovecraft the entities are not malevolent but indifferent: the horror arises from man's irrelevance, not from his persecution. The moral reading is a graft of Derleth's.

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