The Call of Cthulhu

"The Call of Cthulhu was published in 1928, and it is Lovecraft’s most famous story. It’s a story that’s told in several parts, in which an investigation pieces together, from various clues, the existence of monstrous forces that have impinged upon our world. It introduces the monstrous figure, Cthulhu, who is a tentacle-faced extraterrestrial entity so powerful that human beings can’t resist, so much as just try to keep our heads down and not attract its attention. Lovecraft is famous now for something called the Cthulhu Mythos, which is a group of stories that share this world he invented. It takes its name, obviously, from Cthulhu, who is one of a pantheon of these extraterrestrial, interdimensional entities that – should they bother to notice us – could squash us out of existence. Yes, I think that’s another reason that Lovecraft’s popularity blossomed. I tend to think of it as an open-source universe. Lovecraft had a series of interconnected stories, and introduced entities and gods such as Cthulhu. Other authors were then, with his blessing, invited to participate in developing that universe further. August Derleth, for example, contributed his own gods to Lovecraft’s mythos. One of the other things that I think made Lovecraft endure is that, although he wasn’t terribly well known during his lifetime, he was a voluminous letter writer, and really offered a lot of encouragement to young authors who were interested in writing fantasy and science fiction and horror – including for example Robert E. Howard, the creator of the Conan the Barbarian novels, and Robert Bloch, the author of Psycho . He really was generous in that respect."