"Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival... a survival of a hugely remote period when... consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity... forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds... ."- Algernon BlackwoodThe most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
For some reason, this critter is an H.P. Lovecraft (Howard Phillips Lovecraft) classic. I have ordered the 2005 movie. I kept waiting for the action, and somehow it ended before it started. I did not realize how meaningful the title was until the end, when I said, “Oh wow, now I understand.
After Francis Wayland Thurston (a professor at Brown University) shuffles off this mortal coil, he leaves papers. His great-nephew, an anthropologist who narrates the story, is shocked to find that France Wayland’s research into what started as a spooky dream to find that he uncovers a cabal of Cthulhu worshipers. But who or what is Cthulhu? We travel with the narrator as he pieces together what Francis suspects. When Cthulhu calls, we may even have to confront him/it ourselves.
Buyer tip: check the ISBN, check the page count, and if the author isn’t Lovecraft, assume you’re dealing with an adaptation, a derivative, or a tentacle‑shaped metadata accident.
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