In the Library
The Call of Cthulhu
H.P. Lovecraft, 1928
- Form
- Form Novella
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 50 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 3
- Length
- Length 12k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
At the Mountains of Madness
H.P. Lovecraft
Lovecraft does the same thing at the other end of the earth, but sends a whole expedition into the ice to find the city the Old Ones built.
£1.99
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
M.R. James
M.R. James does the same thing with scholars who read the wrong document, but keeps the horror small, close and personal.
£1.99
The War of the Worlds
H.G. Wells
Wells does the same thing with humanity's smallness before things from beyond, but brings the indifferent invaders to Surrey in daylight.
£1.99
About the book
The most merciful thing in the world, the story begins, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. Then it sets about correlating them. A dead professor's box of papers yields a clay bas-relief a young sculptor shaped from his dreams, a New Orleans police inspector's account of a cult chanting in a Louisiana swamp, and a newspaper cutting about a ship found adrift in the Pacific. Each scrap is harmless on its own. Laid side by side, they begin to describe something vast and asleep beneath the sea, in a drowned city whose angles are wrong in ways geometry cannot name. Lovecraft never asks you to believe in monsters, only to follow the evidence, so the dread arrives as a kind of arithmetic. Beneath the feverish adjectives lies an idea that still chills: a universe neither hostile to humanity nor kind, simply indifferent, and older than any god we have prayed to. By the last page the sea itself looks different, and that yellowed clipping in the professor's box no longer reads like news.