First released in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in February 1928, 'The Call of Cthulhu' is a terrifying trilogy of horror stories that has influenced writers such as William S. Burroughs, Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Ligotti and Stephen King.
The story's narrator, Francis Wayland Thurston, recounts his discovery of various notes left behind by his great uncle, George Gammell Angell, a prominent Professor of Semitic languages at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who died during the winter of 1926 after being jostled by a sailor.
The first chapter, The Horror in Clay, concerns a small bas-relief sculpture found among the notes, which the narrator describes: "My somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature.... A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary win.
