Before You Begin

Before you begin.

A sealed box, a piece of wet clay, and a handful of newspaper clippings should not be enough to overturn a person's sense of reality. Yet in H. P. Lovecraft's most influential tale, knowledge becomes frightening precisely because its fragments arrive from credible hands: an elderly scholar, a gifted sculptor, a police inspector, an explorer, and a sailor who would rather remain silent.

First published in 1928, The Call of Cthulhu helped give modern weird fiction one of its defining shapes. Lovecraft replaces the comfortable mystery of a single haunted place with a worldwide pattern—dreams, objects, rituals, and testimony that seem unrelated until someone insists on setting them side by side. The horror lies as much in the method as in what the method discovers.

The story also carries the prejudices of its author and period. Its racialized descriptions and fear of unfamiliar peoples are part of the historical text; this edition preserves that text while refusing to treat those attitudes as neutral or authoritative. Readers may wish to approach its achievement and its failings together.

Enter slowly. Notice who records each account, what object passes from hand to hand, and how dates and places begin to answer one another. The illustrated gallery that follows traces those connections without replacing the story's own deliberate act of discovery.