Lovecraft's Cosmic Horror: The Cthulhu Mythos

H. P. Lovecraft is a spiritual successor of Edgar Allan Poe, recognized as one of the best American writers of “weird fiction” of the Twentieth century. He led an uncomfortable living as a pulp fiction author in the years before and after the Great Depression, and is best recognized for his “Cthulhu Mythos” stories, the genre of which was later classified as “cosmic horror”. “The Call of Cthulhu” tells of a cosmic entity awakening from its ancient sleep as its city arises from the depths of the Pacific Ocean. Sensitive people around the world dream of this event, diabolical cults predict it as the dawn of a new era of chaos, and an unfortunate sailor stumbles upon the entity himself and is driven mad by the revelation. “At the Mountains of Madness” is a story about a scientific expedition to the Antarctica. Its mission is to search for fossilized remains in the deeper layers of the earth. They find the vasticy regions not as uninhabited as they expected, and uncover an ancient city of a bygone race. “The Shadow Out of Time” is about a man whose dreams hide a terrible truth. He discovers that an alien entity from the past had switched bodies with him in order to study the present, and that his dreams are in fact memories of this time. As he embarks upon an archaeological expedition to Australia, he uncovers proof of these events, only to soon lose it. All three stories follow the same basic form and exemplify the plot devices that Lovecraft used in all his stories that are classified as the “Cthulhu Mythos”. These stories are thinly connected through setting, mood, and aforementioned plot devices. Some of the names and ideas Lovecraft used were picked up from or recycled by his colleagues, which led some of their readers to believe that these things had basis in the real world. In fact, Lovecraft was often inspired by other authors, especially Poe, but more often than not his best ideas arose from his own dreams. Not nearly as famous during his lifetime as he is now, Lovecraft is finally – along with Cthulhu – an iconic figure in popular culture