First published 2010
Francis Wayland Thurston is sorting through the belongings of his granduncle, George Gammell Angell, a Brown University professor of Semitic languages who died suddenly in Providence after a stranger jostled him on the street. Among the papers, Thurston finds notes about a small bas-relief sculpture, its surface carved into something between an octopus, a dragon, and a twisted human shape, with a pulpy tentacled head and rudimentary wings rising from a scaly body. The piece was made by Henry Anthony Wilcox, a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, who claims he built it from fever dreams of colossal cities dripping with green ooze. As Thurston reads deeper, Angell's notes branch outward into something harder to dismiss: reports of mass hysteria breaking out across the world at the same moment, crowds in New York, robed cultists in California, all of them responding to the same invisible signal. The deeper Thurston follows the trail, the more the separate pieces lock together into a single, enormous, and very patient presence. Lovecraft wrote this story in the summer of 1926, and it first appeared in Weird Tales in February 1928. It remains one of the clearest introductions to the idea that the universe holds no special place for human beings.
Genres: fiction, science-fiction, classic-literature, 20th-century, horror
Vibes: atmospheric, existential-dread, mysterious, thought-provoking, unsettling
Tropes: cosmic-horror-revelation, forbidden-knowledge, investigative-mystery, unreliable-reality
Setting: Providence, Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, New York, California
Period: 1926, 1928, 20th century
Content warnings: death