Just finished, The Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft

I’ve been wanting to read this forever, so when I finally sat down with it, I was honestly surprised, and a little disappointed, by how short it is. This tiny story somehow spawned an entire corner of modern horror, gaming, movies, memes, tabletop culture… all of it. For such a small book, it’s had a massive and weirdly long-lasting impact on today’s culture (I’m not sure if “culture” is the right word, it might undersell it). You blink and it’s over. but the looming shadow it casts is enormous.

That said, it worked on me. The story is eerie and unsettling in a quiet, creeping way. Not jump-scare horror. more like the slow realization that reality itself is fragile and doesn’t care about you. I was surprised by how immersive it felt despite the detached, academic tone. Weirdly enough, it reminded me a lot of how Hadrian Marlowe describes the Watchers in the Sun Eater series. That same sense of ancient, incomprehensible beings brushing up against human perception, and the mind buckling under the weight of it.

The whole thing just oozes foreboding and apprehension. Every page feels like it’s whispering, you shouldn’t know this. There’s no triumph here, no catharsis. Just the dread of knowledge and the horror of insignificance. I get why this story stuck. I really do. Now I’m left with that hollow, slightly uneasy feeling… and a strong urge to find more books that scratch this same cosmic dread itch. If this was the blueprint, I want to see how far the house has been built since.