The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

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This anthology has little to do specifically with Cthulhu and everything to do with “new Lovecraftian fiction.” But Cthulhu and the “Cthulhu Mythos” (more properly the “Lovecraft Mythos”) has become a brand name recognizable far beyond genre in every facet of popular culture: mainstream literature, gaming, television, film, art, music; even crochet patterns, clothing, jewelry, toys, children’s books, and endless other tentacled products . . . so one does what one can to sell books!

But, to answer the question posed . . . H. P. Lovecraft invented Cthulhu in 1926. The entity makes his first appearance in Lovecraft’s short story, “The Call of Cthulhu,” published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928. A small bas-relief of the creature is described in the story as:

“[A]sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.”

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