中文导读
霍华德·菲利普斯·洛夫克拉夫特（H. P. Lovecraft, 1890-1937）是美国恐怖小说的标志性人物，其创造的"克苏鲁神话"（Cthulhu Mythos）体系深刻影响了后世恐怖文学、奇幻文学与流行文化。《克苏鲁的呼唤》（1928）发表于《诡丽幻谭》（Weird Tales），是克苏鲁神话的奠基之作。小说以三个相互关联的片段构成，通过一个已故教授的遗稿，层层揭开一个令人窒息的真相：在人类文明的表层之下，沉睡着远古的、超越人类理解的恐怖存在。
The Call of Cthulhu
I. The Horror in Clay
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form mere incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the discovery which I have just made, and which I am now forced to announce so boldly. It was from a queer handful of sodden papers and a strange clay bas-relief that I drew the appalling revelation.
My grand-uncle, Professor Angell, was a retired professor of Semitic languages at Brown University. He was found dead in his study on the morning of March 1, 1926. The cause of death was heart disease, but his face was twisted in an expression of the most acute terror—a sight so horrible that the coroner nearly fainted. On his desk was a queer bas-relief of modern workmanship, depicting a monstrous, vaguely anthropoid figure of a monster with an octopus-like head, whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. The thing was shown seated on a queer sort of pedestal, behind which was a Cyclopean masonry of blocks so huge they could not have been laid by human hands.
Professor Angell had been investigating obscure cults and strange survivals. His notes, which I found in a tin box, revealed a terrifying pattern connecting this bas-relief to a series of disturbing dreams, mysterious deaths, and a worldwide network of worshippers of something ancient and terrible.
II. The Tale of Inspector Legrasse
In November 1908, Professor Angell attended a meeting of the American Archaeological Society in St. Louis, where he encountered Inspector Legrasse of the New Orleans police. Legrasse had been searching for information about a strange statuette he had seized during a raid on a voodoo cult in the swamps near New Orleans.
The cult, Legrasse explained, was composed of mongrel and degenerate people who worshipped a being they called "Cthulhu." Their chant was a guttural, half-intelligible refrain: "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn"—"In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."
The cultists spoke of Cthulhu as a great being from the stars who had come to Earth in ages past, when the world was young. He had built a great city called R'lyeh, but some catastrophe had caused the city to sink beneath the sea, and Cthulhu had been trapped in death-like sleep. The cultists believed that when the stars were right, R'lyeh would rise from the depths, and Cthulhu would awake to reclaim the earth.
One old cultist, a half-caste who seemed to be the high priest, told Legrasse of the Cthulhu cult's history: it had existed for untold ages, surviving the rise and fall of civilizations, always keeping alive the worship of the sleeping god. The cult's members could communicate with Cthulhu through dreams, and they believed that when he woke, he would reward his faithful followers with a paradise of madness.
III. The Madness from the Sea
In 1925, a young sailor named Johansen brought news of a strange encounter in the Pacific. His ship, the Alert, had stumbled upon a newly risen island—a place of basalt blocks of monstrous size, covered with a viscous, greenish slime. The geometry of the place was wrong; the angles and dimensions seemed to defy the laws of Euclidean space.
Johansen and his crew explored the island and found a monstrous doorway. When it opened, something emerged—something so terrible that most of the crew died of fright or were seized by the thing that came out. Johansen alone escaped, and his account, written in a shaky hand, described the being as having an octopus-like head, a monstrous body covered with feelers, and wings that beat the air with a sound like thunder.
Johansen managed to escape on the Alert and rams the thing with his ship, sending it back into the sea. But the island—that impossible, non-Euclidean place—sank back beneath the waves as suddenly as it had appeared.
Johansen died under mysterious circumstances before he could be fully interrogated. His papers, including a manuscript describing the voyage, were found in his effects. The manuscript confirmed everything that Professor Angell had suspected: Cthulhu was real, R'lyeh existed, and the cult was worldwide.
核心段落解析
开篇名句
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."
这是洛夫克拉夫特最著名的段落，也是"宇宙恐怖"（cosmic horror）哲学的宣言。它颠覆了启蒙主义"知识即力量"的信条：知识不是解放，而是毁灭。人类的无知不是缺陷，而是恩赐。
非欧几何空间
洛夫克拉夫特反复强调"错误的几何"（wrong geometry）——R'lyeh 的建筑遵循非欧几里得空间法则，人类的大脑无法处理这种视觉信息。这一设定将数学的抽象恐惧具象化：现实本身的结构是人类无法理解的。
"死而不死"的恐怖
克苏鲁"死而梦中"（dead Cthulhu waits dreaming）——这一悖论是洛夫克拉夫特最有力的意象。恐怖不在于它活着，而在于它即使"死了"也仍然存在、仍然在影响世界。这种"不死的死"比任何活的怪物都更令人不安。
文学史地位
- 宇宙恐怖的奠基之作——洛夫克拉夫特创造了"宇宙恐怖"这一子类型，核心理念是：宇宙的本质是冷漠的、无意义的，人类在其中毫无特殊地位。
- 克苏鲁神话体系——以本篇为核心，发展出包含数十位作家参与的共享宇宙。
- 影响广泛——斯蒂芬·金、尼尔·盖曼、吉尔莫·德尔·托罗等均明确承认受其影响。"克苏鲁"已成为流行文化中的通用符号。
- "洛夫克拉夫特式恐惧"（Lovecraftian horror）——成为恐怖文学批评中的标准术语。