What I am reading about today

The Call of Cthulhu" is one of H. P. Lovecraft's best-known short stories. Written in the summer of 1926, it was first published in Weird Tales, February 1928.[1] It is the only story written by Lovecraft in which the extraterrestrial entity Cthulhu himself makes a major appearance.
It is written in a documentary style, with three independent narratives linked together by the device of a narrator discovering notes left by a deceased relative. The narrator pieces together the whole truth and disturbing significance of the information he possesses, illustrating the story's first line: "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."Cthulhu Mythos scholar Robert M. Price, in his introduction to The Cthulhu Cycle, points to Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem "The Kraken" as a major inspiration for Lovecraft's story. The poem depicts the Kraken—elsewhere described as a giant octopus or squid—sleeping "Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea/His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep":
There hath he lain for ages and will lie,
Battening on huge seaworms in his sleep;
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
Price points to the parallels with Lovecraft's creature: a huge, octopoid sea monster, sleeping for ages at the bottom of the ocean (either "dreaming" or "dreamless"), and destined to emerge from his slumber in an apocalyptic age.[2]
Price also considers the work of Lord Dunsany to be a major source for Lovecraft's dreaming god. Lovecraft himself noted that he read some Dunsany, an author he greatly admired, on the day that he conceived the plot of "Call of Cthulhu"; Price points in particular to "A Shop in Go-by Street", which talks of "the heaven of the gods who sleep", and notes that "unhappy are they that hear some old god speak while he sleeps being still deep in slumber". Another Dunsany work cited by Price is The Gods of Pegana, which depicts a god who is constantly lulled to sleep, because if he should awaken "there will be worlds nor gods no more."[3]