Madison

The chosen text is the introductory paragraph of H.P. Lovecraft’s 1926 short story Call of Cthulhu. The story follows Francis Thurston, a Boston gentleman who embarks on a worldwide investigatory expedition to make sense of several separate and mysterious clues. His research takes him to New Zealand, Norway, and finally to sea, where he and his crew chance upon an unchartered island city with a “coast-line of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth's supreme terror”, a cultish city of incomprehensible non-euclidean geometric construction. The crew accidentally unleash the cities great god, Cthulhu, who then mercilessly slaughters them all - only Thurston escapes. But the terror of Cthulhu forever ensues, and with his flight, Thurston foresees his own impending demise. The story is ended with his words "I know too much, and the cult still lives”. The text presents as a forerunner of the Sci-fi Genre of the New Weird. It signals away from anthropocentric safety and towards the-elusive-and-nameless-something-more-than-that-which-presents-itself.