The Call of Cthulhu

Angell has passed away before the narrative begins, but his research is the catalyst that propels Thurston on his quest. Angell is Thurston’s great-uncle, who passed away at the age of 92 under somewhat mysterious circumstances. Thurston mentions that he is a childless widower but does not provide any other personal details.

Angell was a professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, specializing in ancient pictograms and inscriptions. Toward the end of his life, he became obsessed with dream interpretation and secret societies. Thurston notes that Angell’s writings reference theosophical and anthropological works, such as W. Scott-Eliott’s Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria (1904), James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), and Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Europe (1921). These are real works that gained popularity around the turn of the 20th century when interest in spiritualism and the occult were at their peak.

Thurston notes that most of Angell’s papers will be posthumously published by the American Archeological Society but not the box containing his notes on the occult. Angell’s interest in the Cthulhu Cult was tangential to his regular studies, something that, like Thurston, he kept secret. Like Thurston, Angell had completed enough research to publish his findings, but he chose not to. Perhaps he too began to suspect he could be a target for knowing too much.

Wilcox is a secondary character who sets Angell on his search for information about the Cthulhu Cult. Wilcox is “the youngest son of an excellent family” who studies sculpture at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design (162). Wilcox’s connection to a well-known, wealthy family predisposes the professor to believe the young man’s account.

Wilcox is the first character to describe Cthulhu and the city of R’lyeh, and he is the creator of the tablet that so intrigued Angell. Throughout the story, characters sensitive to the “call” of the Old Ones are described as “mad” or bordering on “madness”: Wilcox is “a thin, dark young man of neurotic and excited aspect,” and he describes himself as “psychically hypersensitive” (162). He has become socially isolated, and his peers consider him “queer,” which in this context means strange (162).

Wilcox falls into delirium on March 22, 1928, the same day Johansen and his crew arrived on the island of R’lyeh. Wilcox’s symptoms resolved on April 2—the date of the second storm—and these coincidences make Thurston curious enough to resume his inquiry into the Cthulhu Cult. These correlations suggest that Wilcox’s dreams were caused by a psychic connection with Cthulhu, due to his hypersensitive artistic temperament.

Thurston is skeptical to the point of scorn about Wilcox and his visionary dreams. He says the sculptor’s conversation has a “fantastically poetic cast,” his tale is “rambling,” and Thurston suspects him of deliberately hoodwinking Angell (174). Even when Thurston accepts that Wilcox is not lying, he concludes that Wilcox is “of a type, at once slightly affected and slightly ill-mannered, which I could never like” (175). The story contrasts Thurston’s healthy, scientific-minded skepticism with Wilcox’s self-indulgent, neurotic, and fantastical mindset. Yet, the end of the story suggests that Wilcox’s vision is accurate. The visionary knowledge of artists and occultists, though unverifiable, may reveal truths inaccessible to science and the scientifically minded.