The Call of Cthulhu, H. P. Lovecraft's 1928 story of a dead professor's papers and the cult they uncover, is the cornerstone of the Cthulhu Mythos. A man sorting his great-uncle's effects finds a clay relief of a winged, tentacled thing, along with notes linking a sculptor's fever dreams, a police raid in the Louisiana swamps and a sailor's account of something met in the South Pacific. The dread comes from documents quietly agreeing with one another.
Expect hard going. There are only three chapters, all long, and almost no conversation, just a few lines of interview and interrogation. The narration is scholarly and written in long, clause-heavy sentences, often over thirty syllables, packed with Sino-Vietnamese words for ritual and antiquity, with footnotes on the book's many references. Literary turns such as phải chăng recur. Xưng hô stays narrow, mostly tôi with ông, cậu or ngài, so read this one for formal written Vietnamese rather than everyday talk.
