Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽'s Reviews > I, Cthulhu, or, What’s a Tentacle-Faced Thing Like Me Doing in a Sunken City Like This (Latitude 47° 9′ S, Longitude 126° 43′ W)?

4.5 stars! This humorous short story by Neil Gaiman is, like A Study in Emerald, a take-off on the Cthulhu mythos. Free online here at Tor.com, here we have the monstrous Cthulhu dictating his memoirs to a hapless human servant named Whateley. The beginning of his personal history:

I was spawned uncounted aeons ago, in the dark mists of Khhaa’yngnaiih (no, of course I don’t know how to spell it. Write it as it sounds), of nameless nightmare parents, under a gibbous moon. It wasn’t the moon of this planet, of course, it was a real moon. On some nights it filled over half the sky and as it rose you could watch the crimson blood drip and trickle down its bloated face, staining it red, until at its height it bathed the swamps and towers in a gory dead red light.

Those were the days.

I laughed right out loud, and never looked back.

I'm not a serious fan of Lovecraft and am only passingly familiar with that mythology, so a lot of Gaiman's sly references went swooshing over my head. The Lovecraft wiki was extremely helpful with a few key terms like shoggoth, though.

A must read for Lovecraft fans, and recommended for anyone who likes fantasy horror and humor.