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. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

One of the best-known horror short stories, The Call of Cthulhu is presented in documentary style, as a series of notes found among the papers of the late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston. Mr. Thurston himself has been pulled into the mystery by stumbling upon notes left behind by his late grand-uncle, who in turn had been piecing together reports about outlandish rituals and outbreaks of mania, as they happened around the world, while still strangely connected to each other.