One of my favorite Cthulhu Mythos clichés is the protagonist dragged out of the window by a tentacle as he writes all about it. Where did all these window-lurking tentacles come from anyway? The victims who are scribbling their death rattles never explain that.
“Squidgies” are part-and-parcel of the Mythos. Classic tentacles would start with the ancient legend of the Kraken, said to live off the shore of Iceland. This beast was so large it could devour whole ships. In fiction, the giant squid in Chapter 18 of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) inspired many other writers, along with the killer squids of “The Sea Raiders” (1896) by H. G. Wells and the supernatural guardian in M. R. James’ “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” (1904). But the master of tentacles has to be William Hope Hodgson with his The Boats of ‘Glen Carrig’ (1907), as well as “A Tropical Horror” (1905), “The Thing in the Weeds” (1913), “The Finding of the Graiken” (1913), and “Demons of the Sea” (1919). Along with all these aquatic monsters, there are the space variety such as H. G. Wells’ Martians from War of the Worlds (1898): “A lank tentacular appendage gripped the edge of the cylinder, another swayed in the air.”
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