A brief dive into cosmic horror

“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.” ~H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

Cosmic or Lovecraftian Horror is a subgenre of horror that descended from gothic horror and focuses on stretching the reader’s sense of imagination by offering descriptions and ideas meant to be beyond comprehension. The most influential of the Lovecraftians is Lovecraft himself. Howard Philips Lovecraft, though more often referred to by H. P. Lovecraft, was a New England author in the early 20th century. Growing up, both his parents were admitted to sanitoriums where each would succumb. First his father and later his mother. Both were afflicted with mental ailments derived from what historians assume to be late-stage syphilis. In regards to his father and the results of mourning and sorrow in the case of his mother. After their deaths, he looked up to his grandfather and is quoted to have said, “he became the center of my universe.” In his grandfather’s care, Lovecraft began to develop an appreciation for literature, the main two being classical and gothic. Both genres influenced his work. His short story, Dagon, had a direct reference to Milton’s Paradise Lost in the following excerpt:

“I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night. Through my terror ran curious reminiscences of Paradise Lost, and of Satan’s hideous climb through the unfashioned realms of darkness.”

It shows an appreciation for literature that deeply bleeds into his works, especially his themes, often showing deep similitude to those expressed in classical writers and less appreciated, though essential, pioneers in the genre. Lovecraft’s most famous work, though, is undoubtedly The Call of Cthulhu or, to be more inclusive, the “Cthulhu mythos,” which is all of his stories that mention or contain his “eldritch gods” and related deities, the most famous god being Cthulhu, which is described in the following excerpt from The Call of Cthulhu (I know you’re probably loving all these bits of extra reading but don’t worry, there will be more):

“The Thing cannot be described – there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled.

If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.”

Robert W. Chambers’s loosely connected anthology The King in Yellow. The stories in said anthology focus on a play that shares the book’s name. In the book, anyone who reads the play will become afflicted with madness. Madness is one of the critical elements in Lovecraft’s writing due to both his inspiration from Chambers’ work and the psychological ailments that plagued his parents. The following two are EVEN MORE EXCERPTS, this time from The King in Yellow:

“I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth–a world which now trembles before the King in Yellow.”

“The ambition of Caesar and of Napoleon pales before that which could not rest until it had seized the minds of men and controlled even their unborn thoughts.”

The first two cosmic horror stories ever written are attributed to Algernon Blackwood. The two are his Novella, Willows, and short story, The Man Who Found Out, which I recommend you read before continuing here.

The Man Who Found Out is about a man who read the papers of his old professor that were translated from indestructible ancient stone tablets, which revealed unto him a truth so maddening that he lost his mind and hope. Upon reading it, I realized that it’s almost definitely what inspired the horror game Amnesia: The Dark Descent. The similarities between them arise in the desert artifacts that bring terrible ailments and self-imposed amnesia, which is a result of hypnosis in the short story and a potion in the videogame, both as a response to horrific experiences/realizations the closest evidence we get to what the realization is the following excerpt from the story:

‘”A devil’s dreams! A devil’s foolish dreams!” he cried, with a vicious laugh.’

His novella, Willows, is a slightly longer piece, which can be accessed here, that revolves around the retelling of the narrator’s experience while camping out on the Danube River with his Swedish friend; at face value, the story revolves around the narrator and his jacked Swedish companion journeying down the Danube River in Central and South-Eastern Europe, which starts in the Black Forest and flows into the black sea. While camping on a beach slowly swallowed by the river, the two were assaulted by supernatural fears and hunted by incomprehensible otherworldly entities. There are multiple interpretations of the piece, but the one that I stumbled upon first and that I find to be most interesting given Blackwood’s celibate life is the theory that the story is an allegory for his sexuality and hiding from it. The interpretation is from Reddit, posted by a now-deleted account on r/literature. This is the link, though I recommend reading the novella itself first to understand the source of the theories better. The following are all excerpts from the story which I read last night. If you’ve already read both links, then feel free to skip these wordy blocks.

“The sense of remoteness from the world of humankind, the utter isolation, the fascination of this singular world of willows, winds, and waters, instantly laid its spell upon us both so that we allowed laughingly to one another that we ought by rights to have held some special kind of passport to admit us, and that we had, somewhat audaciously, come without asking leave into a separate little kingdom of wonder and magic—a kingdom that was reserved for the use of others who had a right to it, with everywhere unwritten warnings to trespassers for those who had the imagination to discover them.”

“[The willows] here together in such overpowering numbers. Altogether it was an impressive scene, with its utter loneliness, its bizarre suggestion; and as I gazed, long and curiously, a singular emotion began to stir somewhere in the depths of me. Midway in my delight of the wild beauty, there crept, unbidden and unexplained, a curious feeling of disquietude, almost of alarm.”

“The huge-grown river had something to do with it too—a vague, unpleasant idea that we had somehow trifled with these great elemental forces in whose power we lay helpless every hour of the day and night. For here, indeed, they were gigantically at play together, and the sight appealed to the imagination.”

Beyond these few authors and stories is a wonderfully bleak and scrumptiously horrific genre of nightmares and mind-spitting creatures. I recommend you read more cosmic horror. I recommend you start here, the fiction section of the H. P. Lovecraft archive.

Credits

Image 1: Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

image 2: Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

image 3: Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay