“Maybe those things are old and greater than the regular world and maybe they're not, but I just love tinkering with the idea that there are secret things mankind isn't meant to discover.“ Cosmic horror hits on a different scale than other varieties of horror: consider the ways in which many an H.P. “I love the idea of there being things hidden from the rest of the world, either through outright deceit or through some unlucky bastard not having stumbled across them yet,” the author Nate Southard told me about the appeal of cosmic horror for so many writers. Thin discusses stories that “cultivate a state of ongoing suspense that, even when the story is told, should prove next to impossible to dispel.” We’re less in the territory of monsters that can be hunted, and rather in a realm in which the world itself is revealed to have been monstrous all along. In an afterword to the new NYRB Classics anthology Shadows of Carcosa, editor D.
There’s a kind of dark, absurdist comedy that comes from wrapping yourself up in worry over fates you will realistically never face, but this can also lead to a particularly rich, viable strain of horror.Ĭosmic horror and its manifestations are numerous.
You get can lost trying to envision things that don’t lend themselves to easy envisioning. It’s something of an endurance test to see how long I can stare at it before I either begin to develop a tension headache or panic outright as I mentally and emotionally prepare myself for the Rockies eroding into a dusty plain or Saturn’s rings reaching the end of their lifespan (50 and 100 million years away, respectively). It’s a question of comprehension these days, a surefire way to spook myself is to call up Wikipedia’s “Timeline of the far future” page and look at some of the events forecasted to happen tens of thousands, or tens of millions, of years from now. But bring me to a museum and show me the body of hundred-foot-long a whale? Cue the tremors and terror sweat.
Show me a vampire and I’d shrug werewolves underwhelmed. When I was young, monsters didn’t frighten me quite as much as scale did.
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