this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
277 points (96.6% liked)
Cosmic Horror
650 readers
3 users here now
A community to discuss Cosmic Horror in it's many forms; books, films, comics, art, TV, music, RPGs, video games etc.
"cosmic horror... is a subgenre of horror fiction and weird fiction that emphasizes the horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible more than gore or other elements of shock... themes of cosmic dread, forbidden and dangerous knowledge, madness, non-human influences on humanity, religion and superstition, fate and inevitability, and the risks associated with scientific discoveries... the sense that ordinary life is a thin shell over a reality that is so alien and abstract in comparison that merely contemplating it would damage the sanity of the ordinary person, insignificance and powerlessness at the cosmic scale..."
- Wikipedia
For more Lovecraft & Mythos-inspired Cosmic Horror:-[email protected]
founded 6 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If I was more of a writer, a less fearful take on human insignificance in the same light as Lovecraft would be my first project.
Well, would you look at that...
Though I think that leans more towards niceness than eldritch horror.
Yeah, I'd still go creepy (how can a universe that allows billion year old starlight not be, looked at viscerally?), but I'd try to do it in a way that makes you wonder if the human perspective is necessarily the right one. Lovecraft has a way of including all kinds of adjectives to make you know how you're supposed to feel. He had (ahem) strong feelings about unfamiliar people and practices in real life, so it was kind of inevitable.
Come to think of it, Parasyte had some of the same energy I'm picturing.
You're thinking of The Outside by Ada Hoffmann
Nice, i'll add it to my list. 👍
One for the reading list!
Edit:
There's degrees you can go to with this, though. Lovecraft is a philosophical pessimist in his Mythos, while the other main take on "the absurd" is the Existentialist one, where the lack of meaning is an opportunity to be treasured. I land right in the middle, personally.
Lovecraft redid the deluge myth, in a way, with his Great Race of Yith. God brought a world-ending calamity (more than once), but this time for no specific reason, and saved nothing each time, because why would he when our world isn't important?
He basically just doomers about this, so it's horror. An Existentialist work might have the characters pass up an opportunity to stop it, because the cycle of destruction is a good thing and needed for the Cleopterans to evolve and have their day in the distant future. I'd take more of a survive-in-spite approach, so maybe there's a secret society of astral projectors across the eons, who make a living by leaving relics for each other in long-lasting caves. It's not good that the world keeps ending, but it brings silver linings too, and we make our way in life none-the-less.
Sadly, once the world building ends I'm clueless about building a laying out a narrative that doesn't suck. I'll have to see where Ada Hoffman goes.