Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.
H.P. Lovecraft to Farnsworth Wright, July 5 1927
Only at a dread of dark
Quaver, and they quit their form:
Thousand eyeballs under hoods
Have you by the hair.
Enter these enchanted woods,
You who dare.
“The Woods of Westermaine” by George Meredith (1883)
H.P. Lovecraft inaugurated a revolution in modern imaginative fiction when he articulated, in stories, essays, and letters, the philosophical underpinning of his cosmic approach to horror. In perhaps his most autobiographically informed story, “The Silver Key,” Lovecraft wrote that “the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness.[1]” This was indeed the key to Lovecraft’s concept of weird fiction, where the horror of a tale arises not from rank supernaturalism or mere physical danger, but from the revelation that the anthropocentric view of the world, with human beings crowned in the center of creation, is not merely mistaken, but actively delusional.
This radical decentering of humanity was a favored “punchline” in many of his stories: humans are revealed to be merely the accidental byproduct of Elder Thing bioengineering in “The Mountains of Madness;” the vanity of human supremacy is punctured by the reproductive machinations of the Deep Ones in “The Shadow over Innsmouth;” the presumed permanence of human civilization is shown to be a mere footnote in the vast sweep of the biological history of Earth in “The Shadow Out of Time;” even our ability to physically comprehend the universe is questioned in “The Colour Out of Space.” In these and other stories, Lovecraft uses the abjectification of humans as the shocking denouement of his weird fiction.
Part and parcel with this is Lovecraft’s twisting of the very idea of the ineffable march of progress. Crawford Tillinghast in “From Beyond” has created a machine that exposes the deeper but otherwise invisible reality of nature, revealing a maddening world of alien existences beyond the ability of our paltry senses to perceive. More to the point, in the famous opening to “The Call of Cthulhu,” Lovecraft completely inverts the positivist narrative of early 20th century science and technology; rather than advancing human knowledge and prosperity,
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.[2]
In fact, Lovecraft’s “cosmic indifference” relies on the idea that an increasing knowledge base, whether individually or socially, inevitably overturns the comfortable fiction of the primacy and permanence of humanity.
These two concepts, an indifferent universe in which humanity is menaced by vast forces beyond their comprehension and a world in which the inevitable progress of human knowledge is an existential threat to humanity, represent the major aesthetic and thematic development in horror literature in the early 20th century. Lovecraft’s articulation of them is not entirely sui generis of course (he himself acknowledged his debt to his literary antecedents), but his work is unique in its almost single-minded exploration of what has come to be called “cosmicism.” More to the point, Lovecraft’s popularity, initially as a beloved cult writer but, more recently, as an important figure that has influenced both literary[3] and popular culture[4], has ensured that cosmic horror has become a part of the zeitgeist.
From the perspective of early 20th century America, the aesthetic pleasure and transgressive appeal of cosmicism as a philosophy of horror is evident; it toyed nicely with the very real fear that the grand American experiment was not as unassailable and inevitable as it seemed. It titillated readers by undermining the placidly bourgeois status quo with the threat of displacement by the alien Other, with miscegenation, and with the possibility that the universe was not as neatly Panglossian as all that. In this way, Lovecraft’s cosmic horror simply (though extremely) extrapolated from the conclusions of contemporary science. The realization of the depths of Deep Time in Earth’s history, the identification of extinction as a biological possibility for any species, the Darwinian revolution, and finally the discovery of a whole world of invisible energy and effects in the form of radiation – all of these things factually decentered humanity, making them subject to nature rather than its overlord and highlighting our smallness and fragility.
For cosmic horror’s decentering to be shocking and transgressive, however, it requires first that humans be assumed to be at the center – this is how the revelation of cosmic indifference can function as the frightful climax of a story. In Lovecraft’s milieu of the early 20th century this was indeed the case, with a popular status quo best be described as broadly anthropocentric and positivist.
But in the 21st Century, do these same assumptions exist? And if not, if the wider cultural understanding of humans now is that they have already been decentered, what does that mean for our concept of cosmic horror?
After all, it’s not much of a dark epiphany to state that human beings are small animals in an uncaring world – that’s the lived experience of the 21st century, reinforced daily. Humanity is existentially threatened by maddeningly complex forces that operate on scales we can scarcely conceive. Climate change, pandemics, capitalism; all of these threats represent as profound a reordering of humanity’s relationship to the world around them as anything Lovecraft ever wrote. The primary revelation of cosmicism, that humans are not special and that the universe will not shepherd them safely through danger, is simply the fundamental background noise of day-to-day life. Any real person believing otherwise strikes us as delusional, and it’s laughable to imagine a horror protagonist beginning from a place of such naivety, such that the shattering of that illusion is merely corrective, rather than shocking or transgressive.
Similarly, cosmic horror’s “piecing together” of knowledge into a starkly and bleakly apocalyptic whole seems quaint and ridiculously optimistic in a world of commodified corporatized science, slashed funding for research, a “post-fact” media landscape, and the hallucinogenic world of venture capitalist A.I. schemes. The popular median view of technological “progress” is purely declensionist now[5], with information technology in particular subject to decay, collapse, and abuse. “Reality” is popularly understood to be illusory and malleable, subject to the whims of unknowable and inscrutable forces; similarly, the conspiracism inherent in cosmic horror, with cultists and cabals manipulating events from the shadows, has taken on a very different valence in the 21st century.
Additionally, the very idea of scholarly inquiry into the bleeding edge of human knowledge has been made laughable by recent history. Cosmic horror is built on a world of expertise and specialist knowledge, something under attack in the 21st century. The High Energy Physics Lab at Miskatonic would undoubtably have shut down due to federal funding cuts, while the college administration would probably be investigating the Forbidden Books Department of the Henry Armitage Memorial Library for “radical leftist” DEI practices.
From a thematic perspective, therefore, it is difficult to see what “cosmic horror” in the 21st could even mean. What cosmic revelation is there left to make about humanity, after all? That said, the aesthetics of cosmic horror are definitely going strong – tentacular horrors from other dimensions and cults communing with alien intelligences abound in the literature and have escaped into other genres, like science fiction, fantasy (where secondary worlds may still need decentering), and even literary fiction (see, for example, Thomas Pynchon’s brief but memorable evocation of an alien horror in the tunnels under Montauk in Bleeding Edge).
Within the larger horror genre, the interest in “folk horror” can be seen as partaking of cosmic aesthetics; the countryside is a liminal territory, the folkways of the natives are transformed into ancient rites, animals and plants are twisted and altered. Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach novels are an interesting example of the new ends to which cosmic horror aesthetics can be put – the skewed and altered reality within Area X is as strange as the alien architecture of R’lyeh. Interestingly, the radical decentering of humans (to the point of excision) from Area X suggests a sort of “optimistic” cosmicism, a kind of reading only possible under anthropogenic climate derangement; the removal of humans and the restoration of a (new and alien) “natural” order becomes a comforting corrective to human-caused ecological degradation.
This subversion of cosmicism, where very human evils are countered by the restoration of a natural (or more natural) order is an interesting development in 21st century horror. Many works use the aesthetics of cosmic horror while inverting its themes. For example, P. Djèlí Clark’s Ring Shout uses classic cosmic horror concepts (extradimensional horrors that feed and infect humans and are served by a cult) to explore themes of marginalized identities and resistance. N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became was written, as per the author, to explicitly explore the history and influence of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror (and his racism) on the genre. In it, an embodied avatar of the extradimensional city of R’lyeh wages a war of gentrification on the communities of New York; tentacles, fungal corruption, and skittering things make numerous appearances. What unifies these (and other) works of modern cosmic horror is that, contrary to the older traditions of the genre, they actually radically recenter humanity, not in a solipsistic way, but rather restoratively, affirming the importance of identity and community in the face of hegemonic cosmic hate.
This is an interesting development, and one that is, actually, anticipated (albeit obliquely) by Lovecraft. In an often overlooked section of “The Call of Cthulhu,” the cultist Castro explains that the time for Cthulhu’s return will be patently evident, for then humans “would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy.”[6] Lovecraft here leaves open the way a narrative can enfold human activity within cosmic horror, as Clark or Jemisin have ably done.
Another commonly encountered aspect of modern cosmic horror is the aesthetic deployment of surreality and uncertainty within a work. John Langan, Brian Evenson, and Laird Barron are exemplars of this, making excellent use of the vast and suggestive unknowable in their work, something Lovecraft himself often did to great effect. What differs in the 21st century is, again, the fact that there is no need to decenter the human via incomprehensible and indifferent cosmic weirdness; that is the understood precondition of the modern-day human being. Rather, for these contemporary cosmicists, it is the aesthetic of unknowing that becomes centered, the way people (either as characters or readers) cannot confront meaningfully the alien logic at work. While this is certainly allied to the older expression of cosmic horror, it actually recenters the human and their faculties of apprehension as the site of the uncanny. In other words, it is fundamentally about the trauma of experiencing cosmic horror, rather than the cosmic horror of knowing your experiences don’t fundamentally matter; there is actually very little uncertainty in Lovecraft, for example, where the clarity of the horrific revelation is clear and hard as a diamond for both characters and readers.
The question to ask then is: does the strict, “classic” flavor of cosmic horror still have any relevance or power to startle today? For example, actually existing A.I. has rendered robo-centric science fiction suspect, at least for now; have our constant confrontations with existential crises done the same for cosmic horror? With apologies to Adorno, is it barbaric to write cosmic horror in the 21st century?
I personally hope not. Cosmic horror is an explicitly epistemological literature, a particularly worthy approach these days, it seems to me. Horror as a genre often tries to justify itself as a literature with particular power to comment on the world around us, and the origins of cosmic horror surely illustrate that. But the nature of our epistemologies have, perhaps, changed – if the cosmicism of the early 20th century found horror in the decentering of humanity, where does that leave those of us ontologically decentered in the 21st century? What is the epistemic horror inherent in a modern cosmicism?
An approach centered around the horror of uncertainty is a dead end, I think – perfectly pleasurable, but hardly revelatory. After all, Heisenbergian indeterminacy has been a potent metaphor in cosmic horror since Lovecraft’s day, where it underlined the breakdown of the comfortably quotidian Newtonian mechanics that underpins our illusion of a stable, “real” world. There is nothing horrific about uncertainty today, if only because it’s become so banal; there’s nothing new or startling in our confronting it. Actually, the breakdown of concrete reality can be seen now as a kind of consolatory epiphany, the revolt of messy and vital organicism against mechanistic and dehumanizing systems, a cri de Coeur that history (and therefore life) has not ended. Uncertainty and unsettlement can be read as an almost heroic epistemology (something common in the New Weird, for example). This is laudable and makes for good literature, but it is the antithesis of horror.
If, as I’ve argued, the baseline understanding of the human condition is one of tininess and powerlessness in the face of vast, incomprehensible forces beyond our understanding, is there horror to be mined from embracing it? In other words, rather than being frightened by the vast indifference of the universe, perhaps modern cosmicism reflects the horror of people becoming like the Great Old Ones, living only to kill and take pleasure? That’s certainly one of the true horrors of our times now, the gleefulness with which some people embrace the degradation of humanity for capitalism and oppression. That’s a subtle but important difference, I think – in other words, it’s not the indifference of the cosmos that’s behind the horror, it’s the way a human can wholeheartedly cast off their own humanity to become a part of that indifference[7]. Cthulhu, then, isn’t the problem – it’s his cultists, human beings who have made a decision, that are the real source of cosmic horror today. But, as I write that, I’m confronted by the fact again that this seems to be recentering humanity, making human agency the source of horror, something totally antithetical to cosmicism.
Maybe, then, the cosmic horror moment has passed? There was a brief time where the positivist anthropocentrism of western culture and the scientific materialist worldview were both equally strong enough to create a kind of horrific frisson, but now that’s long gone, with no hope of ever really recapturing it. We can play with the elements of cosmicism, the nostalgic fun of tentacles from beyond and all that, but it will never have the immediacy or excitement or vitality that it did in the early 20th century. Horror is, simply, different now, dealing with different things in different ways, and maybe it’s time we made that break with the past explicit?
[1] “The Silver Key” H.P. Lovecraft, Weird Tales, v. 13, no. 1, 1929, p. 42.
[2] “The Call of Cthulhu,” H.P. Lovecraft, Weird Tales, v.11, n.2, 1928, p. 159.
[3] Borges dedicated his story “There Are More Things” to Lovecraft, for instance, and Joyce Carol Oates has edited a collection of his fiction; similarly, critical appraisals of his work have become something of a minor academic industry.
[4] The existence of plush “Cthulhus” would be enough to make this point, but Lovecraft’s influence on science fiction, fantasy, comics, movies, cartoons, and games is well documented. See, for example, Mark Jones’s 2013 essay “Tentacles and Teeth: The Lovecraftian Being in Popular Culture.”
[5] Merriam-Webster enshrining “enshittification” in the official English lexicon, for example.
[6] “The Call of Cthulhu,” H.P. Lovecraft, Weird Tales, v.11, n.2, 1928, p. 170.
[7] A great recent example of this kind of horror, of humans making themselves like the cruelly indifferent cosmos, is Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night (tr. Megan McDowell, 2023).
Eric Williams 