Cosmic horror

[Anonymous No.20222840]

Why is cosmic horror such a difficult genre or conceptual mode to write quality literature in? Even Lovecraft stumbled under the own weight of the concepts he was to write about, and only really succeeded atmospherically in a few, valuable tales such as 'At the Mountains of Madness' and 'The Dunwich Horror'. Do you know of any other authors or stories which manage to live somewhat up to the natural loftiness of the genre?

[Anonymous No.20222926]

The technique is clunky and works against its unstated aim of 'presenting the unfathomable', or thereabouts. I've always thought modernists like Joyce and Faulkner did a far better job unintentially, because they recognized it was the mind and its pitfalls that make the world seem horrific or unfathomable, and it reflects in their experimental use of language.

Lovecraft et al. try to do the same but with cold, calculating, lucid description - they reduce language to just a 'tool'. It jars, and it doesn't work at all. But that's just my opinion.

[Anonymous No.20222940]

>>20222840
If you’re scared of tentacles or non-Euclidean geometry or chinamen, you’re either retarded or a fag.

[Anonymous No.20222951]

>>20222940
My nigga. Lovecraft fags are pathetic.

[Anonymous No.20222967]

>wowie its sooooo scaaary I cant even describe it!!!!!

[Anonymous No.20222987]

>>20222840
I think I would agree with you. And it makes sense, since Joyce and Faulkner were writing in the wake of WWI like was Lovecraft.
In this respect, I think the two greatest examples of cosmic horror would be Virginia Woolf's Time Passes and the Hell chapter in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

[Anonymous No.20223064]

>>20222987
I think you meant to reply >>20222926 fren

[Anonymous No.20223123]

>>20222840
It's difficult to be overwhelmed by mere words. Visuals really help supplement the ideas even if the genre places more emphasis on the unseeable, indirect nature of things.

[Anonymous No.20223223]

It's hard to be scared of something unimaginable

[Anonymous No.20223241]

>I was living like everyone else, looking at life with the open and blind eyes of man, without being surprised and without understanding. I was living as the beasts live, as we all live, performing all the functions of existence, examining and believing to see, believing to understand what surrounds me, when, one day, I realized that which I understood of the world was a mistake.
>It is a sentence from Montesquieu that suddenly enlightened my thoughts. Here it is: "Had we gained one more sensory organ, our intelligence would've taken another form."
>I thought about this for months and months and months, and gradually a strange clarity entered me, and this clarity made the night there.
Maupassant has a short story called "Lettre d'un fou" which belongs more or less to the cosmic horror genre. I also recommend Machen since he was basically the originator of that genre in the anglosphere.
I believe it is a difficult genre because the perspective you have to adapt, either to read or write it, is very difficult conceptually speaking or because these ideas have become so common and widespread to us in the 21st ce that we simply take them for granted, i.e. superficially. As a consequence, what unfolds in our minds is something far less psyche-breaking and potent than when the Victorians suddenly realized how old the earth truly is thanks to the efforts of the new science of geologists.

[Anonymous No.20223254]

>>20223064
You are correct my fren.

[Anonymous No.20223822]

>>20223123
based

[Anonymous No.20224098]

isn't Calvino sort of cosmic horror at times?

[Anonymous No.20224248]

>>20223241
Machen really was the master. In White People, a girl walking through the woods merrily is horrifying just because of the implications.

[Anonymous No.20224271]

>>20224098
Not really. At his core Calvino is just a sentimental Italian dude.

[Anonymous No.20225533]

>>20222840
>Why is cosmic horror such a difficult genre or conceptual mode to write quality literature in?
Because at its core it's the unknowable (in effect meaning indescribable) meeting abject terror (paralysing fear beyond rational thought) both of which do not lend themselves well to being described in words.
> Even Lovecraft
"Even" Lovecraft? He wasn't even the best writer in his circle.

Cosmic horror is not popular in the first place but if it were to succeed I really think it could only do so in a visual medium. Beksinskis art gets close for many. Movies and perhaps games have tools you just can't use in text. It's possible a graphic novel could pull it off. I don't have ready examples because frankly, once again, the niche genre means there's been few quality attempts to do anything with it. Colour Out of Space is probably the closest they got in movies and that's a Nick Cage b-movie.

The most difficult part is that it requires a well written cast of characters because it's absolutely essential that you get sucked into the POV of the people experiencing the horror and that's usually where horror writers fall short. Imagining horrific monsters and gory disasters is easy, imagining real people dealing with existential fear, not so much.

[Anonymous No.20226741]

Why no decent film adaptations of Lovecraft?

[Anonymous No.20226920]

>>20225533
>He wasn't even the best writer in his circle.
He was the only writer in his circle who wrote cosmic horror.

[Anonymous No.20227543]

>>20226741
Because a glorified bad dragon ad on a monitor is not what makes up the fear of the unknown. The only example I can come up with when a movie achieved this proper level of suspense with visuals is the tree from Sleepy Hollow.

[Anonymous No.20227558]

>>20222840
>cosmic horror
Writing about reality can be a challenge because you must be so faithful to it.

[Anonymous No.20227560]

>>20226741
Not many of his stories are even good for film. There are some decent ones, like the german indie production of the colour out of space (die farbe), the whisperer in darkness and of course the call of cthulhu.

[Anonymous No.20227729]

Read Thomas Ligotti, Laird Barron or Nathan Ballingrud

[Anonymous No.20227732]

>>20223123
I agree with you. On the same note, I think that Bloodborne's way of storytelling lends itself really way for concepts of cosmic horror. You don't see a lot of the major stuff unfold yourself, you just see the consequences, get hints from object descriptions and so on. This kind of indirect storytelling leaves room for uncertainties or "unknowable knowledge".

[Anonymous No.20227801]

>>20223123
>Visuals really help supplement the ideas
>Posts a tentacle vagina from Bloodborne
The only thing these visuals help is reminding of the annoyance that the then-new From trend of making bosses into an untraceable clusterfuck mess brought. The painfully obviously videogame CGI stuff like this wipes off the last hopes for having decent cosmic horror atmosphere that an installation might have still had.

[Anonymous No.20227870]

>>20227729
>Read Thomas Ligotti, Laird Barron or Nathan Ballingrud
all left wing hacks

[Anonymous No.20227886]

>>20227729
is Teatro Grottesco cosmic horror?
>>20227870
directionbrains should be banned from literary discussions on sight

[Anonymous No.20227967]

>>20222840
When the unknown becomes the known, cosmic horror loses its effectiveness. The previously-terrifying idea of humanity being irrelevant in an uncaring universe is now a commonplace. Alien races and the like are nowhere to be seen. There could only ever be one cosmic horror writer, and that was HPL.

>>20222926
Joyce and Faulkner don't make the world seem unfathomable, how do you

[Anonymous No.20227970]

>>20227967
>how do you even come to that conclusion
Fixed

[Anonymous No.20228015]

>>20227967
>The previously-terrifying idea of humanity being irrelevant in an uncaring universe is now a commonplace. Alien races and the like are nowhere to be seen.
"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."
The point of this is not some particular abstract modern theories that you imply have hindered the idea, but the overlook as a whole. In fact, the further we deconstruct the universal laws the more we realize that the potential for such unspeakable horror is very much there. What do we really know if we're anything more than a rainworm on a nuclear warhead, incapable of even beginning to fathom the danger that we are so close to, yet completely unable to influence.

[Anonymous No.20228088]

>>20228015
I wasn't really referring to theories of physics, but more to the fading of the belief that the Universe was made by God for men to inhabit with an intended purpose, a plan of salvation, and so on. Hardly anyone in the developed world believes this anymore, the physics isn't so important.

[Anonymous No.20228119]

>>20228088
HPL never really addressed that belief, at least not that I can recall off. Of course his fiction coincidentally attacked it, but I feel like he has always went deeper than just Christian anthropocentrism. Besides, in casual everyday life regardless of that ordinary people naturally do perceive themselves as the hub of the universe.

[Anonymous No.20228120]

>>20227886
Ligottis early stuff is cosmic horror, TG is more like abstract pessimistic existential despair horror
>>20226920
Clark Ashton Smith though. Yes even with the sword and sorcery settings it counts

[Anonymous No.20228138]

>>20228119
IMO HPL is one of the most profoundly atheistic authors ever. It goes deeper than Christian anthropocentrism but that's what we work with by default in the West

[Anonymous No.20228196]

>>20228138
Oh, I'm Russian never-gave-a-fuck about religion, so I guess I've never even considered Christian anthropocentrism as a part of the equation in this case back when I first read him. Still HPL's cosmic horror and more broadly fear of the unknown just clicked so good with me right away. He does so much more than hurr durr space tentacles in this regard. Stuff like Till A' The Seas, The Shadow Out of Time, The Rats in the Walls, Dagon, The Tree on the Hill, Out of the Aeons really nicely questions the validity of any human perception, obsolete or modern, regardless of religion or faith.

[Anonymous No.20228209]

Because it's usually perverted by people who don't fully understand it, in the same way that someone might pervert what is fundamentally a mystical or visionary work of art by misinterpreting it as merely picturesque and fantastical. Mystical and visionary writings are essentially cosmological cartographies, which is what Lovecraft is also doing but in a horrifying and chaotic way instead of in a way that affirms the goodness and unity of ultimate being.

When midwits and lesser talents misunderstand this as merely psychological or subjective horror at "the unknown," or much worse, as all an allegory for the alienation of capitalist society or whatever, they reduce it even if they superficially put in a lot of effort to maintain the cosmic horror "style." That's because cosmic horror can't be reduced to a "style" or an affective mode, it's a visionary mode and the integrity of the vision has to be maintained.

[Anonymous No.20228372]

>>20228196
Also, Lovecraft DID try to keep up with the latest the sciences, this is apparently from one of his essays:

Of the various conceptions brought before the human mind by the advance of Science, what can be compared in strangeness and magnitude with that of eternity and infinity, as presented by modern astronomy? Nothing more deeply disturbs our settled egotism and self-importance than the realisation of man’s utter insignificance which comes with knowledge of his position in time and space.

Life, or at least life upon the earth and the other planets of the solar system, extends but a little distance, relatively speaking, into the past; for the nebular hypothesis of Laplace can trace the ancestry of the sun and planets to a gaseous, incandescent mass which could under no circumstances support the vital principle. And this condition, removed from us by innumerable years, is obviously but a matter of yesterday as eternity is reckoned. Nor is the future prospect of much greater extent. In a few billion years, a mere second in eternity, the sun and planets must lose the heat bequeathed to them by the parent nebula, and roll black, frozen, and untenanted through space. Therefore the very existence of life and thought is but a matter of a moment in unbounded time; the merest incident in the history of the universe. An hour ago we did not exist; in another hour we shall have ceased to be.

[Anonymous No.20228379]

>>20228372
>Turning to the consideration of infinite space, we are no less paralysed with “thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls”. In our own solar system we discover the apparently boundless earth to be a comparatively small planet, and in the immediate universe we find the entire solar system but an inconsequential molecule. What, then, shall we think when we learn that all that universe is but one of an infinite number of similar star-clusters, only the nearest of which are to be seen from our part of space? And besides all this, we must ever recall that space has no boundary; that the illimitable reaches of vacancy extend endlessly out beyond our sight or comprehension, perhaps beyond the apparently infinite region of the luminiferous ether and beyond control of the laws of motion and gravitation. What mind can venture to depict those remote realms where form, dimensions, matter, and energy may all be subject to undreamt-of modification and grotesque manifestations? All that we know, see, dream, or imagine, is less than a grain of dust in infinity. It is virtually nothing, or at best no more than a mathematical point.
but he did try to end on a bit of a positive note, though this is before he really started writing cosmic horror:
>But whilst all these considerations may well serve to diminish the presumption of the petty philosopher, they should not be permitted to discourage humanity in its devotion to the ideals it has always pursued. Life and mankind have their place in the natural plan, however infinitesimal that place may be; and the laws of Nature are too obvious and well-defined to warrant a feeling of futility and unrest. The essential reality and rationality of our aspirations and moral code should, notwithstanding all the revelations of Science, be apparent even to the most thorough materialist.

I feel like HPL was also someone who really "got" infinity and eternity.

[Anonymous No.20228547]

>>20228372
>Also, Lovecraft DID try to keep up with the latest the sciences
Oh I know about that. I think his attempt to intertwine then-breakthrough scientific perception of the world into his narrative is one of the things that made his stories so resistant to bad aging. To an extent, his pantheon really is a set of ideas and perceptions of the infinity of the universe clothed in horror fantasy skin.

[Anonymous No.20228571]

>>20228547
I find it a bit disappointing that HPL didn't live long enough to see the discovery of cosmic inflation and black holes, I feel like there's something very Lovecraftian about both.

[Anonymous No.20228596]

>>20228571
Life be like this. Alexey Tolstoy didn't live to see the invention of laser.

[Anonymous No.20229008]

>>20228138
Cosmic horror isn't something to be reduced to fedora atheism/rick and morty reddit nihilism. To me it's way more about forces unknown and eternally unknowable to man, not hostile necessarily (too simple) but something he will never be able to grasp, a completely different reality separated by a vast chasm from the world of man. Go read Machen's The White People, especially the intro where they discuss the true nature of sin for an ideal example. Afterwards read Blackwood's The Willows, both stories were the apex of horror in Lovecraft's opinion

[Anonymous No.20229045]

>>20229008
>Cosmic horror isn't something to be reduced to fedora atheism/rick and morty reddit nihilism.
Not him, is this where it really goes today? This is almost as cringe as western females in their 20s thinking Anna Karenina character is a feminist hero.
>Blackwood's The Willows
MUH FUCKING NIGGUH! This is the first time I see anyone on /lit/ appreciating this gem. I also recommend The Hounds of Tindalos by Frank Belknap Long.