“I’ll take Cthulhu over you devils any day.” – Victor LaValle, ‘The Ballad Of Black Tom’
It’s the last week of Behind With Knife! We’ve had chapter 21, chapter 22, and chapter 23 so far this week. Big stuff happening tomorrow and Friday! Who will survive? Check back with your old friends at Lazy & Entitled dot org. Here’s chapter 1 if you need to start at the beginning.
Speaking of friends, The Line Break came out this week, with dear friend and Cotton Xenomorph co-founder Teo Shannon. Teo is the author of the excellent new book, a chronology of blood, which you can buy here and read my thoughts about here. Podcast is at Apple | Spotify | Soundcloud and I assume elsewhere but those are the three I know about.
And now, the sub-genre I am most obsessed with in the year 2025: cosmic horror.
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Do you ever feel like the world has, imperceptibly and over time, become irrevocably different without you noticing? Do you ever feel as though your life is governed by unknowable and uncontrollable forces that are indifferent to the suffering they cause you? Do you ever look at news of resurgent American Nazis, mask-wearing goons racially profiling brown people, and active resegregation policies and think, ‘I thought those monsters were defeated and yet here they are crawling back from their weird holes?’ Do you ever consider how a novel coronavirus popped up seemingly out of nowhere to kill millions and shut down the world for a year plus, and there’s also the theoretical threat of ancient diseases thawing out of the ice caps? Do you ever worry about how global warming is a literal existential threat to all us, we keep doing nothing about it, and the planet is changing in ways we can’t reverse?
Cosmic horror might be for you.
I am relatively new to the genre. I haven’t really read that old racist, “the H.P. stands for Hating People” Lovecraft, beyond a few short stories. I’ve sure spent a lot of time reading people influenced by him. Still, of the books on my shelf that can be listed as cosmic horror, we don’t have much: Sister Maiden Monster by Lucy A. Snyder, North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud, The Ballad Of Black Tom by Victor LaValle, Extended Stay by Juan Martinez, No Gods For Drowning by Hailey Piper, three books of The Southern Reach series by Jeff VanderMeer. Wow, look how many nonwhite dudes! There’s even a woman! Scared-of-his-own-shadow-because-it’s-black Howie Lovecraft would be aghast.
So I’m a novice. I especially feel like a novice because I know people really get into this stuff. Anytime there’s a mythos, I’m nervous about how much earlier others have gotten out of bed. Still, it’s worth rehearsing some basics: cosmic horror, as I understand it, usually involves a character learning that the world is much bigger than they had previously thought. Maybe it’s monsters existing, maybe it’s sleeping Old Gods awakening, maybe it’s a descent to madness, maybe it’s the world fundamentally changing in ways that are scary. If you’ve seen the movie Annihilation, think about how everything is so strangely different once the characters are inside Area X. Think about how off Oscar Isaac’s character is when he returns. In The Ballad Of Black Tom, there is the big flashy goal, which is awakening The Sleeping King, but the truest horror is the police’s indifference to committing murder. That is the action that makes Black Tom. It’s not unlike True Detective Season One, where you have to ask if the specter of The King In Yellow is more horrifying, or the downstream effects of what takes place in Carcosa. By the way, maybe those are spoilers1, but I don’t really believe those are the biggest deal in cosmic horror.
Cosmic horror is the horror most akin to poetry, because it is that which cannot be paraphrased. When I saw Juan Martinez read at Sandra Marchetti’s Diorama launch, he cheerfully described his book as “the hotel that eats people.” It’s not simply that, though. The horror happens to Alvaro on a sentence level. Switching books, but I can’t tell you how unsettling it was the first time that the biologist narrator of Annihilation directly addressed the reader. You have to experience it. That’s also why I’m less interested in the Old Gods or whomever. The horrifying thing is, by the time the tentacles have shown up? You’re kinda fine with it, or at the very least resigned to your fate.
Does Twin Peaks count as cosmic horror? I experience it that way. 2025 has been a year of obsessing over Twin Peaks. The “Got A Light” episode in The Return is a metaphor for the evil unleashed on the world by the development of the atom bomb, but it feels like more than a metaphor, it feels deeply, purely true.2 As I started getting more and more into it, untangling the mysteries or whatever, explanations for things started to make sense in the real world. Not in any way that would hold up in court, but on an intuitive level. Sometimes, a certain geographic point can be a vector for evil. Sure, yeah. There are unseen forces that we cannot comprehend and they do not have our best interests at heart. Obviously. The world is larger, more confusing, and more poisonous than you previously conceptualized. Yes, I am constantly learning this. Sometimes people aren’t even in control of their own actions, so moved are they by these unseen forces. Hey, if theoretical physicists who study quantum mechanics are unsure that humans are capable of free will, so am I. Well, I sorta think the free will/determinism debate is useless anyway, but that’s another column.
Because what’s useful? You know? We live in the richest country in the world, but people go bankrupt if they get sick or get hit by a car. Hey, did we consent to cars—death machines with paint jobs—governing our lives they way they do? Certainly not automated cars that barely/don’t work. We have access to the entirety of human knowledge on our phones, and yet we can’t prevent a genocide. We are shown, repeatedly, that the institution of policing is racist and corrupt and only leads to more death, and yet our politicians insist on funding it. We’ve had longer than I’ve been alive to learn the horrors of the Nazism, and yet ICE broke into my building complex last week. The planet is dying, and we build ocean-guzzling data centers so that we can outsource our entire brains to Large Language Models. People are starving because the government is shut down, and the government is shut down because the president is an accused member of an elite pedophile ring, one that likely includes Bill “Let’s Not Worry About Climate Change Anymore” Gates, and the president doesn’t want anyone to know about it in an official capacity, so the Speaker of the House, who installs spyware on his and his son’s phones so they can narc on each other watching porn, has to keep Congress away, because Congress will reveal to the whole world in a official capacity that the president is a member of an elite pedophile ring, and you’ve already forgotten that this run-on sentence includes people starving and one of the wealthiest men in history saying that we shouldn’t worry about climate change.
Do you feel fucking sane right now?
Someone write the Supreme Alphabet out in blood already. Come, Cthulhu. I’ll learn how to spell your name if you just get ICE out of Chicago.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
- honestly not really, grow up ↩︎
- obviously nothing in “Got A Light” is comparable to the horrors suffered by the people of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Bikini Atoll, or the Wanapum, Nez Perce, Yakama, and Umatilla tribal nations, or the Navajo and pueblo nations. What I’m saying is that sometimes art can feel more real than numbers in a history textbook, and that this episode made me understand the evils of nuclear weapons on a different level. ↩︎