By Jolie Toomajan
Cosmic Enormity
What is cosmic horror? creatures that fall fully outside of the folklore index, fear of the unknown, tentacles and forbidden knowledge, blah blah blah something something waits dreaming. The unfamiliar, the wholly unknown.
We understand the horror of the familiar as uncanny and the horror of the unfamiliar as cosmic (broadly, very very broadly), but some of our most striking instances of cosmic horror are born from an engagement with the banal and uncanny. When Roger Luckhurst argues that cosmic and weird are less a series of genre conventions and more a way of getting something done, “a mode rather than a genre,” the thing the cosmic and the weird accomplish is a kind of radical unmasking of familiarity, not unfamiliarity.
The cosmic as it interacts with the banal is some of the most interesting, while still maintaining the contours of what makes the cosmic cosmic. Understanding inequality as cosmic only makes sense. Understanding the monstrosity of the world around us is the horror of enormity. Our minds do stop us from perceiving things to save our sanity, letting that knowledge in can destroy you. We are all food for an indifferent god.
Examples of Cosmic Horror
Take for example Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) or Nadia Bulkin’s “Violet is the Color of Your Energy” (2015), where the horror isn’t supported by unfamiliarity, but familiarity. In these works, white supremacy and patriarchy are just as truly aligned with the cosmic as an Elder God or a talking meteor. Fully incomprehensible, but not unfamiliar. Just so so much bigger than you, and so unfeeling. Ordinary life is an eggshell-thin barrier between us and several systems of power, indifferent as any God, to look at them fully is to go mad. For these authors, cosmicism isn’t incompatible with the human, just the opposite. The works only make sense when read in the context of the normative.
I also want to make clear that this engagement of the cosmic with its assumed opposite isn’t a contemporary turn; I’m not layering something new onto something old, these works are written in tradition. Though we have welded Lovecraft to our understanding of the cosmic, he was by no means the only one writing it, nor the only one teasing out the contours of its genre conventions.
Women and Cosmic Horror
Women’s engagements with the cosmic occasionally functioned under different lines. CL Moore, a contemporary and friend of Lovecraft (and Weird Royalty in her own right), does this in her famed “Shambleau” (Weird Tales November 1933). While visiting a colony of Mars, Northwest Smith, a Han Solo prototype and a recurring character of Moore’s, interrupts the lynching of a catlike alien woman that the locals call “Shambleau.” This turns out to be a poor decision when the girl is revealed to be an eldritch horror who feeds by inducing ecstasy in her prey, which destroys their bodies and also endangers their souls. Shambleau isn’t so much unfamiliar (the locals have a whole system for dealing with the creatures) as she stands poised at the peak of epistemological disaster
(China Mieville calls it a horror of realization. I call it an epistemological disaster. Tomato, Tomahto).
Smith expects to follow a pulp science fiction plot: Save the girl wearing strategically placed rags on her alien—but still attractive—form, have a brief fling in the hero’s rented room, and she will be forever changed by the encounter, waiting for his return, while he moves on, rakishly, to the next planet and next conquest. Smith walks into a room thinking he is a predator and walks out knowing he is prey. He is forced to confront that it was not his place to interfere in how the locals conducted themselves regarding an invasive threat, that laws and morals are not universal, that women do not need to be saved, and, in fact, some things that look just like women should be shot on sight. The cosmic horror of Shambleau isn’t her illegibility but her legibility, how clearly she shows power structures for fiction.
Utter Powerlessness
Another woman writer from the era, Everil Worrell, uses her “The Grey Killer” (Weird Tales November 1929) to tie the horror of the cosmic to the horror of the banal much less symbolically. Here we are given the hospital notes of Marion, a young woman being treated for tetanus. When a strange doctor with a glowing syringe enters her room at night, Marion reports the intrusion, first to an orderly, then several nurses, and then an escalating series of doctors, all of whom ignore her at best or threaten her with institutionalization at worst.
What is unmasked for Marion along with the supernatural is her powerlessness as a woman in the medical system. For the majority of the story, the enormous power she is fighting against is his power as a doctor, not as an envoy for a cosmic entity. The overwhelming realization of the story is how valuable the doctor’s word is considered when weighed against hers, and how he could dissolve her into nothing simply by declaring it so. Marion begins the story thinking she is a person undergoing treatment, and leaves understanding that the medical community will never listen to a word she says, that she is simply food for “that hydra-headed horror of a hospital.”
Conclusion
These authors show us that the cosmic is bigger than we think, not so much incomprehensible as extra comprehensible. Enormous. Hungry. Soulless. But the association with familiarity was there at the birth of the genre, just more prevalent in women’s writing. And not because all monstrous indifference is unfamiliar. Some of it is as familiar as breathing, our constant companion, and in this larger understanding of the cosmic. the worst part is the familiarity.
Reference
China Miéville. “Introduction.” At the Mountains of Madness: The Definitive Edition. 2005.
CL Moore. “Shambleau.” Weird Tales. November 1933.
Everill Worrell. “The Grey Killer.” Weird Tales. November 1929.
Nadia Bulkin. “Violet Is the Color of Your Energy.” She Walks in Shadows. 2015.
Victor Lavalle. The Ballad of Black Tom. 2016.
Roger Luckhurst. “The Weird: A Dis/orentation.” Textual Practice. 2018.
