If our inborn fear of the unknown lies at the heart of any good Horror story, then Cosmic Horror is the crystallized essence of terror. Indeed, the DNA of Cosmic Horror is rooted in the human experience unfolding against a backdrop of forces so behemoth and unknowable that we are merely an afterthought of their existence. This most often took and takes the shape of dark and ancient gods, alien entities beyond our ability to understand and things so aberrant that their being is inimical to being. But from whence did this spring? Certainly no one woke up with the image in mind of a cephalopodan monster whose own awakening would spell the doom of the human race. Like energy, inspiration cannot be created or destroyed but transforms from one form to another. What horrible sight or sound or collections thereof could have birthed such a genre?
Why, being alive of course.
I kid. Mostly.
To be thrust out into the world is not unlike a second birth. We are ejected from our warm, comforting berth and find ourselves in the cold light of a new existence. Our awareness expands to include harsh realities in which survival, physical or spiritual, is not guaranteed. This discovery certainly breaks the body of us in some way or other. Some of us it shatters entirely and drives us into the arms of comforting fantasies if not outright madness. And what is the point of a real, true Horror story if not finding comfort in madness?
The undisputed grandfather of Cosmic Horror, H.P. Lovecraft was a renowned victim of this shattering. His own fear of the unknown–read: fear of anyone not like himself or who he presumed himself to be–reliably translated into a vision of the universe as one over which alien forces loomed. The origin point for what became the Cthulu Mythos, then, was more or less society itself. Or rather its decadence, a condition which Lovecraft imagined himself alone in understanding. Sound familiar? His protagonists were often the misfortunate few to stumble upon–or seek to foul ends–forbidden knowledge. All the while the rest of humanity trundled along in blissful ignorance of the fact that they were passively the playthings of powers beyond their understanding.
Whatever the root of his fear of the world, old Howard hit upon one thing with absolute clarity: That we need not look very far at all to find a Cthuluan entity gobbling up hope and sanity.
In every city, big or small or sizes betwixt, there are cracks in the shared consciousness of its denizens. Through them fall untold lives as the years draw on and are forgotten as if they were never lived out at all. Certain metropolises have grown so great as to become semi-sentient meatgrinders whose masters may exercise only slight restraint. Hope is devoured on such a scale as to become the lifeblood of such places. Life is permitted, not welcomed, to pass through structures that only evolve as they fall to ruin.
Taken to its natural conclusion, this concept deepens and multiplies until encompassing humanity as a whole. At this point in the grand experiment of sentience and cognition, the mere fact of our collective existence has grown beyond the sum of its parts. We are pieces to a whole that is nevertheless divorced from us, so proliferated that it rolls on heedless of our presence. Human life is cosmic in its capacity for dominion over itself and horrifying in its individual expressions’ ignorance of their own collective predation upon themselves.
Call it what you will–the stock market, the temper tantrums of industry, cities like New York which teeter upon the brink of apotheosis–we gave birth in the modern age to forces so profound that they have suborned us. Their powers are those of an idiot: unaware of themselves and unaware of their effect on those they encompass. Our individual frailty within this schema, especially those of us without many (if any) people on which to rely, is the gravest Horror story imaginable. One in which the threat is nothing less than existential and the odds are best when there is no knowledge of the odds at all.
Indeed, the horror of this story is so complete that to escape it one must invent something only subtly less horrifying: alien gods from beyond the farthest stars.
