User:The Koromo/The Ups and Downs of Modern Lovecraftian Fiction

This is a blog post that has significance importance to me and, I believe, should have significant importance to the majority of aspiring writers here. So yeah. You know the name. Lovecraft! Who here doesn't love Lovecraft, or at least admires him? Very little I bet. If you don't know the name and you also identify with the term horror than you've either been living under a rock or your broadest sense of horror fiction is lying within the decrepit, dust-collecting pages of a Dean Koontz novel (a name so horrible that it sends every single one of the Old Ones into a frenzied state of panic upon so much as a mere utterance).

In the words of Stephen King: "Lovecraft opened the way for me, as he did for those before me." If I could somehow edit a quote, then I would make that "Lovecraft opened the way for me, as he did for those before me and will for those after me". Because it's certainly how the man's influence has effected me and, in some ways, changed me as not only a horror fanatic but as a writer and perhaps even as a person too. He was not my introduction to the genre - I thank Dead Space for transforming me into a buff for all weird fiction - but perhaps the most radically life changing aspect of his works for me was one thing: this wasn't a horror I had seen before.

No, I had seen ghosts and demons and zombies. I'd heard things that go bump in the night, and I had my share of Goosebumps books and schlocky but still entertaining exercises in gore and mutilation. This, however, was a horror not created by a fear of what happens, but a fear of what could happen, the sheer fright of the unknown. When I first laid eyes upon Lovecraft, The Dunwich Horror I believe was my gateway (in part because of the more, uh, "commercial" feel compared to the rest of his works), and of course I'd found myself confused by what I had read, but as the weeks...months...years went by I found it in his works: horror that was crafted perfectly, a horror that was almost flawless in prose as well as execution, a horror that was perfected in itself by not only being nightmarish, but by having a meaning, a purpose, and a literary significance.

This genre was cosmic horror, and I can't find a genre to top it.

So what is "Cosmic Horror"?
Cosmicism, cosmic horror, Lovecraftian horror, whatever you want to call it, is one of the significantly older forms of horror fiction, perhaps only behind gothic horror, who we can all thank another overlord Poe for. Cosmic horror, put in my own terms, focuses on the philosophy that humanity, the planets, and even the solar system fall in utter insignificance behind the sheer vastness of the universe and the impending sense of unknowing of what truly, truly lies beyond the dome we call the sky. Depressing nihilism and bleak cynicism are hugely important tropes in this subgenre, as the goal is to create a universe so vast, so apathetic, so uncaring, and so unknowable that even being aware of the likely existence of the unexplained out there could be too much for the human mind to bear. This is to the point where Lovecraft himself even stated that horror writers must be cynical to write horror effectively, or the author must provide cynical worldviewpoints to some degree. Of course, these may be considered outdated philosophies, but in a sense they still stand true; if your horror is not an exercise in darkness to even the smallest extent, or if there is no worldview that would not be considered "mainstream", then it more oft than not falls into either parody or a genre I and probably a good bunch of others like to call "Horror Lite": a genre which has all the elements of what a horror story would make, but fails to deliver in its execution due it being overshadowed by some sort of hackneyed sentimentality or obvious moral that only eight year olds or under would need to learn (not unlike a lot of stuff on this website, I find), or some sort of frustratingly bland and unnecessary positive outcome that might as well be considered the literary equivalent of a photobomb.

I realize I'm digressing, but this is important to me and many others, and I feel I must emphasize my point on cosmic horror and horror in general by bringing up one of the most crucial points in your story: the ending. Now, this is entirely subjective, but I firmly stand by the belief that in order to complete your horror story, the ending must not be a complete victory for the protagonist(s), if any victory at all. Remember that this is a scary story; the bleakness and terror of your story has much to do with its grand finale, a trope undoubtedly popularized by Lovecraft. Of course "happy" endings can work, but they take away from a scary story unless they're done exceptionally well. Emphasis on horror, which is emphasis on a dark and apathetic world surrounded by the things that go bump in the night or whatever, is completed by an ending that contributes to this. And the ending must of course be dished out satisfactorily either way you go.

Cosmic horror is one of the prime examples of bleakness in the world of horror fiction, and of course it is the ending that makes it. So I assume I should bring up what not to do in your cosmic horror story. Let's bring up our ol' buddy Stephen King, one of my personal favorite writers, and kind of analyze what he does critically. Of course the man is a genius - he has throat grabbing hooks and plots and dialogue that grip the reader like a vice, which ersatz imitators have certainly attempted and failed in his wake, but c'mon, let's face it, people: the man cannot fucking write endings, and an ending that is a failure often results in the entire story falling apart before the reader's very eyes, resulting in stabbing disappointment. Of course there are a few remarkable exceptions to this - for example, the dim nihilism of  'Salem's Lot's epilogue that haunts the reader for days after its completion, or the gibbering lunacy displayed in the closing fifty pages of harrowing masterworks like Pet Sematary - but again I am digressing, because King is no stranger to Lovecraftian horror as well as traditional horror.

Let me bring up a more recent work of his, Under the Dome.