Examples of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cosmic Horror

By Lothar Tuppan

As a companion piece to the previous essay on Cosmic Horror (Cosmic Horror and Literary and Cinematic Existential Dread), here are some examples of cosmic horror in H.P. Lovecraft’s tales that exhibit some of the main themes that built the foundations of how we conceive of the subgenre. These aren’t the only ones and I, inevitably, will leave out someone’s favorites. If so, let me know, and I’ll arrange a Deep One to bring you some Innsmouth gold as a mea culpa. Also, in the interest of brevity (yes, something I’ve sacrificed on the altar to Yog-Sothoth years ago, I know) I won’t be summarizing the plots. There are plenty of online summaries or, if you want brief summaries and excellent analyses, I highly recommend Kenneth Hite’s Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales. It’s absolutely excellent as is its sequel Tour de Lovecraft: The Destinations.

Or, better yet, read the original tales over at https://hplovecraft.com/ as I’ll probably be spoiling plot elements below.

“Dagon”

• The first glimpses of a history older and more malevolent than humans think.
• The using of a real-world deity to show that human mythologies are completely wrong as to the true nature of “divinity” in whatever form.
• Species that are as sentient as humans (and far older).
• The ocean as an alien and hostile realm. A chthonic realm mirroring the ouranic/astral realm of the void of outer space. Cosmic horrors can come from both.
• Hints of an apocalypse where mankind might be swept aside and it wouldn’t matter at all if all humans are forgotten.
• A panic that is more than just fear of a monster. Panic born of the inability to look at a truth greater than what people can understand without going mad. It’s not a perfect example of this one but Lovecraft’s seed is, here, starting to sprout. It will flower into full bloom in later tales.

“Nyarlathotep”

• Apocalypse written in bright bloody letters. No more hinting here. The best description of this story is by Ken Hite in his Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales when he states, in a very complimentary context, “. . . this prose-poem doesn’t even pretend to have a plot. It’s all incident.”(Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales, p.51) and that’s important to notice because it’s the style of this tale that fuels the feeling that reality itself is dissolving around all of mankind and the narrator in particular. Nyarlathotep, the soul of the “tenebrous ultimate gods” has brought everything to complete ruin.
• Some indescribable gods that are at the center of all things. In this case “. . . through this revolting graveyard of the universe. . . ”

“From Beyond”

• Glimpses into the “beyond” of people’s normal mode of reality and it is far more encompassing and alien than what perceived reality is.
• Oh, wait. That beyond. That outside isn’t really outside. We’re inside of it, and it’s inside of us… oh the things that are inside of us, on us, all around us. Thankfully we can’t normally see them or feel them because, if we could it would mean we were tuned properly to them… and they could see and touch us as well.
• From a story-structure perspective this is an unsatisfying tale. From sheer ideas and implications, it’s essential to understanding Lovecraft’s cosmic horror.

“The Nameless City”

• History and time shown to be more alien and “outside” than mankind thinks.
• The first appearance of Abdul Alhazred, the author of the Necronomicon.
• The first time the quote, “That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die” is published.

“The Music of Erich Zann”

• Music as both cosmic horror itself and as a way to combat that horror. In later tales Lovecraft uses angles within geometry to express ways into a greater reality. Here he uses the “angles” of sound (i.e., the intervals between notes) to do the same thing. In Lovecraft, higher mathematics is a way into the horrors (which makes sense as the higher mathematics of HPL’s time were opening “terrifying vistas” into physics).
• Many critics consider this tale to be the first of Lovecraft’s stories with his fully formed voice, style, and themes. Perhaps it is Lovecraftian cosmic horror in its most distilled state.

“The Hound” 

• This is more of an anti-example, or an example of how something really isn’t cosmic horror although some think it is for a superficial reason. This story is firmly in a decadent, gothic, supernatural realm of horror but some include it in a list of cosmic horror or “Cthulhu Mythos” tales only because it introduces, “. . . the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred . . .” without any detail that would make one think this is different from any other historical grimoire that dealt with demonic beings or “evil” deeds (e.g., Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, De praestigiis daemonum, Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis, the various Svartkonstböcker from Sweden, etc.).

“The Festival”

• Ancient truths within one’s DNA that pre-dates humanity and calls to those descendants, whether they want it to or not.
• Source of cosmic horror can come from the stars, within the self (in a horrible sense of self-betrayal), or within the chthonic realms of the underground or the undersea. In “The Festival” all three are present.
• A protagonist that is as much a part of the horror as the antagonists. Lovecraft explores this more fully in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.”

“The Call of Cthulhu”

• Here Lovecraft gives a sense of how big the horror is, not just in Cthulhu’s physical size (at one point described as a “mountain that walked or stumbled”) but in the conspiracy of how wide-ranging the cult, and both the cult’s and Cthulhu’s influence is. This is a great conspiracy story as well as a fantastic cosmic horror tale.
• Not only cultists, but anyone sensitive enough, are hearing unconsciously Cthulhu’s Call and are affected by it. People’s own dreams and subconscious (which are now rising into consciousness like R’lyeh from the depths) are untrustworthy and potentially part of the conspiracy.
• The apocalypse that will destroy humanity (well, transform it into a new stage of becoming from their point of view). This apocalypse is not only a possibility but a reality that was just barely avoided. And there are a global cult of people who are actively trying to bring it about.

“The Colour out of Space”

• An alien that is truly alien and “incomprehensible” to humans (how can a colour be a sentient entity?!?!?).
• The earth (or at least a small region of and the life within) being a host to a growing life form that feeds off of people like parasitic wasp larvae feeding off of a caterpillar. Once that newly born entity matures enough it just leaves their host(s) behind. All the terrestrial life in the region were nothing but food for something no one can understand and could barely recognize as even being present.
• Not only did the colour feed off the life of those affected, but also their minds and sanity.

“The Dunwich Horror”

• Similar to “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft shows people (in this case a family) who are actively working to bring about the return of the Great Old Ones.
• Yog-Sothoth is explained in detailed but ineffable ways. He is almost an almighty “god” in that he is all space, all time, and the access to all of that. He is the gate, the key, and the guardian of the gate, which really means he is the gate, the key, and the guardian to everything.
• And that god, in a wonderfully perverted mockery of the Christ myth, has brought about his own incarnated messiah(s) by mating with a human woman.
• Of course, as Robert M. Price has championed (and Alan Moore made explicit in his graphic novel, Providence), that what, most likely, was happening in the story is that Yog-Sothoth possessed old Noah Elezar Whateley, and then Noah impregnated his own daughter Livinia. That’s how these “miracle births” happened. Not exactly cosmic horror but that realization does show the sort of “beyond good and evil” the Great Old Ones would bring about that Castro talked about in “The Call of Cthulhu” 

“The Whisperer in Darkness”

• A fun tale where Lovecraft takes real-world folklore (the Mi-Go/Migoi/ མི་རྒོད་of Tibetan Yeti lore) and: 1) shows that what humans think they know (about most things) is completely off-base; and 2) it’s far weirder, alien, and sinister than people could imagine.
• Aliens that aren’t what most would normally conceive of as sentient entities. These are fungoid beings that are, “. . . composed of a form of matter totally alien to our part of space—with electrons having a wholly different vibration-rate” which makes it so that a regular camera can’t photograph them. And they’re kind of crustacean-like with wings that fly through space.
• Lovecraft brings the cosmic horror closer by making one of their key outposts the newly discovered Pluto, which is actually Yuggoth. Earth’s own solar system is part of the horror. Taking the “horror in your own neighborhood” theme and expanding it into cosmic territory.
• They harvest people’s brains, keep them in “brain cylinders” where the victim/volunteer’s consciousness is still intact and able to sense things through their technology, and fly them off to Yuggoth.
• They’re an alien species but they worship Nyarlathotep and Shub-Niggurath, reinforcing the Great Old Ones/Outer Gods preeminence in the universe.
• This is the one story where H.P. Lovecraft brings Robert W. Chambers’ King in Yellow myths into the Cthulhu Mythos with mentions of Hastur, the Lake of Hali, the Yellow Sign, and Yian (Yian isn’t technically part of the King in Yellow myths but is from a later Chambers’ story “The Maker of Moons” in which it is a fictional city).

“At the Mountains of Madness”

• How earth’s own geography (Antarctica in this case) is far more alien than mankind could imagine. Here it was home to the Elder Things/Elder Ones/Old Ones for over 500 million years.
• The Elder Things are an alien race that is biologically very different from humans, but with a civilization and social structure just similar enough to be unsettling.
• Here Lovecraft finally explains what Shoggoths are: biological creations of the Elder Things intended to be slave labor.
• He also explains that all terrestrial life, including humans, are just the unintentional product of extra Shoggoth bio-material that some Elder Thing forgot to clean up. Not only are people cosmically unimportant but all human pain, suffering, and existential angst is due to some lazy-ass lab assistant who couldn’t be bothered to go through his checklist properly because he had a hot date with some cylindrical hottie. Thanks Elder Things!

“The Shadow Over Innsmouth”

• The undersea horrors that began in “Dagon” are really developed and merged with some of Lovecraft’s other themes.
• While this inference might be off-base this story (and “Dagon” before it) evokes a “sure there was an Atlantis… but it’s a lot scarier than you realize” feel. Earth’s own history and mythologies being more unrecognizable and alien than people realize.
• A more refined and expanded version of the aforementioned, “Ancient truths within one’s DNA that pre-dates humanity and calls to us, whether we want it to or not.”
• The same with Olmstead not only being a “protagonist that is as much a part of the horror as the antagonists” he’s also a horror to the horrors (“Oops… sorry about what the US Government did to Y’ha-nthlei my Deep One family. My bad. I was still a bit too human back when I ratted you out.”).
• Speaking of Olmstead, him accepting his lineage and leaning into it at the end of the story is probably the most horrifying thing in the story. Maybe people, like Olmstead, don’t really know themselves and maybe they can’t trust themselves either.

“The Dreams in the Witch House”

• Here Lovecraft features the strange angles of geometry front-and-center. Time and space are all connected (in Yog-Sothoth maybe?) if one knows the right angles, the right geometry, the right witchcraft.
• Expanding upon the thesis of “The Call of Cthulhu” here there is a scientist (specifically a mathematician) delving too deeply into reality via his methodology and having that, more true, reality consume him.
• Lovecraft plays with the idea of a secret witch-cult, and the “black man” of witchcraft lore and turns it on its head while keeping the “witchy-ness” of it.
• Lovecraft’s use of odd, strange, angles obviously resonates with people’s sense of proper proportion and order. By evoking that in this story he links a very visceral and physical human reaction to unspeakable cosmic truths.

“The Shadow Out of Time”

• Even more so than in “At the Mountains of Madness” Lovecraft provides a cosmic sense of time. Not only as history but as a temporal landscape to traverse by beings who can do so.
• The Great Race of Yith are beings more alien than most of Lovecraft’s beings and, like the Colour, are intangible consciousnesses, moving from host species to host species.
• Lovecraft, again, shows human’s insignificance as, in the far past, there were species more important than mankind is and in about 50 million years humans will have been forgotten and the dominant life form will be beetles with a hive mind (that the Great Race will inhabit).

Those are just some of the more obvious examples that might give someone who is unfamiliar with Lovecraft’s work a starting place to see where his themes are distinct from the surface gloss of florid language, unspeakable tentacled creatures, and forbidden books.