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Anonymous
Does cosmic horror still have a place in the modern world? 2017-01-29 08:53:25 Post No. 9034339
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Does cosmic horror still have a place in the modern world? 2017-01-29 08:53:25 Post No. 9034339
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Does cosmic horror still have a place in the modern world?
Anonymous
2017-01-29 08:53:25
Post No. 9034339
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As a society we seem to have become more accepting on a certain level of our insignificance in the universe and more aware of how much we don't know. Compared to Lovecrafts time we seem to have lost our certainty in importance in the universe and of our knowledge of the world around us and as such cosmic horror seems to have lost its teeth. Today society seems to have moved on and perhaps the most effective horror appears to be that which focuses on our isolation within society and being alone within a crowd while struggling to deal with the kafkaesque bureaucracy of modern governments and the disconnect between the state and its people. What do you think?
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>>9034339
I don't think we've moved on so much as just stopped thinking about it.
I literally get a vertigo like anxiety when I'm out in the country and recognize the milkyway
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>>9034361
yeah vertigo is a good word for that feeling I get looking up at the stars, or sky for too long.
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>>9034339
You just need to read other "cosmic horror" authors than Lovecraft.
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>>9035703
Such as?
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>>9034339
The horror of everyday life in the 21st century is at once a kafkaesque-bureaucratic horror and a lovecraftian cosmic/body horror. Probably with something of PKD, Gibson, Land, and Baudrilliard on the side for added mindfuckery. The political economy has revealed itself as an enormous, inhuman death machine, cybernetic, biopolitical and near omnipotent. A conspiracy which has long outgrown the need for conscious human conspirators.
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>>9035744
Anyone he talks about in Supernatural Horror in Literature - Machen, Blackwood, Chambers, Hodgson, etc. And after that period Clark Ashton Smith + Ligotti.
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>>9035756
>at once a kafkaesque-bureaucratic horror and a lovecraftian cosmic/body horror.
My Work Is Not Yet Done pretty much epitomizes this idea
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>>9035744
Robert Aickman is GOAT. Also check out Walter de la Mare, or Gustav Meyrink/Hans Heinz Ewers for the more European branch of weird fiction
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>>9034339
>more accepting
top kek. No, people are bigger Platonists than ever.
-violent support of universal normative ethics
-ascension of systematics to godhood (countless people reduce every moment of their lives to something numeric.)
-the violent attacks on 'fake news' and 'alternative facts'
Cosmic Horror is not effective because Platonism has made them numb to it. One is not afraid of something unbelievable.
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>>9035783
You are very misinformed on what Platonism is.
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>>9035795
I'm not, you are.
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>>9035783
Everything, even life itself, is reduced to 'scientific' measurements and economic calculations, while people are becoming both increasingly tribal and increasingly atomised. Liberal democratic universalism was just a cover for powerful financial and military interests. It's quickly becoming impossible to keep that pretence. Expect shit to get much worse.
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>>9035744
Richard Sharpe Shaver. He's an unrecognized genius. Unlike Lovecraft he was schizophrenic and actually believed in the cosmic horrors he wrote about.
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>>9034361
>I literally get a vertigo like anxiety when I'm out in the country and recognize the milkyway
where do you go to see the stars like that?
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>>9034339
Lovecraft used the fear of the unknown as his base. When those unknowns weren't so unknown, he had to find new horizons.
Immigrant quarters > Countryside > Tropics > Under the sea > Antartica > Space
Also "Dreams".
I don't know where you go next... alternate dimensions? I guess Dreams fit that. Maybe its a pendulum and we'll swing back to the earlier stuff.
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