Tag: cosmic horror
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Terror of the Gut
Bantam paperback foldout cover. Artist unknown. For a long time now I’ve held the view that between HP Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, it was Howard who was the consistently better writer. The operative word being “consistently”. At his very, very best, HPL probably outshines REH — but not by much. And it may be…
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Cosmic Horror Without Lovecraft?
Cosmic Horror without Lovecraft. Hm. Yet that is what someone on Twitter proposed in response to my previous post. So I asked myself how about sword and sorcery without Robert E Howard? Or Sword and Planet without Edgar Rice Burroughs? Nah. Not possible. When a writer is responsible for creating or defining a genre or…
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Cosmic, or Lovecraftian, Horror
Cosmic horror is largely, if not solely, the creation of HP Lovecraft. Of whom Stephen King said he “has yet to be surpassed as the Twentieth Century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.” There are certain themes that differentiate Lovecraft’s brand of horror from other horror subgenres. Let’s take a look at some of…
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Facing the Sinister
The other week someone asked me about the symbolism behind the emblem of the Office of Unidentified Phenomena (OUP). The fictional agency for which my paranormal investigator Pierce Mostyn works to save America and the world from those things that make big bumps in the night. It’s a good question, because the design wasn’t haphazard.…
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Fear Is Always With Us
A week and a half ago, Jack Tyler opened our discussion by talking about fear. The fear we choose to enjoy. In this post, I’d like to personalize Jack’s post: the fear I choose. In his classic essay, Supernatural Horror In Literature, HP Lovecraft noted that “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear,…
Threads that Bind 