In an afterword to the new NYRB Classics anthology Shadows of Carcosa, editor D. There’s a kind of dark, absurdist comedy that comes from wrapping yourself up in worry over fates you will realistically never face, but this can also lead to a particularly rich, viable strain of horror.Ĭosmic horror and its manifestations are numerous. You get can lost trying to envision things that don’t lend themselves to easy envisioning. It’s something of an endurance test to see how long I can stare at it before I either begin to develop a tension headache or panic outright as I mentally and emotionally prepare myself for the Rockies eroding into a dusty plain or Saturn’s rings reaching the end of their lifespan (50 and 100 million years away, respectively). It’s a question of comprehension these days, a surefire way to spook myself is to call up Wikipedia’s “Timeline of the far future” page and look at some of the events forecasted to happen tens of thousands, or tens of millions, of years from now.
But bring me to a museum and show me the body of hundred-foot-long a whale? Cue the tremors and terror sweat. Show me a vampire and I’d shrug werewolves underwhelmed. When I was young, monsters didn’t frighten me quite as much as scale did.
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