Cosmic Horror
On the edge of the unknown lie the answers. We may not like those answers but we keep seeking them. H. P. Lovecraft has been quoted to death with: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” That opening line from “Supernatural Horror in Literature” has become facile, a blanket meme for people who like things in nice, neat packages. There is nothing nice or neat about cosmic horror.
Lovecraft’s cosmic horror is an attitude that transcends mere ghost stories. We call it “horror” because the response of well written cosmic tales is a mix of ecstatic awe, terror and understanding. That understanding is that we are tiny, tiny beings in a universe filled with strangeness, danger and mystery. To pull back that veil, in a Lovecraft story, is to invite brain-shattering madness. But not all cosmic writers embrace that outcome. There are writers, Science Fiction writers in particular, who see cosmic revelation as more than a brain-blast of knowledge. Two writers who explored this idea in Science Fiction were A. Merritt and Jack Williamson.
Abraham Merritt
A. Merritt (1884-1943) was probably the most popular writer of Fantasy & Science Fiction going into the Pulp era. He had been writing for the soft weeklies like All-Story and Argosy since 1917. (Murray Leinster was another.) Merritt was a hobbyist who wrote when he had time from his magazine editing job. Despite the day-job, he produced several classics of early Fantasy and SF including The Moon Pool, The Face in Abyss and Burn, Witch, Burn. His Science Fiction is often thought of as Fantasy or Horror now since the genre edges weren’t so rigid at the beginning of the 20th Century. His prose is often thought to be old-fashioned by today’s standards but this doesn’t stop him being read to this day. He inspired many SF writers who followed including Edmond Hamilton, Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore.
The People of the Pit
A Merritt story usually began with his protagonist going to some unusual place. In his first tale, this was a magical Fantasy land reached through a dragon mirror. But for his second tale, “The People of the Pit” (All-Story Weekly, January 5, 1918, reprinted many times) this was a remote spot in the Arctic, “three hundred miles above the first great bend of the Kuskokwim toward the Yukon”. There the explorers seek Hand Mountain, an accursed place no native would ever approach. There they discover a man, ragged and sick unto dying. About his waist is gold, but a kind of gold that has “an unclean, viscid life of its own.” The man is soon fast asleep.
Upon waking, he tells the listeners his name is Sinclair Stanton. A gold-seeker, he too had sought out Hand Mountain. The first sign that something strange was going on was when he found a smooth road that looked to have been tread by millions of feet thousands of years ago. The highway led to the pit, into which Stanton descended to find a strange city inhabited by weird beings of light. He is eventually chained to an altar where the light beings chant to things more evil: “Great transparent snaillike bodies-dozens of waving tentacles stretching from them-round gaping mouths under the luminous seeing globes. They were like the ghosts of inconceivably monstrous slugs!” Wearing down his chain, he escapes and returns to the surface. Having escaped means little, since Stanton can still hear them chanting, calling him back to the pit… (Clark Ashton Smith would use this last idea for his own cosmic masterpiece, “The City of the Singing Flame” (Wonder Stories, July 1931) and its sequel “Beyond the Singing Flame” (Wonder Stories, November 1931).
Now you might ask, what makes this Science Fiction? The effect is certainly one of horror, but Merritt doesn’t explain any of it with supernatural diction. (He does use the word “ghost” but only as a simile). The lights are not ghosts. Their gods are not gods at all, but inter-dimensional aliens. The whole thing is the unearthly on Earth. This makes it Science Fiction by some definitions. Of the forty or so reprintings of the story, most are in SF anthologies. (Clifford D. Simak would experiment with this type of SF in “The Call From Beyond” (Super Science Stories, May 1950) but other examples are rare.)
Jack Williamson
Jack Williamson (1908-2006) today is, of course, the celebrated author of dozens of great SF books like The Legion of Space, The Humanoids, and Seetee Ship. He is remembered as a teacher and an innovator. It was Jack who coined the word “terraforming” in 1942. But back at the beginning of his career he was an A. Merritt fan. His earliest works imitate his master. (He had a chance to collaborator with his idol but it never materialized.) Some of these were written for Weird Tales but the first was for Hugo Gernsback.
The Metal Man
“The Metal Man” (Amazing Stories, December 1928) is a Merritt-style SF tale. We will have the remote part on the map, the weird beings from some place not of earth. Professor Thomas Kelvin of the Geology Department of Tyburn College plans to explore the headwaters of the El Rio de la Sangre or “The River of Blood”, because he discovers radioactive material in the water. He buys a small plane to use. He flies off to make his discovery when he feels his craft passing through a blue illumination. Beyond that he finds a place with weird plants and finally a strange alien city. There he encounters the alien visitor:
It was a terribly, utterly alien form of life. It was not human, not animal — not even life as we know it at all. And yet it had intelligence. But it was strange and foreign and devoid of feeling. It is curious to say that even then, as I lay beneath it, the thought came to me, that the thing and its fellows must have crystallized when the waters of the ancient sea dried out of the crater.
Fleeing the weird creature and its home, Kelvin returns home but finds he must pay a price for his knowledge. His body is slowly becoming metal. He can slow the process with water he took from the site but he is running out…The story ends with Kelvin becoming entire metal.
Later Works
Both Merritt and Williamson used these ideas again. Merritt wrote The Moon Pool (1919) with its fish-frog beings at Ponape, The Face in the Abyss (1930) with its lost valley in South America and The Dwellers in the Mirage (1932) again set in the Arctic. The explorers in these novels find lost people who worships weird things from the ancient past. None of them has as much of an Sf feel as “The People of the Pit”, being more of the H. R. Haggard “lost race” school.
Jack returned to the theme for “The Lake of Light” (Astounding Stories of Super-Science, April 1931), “Through the Purple Cloud” (Wonder Stories, May 1931) and the Weird Tales novel, Golden Blood (May-September 1933). Jack quickly moved away from Merritt-style SF to write in the Space Opera sub-genre (both in the Pulps and in the comic strips) before maturing into his own brand of SF that include many classics such as Darker Than You Think (Unknown, December 1940) and “With Folded Hands…” (Astounding Science-Fiction, July 1947) for John W. Campbell.
Conclusion
Lovecraftian horror, like Basil Copper’s “The Flabby Men” (1977) and The Great White Space (1975) is better known today for cosmic terror, but Science Fiction continues with good examples as well. And not just in books. George R. R. Martin’s Nightflyers and Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (both 2018) gave us great cinematic versions. The Terror (2018, what was it about that year?) by SF/Horror writer Dan Simmons is another good one. (Colin Wilson’s The Space Vampires (1976), filmed as Life Force (1985), not so much.)
