Re: Cosmic Horror
Posted by:
jimrockhill2001 (IP Logged)
Date: 12 January, 2014 07:02AM
Some of the titles on your list would fit into my understanding of "cosmic horror" (early benchmarks would be Clark Ashton Smith's "The Shadows", Hodgson's THE NIGHT LAND, many works by H. G. Wells, Olaf Stapleton, etc.), but others do not even come close:
Yes to:
Hodgson's "The House On The Borderland"
Hodgson's "The Baumoff Explosive" - what separates this from the stories I have excluded below is Hodgson's focus, which BEGINS with a story central to Christianity, but whose mechanism is rationalistic.
Blackwood's "The Willows"
But I see nothing cosmic in the other three:
"The Great God Pan" - the frame could be seen as science-fictional (though Machen's later story, "The Inmost Light" might be a better candidate), but the central story is about as close to traditional demon-haunted Good vs. Evil Christianity-based horror fiction as Machen came, with a decadent touch, which enraged his contemporaries.
"The Horla" - one of the earliest classics dealing with a race of invisible beings (see also Fitz-James O'Brien's "What Was It?", Bierce's "The Damned Thing" and multiple works by Jean Ray), but although some writers have explored the alien-ness of this phenomenon, de Maupassant makes it just as likely that the narrator is insane.
"Xélucha" - a decadent ghost story. Now, if you were to cite "Vaila" (aka "The House of Sounds") I might be more inclined to agree with you.