Below is the second in our series of author interviews celebrating Cosmic Horror and Cthulhu Mythos Month by investigating how authors define the terms. Thanks to author Dave Cohen for his time and answers! Check
Below is the second in our series of author interviews celebrating Cosmic Horror and Cthulhu Mythos Month by investigating how authors define the terms. Thanks to author Dave Cohen for his time and answers! Check out our Cosmic Horror and Cthulhu Mythos Page for more interviews and original fiction.
How do you define the term Cosmic Horror?
For me it’s rooted in the sense of the uncanny, the challenge to the certainties we had ingrained to us from our parents and education. Lovecraft and the other originators of the genre lived in a post-Darwin era when other thinkers like Einstein and Freud were presenting other evidence that reality itself did not mesh with our programming. While such iconic stories like “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Dunwich Horror” end with spectacular sequences, Cosmic Horror begins with a protagonist shaken by evidence that our view of humanity’s place in the universe is not just valid but is in fact pathetic. The basic indifference of the creatures encountered created a new kind of terror, one portraying humans as a kind of larvae in the face of entities older and more powerful and also more entitled to this reality than primates with an exaggerated sense of consciousness.
How do you define the term Cthulhu Mythos?
As a child first encountering his work, I found Lovecraft wonderfully overwhelming with a range of creations that disturbed and fascinated me. I believe we need to use the word fun more when thinking about the Mythos. After decades of reading Lovecraft, I still delight in what his remarkable, pioneering imagination created. But the universe he created goes far beyond a roster of fantastic creatures with the implications that Cosmic Horror confronts readers with both in a challenged reality and within their own minds.
Can you recommend a tale of Cosmic Horror, in the Cthulhu Mythos, or both?
“The Willows” by Algeron Blackwood.
“There are forces close here that could kill a herd of elephants in a second as easily as you or I could squash a fly. Our insignificance perhaps may save us.”
Composed in 1907, “The Willows” presented a view that fascinated and influenced Lovecraft. It’s easy to see why with ideas core to Cosmic Horror before it coalesced into a genre. On a recent read, the story struck me as amazing in how current it seems. A protagonist and a friend go on a river journey, a literary tradition including Huckleberry Finn and Heart of Darkness. Put contemporary characters in an area without cellphone service and the plot still works. Two experienced, worldly men find themselves in a remote section of the Danube where an alternate form of reality objects to their intrusion.
This is quiet, unnerving horror without a fantastic monster emerging at the end. Nature itself, in the form of something as innocuous as willow bushes, reacts to the two humans the way a body does a virus throwing threats and traps as the men become desperate to avoid a fate “far worse than death and not even annihilation.” On that recent read, I found myself thinking about Jeff VanderMeer and other authors working with environmental horror, something else Blackwood pioneered with this landmark story. Both as a still dynamic read and as a cornerstone work of weird fiction, “The Willows” is marvelous.
Can you recommend something of your own work? Cosmic Horror, Cthulhu Mythos, or Otherwise?
My short story “Fathers” stands as the piece I regard as most in the Cosmic Horror tradition. It portrays humans living in an alternate form of reality where their arc and desires are impacted by the strange forces at work in that world building. It also touches on themes of mine involving toxic masculinity and generational feuds, but at its core a young protagonist encounters a cosmic force and is transformed by the experience.
About the Author
Dave Cohen is an author living in Laird Barron’s pacific Northwest. You can read his short story “Fathers” in two parts on New Pulp Tales.
About the Interviewer
Jeremiah Dylan Cook is the author of A Mythos of Monsters and Madness, which includes Cosmic Horror and Cthulhu Mythos short stories. He founded Cosmic Horror and Cthulhu Mythos Month in January of 2023.
