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New Directions in Supernatural Horror
Literature: The Critical Influence of H. P.

Lovecraft 1st ed. Edition Sean Moreland
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Edit ED B Y
s ea n m o rel a nd
The Critical
Influence of
H. P. Lovecraft
New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature
Sean Moreland
Editor
New Directions
in Supernatural
Horror Literature
The Critical Influence of H. P. Lovecraft
Editor
Sean Moreland
University of Ottawa
Ottawa, ON, Canada
ISBN 978-3-319-95476-9 ISBN 978-3-319-95477-6 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95477-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018954728
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This book is dedicated to Caitlín R. Kiernan and Thomas Ligotti, who have
opened holes in the world that can never be closed, and to the late, greatly
lamented David G. Hartwell, whose editorial vision helped shape the course
of horror literature in the late twentieth century and who did so much to
promote and refine it.
Acknowledgments
The impetus for this collection came from conversations with many friends
and colleagues, some of whose critical works can be found in the pages
that follow. Others, whose work doesn’t appear between these covers, also
deserve thanks for their inspiration of, suggestions for, or help with this
volume: these include Aalya Ahmad, S. J. Bagley, Rajiv Bhola, Matt
Cardin, Bobby Derie, Robert D’Errico, Derek Newman-Stille, David
Nickle, Lydia Peever, Dennis Quinn, and Ranylt Richildis. This book also
came about in part due to work presented in the Horror Literature
Division of the ever-generative International Conference on the Fantastic
in the Arts. My thanks go to the conference organizers and to Rhonda
Brock-Servais, former Division Head and perpetual High Priestess of
Horror. Thanks are also due to the Association of part-time professors at
the University of Ottawa, for helping fund my annual participation in the
conference.
Most importantly, my boundless gratitude belongs to my wife,
Madeleine, who makes everything possible, including playing the dancing
clown machine.
vii
Contents
1 Introduction: The Critical (After)Life of Supernatural

Horror in Literature 1
Sean Moreland
Section I “The Oldest and Strongest Emotion”: The

Psychology of Cosmic Horror 11
2 The Birth of Cosmic Horror from the S(ub)lime of

Lucretius 13
Sean Moreland
3 The Evolution of Horror: A Neo-Lovecraftian Poetics 43

Mathias Clasen
4 Ansky’s The Dybbuk, Freud’s Future of an Illusion,

Watson’s “Little Albert,” and Supernatural Horror
in Literature 61
Sharon Packer
5 Gazing Upon “The Daemons of Unplumbed Space” with

H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King: Theorizing Horror
and Cosmic Terror 77
Alissa Burger
ix
x Contents
Section II “A Literature of Cosmic Fear”: Lovecraft,

Criticism, and Literary History 99
6 “Lothly Thinges Thai Weren Alle”: Imagining Horror in

the Late Middle Ages 101
Helen Marshall
7 Lovecraft’s Debt to Dandyism 127

Vivian Ralickas
8 Lovecraft and the Titans: A Critical Legacy 155

S. T. Joshi
9 Reception Claims in Supernatural Horror in Literature

and the Course of Weird Fiction 171
John Glover
Section III “The True Weird”: (Re)Defining the Weird 189
10 Bizarre Epistemology, Bizarre Subject: A Definition of

Weird Fiction 191
Michael Cisco
11 Speaking the Unspeakable: Women, Sex, and the

Dismorphmythic in Lovecraft, Angela Carter, Caitlín
R. Kiernan, and Beyond 209
Gina Wisker
12 Weird Cinema and the Aesthetics of Dread 235

Brian R. Hauser
13 Paranoia, Panic, and the Queer Weird 253

Brian Johnson
Index 279
Notes on Contributors
Alissa Burger is Assistant Professor of English and Director of Writing

Across the Curriculum at Culver-Stockton College. She teaches courses in
research, writing, and literature, including a single-author seminar
on Stephen King. She is the author of Teaching Stephen King: Horror,
The Supernatural, and New Approaches to Literature (Palgrave, 2016)
and The Wizard of Oz as American Myth: A Critical Study of Six Versions
of the Story, 1900–2007 (2012) and editor of the collection Teaching
Graphic Novels in the English Classroom: Pedagogical Possibilities of
Multimodal Literacy Engagement (Palgrave, 2017).
Michael Cisco is the author of the novels The Divinity Student, The
Tyrant, The San Veneficio Canon, The Traitor, The Narrator, The Great
Lover, Celebrant, and MEMBER, and a short story collection, Secret
Hours. His fiction has appeared in The Weird, Lovecraft Unbound, and
Black Wings (among others). His scholarly work has appeared in Lovecraft
Studies, The Weird Fiction Review, Iranian Studies, Lovecraft and Influence,
and The Lovecraftian Poe. He teaches in CUNY Hostos, New York City.
Mathias Clasen is Assistant Professor of Literature and Media at Aarhus
University, Denmark. He specializes in supernatural horror in literature
and film, particularly modern American horror, and he has published
works on zombies, vampires, Richard Matheson, Dan Simmons, and
Bram Stoker. His work aims at explaining the functions and forms of hor-
rifying entertainment by situating the study of the genre within a frame-
work informed by evolutionary and cognitive psychology as well as
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
neuroscience. His monograph Why Horror Seduces (2018) investigates

modern American horror in film, literature, and video gaming within a
scientific framework.
John Glover is the Humanities Research Librarian at Virginia
Commonwealth University, where he supports students and faculty in their
research and instruction, pursues various outreach programs, and directs
Digital Pragmata, a digital arts and humanities initiative. In 2015 he pre-
sented “Node, Edge, or Tentacle: Data and the Lovecraftian Literary
Network” at the 36th International Conference on the Fantastic in the
Arts. His research interests include humanities librarianship, digital human-
ities, literary horror, and the research practices of creative writers. He speaks
regularly on research for creative writers, and in spring 2015, he co-taught
“Writing Researched Fiction” in VCU’s Department of English. As “J. T.
Glover,” he writes fiction and non-fiction, and his work has appeared in The
Children of Old Leech, The Lovecraft eZine, and New Myths, among others.
Brian R. Hauser is Assistant Professor of Film at Clarkson University in
Potsdam, New York. He has published essays on The X-Files and its rela-
tion to the vanishing Americans in James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, a
rhetorical narrative theory approach to cinematic adaptation, and the
importance of DIY-independent cinema. He is also a filmmaker and
screenwriter, who won the 2010 H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival Screenwriting
Competition with his feature-length script Cult Flick. He is completing a
monograph on weird cinema.
Brian Johnson is Associate Professor and Graduate Chair of English at
Carleton University where he teaches theory, genre fiction, and Canadian
literature. Recent publications include essays on serial killing in Canadian
crime fiction, the pedagogy of horror, libidinal ecology in Swamp Thing,
and alien genesis in H. P. Lovecraft and Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. His
research focuses on weird fiction, superheroes, and sexuality.
S. T. Joshi is a freelance writer and editor. He has prepared comprehensive
editions of Lovecraft’s collected fiction, essays, and poetry. He is also the
author of The Weird Tale (1990), The Modern Weird Tale (2001), and
Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012). His award-
winning biography H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996) was later expanded as I
Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (2010). He has also
prepared Penguin Classics editions of the work of Arthur Machen, Lord
Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, and Clark Ashton Smith, as
well as the anthology American Supernatural Tales (2007).
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
xiii
Helen Marshall is a critically acclaimed author, editor, and medievalist.

After receiving a PhD from the prestigious Centre for Medieval Studies at
the University of Toronto, she spent two years completing a postdoctoral
fellowship at the University of Oxford, investigating literature written dur-
ing the time of the Black Death. She was recently appointed Lecturer of
Creative Writing and Publishing at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge,
England.
Sean Moreland His essays, primarily focused on Gothic, horror and
weird fiction in its literary, cinematic, and sequential art guises, have
appeared in many collections, encyclopaedic volumes, and journals, most
recently Lovecraftian Proceedings 2 and The Oxford Handbook of Edgar
Allan Poe. He recently edited The Lovecraftian Poe: Essays on Influence,
Reception, Interpretation and Transformation (2017). He is in the midst
of a monograph, tentatively titled Repulsive Influences: A Historical Poetics
of Atomic Horror, which examines how horror literature since the early
eighteenth century has interwoven with the reception of Lucretius’s De
Rerum Natura in shaping popular anxieties about materialism and mor-
tality. He teaches in the English Department at the University of Ottawa
and occasionally conducts interviews, writes reviews, and blogs about
weirdness at Postscripts to Darkness (www.pstdarkness.com).
Sharon Packer is a psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist in private
practice and Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Icahn School of
Medicine at Mount Sinai. She is also an author and a prolific writer whose
most recent book is Neuroscience in Science Fiction (2015).
Vivian Ralickas holds her PhD in Comparative Literature from the
University of Toronto. Her published works include art criticism, transla-
tions, and two essays on Lovecraft: “Art, Cosmic Horror, and the
Fetishizing Gaze in the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft” (2008) and “‘Cosmic
Horror’ and the Question of the Sublime in Lovecraft” (2007). She
teaches English Composition and Literature, including courses on horror
fiction and Dandyism, at Marianopolis College in Montreal.
Gina Wisker is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Higher
Education. Her principal teaching, PhD supervision, and research interests
lie in contemporary women’s writing, Gothic, horror, and postcolonial
writing. Her published works include Margaret Atwood, an Introduction
to Critical Views of Her Fiction (2012), Key Concepts in Postcolonial
Writing (2007), Horror Fiction (2005), and Postcolonial and African
American Women’s Writing (2000).
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: The Critical (After)Life

of Supernatural Horror in Literature
Sean Moreland
In 1925, writer and publisher W. Paul Cook (1881–1948) invited his

friend and fellow amateur journalist H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) to write
a historical and critical survey of supernatural literature. Already an avid
reader, and increasingly an accomplished writer, of such fiction, Lovecraft
committed to this task with an ambitious course of reading including
acknowledged classics, less well-known historical works, and many con-
temporary fictions of the strange and supernatural, most of them by British
and American writers. His research and preparation was such that it took
Lovecraft nearly two years to submit the manuscript to Cook for
publication.1
The initial, and only partial, first publication of the essay occurred in
1927, in what turned out to be the sole volume of Cook’s journal, The
Recluse. Lovecraft’s most ambitious and influential critical work,
Supernatural Horror in Literature (hereafter SHL) would reach only a
handful of readers at this time. Nevertheless, by the end of the twentieth
century, SHL was widely recognized as exerting an unparalleled influence
over the development and reception of Anglophone supernatural, horrific,
and weird literature. The essay’s core critical concepts continued to evolve
S. Moreland (*)
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada
© The Author(s) 2018 1

S. Moreland (ed.), New Directions in Supernatural Horror
Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95477-6_1
2 S. MORELAND
in Lovecraft’s later career; one trajectory of this development, Lovecraft’s

changing assessment of the “titans” of early twentieth-century weird
fiction, is detailed by S. T. Joshi’s chapter in this volume. During Lovecraft’s
lifetime these critical concepts would reach a wider audience than the essay
itself due to their embodiment in his fictions and exposition via his volu-
minous letters, many of them to an epistolary circle of writers who adopted
and adapted his critical framework through their own writings, as John
Glover’s chapter elaborates.
SHL itself would posthumously reach a wider audience with its publica-
tion by Arkham House, first as part of The Outsider and Others (1939) and
then as part of Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (1965). Even at that point,
few could have predicted how its critical and popular influence would con-
tinue to grow, with Dover publishing an inexpensive paperback edition in
1973 to a greatly expanded readership. SHL’s public profile rose with the
onset of the mass market “Horror Boom” of the late 1970s and 1980s. In
1981, it received a belated endorsement in Stephen King’s biographically
inflected survey of horror, Danse Macabre, which suggested, “If you’d like
to pursue the subject [of earlier supernatural fiction] further, may I recom-
mend H. P. Lovecraft’s long essay Supernatural Horror in Literature? It is
available in a cheap but handsome and durable Dover paperback edition.”
King’s immensely popular writings, as Alissa Burger’s chapter explores,
did much to renew public interest in Lovecraft’s work in general.2
In 1987, influential editor and anthologist David G. Hartwell more
forcefully emphasized SHL’s importance to the development of modern
horror. His seminal anthology The Dark Descent: The Evolution of Horror
describes Lovecraft as “the most important American writer of horror fic-
tion in the first half of” the twentieth century, as well as “the theoretician
and critic who most carefully described the literature” with SHL, which
provides “the keystone upon which any architecture of horror must be
built: atmosphere.”3 Hartwell rightly singles out atmosphere as SHL’s
most important idea, as expressed in one of the most widely cited state-
ments in the essay. Atmosphere, Lovecraft insists, is the “all-important
thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot,
but the creation of a given sensation” (23). The “true weird tale” (22)
creates an “atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer,
unknown forces,” with “a hint, expressed with a seriousness and porten-
tousness becoming its subject,” of “a malign and particular suspension or
defeat” of the laws of nature (23).4
INTRODUCTION: THE CRITICAL (AFTER)LIFE OF SUPERNATURAL… 3
Because of its insistence on atmosphere, Hartwell claims SHL is “the

most important essay on horror literature.”5 This assessment has been
echoed many times since. In More Things than Are Dreamt of: Masterpieces
of Supernatural Horror (1994), James Ursini and Alain Silver state,
“Lovecraft’s fame rests almost as heavily on his work as a scholar as that of
a writer of fiction,” due to his “now classic” survey of the field. They
locate SHL’s importance in its “expansive analysis of supernatural horror
and fantasy contrasted with the condescending tone of earlier essayists.”6
Cumulatively, such estimates reinforce S. T. Joshi’s claim, in the preface to
his annotated edition of SHL, that it is “widely acknowledged as the finest
historical treatment of the field.”7
Lovecraft took supernatural fiction very seriously, and was among the
first critics or theoreticians to do so consistently. He saw it as a crucial liter-
ary tradition with significant cultural value, deeply rooted in the evolved
nature of humanity and tied to the state of society, and therefore emi-
nently worthy of close study and focused aesthetic appreciation.
SHL reflects its author’s historical and cultural moment, his enthusi-
asms, prejudices, and anxieties, as much as his insights and capacity for
rigorous thought. It is Lovecraft’s most sustained attempt to reconcile
what a 1927 letter describes as his own “parallel natures”:
The world and all its inhabitants impress me as immeasurably insignificant,

so that I always crave intimations of larger and subtler symmetries than these
which concern mankind. All this, however, is purely aesthetic and not at all
intellectual. I have a parallel nature or phase devoted to science and logic,
and do not believe in the supernatural at all – my philosophical position
being that of a mechanistic materialist of the line of Leucippus, Democritus,
Epicurus and Lucretius – and in modern times, Nietzsche and Haeckel.8
Hardly a disinterested survey, SHL is Lovecraft’s attempt to think

through feeling, situating his “purely aesthetic” cravings intellectually by
providing a historical account of a literary form defined through an objec-
tification of affect. Both descriptive history and prescriptive canonization,
it opens with the resounding statement, “the oldest and strongest emo-
tion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of
the unknown,” (21) and then proposes that its ability to evoke this emo-
tion is the standard whereby the “literature of cosmic fear” should be
judged (23). SHL explains the appeal of supernatural and weird fiction
across history and cultures by presenting Lovecraft’s “intimations of larger
4 S. MORELAND
and subtler symmetries” as an elementary, “if not always universal” (21),

aspect of human psychology. The appeal of supernatural fiction is linked to
what Lovecraft elsewhere calls “the most ineradicable urge in the human
personality,” which is the desire “for ultimate reality.” This desire is “the
basis of every real religion” and philosophy, and “anything which enhances
our sense of success in this quest, be it art or religion, is the source of a
pricelessly rich emotional experience—and the more we lose this experi-
ence in religion, the more we need to get it in something else.”9 Lovecraft
sees supernatural literature’s chief value as its provision of such a rich emo-
tional experience in the form of “atmosphere.”
Lovecraft also took atmosphere very seriously. Like the notion of a
“structural emotion” or dominant tone developed by T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition
and the Individual Talent” (1919), Lovecraft’s atmosphere derives to a
large extent from Poe’s aesthetic criterion, the “Unity of Effect.”
Atmosphere offers a sense of expansion, a “feeling of magnification in the
cosmos—of having approached the universal a trifle more closely, and ban-
ished a little of our inevitable insignificance.”10 However, atmosphere also
takes on, in William F. Touponce’s words, “the primary meaning of histori-
cal authenticity in Lovecraft’s aesthetics.”11 Atmosphere is Lovecraft’s
refuge against the culture-corrosive maelstrom of modernity, offering an
eminently Eliotic “sensation of a sort of identification with our whole
civilization.”12
Lovecraft took civilization very seriously, too. In the same letter, he
claims to care not about individual human beings, but only about civiliza-
tion, by which he means “the state of development and organisation which
is capable of gratifying the complex mental-emotional-aesthetic needs of
highly evolved and acutely sensitive men.”13 Such men are SHL’s ideal
readers, with “minds of the requisite sensitiveness” to appreciate the seri-
ous atmosphere of the true weird tale (20). Despite the universality of
some of SHL’s insights and the expansive audience it has found since its
first publication, it is evident that Lovecraft envisioned his audience of
“acutely sensitive,” and sufficiently serious, readers as defined along gen-
der, class, and racial lines, as many of the contributions to this volume
examine.
The racial politics of Lovecraft’s atmosphere are prominent in SHL’s
typological approach to the supernatural literature of different cultures.
While justifying Lovecraft’s claim that the “literature of cosmic fear” (22)
is a trans-cultural, almost universal, human phenomenon stemming from
a “profound and elementary principle” (21), his brief discussions of non-
Anglo-Saxon examples emphasize their insufficient seriousness and cosmi-

cism. For example, “In the Orient, the weird tale tended to assume a
gorgeous colouration and sprightliness which almost transmuted it into
sheer phantasy. In the West, where the mystical Teuton had come down
from his black Boreal forests and the Celt remembered strange sacrifices in
Druidic groves, it assumed a terrible intensity and convincing seriousness
of atmosphere which doubled the force of its half-told, half-hinted hor-
rors” (24).
This contrast suggests the close kinship between “atmosphere” and
what would have been called, by the Gothic writers of the previous two
centuries, the sublime, a kinship this volume’s first chapter develops in
detail. Indeed, Lovecraft’s contrast re-stages the Burkean distinction
between powerful, masculine sublimity and delicate, feminine beauty. It
aligns the former with the Western cultural imagination, with its Teutonic
seriousness, and the latter with its Oriental counterpart, sheer, sprightly,
and not so serious. This is a ubiquitous trope of late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century Orientalism, and hardly unique to Lovecraft. Yet here it
reveals a hierarchy of literary form, establishing that the seriousness, inten-
sity, and atmosphere of the “true” weird, with its cosmic orientation, ele-
vates it above the merely decorative diversions of “sheer phantasy.”
It also suggests the belief in racialized cultural incompatibility that leads
to Lovecraft’s elsewhere-stated desire to “get rid of the non-English
hordes whose heritages and deepest instincts clash so disastrously with”
those of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans—especially the more
serious and sensitive among them.14
The criterion of atmosphere becomes in this and related passages a
means of suggesting the superiority of the “mystical Teuton” in the realm
of literary supernaturalism. Passed over quietly by most of the plaudits
above, this aspect of SHL must be reckoned with by writers and scholars
who admit the importance of Lovecraft’s critical legacy. The need to do so
is especially important in light of how Lovecraft’s critical legacy continues
to influence the course and conception of horror, weird, and supernatural
fiction in the first decades of the twenty-first century.
Ann and Jeff VanderMeer do so, at least to a degree, in the introduc-
tion to their epic compendium The Weird (2011). Important for its inter-
national scope and commitment to going beyond the work of Lovecraft
and the Anglo-American pulp tradition, The Weird is nevertheless
grounded in SHL’s definition of weird fiction:
6 S. MORELAND
A “weird tale,” as defined by H. P. Lovecraft in his nonfiction writings and

given early sanctuary within the pages of magazines like Weird Tales (est.
1923) is a story that has a supernatural element but does not fall into the
category of traditional ghost story or Gothic tale, both popular in the 1800s.
As Lovecraft wrote in 1927, the weird tale “has something more than secret
murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains.” Instead, it repre-
sents the pursuit of some indefinable and perhaps maddeningly unreachable
understanding of the world beyond the mundane—a “certain atmosphere of
breathless and unexplainable dread” or “malign and particular suspension or
defeat of … fixed laws of Nature”—through fiction that comes from the
more unsettling, shadowy side of the fantastical tradition.15
This suggests the difficulty, or perhaps impossibility, of working with the

weird as a historically informed mode of expression without wrestling with
Lovecraft’s critical legacy. An awareness of this is evident in the
VanderMeer’s claim that “the Weird is the story of the refinement (and
destabilization) of supernatural fiction within an established framework,”
a framework that SHL did much to establish. However, they also oppose
the Weird to this (or to any) singular tradition: it involves “the welcome
contamination of that fiction by the influence of other traditions.”16 The
phrase “welcome contamination” is a quiet critical rejoinder to SHL’s cul-
tural politics of racial exclusivity.
Despite the widespread acknowledgment of SHL’s importance, and the
problems its influence poses, the essay has not received much in the way of
sustained critical attention. In S. T. Joshi’s words, scholars of both Lovecraft
and weird fiction broadly “have not made as full use” of Lovecraft’s essay
as they could.17 The chapters in this volume begin to rectify this, variously
deepening and broadening the critical dialogue surrounding SHL by
examining its achievements, limitations, and influences. They do so using
a variety of conceptual and methodological approaches and, in some cases,
by pushing SHL’s critical concepts in directions Lovecraft could not have
foreseen and would not have approved.
The essays in the first section, “‘The Oldest and Strongest Emotion’:
The Psychology and Philosophy of Horror” explore SHL’s conceptions of
fear, horror, and the cosmic. My chapter, “The Birth of Cosmic Horror
from the S(ub)lime of Lucretius,” turns to the vexed question of cosmic
horror’s relationship with the sublime. Focusing on the adjective “cos-
mic,” I argue that the classical materialist poetics of first-century BCE
Roman poet Lucretius are a major source for Lovecraft’s modernist muta-
tion of the sublime into SHL’s cosmic horror and his later ideal of a “non-
supernatural cosmic art.” Mathias Clasen turns to evolutionary psychology
to examine SHL’s achievement with “The Evolution of Horror: A
Neo-Lovecraftian Poetics.” Clasen analyzes SHL’s attempt to produce a
naturalistic account of both the emotion of horror and the seductive
appeal of supernatural horror fiction, demonstrating that many of
Lovecraft’s claims for the psychobiological basis of horror are eminently
compatible with contemporary social scientific models of human nature
and culture. Sharon Packer’s chapter, “Ansky’s The Dybbuk, Freud’s
Future of an Illusion, Watson’s Little Albert and Supernatural Horror in
Literature,” engages with the history of psychology, considering the influ-
ence of Freudian psychoanalysis and the behaviorist experiments of John
B. Watson on Lovecraft’s conception of fear and horror. Packer also criti-
cally considers Lovecraft’s appreciation for aspects of Jewish mystical lit-
erature, and particularly SHL’s praise of Ansky’s The Dybbuk, despite his
infamously anti-Semitic views. Rounding out this section while anticipat-
ing the concern of the essays in the second is Alissa Burger’s “Gazing
Upon ‘The Daemons of Unplumbed Space’ with H.P. Lovecraft and
Stephen King: Theorizing Horror and Cosmic Terror.” Burger looks back
on Lovecraft’s concept of cosmic horror and its relationship to hierarchies
of affect through its reception and adaptation by the most popular living
writer of supernatural horror, Stephen King. King’s Danse Macabre builds
on Lovecraft, while casting a long shadow of its own over late twentieth-
and early twenty-first-century horror and supernatural fiction, and Burger
charts Lovecraft’s critical influence not only in a number of King’s stories,
but also in their cinematic adaptations.
The essays in the second section, “‘A Literature of Cosmic Fear’:
Lovecraft, Criticism and Literary History,” focus on SHL’s historical and
critical claims. Helen Marshall moves back beyond the eighteenth-century
Gothic, examining SHL’s elliptical treatment of horror in the Medieval
period. Despite Lovecraft’s evident disdain for and relative ignorance of
the culture of the late Middle Ages, Marshall finds his essay useful for re-
framing the penitential poem The Prick of Conscience as an early example
of the “literature of cosmic fear.” Vivian Ralickas turns to the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, via Lovecraft’s interest in the philosophical and
aesthetic movement of Dandyism. Examining Lovecraft’s relationship
with Epicureanism and Dandyism as modes of aestheticized, elitistic mas-
culinity, Ralickas provides a detailed account of how these movements
framed SHL’s engagement with writers including Baudelaire, Gauthier,
8 S. MORELAND
and Wilde. S. T. Joshi’s “Lovecraft and the Titans: A Critical Legacy”

focuses on Lovecraft’s prescience as literary critic, re-examining his assess-
ment of five of the early twentieth century’s most important writers of
weird fiction, M. R. James, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur
Machen, and Walter de la Mare. Joshi closely traces Lovecraft’s shifting
critical views of these writers, focusing particularly on how his developing
conception of cosmicism affected his estimation of their respective achieve-
ments. John Glover’s “Reception Claims in Supernatural Horror in
Literature and the Course of Weird Fiction” provides a detailed analysis of
both Lovecraft’s own critical writings and those of his early champions,
many of whom were also his epistolary interlocutors and friends. Glover
concludes by examining Lovecraft’s relationship with the shifting defini-
tions of “horror” and “weird” fiction over the last quarter century, open-
ing the field that will be further explored by the essays in the third and
final section.
The essays in “‘The True Weird’: (Re)defining the Weird” work with
and through SHL’s often nebulous and even contradictory conception of
the weird in a variety of ways. Returning to some of the concerns raised by
the essays in the first section, but from a very different perspective, Michael
Cisco’s “Bizarre Epistemology, Bizarre Subject: A Definition of Weird
Fiction” reads Lovecraft’s philosophy of horror in resistant and creative
ways via Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze. Cisco uses SHL and
related writings as philosophical instruments in order to work out an origi-
nal, experiential theory of the bizarre. With “Women, Sex and the
Dismorphmythic: Lovecraft, Carter, Kiernan and Beyond,” Gina Wisker
provides both a feminist critique of Lovecraft’s essay and an examination
of how a number of important contemporary women writers of weird fic-
tion have adapted and transformed elements of Lovecraft’s writings. To
this end, she examines short fiction by Angela Carter, Caitlín R. Kiernan,
and a number of contemporary writers whose work is featured in Silvia
Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles’s groundbreaking anthology She Walks
in Shadows (2015, released in the US as Cthulhu’s Daughters.)
Brian R. Hauser turns to Lovecraft’s influence and critical relevance for
film studies with “Weird Cinema and the Aesthetics of Dread.” Hauser
explores the applicability of the adjective “Lovecraftian” to a number of
contemporary films, while examining the reflections these films offer of
Lovecraft’s aesthetic and critical principles, by drawing on contemporary
studies including Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie (2016.) Finally,
Brian Johnson’s chapter, “Paranoia, Panic, and the Queer Weird,” brings
this volume full circle with a return to the psychology of horror via a his-
toricized account of Lovecraft’s Freudian intertexts, which become part of
a wide-ranging examination of the relationship between the shifting
connotations of the words “queer” and “weird” through the twentieth
century. Johnson’s penetrating analysis of the ways homophobia shaped
Lovecraft’s cultural context provides a deeper understanding not just of
his writings, but also his troubling exemplarity in twentieth-century sexual
politics.
Notes
1. Readers interested in a more detailed account of the essay’s biographical
context and publication history should consult S.T. Joshi’s “Introduction”
to The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature (New York:
Hippocampus Press, 2000), 9–20.
2. Stephen King, Danse Macabre (New York: Berkeley Books, 1983).
3. David G. Hartwell, The Dark Descent (New York: Tor Books, 1987), 5.
4. For a cogent discussion of the significance of this conception, its roots in
Lovecraft’s reading of Poe, and its evolution in his later critical writings,
see S.T. Joshi, “Poe, Lovecraft and the Revolution in Weird Fiction,”
(paper presented at the Ninth Annual Commemoration Program of the
Poe Society, October 7, 2012), http://www.eapoe.org/papers/psblctrs/
pl20121.html
5. Hartwell, The Dark Descent, 85.
6. James Ursini and Alain Silver, More Things than Are Dreamt of: Masterpieces
of Supernatural Horror (Limelight, 1994), 61.
7. S.T. Joshi, “Preface,” The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature,
edited by S.T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2000), 7.
8. Lovecraft, Selected Letters II, 160.
11. Touponce, 59.
13. H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters Volume II (Sauk City: Arkham House,
1971), 290.
15. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, “Introduction,” The Weird (New York: Tor
Books, 2011), xv.
16. The Weird, xvi.
17. S.T. Joshi, “Preface,” The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature,
edited by S.T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2000), 7.
SECTION I
“The Oldest and Strongest Emotion”:

The Psychology of Cosmic Horror
CHAPTER 2
The Birth of Cosmic Horror

from the S(ub)lime of Lucretius
Sean Moreland
Cosmic Horror: A Terrible Sublime

…vapour chill
The ascendance gains when fear the frame pervades,
And ruthless HORROR, shivering every limb …
Lucretius1
In an exchange with scholar Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, China Miéville

locates Lovecraft within a “visionary and ecstatic tradition,” part of a
“break” in that tradition contemporaneous with the First World War.
This break is the shattering of representation that gave rise to modernist
literature, “a kind of terrible, terrible sublime.”2 This chapter contrasts
what Supernatural Horror in Literature (SHL) calls cosmic horror with
earlier uses of the term, examining the pre-modern aesthetic sources
Lovecraft synthesized with early twentieth-century anxieties in expressing
this terrible sublime. Lovecraft identified with the first-century BCE
Roman poet Lucretius,3 whose epic poem De Rerum Natura (DRN) was
crucial to his subversion of the theological and sentimental humanist
S. Moreland (*)
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada
© The Author(s) 2018 13

S. Moreland (ed.), New Directions in Supernatural Horror
Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95477-6_2
14 S. MORELAND
foundations of the Enlightenment, Romantic, and Victorian discourse on

the sublime. Lovecraft read the Roman writer through his own racialized
sexual and political anxieties in ways that continue to shape modern weird
and horror fiction and contemporary philosophical appropriations of his
writings alike.
Ghosts and Goulds: Cosmic Horror

Before Lovecraft
Can I not fling this horror off me again,
Seeing with how great ease Nature can smile,
Balmier and nobler from her bath of storm,
At random ravage?
Tennyson, “Lucretius”
As Brian Stableford notes, “the notion of ‘cosmic horror’ is closely associ-

ated with Lovecraft.”4 However, although Lovecraft’s writing, and SHL in
particular, popularized and re-defined cosmic horror, which would become
almost exclusively associated with him by the late twentieth century,
Lovecraft did not invent the phrase, already in circulation nearly a decade
before his birth, nor was he the first to conceive of the affective concept it
described. Horror writer Thomas Ligotti looks back to the writings of
French scientist and Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal for an early mod-
ern, and contrapuntal, conception. Pascal
wrote of his a sense of being ‘engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces

whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me; I am terrified.
The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread’ (Pensées,
1670). Pascal’s is not an unnatural reaction for those phobic to infinite
spaces that know nothing of them.5
The Enlightenment saw a proliferation of writings about the affective

intensity evoked by the scalar abysses of the world viewed through the
complementary lenses of the microscope and telescope. Consider this pas-
sage from The Book of Nature, a collection of lectures by British physician,
philosopher, natural theologian, and the Romantic period’s most influen-
tial translator of Lucretius, John Mason Good:
THE BIRTH OF COSMIC HORROR FROM THE S(UB)LIME OF LUCRETIUS 15
What is the aggregate opinion, or the aggregate importance of the whole

human race! We call our selves lords of the visible creation: nor ought we at
any time, with affected abjection, to degrade or despise the high gift of a
rational and immortal existence.—Yet, what is the visible creation? By whom
peopled? And where are its entrances and outgoings? Turn wherever we will,
we are equally confounded and overpowered: the little and the great alike
are beyond our comprehension. If we take the microscope, it unfolds to us
[…] living beings, probably endowed with as complex and perfect a struc-
ture as the whale or the elephant, so minute that a million millions of them
do not occupy a bulk larger than a common grain of sand. If we exchange
the microscope for the telescope, we behold man himself reduced to a com-
parative scale of almost infinitely smaller dimension, fixed to a minute planet
that is scarcely perceptible throughout the vast extent of the solar system;
while this system itself forms but an insensible point in the multitudinous
marshallings of groups of worlds upon groups of worlds, above, below, and
on every side of us, that spread through all the immensity of space.6
Published in 1826, Good’s description of cosmicism resembles Lovecraft’s

a century later, but for its emphasis on “creation,” and the concluding
sentence this word anticipates: “and in sublime, though silent harmony
declare the glory of God, and show forth his handy work.”7 Good spent
much of his intellectual life desperately attempting to reconcile Christianity
with both Lucretius’s atomic materialist vision and that emerging with
nineteenth-century scientific developments. Throughout his writings, the
word “sublime” reminds readers of the presence of a divine creator, and
the unique relationship this creator has with humanity. His tendentious
translation of Lucretius interjects the word sublime frequently in order to
reinstate the divine significance of the human figure, in effect subverting
the Roman poet’s depiction of humanity as merely one among countless
species of perishable material phenomena, emerging via a procession of
undirected collisions at the atomic level.
Good’s description is but one dramatic example of the “turn” charac-
terizing most accounts of the sublime from the early Enlightenment
through the late Victorian era. In this turn, horror, a paralyzing affect
marked by a freezing sensation, one often occasioned by the vastness and
unknowability of the universe, is melted into a sensation of awesome ele-
vation, usually by a theistic intimation of our privileged position within
that universe. It is within this discourse of affective theology that “cosmic
horror” existed prior to Lovecraft.
16 S. MORELAND
The earliest use I’ve found of the phrase itself is part of a journalistic
description of the period leading up to the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883:
“We could feel that some cosmic horror was impending long before the
catastrophe took place, and I fancy that other sensations of a like nature
are in store. We hear from one part of Asia of atmospheric phenomena
which disturb numerous and delicate people.”8 From its first recorded
appearance, nearly a half-century before Lovecraft adapted it, the term
“cosmic horror” was associated with an atmosphere, in the most literal
sense, one that “delicate” people were especially responsive to, and one
involving a disturbing intimation of threatening immensity. This usage
derives from the idea of “cosmic emotion” developed by English mathe-
matician and philosopher, William Kingdon Clifford, who in turn derived
it from English utilitarian philosopher, Henry Sidgwick.9 Clifford defines
what he means by the term in his 1877 essay, “The Cosmic Emotion”:
By a cosmic emotion—the phrase is Mr. Henry Sidgwick’s—I mean an emo-

tion which is felt in regard to the universe or sum of things, viewed as a
cosmos or order. There are two kinds of cosmic emotion—one having refer-
ence to the Macrocosm or universe surrounding and containing us, the
other relating to the Microcosm or universe of our own souls. When we try
to put together the most general conceptions that we can form about the
great aggregate of events that are always going on, to strike a sort of balance
among the feelings which these events produce in us, and to add to these the
feeling of vastness associated with an attempt to represent the whole of exis-
tence, then we experience a cosmic emotion of the first kind. It may have the
character of awe, veneration, resignation, submission; or it may be an over-
powering stimulus to action.10
Clifford points out the admirable synthesis of these two forms in a sen-
tence by Immanuel Kant, which has been “perfectly translated by Lord
Houghton”:
The two things I contemplate with ceaseless awe:

The stars of heaven, and man’s sense of law.11
Clifford’s cosmic emotion is a version of the Kantian sublime influenced

by Herbert Spencer’s progressivist evolutionary views. Clifford calls it
“the cosmic emotion,” rather than specifying what emotion it is, because
“the character of the emotion with which men contemplate the world, the
temper in which they stand in the presence of the immensities and the
eternities, must depend first of all on what they think the world is.”12 In
other words, whether the cosmic emotion is awe or terror depends on
how “the world,” reality, is understood, an understanding that changes
drastically with historical and cultural context and the development of sci-
entific knowledge: “Whatever conception, then, we can form of the exter-
nal cosmos must be regarded as only provisional and not final, as waiting
revision when we shall have pushed the bounds of our knowledge further
away in time and space.”13 Clifford’s cosmic emotion influenced William
James, whose The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) presents it as a
natural legitimation of religious belief. Ligotti notes the contrast between
James and Lovecraft in this regard: “In both his creative writings and his
letters, Lovecraft’s expression of the feelings James describes form an
exception to the philosopher-psychologist’s argument, since Lovecraft
experienced such cosmic wonder in the absence of religious belief.”14
Clifford’s ambiguous “cosmic emotion” was resolved by American lexi-
cographer, physician, and natural theologian George M. Gould into “cos-
mic horror.” Gould’s formulation was popular in medical, philosophical,
and theological literature from the mid-1890s through to about 1910,
first occurring in 1893: “I have learned that many another sensitive
despairing soul, in the face of the glib creeds and the loneliness of subjec-
tivity, has also and often felt the same clutching spasm of cosmic horror,
the very heart of life stifled and stilled with an infinite fear and sense of
lostness.”15 Gould continued to refer to cosmic horror in his later writ-
ings, associating it with a supposed pathological inability to recognize
divinity in nature. His 1904 essay “The Infinite Presence” states: “Only
for a short instant, at best, will most persons consent to look open-eyed at
any clear image of fate or of infinity,” since “the freezing of the heart that
follows, the appalling shudder at the dread contemplation of infinity,
which may be called cosmic horror, is more than can be endured. If those
stars are absolutely and positively infinite, then there is no up or down,
and they knew no beginning, will have no ending. With any such staring
gorgon of fatalism the surcharged attention is shaken.”16
However, Gould asks, “Why may not this cosmic horror be turned to
cosmic pleasure? It is at best not bravery or athletic prowess, and at worst
it is a psychic want of equilibrium, a morbid metaphysics.”17 Gould con-
cludes that those who exercise a moral intuition of the infinite experience
cosmic horror as the first stage on a journey to ecstatic elevation: “The
horror is from disuse of the innate power, and the sublimest pleasure may
be found in excursions into the infinite.”18 For Gould, cosmic horror is
18 S. MORELAND
only a base material that “man’s sense of law” sublimates by affective

alchemy into an elevated “ceaseless awe,” the inability to reach such
“sublime pleasure” he equates with “a morbid metaphysics.” This is a
medico-theological recapitulation of the Kantian sublime that Lovecraft
turns on its head.
A Morbid Metaphysics: Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror

I have encountered no evidence that Lovecraft had firsthand knowledge of
Gould’s writings, which he would have scorned. Yet Lovecraft’s concep-
tion of cosmic horror can be best understood in contrast to Gould’s.
Where Gould’s cosmic horror exemplifies what Miéville calls “the nos-
trums of a kind of late Victorian bourgeois culture,” Lovecraft’s concep-
tion becomes, also in Miéville’s words, “the most pure and vivid expression
of that moment” when such nostrums become “unsustainable.”19
While the primary inspirations of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror are works
of supernatural literature, including those by Poe, Arthur Machen,
Algernon Blackwood, and William Hope Hodgson, their work is demon-
strably shaped by Romantic and Victorian natural theology. Good’s Book
of Nature was an important source for Poe’s cosmic tales and philo-
sophical ruminations. SHL places Hodgson “perhaps second only to
Algernon Blackwood in his serious treatment of unreality,” with House
on the Borderland called “perhaps the greatest” of his works (59; see
S. T. Joshi’s chapter for an account of the evolution of Lovecraft’s cos-
micism as criterion). This novel describes an affect that as clearly echoes
Addison’s account of the sublime (described below) as it anticipates
Lovecraft’s cosmic horror:
There was no need to be afraid of the creature; the bars were strong, and
there was little danger of its being able to move them. And then, suddenly,
in spite of the knowledge that the brute could not reach to harm me, I had
a return of the horrible sensation of fear, that had assailed me on that night,
a week previously. It was the same feeling of helpless, shuddering fright.
The most direct and detailed literary source of SHL’s conception of cos-
mic horror is Blackwood’s “The Willows,” described as the “foremost” of
his fictions for the “impression of lasting poignancy” it evokes (66.) “The
Willows” details “a singular emotion” closely related to, but distinct
from, natural sublimity, in which “delight of the wild beauty” mingles

with “a curious feeling of disquietude, almost of alarm” that “lay deeper
far than the emotions of awe or wonder,” and “had to do with my realiza-
tion of our utter insignificance before this unrestrained power of the ele-
ments about me.”20 The only difference between this description and
Gould’s cosmic horror is that Blackwood’s affect involves a simultaneous
commingling of horror and awe, rather than the resolution of the former
into the latter by a sublime turn. Lovecraft consistently follows Blackwood
in presenting cosmic horror as a “sense of awe” “touched somewhere by
vague terror.”21
The simultaneous fusion of Lovecraft’s version of cosmic horror and
the sequential fission of Gould’s are reflected in their respective diction.
Where Gould is consistent in using the phrase “cosmic horror” through-
out his writings, Lovecraft’s phrasing varies widely. In SHL alone, Lovecraft
refers, seemingly interchangeably, to “cosmic panic,” “cosmic terror,”
“cosmic horror,” and “cosmic fear.”22 As Stableford notes, “Lovecraft’s
fascination with the adjective ‘cosmic’ is clearly evident” in SHL, but the
adjective is “used there in a sense that is rather different from the connota-
tions eventually acquired by ‘cosmic horror.’”23 Like Clifford’s deliber-
ately unspecified “cosmic emotion,” SHL’s recurring use of “cosmic”
modifies a variety of emotions, a vacillation more revealing than termino-
logical consistency could be. These verbal compounds serve three closely
related functions in Lovecraft’s writings, and especially in SHL.
First, they distinguish between Lovecraft’s use of “cosmic” and the tra-
ditional teleological and providential connotations cosmos carried over
from Greek philosophy. Lovecraft’s compounds move from the lofty or
mystical connotations of “cosmic” in its Stoic or neo-Platonic uses to what
he called “cosmic indifferentism.” This philosophy is grounded, as
S.T. Joshi explains, in
mechanistic materialism. The term postulates two ontological hypotheses:

1) the universe is a “mechanism” governed by fixed laws (although these
may not all be known to human beings) where all entity is inextricably con-
nected causally; there can be no such thing as chance (hence no free will but
instead an absolute determinism), since every incident is the inevitable out-
come of countless ancillary and contributory events reaching back into
infinity; 2) all entity is material, and there can be no other essence, whether
it be “soul” or “spirit” or any other non-material substance.24
20 S. MORELAND
For Lovecraft, the cosmic follows a dynamics of descent, back to the body
and its physiological states. Mathias Clasen notes that Lovecraft was
among the first theorists of horror to consistently apply “a natural basis for
the appeal of horror stories” by recognizing that “people are biologically
susceptible to superstitious fear.”25 The accuracy of this recognition is
explored in more detail by Clasen’s chapter.
Second, Lovecraft’s phrasal compounds differentiate between the emo-
tion they signify and its “mere” physiological equivalent, a distinction
more fully explored by Michael Cisco’s chapter. The latter emotions are
the provenance of the “externally similar but psychologically widely differ-
ent” literature of “mere physical fear and the mundanely gruesome,” and
this is not SHL’s domain (22). Where “fear” is a simple, instinctive response
to a perceived threat, “cosmic” suggests a component of cognitive disrup-
tion, an epistemic shock, the intrusion of “the unknown.”
Third, Lovecraft’s insistent vacillation between terror, horror, panic,
dread and fear ambiguates these emotions, unsettling the hierarchized dif-
ferentiation of terror from horror first popularized by Gothic novelist Ann
Radcliffe, building on philosopher Edmund Burke, toward the end of the
eighteenth century. Radcliffe claimed that horror paralyzed and froze the
faculties, a description echoed by Gould’s account of cosmic horror a cen-
tury later. Terror, on the other hand, stimulated the imagination, awak-
ened the senses, and involved the sublime. This aspect of Radcliffe’s
distinction anticipated Kant’s account of the sublimation of terror via the
intuition of moral reason, an account reframed by Gould’s formulation,
one that has maintained a centuries-long influence. It is, for example,
echoed by Stephen King’s Danse Macabre (1981), as Alissa Burger’s chap-
ter details. Yet the collapse of Radcliffe’s Burkean hierarchy, part of the
rhetorical work done by SHL’s lexical transitions, was a crucial part of
Lovecraft’s break from his Romantic and Victorian precursors.
“To Resuscitate the Dead Art”: Howard

Lovecraft, Re-animator!
For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime”
In the old sense. Wrong from the start—
Ezra Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly” (1920)
On first glance, Miéville’s characterization of Lovecraft’s work as “mod-

ernist” in its manifestation of a “terrible sublime” associated with the cul-
tural trauma of the First World War seems to contradict both Lovecraft’s
hostility toward modernist poetics and his apparent eschewal of “the sub-
lime,” a term rarely employed in his writings. However, Norman
R. Gayford’s “The Artist as Antaeus” and, more recently, Gerry Carlin and
Nicola Allen’s “Slime and Western Man: H. P. Lovecraft in the Time of
Modernism” demonstrate that Lovecraft’s soi-disant anti-modernism is
rather a committed argumentative dialogue with it. In Carlin and Allen’s
words, Lovecraft “often shares the central concerns of the writers from
which he ostensibly sought to distance himself.”26 Gayford emphasizes
that Lovecraft’s suspicion for modernist poetics stems from his absolute
separation of “art and scientific philosophy,” and his conviction that no
“artistic pattern can represent reality.” Since the nature of the universe,
according to Lovecraft, is an “infinite chaos where the very conception of
a value is a local and transient accident,” poetic attempts to formalize the
chaotic conditions of physical and social reality in the early twentieth cen-
tury are profoundly misguided, making modernist literary techniques such
as those that inform Eliot’s “The Waste Land” “very well meant, but quite
ironically futile.”27
The aesthetics of the Romantic sublime were dead, shattered, it could
fairly be said, by the First World War. The opening stanza of Ezra Pound’s
autobiographical poem, above, emphasizes the abdication of “the sub-
lime” shared by Lovecraft, a term SHL replaces with its procession of
cosmic compounds. While Lovecraft was deeply hostile to the modernist
poetics of Pound and Eliot, he nevertheless shared their hatred of the
parochial sentimentality of Romanticism:
The one form of literary appeal which I consider absolutely unsound,

charlatanic, & valueless—frivolous, insincere, irrelevant & meaningless—is
that mode of handling human events & values & motivations known as
romanticism. Dumas, Scott, Stevenson—my gawd!28
So, like Pound and Eliot, Lovecraft returned to the pre-Romantic past to
find a way through the rags and bones, rot and fossils of “the sublime” to
the unsettling intensity it had once signified.
SHL’s insistence on the “essential impersonality” of the artist, grounded
in its praise for Poe, is part of its rejection of Romantic sentimentality.
Eliot shares Lovecraft’s disdain for personalistic moralism, if not his high
22 S. MORELAND
estimation of Poe. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) claims

that true art is necessarily “a continual extinction of personality,”29 empha-
sizing “how completely any semi-ethical criterion of ‘sublimity’ misses the
mark.”30 This signals Eliot’s rejection of Burkean and Kantian theories of
the sublime, as well as Matthew Arnold’s view that the sublime effects of
great poetry could function as a form of, or substitute for, religious ven-
eration, a view the atheistic Lovecraft and the piously Anglo-Catholic
Eliot abhorred for different reasons.
Eliot contrasts the “structural emotion” or “dominant tone” of a liter-
ary work with the more “superficial emotions” or “floating feelings” of
the writer and readers that circulate around it. Eliot’s “depersonalization”
of poetry and emotion is close kin to Lovecraft’s cosmicization of super-
natural fiction, because, despite Eliot’s deliberate self-distancing from Poe
at this stage in his career, his conception of “structural emotion” owes as
much to Poe’s “Unity of Effect” as Lovecraft’s conception of “atmo-
sphere” does. Both writers oppose this “structural emotion” to “mere”
personal emotion, portraying it instead as profoundly transpersonal, wir-
ing the individual in to a (also in both cases racialized) culture stream.
Both use this emotion, a sublimity opposed to the sublime, to refigure
their respective literary traditions.
That Lovecraft’s cosmic horror is closely related to sublimity is not a
new observation. Stableford’s “The Cosmic Horror” admirably glosses
this relationship, charting the outgrowth of cosmic horror from the sub-
lime of Gothic and Romantic literature, while tracing the drift of Lovecraft’s
use of the term “cosmic” away from the 1927 version of SHL, and simul-
taneously away from the sublime of Gothic romance. While others have
delved into this vexed relationship in more detail, the vast and often con-
tradictory nature of the discourse on the sublime makes it difficult to do
so without subordinating sublimity to a particular philosophical account
of the sublime. Such a subordination informs Alex Houstoun’s “Lovecraft
and the Sublime: A Reinterpretation” and in a more nuanced way Vivian
Ralickas’s “Cosmic horror and the question of the sublime in Lovecraft.”31
Both Houstoun and Ralickas interrogate and reject earlier critical attempts
to reconcile cosmic horror with the Burkean or Kantian sublime.32
Ralickas’s more ambitious essay turns from Burke and Kant to psychoana-
lytic theory, elaborating cosmic horror via Kristeva’s notion of abjection to
provide a useful “roadmap for future study of Lovecraftian aesthetics.”33 It
is, however, a roadmap on which some crucial regions remain obscure.
Ralickas writes, “In its ironic subversion of sublimity, cosmic horror not
only denies the subject a safe vantage point from which to witness the spec-
tacle in question, but also converts the sublime turn into a dynamics of
descent.”34 Contrary to the Burkean or Kantian sublime, which assert “the
centrality of the human subject, the poetics particular to cosmic horror
relegates it to the sidelines by reversing the order of priority that sublimity
establishes between the subject and its objects, privileging the latter over
the former.”35 Ralickas’s account of sublimity reduces it to the conceptions
of the sublime proposed by Burke and Kant; Vrasidas Karalis’s
“Disambiguating the Sublime and the Historicity of the Concept” indicates
the problems with subordinating sublimity to a particular historical itera-
tion, and conversely those inherent in defining sublimity without reference
to a particular cultural or historical context. Karalis argues that attempts to
re-figure (or even re-name) sublimity always accompany “a dominant crisis
of representation,” in which “the sublime emerges as a category of classifi-
cation intended to name the unknowability of the emerging order.”
Sublimity, therefore, in its numerous forms and modes, is a historically
and culturally variable, highly provisional means of representing an aes-
thetic experience beyond the scope of dominant modes of representation.
This means there are “various forms of sublime according to the spatial
and temporal potentialities of each culture.”36 While the aesthetic criteria
for sublimity vary widely across historical and cultural contexts, what
unites them is that each embodies a “historically defined category of expe-
riencing and interpreting objective realities.” This occurs, Karalis claims,
“when conceptual paradigms collide with each other in periods of extreme
cultural transition and re-orientation. During such historical periods of
transition, an existing order of things and values is gradually undermined,
dislocated, and transformed by different forms of perception and diverse
patterns of ordering experience.”37
Karalis’s conception supports Miéville’s characterization of the shatter-
ing of representational modes occurring contemporaneously with the First
World War as a “terrible sublime.” It also illuminates the semantic chasm
opened by Ralickas’s painstaking distinctions between cosmic horror and
the Burkean/Kantian modes of the sublime, enabling a recognition of
Lovecraft’s cosmic horror as a particular, historically specific expression of
the “mental category” of sublimity, a radical mutation of what Victorian
writers like Gould or Arnold would have recognized as sublime. However,
Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, while a product of its own early twentieth-century
context, also draws heavily on the sublimes of earlier historical moments.
24 S. MORELAND
“We Survey a Dead Monster”: Lovecraft, Addison,

and the Lucretian Sublime
Joseph Addison not only served Lovecraft as a model prose stylist, but
also, as J. D. Worthington emphasizes, “had a broader influence” than
“mere style or manner,” deeply influencing his “views of life and the
arts.”38 The “Pleasures of the Imagination” essays, known to and beloved
by Lovecraft from an early age, contain some of Addison’s most cogent
meditations on the sublime. Addison claims the sublime “does not arise so
properly from the description of what is terrible, as from the reflection we
make on our selves at the time of reading it.”39 Even more apropos of
Lovecraft is Addison’s later statement that “the more frightful appear-
ance” fearsome and awful entities display, “the greater is the pleasure we
receive from the sense of our own safety. In short, we look upon the ter-
rors of a description, with the same curiosity and satisfaction that we sur-
vey a dead monster.”40 This description is germinal for Lovecraft: the
ancient monster, seemingly dead, whose return is described in a language
characterized by intensity and verbal excess, juxtaposed with elision and
deferral, all poetic devices associated with the sublime. Many of Addison’s
meditations on sublimity were occasioned by his interest in astronomy:
If we rise yet higher, and consider the fixt Stars as so many vast Oceans of
Flame, that are each of them attended with a different Sett of Planets, and
still discover new Firmaments and new lights, that are sunk farther in those
unfathomable Depths of Ether, so as not to be seen by the strongest of our
Telescopes, we are lost in such a labyrinth of Suns and Worlds, and are con-
founded with the Immensity and Magnificence of Nature.41
In Anne Janowitz’s words, “Eye, telescope, and imagination can just

about totalise the sweep from our solar system to the expanse of stars
outside it, but when the mind considers the immensity of the universe, it
becomes unmoored, so that ‘we are lost’ and ‘confounded,’” “a com-
mon feature of the trope” of cosmic sublimity.42 The ambivalence of
Addison’s reaction to such cosmic vistas, fusing enthusiastic elevation
with loss and confusion, is foundational not only for Burke’s A
Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful Enquiry (1757), but for Kant’s later theorizations of the sub-
lime, first in his Observations (1764) and later in the Critique of Judgment
(1790). The latter closely echoes Addison, stating that “sublimity is not
contained in anything in nature, but only in our mind, insofar as we can
become conscious of being superior to nature within us and thus also to
nature outside us.”43 While Kant grounds the theological ruminations of
Good and Gould, Lovecraft eschews them in returning to Addison, and
beyond Addison, to Lucretius.
Pseudo-Longinus’s first-century CE Peri Hypsos has long been
regarded as the primary source of sublime aesthetics in the early modern
world. Karalis explains, “Longinus paved the way for medieval art and
the Christian sublime as expressed by Gothic architecture, twelfth-cen-
tury Byzantine mosaics, and frescoes.”44 Central to the Longinian sub-
lime is a focus on sublime objects or expressions that serve as a means of
subjective elevation, an ekstasis understood as divine. As its influence
over religious iconography and theological rhetoric attests, the
Longinian sublime is, in Glenn Most’s words, “fundamentally a form of
theodicy, justifying human suffering by appeal to the superior logic of
divine wisdom.”45
The Longinian mode is especially evident in the writings of Addison’s
older contemporary, English dramatist and critic John Dennis. Dennis
sought to explain the role of sublime terror in poetry in his 1704 essay
“Grounds of Criticism in Poetry.” Echoing Longinus, Dennis claims no
passion is more “capable of giving a great spirit to poetry” than the “enthu-
siastic terror” of the sublime.46 Dennis iterates notable objects of such
terror: “gods, demons, hell, spirits and souls of men, miracles, prodigies,
enchantments, witchcraft, thunder, tempests, raging seas, inundations,
torrents, earthquakes, volcanoes, monsters, serpents, lions, tigers, fire, war,
pestilence, famine,” before concluding that “of these ideas none are so ter-
rible as those which show the wrath and vengeance of an angry god.”47
The balance between subject and object for Dennis is clear: the object
is privileged, not in itself, but because it leads the subject to a recognition
of divine omnipotence. This brief flashback into the early modern dis-
course on the sublime reveals that Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, privileging
object over subject and focusing on the latter’s inevitable extirpation by
the former, marks less an innovation than a return to older conceptions of
the sublime. It is a retrogressive mutation.
This return to the object informs Lovecraft’s twenty-first-century adop-
tion as a kind of prophet by philosophical paradigms including speculative
realism and object-oriented ontology, which variously attempt to break
26 S. MORELAND
out of the subjective double bind imposed by Kantian philosophy, with its
foreclosure of metaphysical speculation and bracketing of the Ding-an-
Sich. However, the return of the object in Lovecraft’s cosmic horror is
hardly the return of the Longinian sublime, despite Longinus’s predomi-
nance in modern discussions. Glenn Most notes the “restrictive identifica-
tion of the sublime” with Longinus, which “neglects a theoretically and
historically crucial alternative to the Longinian conception.”48 This alter-
native is the atomic sublime of DRN, a major inspiration for both ancient
and early modern accounts of sublimity.49
The Longinian and Lucretian sublime share much in common, includ-
ing probable textual sources. As David Norbrook explains,
Lucretius’s sublime has enough parallels with Longinus to suggest that both
writers were drawing on a common stock of classical writing on the sublime,
such as the interest in storm-tossed seas, earthquakes, clouds, and volcanoes.
Longinus’s sublime, like Lucretius’s, involves the imagination’s transcend-
ing the bounds of the universe, and it is stimulated by the indeterminate
reach of heights and depths.50
In contrast to Longinian theodicy, the Lucretian sublime posits, in Most’s

words, “the irrelevance of the gods and the fundamental randomness and
meaninglessness of the universe.”51 Longinus finds in spectacles of natural
immensity and power what Norbrook calls “a divine grandeur to which
our souls aspire,” so that “wonder leads to religious belief, admiration for
a divine Author who alone could account for such order.” DRN rejects
this grasping for supernatural explanation, leading nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century materialist thinkers including Marx, Tyndall, Haeckel,
Freud, Einstein, and, of course, Lovecraft, to return to it as the locus clas-
sicus of poetic atomism.
Norbrook writes, “For Lucretius, the horror inspired by the infinite
cosmos is to be strongly contrasted with fear of creating or punishing dei-
ties, animi terrores,” mere terrors of the mind, since “the supernatural
machineries and explanations” invented “to accommodate this wonder in
fact tame and diminish it.”52 Lucretius’s affective vocabulary informs the
difference between Lovecraft’s compound “cosmic horror” and Radcliffe’s
sublimated terror and abjected horror, a difference reflected in their con-
trastive approaches to literary supernaturalism.
The Cancer of Superstition: Lucretius’s Bastards

Whilst human kind
Throughout the lands lay miserably crushed
Before all eyes beneath Religion—who
Would show her head along the region skies,
Glowering on mortals with her hideous face—53
Lucretius
Enthron’d amid the wild impending rocks,
Involv’d in clouds, and brooding future woe,
The demon Superstition Nature shocks,
And waves her Sceptre o’er the world below.
Ann Radcliffe
Lucretius insists that belief in such supernatural conceits as immortal

souls and divine reward and punishment lead to oppression and misery,
personified in the dreadful specter of Religio, described in the passage
above. Opposed to this personification of animi terrores is the dynamism
of nature viewed through Epicurus’s atomistic philosophy, which carries
the mind “beyond the flaming walls of the world.” As James I. Porter
explains, “The entire thrust of the atomistic critique of nature was in a
sense Kantian (proto-Enlightenment) in spirit: its aim was to demytholo-
gize nature, to liberate mankind from blinding superstition and to render
nature susceptible of dispassionate scientific (rational) analysis.”54 In the
Critique of Judgment, Kant builds on Lucretius’s epistemological turn and
rhetorical structure alike in asserting the mind’s primacy over the chaos of
sensual experience by portraying reason, like Lucretius’s epic hero
Epicurus, standing triumphant over the seductive, destructive threat of
the unquantifiable and the excessive.
This rhetorical structure, in which an enlightened naturalism over-
throws the oppressive force of cultic belief, is also mirrored throughout
Radcliffe’s Gothic fictions. This is made explicit in her early novel A Sicilian
Romance (1790) with the embedded poem, “Superstition: An Ode.” The
poem, a verse improvisation on Lucretius’s description of Religio, was
likely inspired by Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our
Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). Burke upholds Lucretius’s
description of Religio as sublime due to its expression of obscurity;
Lucretius has not “said a single word which might in the least serve to
mark a single limb or feature of the phantom, which he intended to repre-
28 S. MORELAND
sent in all the horrors imagination can conceive.”55 Yet Burke is deeply
suspicious of Lucretius’s condemnation of Religio. In Eric Baker’s words,
the Enquiry was meant to counter “the privileging of theoretical knowl-
edge over feeling (of Locke’s Essay over Milton’s Paradise Lost).” Baker
explains that Burke “viewed Lucretius as complicitous in the rationalist
tendency to declare everything that cannot be clearly understood and
explained—such as the experience of the sublime—to be devoid of value.”56
One of Lovecraft’s “parallel natures” embraced this “rationalist ten-
dency” wholeheartedly. He echoes the description of obscure Religio sub-
tly in his tales, and more polemically in his letters and criticism, which link
superstition and religion (interchangeable terms for Lovecraft) to “heredi-
tary emotion”:
The crude human animal is ineradicably superstitious, and there is every

biological and historical reason why he should be. An irreligious barbarian is
a scientific impossibility. Rationalistic conceptions of the universe involve a
type of mental victory over hereditary emotion quite impossible to the
undeveloped and uneducated intellect.57
The relationship between cosmic horror and religious awe is another

region obscured in Ralickas’s roadmap. While identifying the problem
with uncritically conflating “the religious awe attendant on Burkean sub-
limity with Lovecraft’s anti-humanist category of cosmic horror,”58 she
contradicts his explicit alignment of cosmic horror with religious awe. (22)
Lovecraft writes that “cosmic fear” is rooted in “a psychological pattern”
“as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition
of mankind, coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many
aspects of it” (21).
Nor does Lovecraft’s understanding of cosmic horror as offering a
pleasurable, expansive awe akin to sublimity change in his later writings.
In a 1934 letter to R. H. Barlow, for example, he claims, “the seat of the
pleasure of the weird is certainly tremendously obscure. My own view is
that tales of the supernatural give one a sense of a greatly expanded
ego.” However, this sense of expansion is not linked, as it is for Radcliffe
or Kant, Good or Gould, to a moral intuition or intimation of divinity,
what Eliot called a “semi-ethical” criterion. Rather, Lovecraft under-
stands it as dependent on an apparent and momentary “conquest of the
galling limitations of time, space & natural law,” while admitting “that
may be only part of the story. It would hardly explain why the terrible is
preferred to other forms of the supernatural.”59 In his 1933 essay “Notes

on Writing Weird Fiction,” Lovecraft returns to SHL’s opening sen-
tence to explain the lure of the terrible: “These stories frequently
emphasize the element of horror because fear is our deepest and stron-
gest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of
nature-defying illusions.”60
Gould or William James would assume the atheistic Lovecraft’s “mor-
bid metaphysics” prevented his conversion of cosmic horror into cosmic
pleasure. Ralickas’s understanding of cosmic horror as abjection would
lead us to expect a jolt of jouissance and ego-dystonic disgust. Lovecraft,
however, manifestly found ego-expansive enjoyment in the cosmic horror
fictions he canonized, and sought to produce them in those he wrote.
While Ligotti’s fiction seethes in the direction of an anti-humanist abjec-
tion irreconcilable with the sublime, he also notes the difference between
this and what Lovecraft understood as cosmic horror: “For Lovecraft, cos-
mic wonder and a ‘tranquility tinged with terror,’ as the British political
theorist and aesthetician Edmund Burke referred to such experiences,
were basic to his interest in remaining alive.”61
This association of cosmic horror with religious awe is crucial to the
polemical purpose of SHL, whose “sensitive” readers are expected to sub-
limate innate “religious feeling” into the “literature of cosmic fear.” Such
readers gratify “hereditary emotion” while still attaining an eminently
Epicurean “mental victory” over it. They contrast with “the herd” for
whom religion is necessary, a 1929 letter states, as “it helps their orderly
conduct as nothing else could.”62 Thus, Lovecraft espouses a religiously
structured social conservatism very close to that articulated, a century and
a half earlier, by Burke. Alien to the revolutionary spirit of eighteenth-
century Gothicists including Radcliffe, William Godwin, and Charles
Brockden Brown, Burke’s conservatism resurges in the work of the most
influential writer and critic of supernatural fiction in the Romantic period,
Sir Walter Scott.
Scott’s introduction to an 1811 reprint of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto
develops the idea that “Romantic narrative is of two kinds—that which,
being in itself possible, may be the matter of belief at any period; and that
which, though held impossible by more enlightened ages, was yet conso-
nant with the faith of earlier times.”63 Otranto embodies the latter. Despite
its historical significance, Lovecraft is contemptuous of Otranto, which is
entirely “devoid of the true cosmic horror.” (27) Scott, on the other hand,
privileges Walpole’s approach over Radcliffe’s Enlightenment skepticism:
30 S. MORELAND
The bold assertion of the actual existence of phantoms and apparitions

seems to us to harmonize much more naturally with the manners of feudal
times, and to produce a more powerful effect upon the reader’s mind, than
any attempt to reconcile the superstitious credulity of feudal ages with the
philosophic skepticism of our own.64
Scott follows Burke in using Gothic supernaturalism to develop a reli-

gious, nationalist, and culturally conservative historical consciousness.
Stephen King once famously compared horror writers, with their profes-
sional exploitation of all-too-common fears, to a “Republican banker in a
three-piece suit,” and a straight line can be drawn from the truth of this
observation to many of the Horror Boom’s Greatest Hits, back through
Lovecraft and Scott to Burke’s Gothic political theology.
Despite this political kinship, Lovecraft’s dislike for Scott is presented
openly in his letters, and more subtly by SHL’s stinting praise. Scott “fre-
quently concerns himself with the weird,” has “great respect” for the
supernatural (a backhanded compliment much like that SHL pays to the
“Hebrew imagination,” as Sharon Packer’s contribution to this volume
explores), and his Letters on Witchcraft and Demonology are valuable com-
pendia (35). But despite Scott’s titanic stature in the early nineteenth cen-
tury, Lovecraft can bring himself to say nothing good about Scott’s fiction
or literary criticism. The Romantic-era writers Lovecraft does praise are
those whose writings display a “parallel nature” akin to his own: Mary
Shelley, whose Frankenstein “has the true touch of cosmic fear” (35),
Radcliffe, and, of course, Poe. These are the precursors to the modern
“speculative scepticism” he associates with cosmic horror. Each of them
drew directly on Lucretius in their own fictions, signaling their weirdly
materialist orientations.65
SHL particularly praises Radcliffe, underlining her anticipation of Poe.
She masters “atmospheric creation,” has a strong “sense of the unearthly”
and “visual imagination,” and is a “fresh luminary of wholly superior
order” who “set new and higher standards in the domain of macabre and
fear-inspiring atmosphere” (29). Nevertheless, Radcliffe’s Enlightenment
naturalism, or at least her lack of legerdemain in maintaining it, leads
Lovecraft to join Scott in condemning her “custom of destroying her own
phantoms at the last through laboured mechanical explanations.” He
instead praises Radcliffe’s bête noire and exemplar of a “positive horror”
incompatible with the sublime, Matthew Lewis, quipping that, while his
work is uneven, Lewis at least “never ruined his ghostly visions with a
natural explanation” (30).66
Radcliffe’s “mechanical explanations” underscored a crucial problem
for Lovecraft’s ideal of cosmic horror, which increasingly demanded both
rigorous naturalism and the disruptions of time, space, and natural law
necessary for the expansive affect he sought to evoke. That Lucretius was
important to Lovecraft’s passage beyond this aporia is suggested as early as
a 1920 letter to Alfred Galpin:
As to any especial “creed of speculative scepticism”, as Gahal-Bah describes

his present need, I would advise Epicureanism as a base. That old geezer had
the right idea, and drew from the right sources, largely my old friend
Democritus. Read Lucretius’ “De Rerum Natura” for the best possible
exposition of this unsurpassed philosophy.67
That his return to these writers while preparing SHL led Lovecraft back
to Lucretius, even if unconsciously, is suggested by the dream he experi-
enced a couple of months after completing revisions to the typescript of
the essay.68 In the version described in a letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer,
Lovecraft writes that he was
in my own library, and there lay on the table the copy of Lucretius De Rerum
Natura that I had been reading, rolled about three-quarters toward the end
to the astronomical part in Book V which I had reached when Cnaeus
Balbutius had been announced. I can still see the line where I left off –
LUNAQUE.SIVE.NOTHO.FERTUR.LOCA.LUMINE.LUSTRANS69
William Ellery Leonard translates the passage in question as:
And whether the journeying moon illuminate

The regions round with bastard beams, or throw
From off her proper body her own light,
Whichever it be, she journeys with a form
Not larger than the form doth seem to be
Which we with eyes of ours perceive.70
Here, Lucretius’s Epicurean physics are at their most incompatible with

modern science due to naïve empiricism. While Lucretius remains agnostic
about whether the moon reflects the sun’s light or emits her own, he con-
32 S. MORELAND
fidently declares that the moon must be roughly the size it appears to our
eyes; if it appeared smaller because it was at a great distance from us, it
would necessarily also appear to be distorted or hazy. Lucretius’s descrip-
tion of the moon’s “bastard light,” an ancient example of speculative skep-
ticism, offered Lovecraft a visual intimation of the supplemental
non-supernatural mode he would later conceive.
Lovecraft understands cosmic horror, related to the affective state of
religious sublimity, as a “rich emotional experience” and an “ineradicable”
component of human psychology. But it is a state that inspires grasping
speculations that have no place in scientific philosophy, one that thereby
feeds the “cancer” of superstition and religious belief. In a 1929 letter,
Lovecraft claims, “I feel a great cleavage betwixt emotion and perceptive
analysis, and never try to mix the two. Emotionally I stand breathless at
the awe and loveliness and mystery of space with its ordered suns and
worlds.” However, he goes on, “when I start thinking I throw off emo-
tion as excess baggage.”71 Unlike Clifford and James, Lovecraft abjects
cosmic emotion from philosophical and scientific inquiry. Colliding and
combining with cognitive disruption, cosmic emotion becomes atmo-
sphere, the structural emotion that defines weird literature. Atmosphere is
a kind of “bastard light” produced by rationality’s entanglement with
“hereditary emotion.” It makes possible what Lovecraft describes in a
1930 letter as “my big kick,” which
comes from taking reality just as it is—accepting all the limitations of the
most orthodox science—and then permitting my symbolising faculty to
build outward from the existing facts; rearing a structure of indefinite prom-
ise and possibility whose topless towers are in no cosmos or dimension pen-
etrable by the contradicting-power of the tyrannous and inexorable intellect.
But the whole secret of the kick is that I know damn well it isn’t so.72
The phrasing of this formulation displays its ancestry, echoing as it does

Poe’s poem “The City in the Sea,” which in turn echoes a passage from
DRN V, also the inspiration for Lovecraft’s earlier Roman dream. The writ-
ers on whom SHL’s bastard light shines brightest are those who come closest
to this kick. Not those, like Walpole or Scott, who “respect” the supernatu-
ral, but those who sublimate the affective intensity that gives rise to it, com-
bining it with “speculative scepticism” to create “serious” atmosphere.73
Magna Mat(t)er: Lucretius’s Dismorphmythic

Materials
Both the 1920 letter to Galpin and the 1929 letter to Harris also reveal
how interwoven Lovecraft’s philosophical aesthetics, including his admi-
ration for Lucretius, are with his racializing beliefs. Immediately after rec-
ommending DRN ’ s exposition of Epicurean philosophy to Galpin as the
best base for “speculative scepticism,” Lovecraft states, “There are many
reasons why moderns can never surpass Epicurus, among them racial infe-
riority. We are certainly as far below the Greeks as, for example, the
Mongolians are below us.”74 Byron Nakamura explains how Lovecraft’s
racialized cultural anxieties infiltrate his Lucretius-inspired Roman dream
of 1927: “Onto the Roman landscape he projected not unknown or
unnameable terrors but terrors very real to the author: the terrors of
change in the form of foreign immigrants, eastern invaders, and the per-
ceived decline of the west.”75 These “very real terrors” drove Lovecraft’s
powerful sense of identification with both the early eighteenth-century
English and the first-century Roman writer whose literary fragments he
shored against the maelstrom of the modern. Modernity for Lovecraft
meant cosmopolitical horror, marked by immigration and mechanization,
and the atmosphere of cosmic horror was both an assault on and a refuge
from such threats.
In his nostalgia for the Augustan, Lovecraft ironically brought himself
closer to the cultural politics of the early Gothic sublime than to its more
cosmic descendants. According to Karalis, the fascination with the sublime
intensified as “the ‘universalism’ of the European Enlightenment had to
face the growing differences between European societies” and “the chal-
lenge from the ‘savages’ in the ‘new’ countries.”76 Karalis points to Kant’s
pre-Critical Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764,
notably the same year that Walpole published The Castle of Otranto) to
exemplify this tension. Observations claims that “savages have little feeling
for the beautiful in moral understanding,” and that the “remaining natives
of this part of the world show few traces of a mental character disposed to
the finer feelings, and an extraordinary apathy constitutes the mark of this
type of race.”77 Karalis argues that Kant’s later Critiques “transcended his
own youthful arrogance,” introducing “the destabilizing factor of the sub-
lime as a mental category to indicate those elements of feeling, structure,
and representation that couldn’t be accommodated to the dominant hori-
zons for the production of meaning.”78 In short, Karalis interprets the
34 S. MORELAND
Kantian Critical sublime as a means of displacing the presumption of cul-

tural superiority inherent in universalizing aesthetic judgments.
Lovecraft’s return to a particularly eighteenth-century brand of racial-
izing aesthetic theory is evident in SHL, whose literary and affective hier-
archies in turn suggest a hierarchy of readers and culture streams.79 As
Silvia Moreno-Garcia writes of SHL’s opening sentence,
The unknown, for Lovecraft, is not limited to an external “cosmic” horror;”

“The “unknown” for Lovecraft is often an “inner” horror rooted in biology
and the site of the “unknown” ceases to be an abstract space and becomes
the human body, including the white male body, a body which is always in
danger or under siege. Lovecraft’s men are engaged in a biological battle.80
Cosmic horror, as Lovecraft conceived of it, is caught up in this per-

ceived “biological battle,” in which, in Gina Wisker’s words, a major
source of “fear and distaste is the women, the source of whatever is being
bred.”81 Wisker’s contribution to this volume expands upon what she calls
Lovecraft’s dismorphmythia, his identification of women with a merely
material, and most often monstrous, body. Going back to, and beyond,
the Homeric epic, the dismorphmythic has an ancient tradition, including
DRN. Lucretius’s gendered poetics reinforce traditional associations of
femininity with both vital, mutable, but insentient materiality (personified,
eroticized Nature) and irrational, but hereditary, superstition (the goddess
Religio). It is precisely here, in the formless fecundity of the Magna Mater,
that Lovecraft’s few fictional women and many fictional monsters
converge.
Conversely, Lucretius celebrates an Epicurean masculinity of spectato-
rial rationality, a crucial precursor both for the Regency Dandy and for the
fin-de-siècle flâneur that fascinated Lovecraft, as illuminated by Vivian
Ralickas’s chapter. Like Lovecraft’s other Lucretian materials, however,
these gendered poetics were mutated through First World War-era dis-
courses of nationalism, eugenics, and racial degeneration, before becom-
ing part of the “terrible sublime” of cosmic horror.82
The Consolation of (Cosmic) Philosophy

Could the Epicurean will hostile to pessimism be merely the prudence of a
suffering man? And even scientific enquiry itself, our science—indeed, what
does all scientific enquiry in general mean considered as a symptom of life?
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music
Ralickas asks whether cosmic horror can be reconciled with “the sub-
lime turn.”83 Examining a number of Lovecraft’s fictions in detail, and
focusing on the fates of his characters rather than the affective responses
they generated for their author, and continue to generate for many read-
ers, she concludes that it cannot.
Many earlier readers implicitly asked the same question of Lucretius,
and came to the same conclusion. While Virgil, Ovid, and Horace found
sublimity in Lucretius, the sublime’s early modern association with
Longinus and monotheistic religion meant that modern readers often did
not, despite the attempts of interpreters like Good to recuperate Lucretius
for a Christianized Longinian sublime.
Like most of Lovecraft’s horror tales, DRN terminates with scenes of
abject horror, disease, irrational frenzy, and death. Despite its widespread
influence throughout the early modern, Enlightenment, and Romantic
periods, and its demonstrable influence on Addison, Burke and Kant’s
theories of the sublime, DRN was thought to lack “true” sublimity due to
its depiction of a radically material and entropic universe. Thus Milton
depicted Satan’s fall in terms of the Lucretian clinamen, building Hell
from his dark materials, a descent echoed by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s esti-
mation that Lucretius had “limed the wings of his swift spirit in the dregs
of the sensible world,” making his poetic trajectory a dynamics of descent.
Nevertheless, there is a sublime turn in Lucretius; it just does not cor-
respond to the crypto-apotheosis expected of its religious Longinian
counterpart. Because it does not lead to a felt “infinite presence,” it would
not be recognized as such by George M. Gould or Matthew Arnold.
Instead, the Lucretian sublime is, precisely, entropic. It responds to the
metamorphic dynamism of nature with commingled wonder and horror.
Transformations including death and disintegration are natural, inevitable,
and necessary, and should be met with ataraxia, rather than attempts to
escape death and posthumous punishment by appeasing the animi terrores
of Religio. DRN’s poetics of descent are, ultimately, meant to reinforce
this Epicurean ethos by preparing readers for their own inevitable
dissolution.
Apart from using Lucretian materials to develop his supplemental cos-
mic aesthetics, re-orient the history of literary supernaturalism, shore up
theories of racial degeneration, and reinforce assumptions of gendered
alterity, Lovecraft aspired to an Epicurean ethos throughout his life. This
is hauntingly expressed by a letter written to Nils Frome in 1937, during
Lovecraft’s slow death from intestinal cancer:
36 S. MORELAND
the notion of anything “immortal” about man or any biological organism—

that is, the notion of any qualities not dependent upon the cells of the mate-
rial body—is in the light of today’s knowledge wholly untenable … Who
really wants to be cosmically important? … Instead of fretting about being
insignificant, it’s up to us to enjoy the faculties we have—exercising our
intellectual curiosity in study, and our aesthetic sense in imaginative and
artistic creation … We are only a momentary accident—but even so, we
typify far subtler and more delicate energy-transformation processes than
any other objects within our field of view.84
This invocation of Lucretian entropy is tinged by the “religious feeling”

that for Lovecraft was inseparable from that incongruous, unsettling “cos-
mic emotion,” so much more than “mere” horror. Matthew Beach argues,
In his correspondence, Lovecraft often spoke of cosmic time to those strug-

gling with the very human problems of distress, illness, and loss. It seems
odd at first that Lovecraft would reference the very cosmic time he believes
renders human suffering “insignificant” in these moments, but it is clear
from his letters that he understands his cosmic philosophy as offering real
consolation.85
Despite his divorce from the naïve empiricism and indeterminacy of the
Epicurean picture of the universe, Lovecraft remained enrapt with the
Lucretian entropic sublime, with its wonder at the “delicate energy-
transformation processes” we tend to experience as fixed entities and
objects. This informs his attraction for contemporary philosophers from
Gilles Deleuze through Graham Harman and Patricia MacCormack; in
MacCormack’s words, Lovecraft’s cosmic horror “resonates with para-
digm shifts in philosophies of ecological ethics and what could be described
as a physics of radical alterity.”86 It is also central to Lovecraft’s importance
for contemporary writers including Caitlín R. Kiernan. Asked how her
study of paleontology and writing of fiction intersect, Kiernan’s reply reso-
nates with Lovecraft’s Lucretian sublimity:
I need a world filled with wonder, with awe, with awful things. I couldn’t exist
in a world devoid of marvels, even if the marvels are terrible marvels. Even if
they frighten me to consider them. What would be the point of a world like
that, a humdrum world of known quantities and everyday expectations? A lot
of people don’t grasp the importance of uncertainty to the scientific enter-
prise. A fact is only a momentary model of some aspect of the universe, backed
by explanatory theory, waiting to be revised upon further study.87
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A common fish (A. cuchia) in Bengal, remarkable for its singular
respiratory apparatus. It has only three branchial arches, with
rudimentary branchial laminæ, and with very narrow slits between
the arches. To supplement this insufficient respiratory apparatus, a
lung-like sac is developed on each side of the body behind the head,
opening between the hyoid and first branchial arch. The interior of
the sac is abundantly provided with blood-vessels, the arterial
coming from the branchial arteries, whilst those issuing from it unite
to form the aorta. A. cuchia approaches the Eels in having the
humeral arch not attached to the skull.
Monopterus.—Vent in the posterior half of the body, which is
naked. Three branchial arches with rudimentary gills, but without
breathing sac.
One species (M. javanicus), which is extremely common in the
East Indian Archipelago and in the eastern parts of the Continent.
Upwards of three feet long.
Symbranchus.—Vent in the posterior half of the body, which is
naked. Four branchial arches with well developed gills.
Three species, of which one (S. marmoratus) is extremely
common in tropical America, and the other (S. bengalensis) not less
so in the East Indies.
Chilobranchus.—Vent in the anterior half of the length of the
body, which is naked. Vertical fins reduced to a simple cutaneous fold,
without rays.
A small fish (Ch. dorsalis) from North Western Australia and
Tasmania.
Thirty-First Family—Murænidæ.
Body elongate, cylindrical or “band-shaped, naked or with
rudimentary scales. Vent situated at a great distance from the head.
Ventral fins none. Vertical fins, if present, confluent, or separated by
the projecting tip of the tail. Sides of the upper jaw formed by the
tooth-bearing maxillaries, the fore part by the intermaxillary, which is
more or less coalescent with the vomer and ethmoid. Humeral arch
not attached to the skull. Stomach with a blind sac; no pyloric
appendages. Organs of reproduction without efferent ducts.
The “Eels” are spread over almost all fresh waters and seas of
the temperate and tropical zones; some descend to the greatest
depths of the oceans. The young of some have a limited pelagic
existence. (Leptocephali, see p. 179.) At Monte Bolca fossil remains
are very numerous, belonging to recent genera, Anguilla,
Sphagebranchus, and Ophichthys; even larval Leptocephales have
been preserved. Anguilla has been found also in the chalk of Aix and
Oeningen.
In the majority of the species the branchial openings in the
pharynx are wide slits (Murænidæ platyschistæ); in others, the true
Murænæ, (Murænidæ engyschistæ) they are narrow.
Nemichthys.—Exceedingly elongate, band-shaped; tail tapering
into a point. Vent approximate to the pectorals, but the abdominal
cavity extending far behind the vent. Jaws produced into a long
slender bill, the upper part being formed by the vomer and
intermaxillaries. The inner surface of the bill covered with small tooth-
like asperities. Eye large. The nostrils of each side are close together,
in a hollow before the eye. Gill-openings wide, nearly confluent.
Pectoral and vertical fins well developed.
This very singular type is a deep-sea form, occurring at depths of
from 500 to 2500 fathoms. The two species known have hitherto
been found in the Atlantic only.
Cyema.—This genus combines the form of the snout of
Nemichthys, with the soft and shorter body of a Leptocephalus; but
the gill-openings are very narrow and close together on the abdominal
surface. Vent in about the middle of the length of the body; vertical fins
well developed, confined to, and surrounding, the tail. Pectoral fins
well developed. Eye very small.
Known from two specimens only, 4½ inches long, dredged in
depths of 1500 and 1800 fathoms in the Pacific and Antarctic
Oceans.
Saccopharynx.—Deep-sea Congers, with the muscular system
very feebly developed, with the bones very thin, soft, and wanting in
inorganic matter. Head and gape enormous. Snout very short,
pointed, flexible, like an appendage overlapping the gape. Maxillary
and mandibulary bones very thin, slender, arched, armed with one or
two series of long, slender, curved, widely set teeth, their points being
directed inwards; palate toothless. Gill-openings wide, at some
distance from the head, at the lower part of the sides; gills very
narrow, free, and exposed. Trunk of moderate length. Stomach
distensible in an extraordinary degree. Vent at the end of the trunk.
Tail band-like, exceedingly long, tapering in a very fine filament.
Pectoral small, present. Dorsal and anal fins rudimentary.
This is another extraordinary form of Deep-sea Eels; the
muscular system, except on the head, is very feebly developed; the
bones are as thin, soft, and wanting in inorganic matter, as in the
Trachypteridæ. This fish is known from three specimens only, which
have been found floating on the surface of the North Atlantic, with
their stomachs much distended, having swallowed some other fish,
the weight of which many times exceeded that of their destroyer. It
attains to the length of several feet.
Synaphobranchus.—Gill-openings ventral, united into a
longitudinal slit between the pectoral fins, separate internally. Pectoral
and vertical fins well developed. Nostrils lateral, the anterior
subtubular, the posterior round, before the lower half of the eye. Cleft
of the mouth very wide; teeth small; body scaly. Stomach very
distensible.
Deep-sea Congers, with well-developed muscular system,
spread over all oceans, and occurring in depths of from 345 to 2000
fathoms. Four species are known. Probably attaining to the same
length as the Conger.
Anguilla.—Small scales imbedded in the skin. Upper jaw not
projecting beyond the lower. Teeth small, forming bands. Gill-openings
narrow, at the base of the pectoral fins. The dorsal fin commences at
a considerable distance from the occiput.
Some twenty-five species of “Eels” are known from the
freshwaters and coasts of the temperate and tropical zones; none
have been found in South America or the west coast of North
America and West Africa. The following are the most noteworthy:—
The common European species (A. anguilla) is spread over Europe
to 64° 30´ lat. N., and all round the Mediterranean area, but is not
found either in the Danube or in the Black and Caspian Seas; it
extends across the Atlantic to North America. The form of the snout
varies much, and some naturalists have believed that specimens
with a broad and obtuse snout were specifically distinct from those
with pointed snout. However, every degree of breadth of the snout
may be observed; and a much safer way of recognizing this species,
and distinguishing it from other European Eels, is the forward
position of the dorsal fin; the distance between the commencement
of the dorsal and anal fins being as long as, or somewhat longer
than, the head. Eels grow generally to a length of about three feet,
but the capture of much larger examples is on record. Their mode of
propagation is still unknown. So much only is certain that they do not
spawn in fresh water, that many full-grown individuals, but not all,
descend rivers during the winter months, and that some of them at
least must spawn in brackish water or in deep water in the sea; for in
the course of the summer young individuals from three to five inches
long ascend rivers in incredible numbers, overcoming all obstacles,
ascending vertical walls or floodgates, entering every larger and
smaller tributary, and making their way even over terra firma to
waters shut off from all communication with rivers. Such
immigrations have been long known by the name of “Eel-fairs.” The
majority of the Eels which migrate to the sea appear to return to
fresh water, but not in a body, but irregularly, and throughout the
warmer part of the year. No naturalist has ever observed these
fishes in the act of spawning, or found mature ova; and the organs of
reproduction of individuals caught in fresh water are so little
developed and so much alike, that the female organ can be
distinguished from the male only with the aid of a microscope.
The second species found in Great Britain, on the coasts of
Europe generally, in China, New Zealand, and the West Indies, is (A.
latirostris) the “Grig” or “Glut,” which prefers the neighbourhood of
the sea to distant inland-waters, and in which the dorsal fin begins
farther backwards, the distance between the commencement of the
dorsal and anal fins being shorter than the head; its snout seems to
be always broad. On the American side of the Atlantic other species,
beside A. anguilla are found in abundance: A. bostoniensis, A.
texana. The largest Eels occur in lakes of the islands of the Indo-
Pacific, and they play a conspicuous part in the mythology of the
South-Sea Islanders and Maories; individuals of from eight to ten
feet in length have been seen, and referred to several species, as A.
mauritiana, fidjiensis, obscura, aneitensis, etc.
Conger.—Scaleless. Cleft of the mouth wide, extending at least to
below the middle of the eye. Maxillary and mandibulary teeth arranged
in series, one of which contains teeth of equal size, and so closely set
as to form a cutting edge. No canine teeth. Vomerine band of teeth
short. Pectoral and vertical fins well developed, the dorsal
commencing behind the root of the pectoral. Gill-openings large,
approximate to the abdomen. The posterior nostril opposite to the
upper or middle part of the orbit, the anterior in a tube. Eyes well
developed.
The “Congers” are marine Eels; the best known species (C.
conger) seems to be almost cosmopolitan, and is plentiful all round
Europe, at St. Helena, in Japan, and Tasmania. It attains to a length
of eight feet, and thrives and grows rapidly even in confinement,
which is not the case with the freshwater Eel. Three other species
are known, of which C. marginatus from the Indian Ocean, is the
most common. Leptocephalus morrisii is an abnormal larval
condition of the Conger.
Genera allied to Conger are Poeciloconger, Congromurcæna,
Uroconger, and Heteroconger.
Murænesox.—Scaleless. Snout produced. Jaws with several
series of small closely set teeth, anteriorly with canines; vomer with
several long series of teeth, the middle of which is formed by large
conical or compressed teeth. Gill-openings wide, approximate to the
abdomen. Pectoral and vertical fins well developed, the dorsal
beginning above the gill-opening. Two pairs of nostrils, the posterior
opposite to the upper part or middle of the eye.
Four species from tropical seas, M. cinereus being very common
in the Indian Ocean, and attaining to a length of six feet.
Nettastoma.—Scaleless. Snout much produced, depressed.
Jaws and vomer with bands of card-like teeth, those along the median
line of the vomer being somewhat the larger. Vertical fins well
developed; pectorals none. Gill-openings of moderate width, open.
Nostrils on the upper surface of the head, valvular; the anterior near to
the end of the snout, the posterior above the anterior angle of the eye.
This genus lives at some depth, the Japanese species (N.
parviceps) having been obtained at 345 fathoms. N. melanurum from
the Mediterranean, seems to inhabit a similar depth. Hyoprorus is its
Leptocephalid form.
Genera allied to Murcænesox are Saurenchelys, Oxyconger,
Hoplunnis, and Neoconger; in all these the nostrils have a superior
or lateral position. In other genera the nostrils perforate the upper lip,
as in Myrus, Myrophis, Paramyrus, Chilorhinus, Murænichthys, and
Ophichthys, the last genus deserving of particular mention on
account of its great range and common occurrence.
Ophichthys.—Nostrils labial; extremity of the tail free, not
surrounded by a fin.
More than eighty species are known, many of which are
abundant on the coasts of the tropical and sub-tropical zones. They
do not attain to a large size, but many must be extremely voracious
and destructive to other fishes, if we draw an inference from the
formidable dentition with which their jaws and palate is armed. Other
species have much more feeble, and some even obtuse teeth, better
adapted for seizing Crustaceans than vigorous and slippery fishes.
Some have rudimentary pectoral fins or lack them altogether. Many
are highly ornamented with bands or spots, the coloration being
apparently very constant in the several species.
Fig. 303.—Ophichthys crocodilinus,

from the Indo-Pacific.
Moringua.—Body scaleless, cylindrical, with the trunk much
longer than the tail. Pectorals none or small; vertical fins but little
developed, limited to the tail. Posterior nostrils in front of the small
eye. Cleft of the mouth narrow; teeth uniserial. Heart placed far behind
the branchiæ. Gill-openings rather narrow, inferior.
Six species from freshwaters, brackish water, and the coasts of
India to the Fiji Islands.
Muræna.—Scaleless. Teeth well developed. Gill-openings and
clefts between the branchial arches narrow. Pectoral fins none; dorsal
and anal fins well developed. Two nostrils on each side of the upper
surface of the snout; the posterior a narrow round foramen, with or
without tube; the anterior in a tube.
Fig. 304.—Head of a Muræna.
Fig. 305.—Muræna pavonina, from Southern Seas.

The Murænas are as abundantly represented in the tropical and
sub-tropical zones, and have nearly the same range, as Ophichthys.
The number of species known exceeds eighty. The majority are
armed with formidable pointed teeth, well suited for seizing other fish
on which they prey. Large specimens thus armed readily attack
persons in and out of the water; and as some species attain a length
of some six or eight feet, they are justly feared by fishermen. The
minority of species have obtuse and molar-like teeth, their food
consisting chiefly of Crustaceans and other hard-shelled animals.
Most of the Murænas are beautifully coloured and spotted, some in a
regular and constant manner, whilst in others the pattern varies in a
most irregular fashion: they have quite the appearance of snakes.
The Muræna of the Ancient Romans is Muræna helena, which is not
confined to the Mediterranean, but also found in the Indian Ocean
and on the coast of Australia. Its skin is of a rich brown, beautifully
marked with large yellowish spots, each of which contains smaller
brown spots.
Fig. 306.—Muræna picta, from the Indo-Pacific.

Gymnomuræna differs from Muræna in having the fins reduced to
a short rudiment near the end of the tail. Six species are known
growing to a length of eight feet.
Fig. 307.—Gymnomuræna vittata, from Cuba.
Myroconger and Enchelycore belong to the same sub-family as
Muræna, but the former is provided with pectoral fins, and in the
latter the posterior nostril is a long slit, and not round as in the other
genera.
FIFTH ORDER—LOPHOBRANCHII.
The gills are not laminated, but composed of small rounded lobes
attached to the branchial arches. Gill-cover reduced to a large simple
plate. Air-bladder simple, without pneumatic duct. A dermal skeleton
composed of numerous pieces arranged in segments, replaces more
or less soft integuments. Muscular system not much developed.
Snout prolonged. Mouth terminal, small, toothless, formed as in
Acanthopterygians.
Fig. 308.—Gills of Hippocampus abdominalis.
First Family—Solenostomidæ.
Gill-openings wide. Two dorsal fins, the rays of the anterior not
articulated. All the other fins well developed.
One living genus only is known, which was preceded in the
tertiary epoch by Solenorhynchus (Monte Postale).
Solenostoma.—Snout produced into a long tube. Body
compressed, with very short tail. All parts covered with thin skin,
below which there is a dermal skeleton formed by large star-like
ossifications. The soft dorsal and anal fins on elevated bases; caudal
fin long. Ventral fins inserted opposite to the anterior dorsal, close
together, seven-rayed; they are free in the male, but in the female
their inner side coalesces with the integuments of the body, a large
pouch for the reception of the eggs being formed thereby. Air-bladder
and pseudobranchiæ absent. Branchiostegals four, very thin.
Intestinal tract very simple, with a stomachic dilatation, without pyloric
appendages. Ova very small.
The dermal skeleton of this singular type is formed by star-like
ossifications, four in each horizontal and vertical series on the side of
the fore part of the trunk; each consists of four or three radiating
branches by which it joins the neighbouring bones; on the hind part
of the trunk and tail the series are diminished to two. The dorsal and
abdominal profiles in front of the fins are protected by similar bones.
The vertebral column is composed of eighteen abdominal and fifteen
caudal vertebræ, the vertebræ gradually decreasing in length
backwards, so that the shortness of the tail is caused not only by the
smaller number of vertebræ, but also by their much lesser length.
Neural and hæmal spines are developed. The pelvis consists of two
pairs of cartilaginous laminæ, the convex margin of the anterior
fitting into an angle of a dermal bone which separates the pelvis from
the well-ossified humeral arch.
The singular provision for the retention and protection of the eggs
has been described above (p. 162, figs. 73 and 74), and we have
only to repeat here that it is the female which takes care of the
progeny, and not the male as in the following family. Two or three
small species are known from the Indian Ocean; they are beautifully
marked, especially the male, which also appears to be of smaller
size in this genus than the female.
Second Family—Syngnathidæ.
Gill-openings reduced to a very small opening near the upper
posterior angle of the gill-cover. One soft dorsal fin; no ventrals, and,
sometimes, one or more of the other fins are also absent.
Small marine fishes, which are abundant on such parts of the
coasts of the tropical and temperate zones as offer by their
vegetation shelter to these defenceless creatures. They are bad
swimmers (the dorsal fin being the principal organ of locomotion),
and frequently and resistlessly carried by currents into the open
ocean or to distant coasts. All enter brackish water, some fresh
water. The strata of Monte Bolca and Licata (Sicily) have, yielded
evidence of their existence in the tertiary epochs; beside species of
Siphonostoma and Syngnathus (Pseudosyngnathus), remains of an
extinct genus, Calamostoma, allied to Hippocampus, but with a
distinct caudal fin, have been found. On their propagation see p.
163, Fig. 76.
A. Syngnathina.—The tail is not prehensile, and generally
provided with a caudal fin.—Pipe-Fishes.
Siphonostoma.—Body with distinct ridges, the upper caudal ridge
continuous with the lateral line, but not with the dorsal ridge of the
trunk. Pectoral and caudal fins well developed; dorsal fin of moderate
length, opposite to the vent. Humeral bones movable, not united into a
“breast-ring.” Males with an egg-pouch on the tail, the eggs being
covered by cutaneous folds.
Two species, of which S. typhle is common on the British, and
generally distributed on the European coasts.
Syngnathus.—Body with the ridges more or less distinct, the
dorsal ridge of the trunk not being continuous with that of the tail.
Pectoral fins well developed; caudal present. Dorsal fin opposite or
near to the vent. Humeral bones firmly united into the breast-ring.
Egg-pouch as in Siphonostoma.
The distribution of this genus nearly coincides with that of the
family, some fifty species being known. S. acus, the great Pipe-fish
(see Fig. 75, p. 163), is one of the most common European fishes,
extending across the Atlantic and southwards to the Cape of Good
Hope; it attains a length of 18 inches. Another very common species,
frequently met at sea, and spread over nearly all the tropical and
sub-tropical seas, is S. pelagicus, agreeably marked with alternate
brown and silvery cross-bars.
Doryichthys.—Body with the ridges well developed. Pectoral and
caudal fins present. Dorsal fin long or of moderate length, opposite to
the vent. Humeral bones firmly united. Males with the lower ridges of
the abdomen dilated, the dilated parts forming a broad groove for the
reception of the ova.
In these Pipe-fishes the ova are not received in a completely
closed pouch, but glued on to the surface of the abdomen. Twenty
species from tropical seas.
Nerophis.—Body smooth, rounded, with scarcely any of the
ridges distinct. Pectoral fin none, caudal absent or rudimentary, the tail
tapering into a point. Dorsal fin of moderate length, opposite to the
vent. The ova are attached to the soft integument of the abdomen of
the male, and are not covered by lateral folds of the skin.
Seven species from the European seas and the Atlantic. N.
æquoreus (Ocean Pipe-fish), N. ophidion (Straight-nosed Pipe-fish),
and N. lumbriciformis (Little Pipe-fish), are common on the British
coasts.
Protocampus.—The whole dermal skeleton is covered with skin.
A broad cutaneous fold runs along the back in front and behind the
dorsal; a similar fold along the abdomen. Pectoral fin none; caudal
very small.
The single species of this remarkable genus, P. hymenolomus,
occurs in the Falkland Islands. It may be regarded as an embryonal
form of Nerophis, the median skin-folds being evidently remains of
the fringe which surrounds the body of the embryo.
The other genera belonging to this group are, Icthyocampus,
Nannocampus, Urocampus, Leptoichthys, Coelonotus, and
Stigmatophora.
Hippocampina.—The tail is prehensile, and invariably without
caudal fin.—Sea-horses.
Gastrotokeus.—Body depressed, the lateral line running along
the margin of the abdomen. Shields smooth. Tail shorter than the
body. Pectoral fins. No pouch is developed for the ova, which are
imbedded in the soft integument of the abdomen of the male.
Gastrotokeus biaculeatus, very common in the Indian Ocean to
the coasts of Australia.
Solenognathus.—Body compressed, deeper than broad. Shields
hard, rugose, with round or oval interannular plates; and without
elongate processes. Tail shorter than the body. Pectoral fins.
Three species, from the Chinese and Australian Seas; they are
the largest of Lophobranchs, S. hardwickii, attaining to a length of
nearly two feet.
Fig. 309.—Phyllopteryx eques.
Phyllopteryx.—Body compressed, or as broad as deep. Shields
smooth, but some or all of them are provided with prominent spines or
processes on the edges of the body; some of the processes with
cutaneous filaments. A pair of spines on the upper side of the snout
and above the orbit. Tail about as long as the body. Pectoral fins. The
ova are imbedded in soft membrane on the lower side of the tail,
without a pouch being developed.
Three species from the coasts of Australia. The protective

resemblances with which many Lophobranchs are furnished, attain
to the highest degree of development in the fishes of this genus. Not
only their colour closely assimilates that of the particular kind of
seaweed which they frequent, but the appendages of their spines
seem to be merely part of the fucus to which they are attached. They
attain a length of 12 inches.
Hippocampus.—Trunk compressed, more or less elevated.
Shields with more or less prominent tubercles or spines. Occiput
compressed into a crest, terminating at its supero-posterior corner in a
prominent knob (coronet). Pectoral fins. The males carry the eggs in a
sac at the base of the tail, opening near the vent.
A singular resemblance of the head and fore part of the body to
that of a horse, has given to these fishes the name of “Sea-horses.”
They are abundant between and near the tropics, becoming scarcer
in higher latitudes. Some twenty species are known, some of which
have a wide geographical range, as they are often carried to great
distances with floating objects to which they happen to be attached.
—Acentronura is a genus closely allied to Hippocampus.
SIXTH ORDER—PLECTOGNATHI.
Teleosteous fishes with rough scales, or with ossifications of the
cutis in the form of scutes or spines; skin sometimes entirely naked.
Skeleton incompletely ossified, with the vertebræ in small number.
Gills pectinate; a narrow gill-opening in front of the pectoral fins.
Mouth narrow; the bones of the upper jaw generally firmly united. A
soft dorsal fin, belonging to the caudal portion of the vertebral
column, opposite to the anal; sometimes elements of a spinous
dorsal besides. Ventral fin none, or reduced to spines. Air-bladder
without pneumatic duct.
First Family—Sclerodermi.
Snout somewhat produced; jaws armed with distinct teeth in
small number. Skin with scutes or rough. The elements of a spinous
dorsal and ventral fins generally present.
Marine fishes of moderate or small size, very common in the
tropical zone, but scarcer in higher latitudes. They have been found
in three localities of tertiary strata, viz., at Monte Bolca, where a
species of Ostracion occurs, and in the Schists of Glaris, from which
two genera have been described, Acanthoderma and
Acanthopleurus, closely allied to Balistes and Triacanthus.
Glyptocephalus from the Isle of Sheppey has the skull of a Balistes,
but its body is covered with tubercles arranged in regular series. The
Scleroderms may be divided into three very natural groups:—
A. Triacanthina.—The skin is covered with small, rough, scale-
like scutes. A spinous dorsal fin with from four to six spines. A pair of
strong, movable ventral spines, joined to the pelvic bone.
To this group belong the genera Triacanthodes, Hollardia, and
Triacanthus, represented by five species, of which Triacanthus
brevirostris from the Indian Ocean is the most common.
B. Balistina.—Body compressed, covered with movable scutes or
rough. Spinous dorsal reduced to one, two, or three spines. Ventral
fins reduced to a single pelvic prominence, or entirely absent.
To this group belong the genera Balistes, Monacanthus, and
Anacanthus, the last genus being distinguished by a barbel at the
lower jaw.
Fig. 310.—Balistes vidua.

Balistes, or the “File-fishes” proper, inhabit the tropical and sub-
tropical seas; shoals of young are not rarely met with in mid-ocean.
Some thirty species are known, many attaining a length exceeding
two feet; but the majority are much smaller, and frequently beautifully
and symmetrically marked. Both jaws are armed with eight strong
incisor-like and obliquely truncated teeth, by which these fishes are
enabled to break off pieces of corals on which they feed, or to chisel
a hole into the hard shell of Mollusca, in order to extract the soft
parts. They destroy an immense number of Mollusks, thus becoming
most injurious to the pearl-fisheries. The first of their three dorsal
spines is very strong, roughened in front like a file, and hollowed out
behind to receive the second much smaller spine, which, besides,
has a projection in front, at its base, fitting into a notch of the first.
Thus these two spines can only be raised or depressed
simultaneously, and the first cannot be forced down, unless the
second has been previously depressed. The latter has been
compared to a trigger, hence a second name, “Trigger-fish,” has
been given to these fishes. Some species are armed with a series of
short spines or tubercles on each side of the tail. Two species (B.
maculatus and B. capriscus), common in the Atlantic, sometimes
wander to the British coasts.
The Monacanthus are similarly distributed as the Balistes, and
still more abundant, some fifty species being known. Their dentition
is very similar, but they possess one dorsal spine only, and their
rough scales are so small as to give a velvety appearance to the skin
(Figs. 17 and 18, p. 48). Adult males of some of the species possess
a peculiar armature on each side of the tail, which in females is
much less developed or entirely absent. This armature may consist
either in simple spines arranged in rows, or in the development of
the minute spines of the scales into long stiff bristles, so that the
patch on each side of the tail looks like a brush.
C. Ostraciontina.—The integuments of the body form a hard
continuous carapace, consisting of hexagonal scutes juxtaposed in
mosaic-fashion. A spinous dorsal and ventral fins are absent; but
sometimes indicated by protuberances.
The “Coffer-fishes” (Ostracion) are too well known to require a
lengthened description. Only the snout, the bases of the fins, and the
hind part of the tail are covered with soft skin, so as to admit of free
action of the muscles moving these parts. The mouth is small, the
maxillary and intermaxillary bones coalescent, each jaw being armed
with a single series of small slender teeth. The short dorsal fin is
opposite to the equally short anal. The vertebral column consists of
fourteen vertebræ only, of which the five last are extremely short, the
anterior elongate. Ribs none. The carapaces of some species are
three-ridged, of others four- and five-ridged, of some provided with
long spines. Twenty-two species from tropical and sub-tropical seas
are known.
Second Family—Gymnodontes.
Body more or less shortened. The bones of the upper and lower
jaw are confluent, forming a beak with a trenchant edge, without
teeth, with or without median suture. A soft dorsal, caudal and anal
are developed, approximate. No spinous dorsal. Pectoral fins; no
ventrals.
Marine fishes of moderate or small size from tropical and sub-
tropical seas. A few species live in fresh water. Fossil remains of
Diodon are not scarce at Monte Bolca and Licata; a distinct genus,
Enneodon, has been described from Monte Postale. The
Gymnodonts may be divided into three groups:
A. Triodontina.—Tail rather long, with a separate caudal fin.
Abdomen dilatable into a very large, compressed, pendent sac, the
lower part of which is merely a flap of skin, into which the air does not
penetrate, the sac being capable of being expanded by the very long
pelvic bone. The upper jaw divided by a median suture, the lower
simple.
A single genus and species (Triodon bursarius) from the Indian
Ocean.
B. Tetrodontina.—Tail and caudal fin distinct. Part of the
œsophagus much distensible, and capable of being filled with air. No
pelvic bone.
“Globe-fishes” have a short, thick, cylindrical body, with well
developed fins. It is covered with thick scaleless skin, in which,
however, spines are imbedded of various sizes. The spines are very
small, and but partially distributed over the body in some species,
whilst in others they are very large, and occupy equally every part of
the body. These fishes have the power of inflating their body by filling
their distensible œsophagus with air, and thus assume a more or
less globular form. The skin is, then, stretched to its utmost extent,
and the spines protrude and form a more or less formidable
defensive armour, as in a hedgehog; therefore they are frequently
called “Sea-hedgehogs.” A fish thus blown out turns over and floats
belly upwards, driving before the wind and waves. However, it is
probable that the spines are a protection not only when the fish is on
the surface and able to take in air, but also when it is under water.
Some Diodonts, at any rate, are able to erect the spines about the
head by means of cutaneous muscles; and, perhaps, all fill their
stomach with water instead of air, for the same purpose and with the
same effect. In some Diodonts the spines are fixed, erect, not
movable. The Gymnodonts generally, when taken, produce a sound,
doubtless by the expulsion of air from the œsophagus. Their
vertebral column consists of a small number of vertebræ, from 20 to
29, and their spinal chord is extremely short. All these fishes have a
bad reputation, and they are never eaten; indeed, some of them are
highly poisonous, and have caused long continued illness and death.
Singularly, the poisonous properties of these fishes vary much as
regards intensity, only certain individuals of a species, or individuals
from a certain locality, or caught at a certain time of the year, being
dangerous. Therefore it is probable that they acquire their poisonous
quality from their food, which consists in corals and hard-shelled
Mollusks and Crustaceans. Their sharp beaks, with broad
masticating posterior surface, are admirably adapted for breaking off
branchlets of coral-stocks, and for crushing hard substances.
Fig. 311.—Jaws of Tetrodon.

Fig. 312.—Tetrodon margaritatus.
Tetrodon (including Xenopterus).—Both the upper and lower
jaws are divided into two by a mesial suture.
Extremely numerous in tropical and sub-tropical zones, more
than sixty species being known. In some of the species the dermal
spines are extremely small, and may be absent altogether. Many are
highly ornamented with spots or bands. A few species live in large
rivers—thus T. psittacus from Brazil; T. fahaka, a fish well known to
travellers on the Nile, and likewise abundant in West African rivers;
T. fluviatilis from brackish water and rivers of the East Indies. The
species figured is one of the smallest, about six inches long, and
common in the Indo-Pacific.
Diodon.—Jaws without mesial suture, so that there is only one
undivided dental plate above and one below.
In these fishes, as well as in some closely allied genera, the
dermal spines are much more developed than in the Tetrodonts; in
some the spines are erectile, as in Diodon, Atopomycterus,
Trichodiodon, and Trichocyclus; in others they are stiff and
immovable, as in Chilomycterus and Dicotylichthys. Seventeen
species are known, of which Diodon hystrix is the most common as it
is the largest, growing to a length of two feet. It is spread over the
Tropical Atlantic as well as Indo-Pacific, as is also a smaller, but
almost equally common species, Diodon maculatus.

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New Directions in Supernatural Horror

Literature: The Critical Influence of H. P.

ISBN 978-3-319-95476-9 ISBN 978-3-319-95477-6 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018954728

Cover illustration: zhengzaishuru / iStock / Getty Images

1 Introduction: The Critical (After)Life of Supernatural

Section I “The Oldest and Strongest Emotion”: The

2 The Birth of Cosmic Horror from the S(ub)lime of

3 The Evolution of Horror: A Neo-­Lovecraftian Poetics 43

4 Ansky’s The Dybbuk, Freud’s Future of an Illusion,

5 Gazing Upon “The Daemons of Unplumbed Space” with

Section II “A Literature of Cosmic Fear”: Lovecraft,

6 “Lothly Thinges Thai Weren Alle”: Imagining Horror in

7 Lovecraft’s Debt to Dandyism 127

8 Lovecraft and the Titans: A Critical Legacy 155

9 Reception Claims in Supernatural Horror in Literature

Section III “The True Weird”: (Re)Defining the Weird 189

10 Bizarre Epistemology, Bizarre Subject: A Definition of

11 Speaking the Unspeakable: Women, Sex, and the

12 Weird Cinema and the Aesthetics of Dread 235

13 Paranoia, Panic, and the Queer Weird 253

Alissa Burger is Assistant Professor of English and Director of Writing

neuroscience. His monograph Why Horror Seduces (2018) investigates

Helen Marshall is a critically acclaimed author, editor, and medievalist.

Introduction: The Critical (After)Life

In 1925, writer and publisher W. Paul Cook (1881–1948) invited his

© The Author(s) 2018 1

in Lovecraft’s later career; one trajectory of this development, Lovecraft’s

Because of its insistence on atmosphere, Hartwell claims SHL is “the

The world and all its inhabitants impress me as immeasurably insignificant,

Hardly a disinterested survey, SHL is Lovecraft’s attempt to think

and subtler symmetries” as an elementary, “if not always universal” (21),

Anglo-­Saxon examples emphasize their insufficient seriousness and cosmi-

A “weird tale,” as defined by H. P. Lovecraft in his nonfiction writings and

This suggests the difficulty, or perhaps impossibility, of working with the

and Wilde. S. T. Joshi’s “Lovecraft and the Titans: A Critical Legacy”

“The Oldest and Strongest Emotion”:

The Birth of Cosmic Horror

Cosmic Horror: A Terrible Sublime

In an exchange with scholar Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, China Miéville

© The Author(s) 2018 13

foundations of the Enlightenment, Romantic, and Victorian discourse on

Ghosts and Goulds: Cosmic Horror

As Brian Stableford notes, “the notion of ‘cosmic horror’ is closely associ-

wrote of his a sense of being ‘engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces

The Enlightenment saw a proliferation of writings about the affective

What is the aggregate opinion, or the aggregate importance of the whole

Published in 1826, Good’s description of cosmicism resembles Lovecraft’s

By a cosmic emotion—the phrase is Mr. Henry Sidgwick’s—I mean an emo-

The two things I contemplate with ceaseless awe:

Clifford’s cosmic emotion is a version of the Kantian sublime influenced

only a base material that “man’s sense of law” sublimates by affective

A Morbid Metaphysics: Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror

from, natural sublimity, in which “delight of the wild beauty” mingles

mechanistic materialism. The term postulates two ontological hypotheses:

“To Resuscitate the Dead Art”: Howard

On first glance, Miéville’s characterization of Lovecraft’s work as “mod-

The one form of literary appeal which I consider absolutely unsound,

estimation of Poe. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) claims

“We Survey a Dead Monster”: Lovecraft, Addison,

In Anne Janowitz’s words, “Eye, telescope, and imagination can just

In contrast to Longinian theodicy, the Lucretian sublime posits, in Most’s

The Cancer of Superstition: Lucretius’s Bastards

1 Introduction: The Critical (After)Life of Supernatural

Section I “The Oldest and Strongest Emotion”: The

2 The Birth of Cosmic Horror from the S(ub)lime of

3 The Evolution of Horror: A Neo-Lovecraftian Poetics 43

4 Ansky’s The Dybbuk, Freud’s Future of an Illusion,

5 Gazing Upon “The Daemons of Unplumbed Space” with

Section II “A Literature of Cosmic Fear”: Lovecraft,

6 “Lothly Thinges Thai Weren Alle”: Imagining Horror in

7 Lovecraft’s Debt to Dandyism 127

8 Lovecraft and the Titans: A Critical Legacy 155

9 Reception Claims in Supernatural Horror in Literature

Section III “The True Weird”: (Re)Defining the Weird 189

10 Bizarre Epistemology, Bizarre Subject: A Definition of

11 Speaking the Unspeakable: Women, Sex, and the

12 Weird Cinema and the Aesthetics of Dread 235

13 Paranoia, Panic, and the Queer Weird 253

Anglo-Saxon examples emphasize their insufficient seriousness and cosmi-