{"id":16898,"date":"2015-10-29T14:46:40","date_gmt":"2015-10-29T18:46:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=16898"},"modified":"2015-10-29T14:46:55","modified_gmt":"2015-10-29T18:46:55","slug":"shadows-of-carcosa-talse-of-cosmic-horror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2015\/10\/29\/shadows-of-carcosa-talse-of-cosmic-horror\/","title":{"rendered":"Shadows of Carcosa: Talse of Cosmic Horror<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1891, Ambrose Bierce published “An Inhabitant of Carcosa,” a very short story about a man who wakes up one day unsure where he is. He knows that he had been sick in bed and worries that, in some state of delirium,\u00a0he wandered off to this strange, ruined\u00a0place that exudes absence and despair. What is this place? Soon he comes across an ancient\u00a0cemetery that answers his question and gives us a glimpse at the world from the perspective of the great practitioners of cosmic horror. The ancient, unseen world — billions of unseen souls who, whether in life or\u00a0death, have\u00a0discovered mysteries we cannot imagine\u00a0—\u00a0it’s all\u00a0still attached to us. Indeed,\u00a0this physical absence reminds us of our own fate, making our day-to-day toils utterly meaningless.<\/p>\n

The place, Carcosa, explored so briefly in Bierce’s original story, encapsulates a\u00a0tantalizing an idea.\u00a0Many authors explicitly hearken to Carcosa itself as they explore\u00a0the long shadows of its sinister architecture.\u00a0R.W. Chambers adopted\u00a0the locale\u00a0for some of his tales of terror,\u00a0which in turn ushered the\u00a0city into\u00a0H.P. Lovecraft’s\u00a0Cthulhu Mythos. Carcosa has shown up in dozens of works and has crossed over to other mediums, even today, as fans of True Detective<\/em> know, usually\u00a0summoning some mystical and<\/em> horrific place, a gray zone between life and death where we can explore of our primal fears and see just how little we and our worries are. NYRB Classics has put together a seasonal offering of tales in this vein, Shadows of Carcosa: Tales of Cosmic Horror by Lovecraft, Chambers, Machen, Poe, and Other Masters of the Weird<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"Shadows<\/p>\n

The collection, which is a slightly modified edition of an older NYRB Classics collection called The Colour Out of Space<\/em>, contains 12 stories that can be situated within the sphere of “cosmic horror.” If psychological horror — such as Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” or “The Cask of Amontillado,”\u00a0Hitchcock’s Psycho<\/em>, or de Palma’s Dressed to Kill<\/em> — taps into the frightening, uncontrollable, perhaps unknowable,\u00a0vast space inside the human mind, cosmic horror is inspired by the terror of the uncontrollable, unknowable, infinite space outside of our own skin, a space, they argue,\u00a0we tend to normalize (else, how could we cope?)\u00a0under\u00a0a comforting veil of stories and delusions, a veil these authors tear away, exposing not only the terrors beneath the veil but also our own preference for illusion (something that often results in these authors being called misanthropic). Naturally, cosmic horror often leads to psychological horror: not everyone\u00a0who sees the world under those veils\u00a0keeps\u00a0her\u00a0sanity.<\/p>\n

This mode of\u00a0exploration of\u00a0humanity’s place in this\u00a0universe\u00a0through horror fiction didn’t start with Bierce, of course. Indeed, even this collection begins earlier with Edgar Allan Poe’s “MS. Found in a Bottle,” first published in 1833. This story is\u00a0an early iteration of\u00a0a survivor — though not, one thinks, a fortunate one —\u00a0who finds himself in\u00a0a world that isn’t quite the\u00a0same physical world he thought he inhabited. From Poe, we move to Bram Stoker and his gory 1914 story “The Squaw,” which takes place in a medieval castle,\u00a0with a torture chamber, that a young couple is visiting for their honeymoon (for me, this is the least fitting story in the collection).\u00a0Bierce then takes over the collection for three stories, including “An Inhabitant of Carcosa,” before\u00a0we get\u00a0to some of the authors most famously associated with this type of horror.<\/p>\n

R.W. Chambers’ “The Repairer of Reputations” was originally published in his 1895 collection The King in Yellow<\/em>, a book that references “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” in various ways. This is a phenomenal story, the best, by my estimation, up to this point in the collection. It tells the story of a young man living in New York in 1920, a quarter of a century into the future if you were to have read the story upon its original publication, though our narrator, who feels he was wrongly placed into an insane asylum before the story begins, is far from reliable. In “The Repairer of Reputations,” our narrator feels that he is the second heir in line\u00a0to inherit the\u00a0Imperial Dynasty of America,” the remnant of a lost kingdom from Hyades stars. His cousin, Louis, is first in line and must be forced to abdicate. Again, this is a story that shows just how closely related cosmic horror and psychological horror are.<\/p>\n

The collection keeps getting better.<\/p>\n

In M.P. Shiel’s 1911\u00a0masterpiece, “The House of Sounds,”\u00a0the narrator visits a home situated on the outer limits (or, rather, a home on an island off of northern Norway), where the sounds of the battering waves force all communication to happen in writing. Algernon Blackwood’s 1907 story, “The Willows,” suggests dread and malevolence in\u00a0otherwise seemingly innocuous surroundings, like the willows\u00a0(and was apparently one of Lovecraft’s favorites). Walter de la Mare’s “Seaton’s Aunt” is the melancholy story of two boys who\u00a0come together for one strange meeting\u00a0that somehow keeps them acquainted\u00a0over the years as they get closer to their doom.<\/p>\n

My three favorites in the collection, though, are from acknowledged masters.<\/p>\n

From Arthur Machen we get “The White People,” first published in 1904. This terrifying tale, a favorite as it brings\u00a0out our inner antiquarian,\u00a0touches on one of the most chilling elements of any kind of horror: a child’s innocence in the face of evil. Henry James’s “The Jolly Corner” is also included; while not the masterpiece that “The Turn of the Screw” is, it is still a masterpiece with riches in ambiguity, in which a man becomes haunted by his own ghost. The collection comes to an end with H.P. Loveraft’s 1927 story “The Colour Out of Space,” where we can walk with a\u00a0Lovecraftian outsider\u00a0again as he\u00a0seeks to uncover the answer to a question he cannot even\u00a0articulate within\u00a0borders of a mysterious town.<\/p>\n

This collection was released earlier this month, and I’ve been sifting through it little by little as we approach Halloween. I’d read some of the stories before, and they were a delight to revisit, and I was just as delighted by the stories I came across for the first time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Trevor looks at the contents of a seasonal offering from NYRB Classics, Shadows of Carcosa: Tales of Cosmic Horror by Lovecraft, Chambers, Machen, Poe, and Other Masters of the Weird<\/em>. Read the full post<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16641,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[800],"tags":[],"coauthors":[505],"class_list":["post-16898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/Shadows-of-Carcosa.png?fit=600%2C960&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-4oy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16898"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16901,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16898\/revisions\/16901"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16898"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=16898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}