25 KiB
"Lovecraftian fiction: horror where our protagonists are not stupid, where we are up against evils that are so unspeakably large that we just can’t do anything." - Writing Excuses
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Author: u/MugaSofer *
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URL: http://www.writingexcuses.com/2015/01/20/writing-excuses-10-3-lovecraftian-horror/
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Score: 21
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Created: 2015-07-14T15:33:25
Post:
Comments:
u/alexanderwales [+20] Time flies like an arrow (32 minutes later)
There's this interesting distinction that they make between "large" Lovecraftian fiction (which is mostly about threats against the world and grand horrors) and "small" Lovecraftian fiction (which is mostly about subtle wrongness). I wonder whether that's just a matter of the scale of the threat, but I sort of suspect that it's not. To me, it seems like they're pulling different strings, but it's hard to define exactly what the difference is.
It's like ... you look up and to the right while trying to think of a word. When you look down, there's a lemon sitting next to your hand. This is unsettling, because you don't remember the lemon being there. You don't remember bringing a lemon into the room. The lemon itself isn't a threat to you. I think that's what defines the small-scale Lovecraftian horror to me. Whereas the large-scale Lovecraftian horror is a thing that's tearing apart reality itself, an actual overwhelming threat. I think in both cases there's a characteristic of helplessness and unease, but it might be an internal/external distinction.
u/Chronophilia [+4] sci-fi ≠ futurology (7 hours later)
I've tried to explain that distinction before, and I think it helps to think of it as three types of horror rather than two.
To expand on your example, you look down and see a lemon. Okay, it's strange, but it's the sort of thing that might actually happen. Maybe you just forgot you had a lemon. It's unnerving, but you can't necessarily communicate that fact to other people. You might struggle to explain to friends why a lemon is scary. You certainly wouldn't tell the police about it or try to enlist anyone to help you protect yourself from the lemons. It's just a little bit strange, a little bit worrying. (Of course, getting that feeling across in writing is the clever part, since part of the point is that it's hard to explain.)
In the second class, you have witnessed something that can only be explained by the supernatural. No prankster, no slip of memory, could justify it completely. Sticking with the theme, this is where you see a lemon floating in mid-air with a grinning face. Now the supernatural is real, and that's scary in a different way. Now it's a potential threat, even if you don't necessarily know exactly what it is.
And in the third class, you have shoggoths coming out of the walls and cracks in the sky and generally things being immediately deadly and unstoppably powerful. No longer potential threats, these are definite and very real threats, and there's no plausible defence against them.
u/None [+14] (10 hours later)
Maybe you forgot you had a lemon.
Maybe you just keep forgetting you have lemons.
Maybe that time you went to the grocery store and there was no fruit but lemons, you just forgot about the lemons. Or maybe it was something to do with the breast cancer charity drive. That had a picture of a lemon on it.
If fact, did it even say lemon cancer? You check again.
You must have forgotten. It just says LEMON.
When you open your fridge to get a drink, it's empty.
Except for the lemon.
...
You put the gun on the table. You close your eyes, and you breathe. Possibly your last breath.
You reach forwards. You're afraid that you'll just feel a lemon. But no, it's a gun. You touch the barrel to your jaw.
You pull the trigger.
You see a lemon.
u/CMEast [+4] (2 days later)
Sorry to put this here but I read your comment on small scale Lovecraftian horror and an idea for a short story appeared, fully formed, in my head and so I immediately wrote it down.
There's probably a better place for me to put it to get feedback and I'm sure my inexperience at writing will be clear to those brave enough to read it but, well, here is the short story:
PaperclipHis eyes fix upon the seat next to mine and I remember why I try not to take the bus. As he shuffles and mutters up the aisle I hesitate for a second; thinking to leave my bag there or perhaps quickly stand and let him have the seats to himself but no, that would be uncharitable. I lift my handbag up onto my lap and tuck my skirt in, twisting in to the side to give him space while making a pretense at being fascinated with the grey, empty building outside. Mentally I give myself a gold star for kindly letting him sit next to me - and then immediately tell myself off for thinking this counts as a 'good deed'; besides, he probably won't even speak to me and my stop is only ten minutes away.
"Thank you for the seat my dear, you're not a monster are you?"
Shit.
"Not a problem" I tell the window, turning and nodding briefly, sparingly, in almost his direction before returning to my desperate concrete and smeared glass London vista. I should have put my headphones in but it'd be rude to do it now. Maybe he'll stop.
Silence, for 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30; then muttering and I try to hide the sigh of relief. He didn't ask me if I was a monster did he? I smile, nervously, at my crazy imagination and I can see my movement in the reflection; no I'm sure he didn't say that, I must have misheard - I'm always doing that. He didn't sound mad anyway, quite a nice, normal voice really.
Then his throat clears and my heart drops as he whispers:"The monsters in our minds are eating things you know."
My back stiffens and a shivver runs down my spine, my breath caught in my throat like a rabbit in the headlights of those words and if I could have breathed I'd have screamed except in that moment, before I could do anything further, he continued; quietly, like a lost little terrified child:
"They don't like me at all... but you're not a monster are you?"
I turned, slowly, to face him. How could I not at that deperate cry for help, my fear diminished by his own far greater terror. His pleading eyes staring straight into mine as if searching for something, hope and fear stretched across his face and I couldn't help but answer.
"No. I'm not a monster"
He sags and ducks his head, the tension falling away until he seems almost collapsed in to his seat. I suddenly realise that everyone is very aware of us; of him - trying not to look and yet somehow still judging with their hostile silence their averted gazes. I feel guilty, aware that I'm disturbing them and then the man looks up at me, smiling, and I forget the other passengers.
He's not as old as I initially thought him to be, especially now that I'm actually looking at him. Maybe in his fourties? Probably younger actually. He has friendly eyes - green like my husbands actually - and a nice smile. He's definitely been sleeping on the streets though as his hair and beard are in disarray and his clothes are odd and ill fitting; I'm not even sure how some of them are fitting together.
He sits up a little, straightening himself as if to look more respectable and then he looks deep into my eyes again; so quietly, oh so quietly, he whispers:
"Don't worry, I won't ask you for anything as I don't want them to get you!"
Ok, so he's well spoken too... and quite clearly mad. I wonder briefly if I should contact someone - the police or an ambulance or something; when he quietly continues:
"You've helped already, it's good to know I'm not the only one. But you have to hide it ok? Don't let the mind monsters know! You can see it in their eyes!"
Sighing to myself, I blink and look away. Feeling awkward now but wanting to help:
"Hey, my name is Julia; what's yours? Do you have a family?" I whisper back while trying to smile encouragingly.
"It doesn't matter, I'll be forgotten soon enough. Eaten up."
I wince, and he see's but continues on:
"Julia, I need to ask you a question. It's important ok?"
I nod, sighing to myself; well only five or so minutes to my stop now.
"Julia. What is a tolvidu?"
"... a what?"
"A toldvidu"
I sit there confused, trying to say the word back to myself but I'm not sure I even heard it properly.
"Sorry, did you say 'tolvidu'? Could you spell it? Like T-O-L...V? Or is that an F? What is it?"
He smiles broadly, seeming genuinely happy at my confusion which just makes me frustrated; I'm willing to help him but I'm not going to let him play games with me.
"Ok Julia, another: what is a clooful? This ones easier, it only disppeared a short time ago."
His question is clearly serious but he doesn't nearly as worried as he was for that first question.
"Disappeared a short time ago? Ok so are they animals that are going extinct?"
He smiles again and his eyes, that seemed so full of fear, are now twinkling with amusement.
"I'm glad Julia; so glad. Sorry, I'm using your name a lot but it's been a while since I've talked to someone and it's nice to use your name; sorry if I'm being awkward. Interesting guess though, I guess they are going extinct - that's a nice way to put it, thank you! Ok, just a couple more and you're done ok?"
As he talks I get more and more annoyed and when he mentions more questions I snap. Keeping my voice just barely at a whisper to not disturb the other passengers I tell him:
"Look, I was happy to talk to you or help in some way but I'm not answering your nonsense questions anymore; my stop is coming up so if you would please kindly move I would like to get off now"
The last part at almost my normal voice level, I stand; bag in hand like a shield in front of me; while awkwardly reaching for the button over his head to indicate my stop.
"I'm so sorry Julia" he whispers frantically, "but I've got to know! Do you know what a rundel is? Or a zberber?"
I start to shuffle forward and he quickly stands to get out of my way, the bus is starting to slow but I awkwardly fumble past him.
"What about a nool? Ever gone nooling?"
I turn angrily to face him:
"Would you stop talking? I have no idea what you're saying but I want to get off this bus and I don't want you following me ok? I'm sorry but I don't want to speak to you."
"That's fine; I understand. I won't disturb you anymore and I won't get off here. I just wanted to know you'd be safe."
He's still trying to whisper but the whole bus is obviously paying attention to him. I start walking down the aisle to the entrance and I can hear him following me slowly, hesitantly and, as I get to the entrance I hear:
"Wait! Hold on please! Julia wait!"
I step off the bus and turn to look as the man rushes to the entrance and then halts. I'm holding my bag up in defense - though I'm not sure what I would do if he stepped down.
He leans forward and whispers hoarsely:
"Angivur, Paperclip, Rendillop, Doilen"
Confused, I look up into his staring eyes and ask:
"Of course I know what a paper..." but the words dry up in my mouth at the look of sheer horror in his eyes.
"Don't. Ever. Say it Julia. Now run!"
He turns to the bus driver and screams before running down the aisle, shouting and gibbering nonsense but the bus driver just stares at me with black dead eyes. I turn and I run, heart pounding, chest heaving I spring until I can't go any further, collapsing down against a wall; arms and legs burning and a stitch stabbing at my stomach while I gasp and gulp for air.
I lay there for five or ten minutes; at first just calming down and recovering from the run and then feeling embarrassed at being so scared by the delusions of a mad man. I finally pick myself back up, aching all over and look around me; not too far from home as thankfully I at least ran in the right direction; maybe if I was fitter I'd have even made it all the way. Ok so two lessons learnt from this; start going to the gym again and don't listen to nutters.
(I ran out of space so I've continued the little bit that's left in the next comment)
u/CMEast [+5] (2 days later)
Ten minutes later and I'm home; limping tiredly through the door and into the living room to fall into my husbands arms.
"Honey, are you ok? What happened to you?"
I tell him the story for the next twenty minutes, sniffing back my tears of relief and shame and exhaustion. Halfway through, we went to the kitchen so he could make us some tea and now we were sitting at the kitchen table, warm mugs in our hands and my head rested on his shoulder.
"I've said before that you were too nice Julia; you're not obligated to talk to these people you know?"
"I know love I know, you're right. I just didn't want to be mean that's all. I'm not going to let it happen ever again" and I take another sip of tea, finally feeling better; if a little angry now at both myself for getting worked up and at that man.
"That's good to hear. You know you could have always pretended you had a text from me; you know you could have called - even if you end up leaving a long voicemail! It would have been better than listening to that man with his nonsense words, what a cruel trick".
"Oh but Josh, I don't think he was tricking me. Not on purpose. I think he thought they were all real words! Besides, they weren't all nonsense. He asked me what a paperclip was; strange huh?"
"... what was that Julia? A paperclip? What is that?"
I sit up and look at him as he sits there, confused.
"A paperclip? You know, for temporarily sticking bits of paper together. You use them for work and things. You've got some on your desk upstairs!"
He still looks confused and I'm angry now:
"David you know what I'm talking about right? You have them on your desk upstairs! You'd better not be winding me up after all I've been through today, it's not funny!"
"Do you mean a staple dear?"
I leap up out of my chair so quickly that it falls back against the fridge with a bang, shouting:
"Don't you fucking wind me up David, this isn't funny. A paperclip. Like a little curl of metal that..."
As I see his blank, confused expression my fury turns to fear I stop shouting; 'the desk, there's some on the desk'. I rush upstairs to the little office to find them; bursting into the room, I head straight to the desk tidy where we keep the... not there. They aren't there but I know they were. I start looking frantically through all the drawers and folders; sweeping everything off the desk in a panic I pull out the pay slips as we... no; no I KNOW we use them for that. I did it just last week but now they are all kept loose in a folder. Where can they be, I know we had them! I know what a paperclip is!
Ten minutes later, David comes up to find me sitting in a pool of papers and stationery; tears streaming down my face. I point to my phone, thrown off to the side:
"I can't even find them on google! But I know what a paperclip is. You know what one is I'm sure of it! I'm not mad"
David just looks at me with sad eyes, steps behind me and wraps his strong arms around my shoulders; holding me close and telling me everything was going to be ok.
"I'm sorry for shouting at you; you're so good to me" And I break out into fresh sobs, burying my head into his arm.
"It's ok baby, everything's fine. You're just tired and you've had a long day. Why don't you get some sleep and you'll feel better in the morning I promise, ok?"
I nod and, holding onto him for support, I stand up and let him lead me to the bedroom where he gets me undressed and puts me in bed.
"Julia honey, it's a little early still so I might stay up a little longer; is that ok with you?" he says as he kisses my forehead and walks to the door.
I go to answer him but fear clamps my throat shut, my hold body is paralysed beneath the sheets and I'm digging my nails into my hand.
"Good night dear, in the morning I'm sure you'll be a whole new Julia" he smiles that same smile I first fell in love with and then closes the door behind him.
Hiding under the covers, shaking like a leaf and with my fists pressed to my mouth to not scream; all I can think of is that split second where I looked at him and his eyes were black and dead.
u/what_deleted_said [+3] (a month later)
All she has to do is ignore the occasional dead eyes and she can be a paperclip millionaire. They're quite useful.
u/CMEast [+2] (a month later)
Hah :)
Wasn't sure if anyone read actually read this. It's very rough so I didn't mind but it's nice to know someone saw it. Thanks!
u/qznc [+10] Chaos Legion (5 hours later)
For /r/rational a more appropriate horror story would be "science is evil". The blog post Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology Is Indistinguishable From Cthulhu says this:
For starters, 'Knowledge is good'. That's pretty core to most of our belief systems. And the Cthulhu Mythos present a world where that's horribly not true - where knowledge is something that you must avoid if you wish to continue to function. Where people who learn, study and seek to understand, kill themselves or kill people close to them. Where all those idiots saying 'we should limit scientific exploration' were right.
And then there is Meditations on Moloch, which explains those "alien gods" more clearly and with less fiction.
Moloch is exactly what the history books say he is. He is the god of Carthage. He is the god of child sacrifice, the fiery furnace into which you can toss your babies in exchange for victory in war.
He always and everywhere offers the same deal: throw what you love most into the flames, and I will grant you power.
As long as the offer is open, it will be irresistable.
and
Everything the human race has worked for – all of our technology, all of our civilization, all the hopes we invested in our future – might be accidentally handed over to some kind of unfathomable blind idiot alien god that discards all of them, and consciousness itself, in order to participate in some weird fundamental-level mass-energy economy that leads to it disassembling Earth and everything on it for its component atoms.
u/None [-2] (a day later)
But there's always that fear: what if we can't? What if our brains just won't do this? What if the system we're looking at is fundementally not subject to rationality?
Reactions:
- u wot m8?
- WAAAAAAAGH!
- Just who do you think I am?
- ORETACHI WO! DARE DA TO OMOTTE YAGURU!?
u/IWantUsToMerge [+6] (9 hours later)
Lovecraftian knowledge tends to drive people insane, so there's a tension here, a rational protagonist is never harmed by learning, yet learning about how the old one's died would rend a futurist's soul asunder...
u/None [+3] (a day later)
A rational protagonist is never harmed by learning unless memetic hazards are real. If Roko's Basilisk walks around the corner, don't try to learn the color of its eyes.
Suppose that your brain is as poorly designed as we imagined AI computers to be in the early days of the original Star Trek. Feed it a logic paradox, it crashes horribly and melts. Except instead of logic paradoxes, we have eldritch lore. You don't even know you're vulnerable until you've already been damaged.
u/None [+8] (6 hours later)
I've oft thought that Lovecraft is the most native horror style to the /r/rational genre - in part because of how frequently Lovecraft-style incomprehensibility can be used to model things like human nature or big data. Also, I swear there was an EY post (in the Quantum Physics sequence, maybe) describing the difference between how we perceive walking through a park, and what's really happening as we walk through a park (all sorts of quantum stuff bubbling under the surface, that we'll never be able to directly perceive). But I can't find it anywhere. /u/EliezerYudkowsky, do you recall ever writing such a thing?
In any case, I'm glad to see this here. Cheers, OP!
u/Revisional_Sin [+5] (17 hours later)
"When you walked through a park, the immersive world that surrounded you was something that existed inside your own brain as a pattern of neurons firing. The sensation of a bright blue sky wasn't something high above you, it was something in your visual cortex, and your visual cortex was in the back of your brain. All the sensations of that bright world were really happening in that quiet cave of bone you called your skull, the place where you lived and never, ever left. If you really wanted to say hello to someone, to the actual person, you wouldn't shake their hand, you'd knock gently on their skull and say "How are you doing in there?" That was what people were, that was where they really lived. And the picture of the park that you thought you were walking through was something that was visualized inside your brain as it processed the signals sent down from your eyes and retina.
It wasn't a lie like the Buddhists thought, there wasn't something terribly mystical and unexpected behind the veil of Maya, what lay beyond the illusion of the park was just the actual park, but it was all still illusion."
u/None [+2] (a day later)
It really says something about how long I've been on here that I now consider that entire ranting paragraph to be tediously stating the obvious, and to, in fact, describe the only possible state of affairs under which you would ever get conscious, thinking human beings.
u/EliezerYudkowsky [+3] Godric Gryffindor (a day later)
I have memories, but I'm not sure where I wrote it, sorry!
u/TimeLoopedPowerGamer [+2] Utopian Smut Peddler (2 hours later)
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.
In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.
Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.
“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations.
Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.
Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology.
L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them.
u/chaosmosis [+4] and with strange aeons, even death may die (2 days later)
Old Man Henderson is the closest thing to a munchkin Lovecraft story I've ever seen.