An excellent article from one of my favorite authors dealing with one of my favorite subjects. I’m posting the whole thing here, but be sure and check out Charles Stross’s blog soon!
Existential horror: it’s not just for breakfast.
H. P. Lovecraft didn’t invent horror, but he pretty much pioneered the first open-source horror mythos; a universe mind-bogglingly ancient and vast (he had Edwin Hubble’s cosmology to work with, not Bishop Usher’s), populated by mind-numbingly alien beings, around whose feet we are as dust. And in this eschatology Lovecraft found room for a particularly chilling apocalyptic resonance; for one day, when the stars are right, that which is not dead but sleeping will awaken and return to earth, there to impose its unspeakable and nightmarish will upon those of us who survive. Or something like that.
Sort of like this.
It occurs to me that the return of the Old Ones in the Lovecraftian mythos shares quite a lot of things with the other hoary staples of western mythology; of Armageddon and Apocalypse, of the fear of total nuclear annihilation that those of my generation grew up with, even — to pull a science-fictional twist — of the singularity (which isn’t known as the rapture of the nerds for nothing).
There are some subtle differences, of course. As with the singularity, what comes after the stars come right is inconceivable by default: we are no longer the dominant species in the intellectual food chain, able to map out and name the universe around us — we are, in fact, as dust beneath their feet. In contrast, the end times of Christian eschatology are fairly extensively described (idyllic heavenly whatever for the godly, eternal boiling sulphur for the rest of us). Thermonuclear armageddon tends towards the justified-punishment-of-the-sinners in fiction; what comes after is described in gruesome detail (for example in Threads or A Canticle for Liebowitz).
But is it good horror?
My take on horror is that it is a branch of literature that reflects the human condition distorted almost out of recognition. It’s there to tell us something about ourselves — frequently something unpleasant (although there is scope for redemptive messages if the author is so inclined.)
You can apply horror to just about any other fictional form by spray-painting it with a thin wash of atomized blood. Weirdly enough, in this respect horror works just like humour; you can write humorous fantasy (a hat tip to Sir Terry here), or humorous romance, or humorous hard-boiled detective stories. So why not layer the two tints? Spray horror atop humour, or vice versa, to add a sick laugh at the apocalypse in order to bring it back to earth in the fertile soil of human concerns. It worked for Stanley Kubrick in Dr. Strangelove, one of my favourite movies; it’s also the material I was working with in “The Atrocity Archives” and “The Jennifer Morgue”.
The former of those novels started out with a dry run in 1998, a short story titled A Colder War. There’s nothing terribly funny about “A Colder War”: I was groping in the dark for a way to express the alienating horror of nuclear annihilation that I’d grown up with, and Lovecraft’s monsters came perfectly to hand. The existential dread they evoke is not so alien to those of us who lived through the original Cold War. But I couldn’t write a whole novel in that key — there’s no redemptive message in a holocaust without survivors. Hence the leavening of dark humour in “The Atrocity Archives”, and the somewhat lighter tone of “The Jennifer Morgue”.
For some reason I don’t want to examine too deeply, I’m rather attached to those two novels — to the extent of having written a third, and having vague plans for at least two more. But schoolboy humour isn’t enough to sustain or motivate a series work, so I’ve been floundering around looking for thematic lessons to bolt atop the structure of the Laundry series. And it occurs to me that the Lovecraftian apocalyptic singularity is underexplored. In a nutshell, it poses this question: what happens when we take the human condition, and twist? You need a topping of gallows humour just to keep it in perspective: humour is a brutal necessity when you’re confronting the horrific on a day to day basis (as anyone who hangs out with medics can probably attest).
What’s the role of humour in this universe? Well, one might ask what Stanley Kubrick intended when he turned “Dr. Strangelove” into a theatre of the absurd: absurdity is generated by dissonance between a situation and its meaning, and Kubrick used it to viciously anatomize the process of atomic annihilation and hold up the petty and banal motives of its perpetrators to ridicule. But “Dr. Strangelove” didn’t laugh at what came after the bomb — it ended, on a double-blind ironic note (singing “We’ll meet again” to a background of mushroom clouds). The bomb was the punch-line of the joke, not the set-up. What happens in a survivable apocalypse? Lovecraftian apocalyptic fiction never actually explores the consequences of the Old Ones returning, let alone the human wreckage left behind in the aftermath. It’s like the Singularity in SF, circa 2000 — off-limits to exploration.
(Clears throat.) This isn’t a manifesto. It’s just an explanation of what I’ve been writing, and what I plan to write more of. It’s probably best described by a portmanteau word: Strangelovecraftian (or, if you’re in a hurry, Strangecraftian) fiction. It’s goal is to use the eschatalogical horror of the Mythos much as recent SF has used the Singularity, to shed light on the human condition under circumstances that warp the soul.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go find a cave to gibber in …
So I blew through Poison Sleep in two days. What a fun book! And so much more satisfying than the first one was. I will be after the rest of this series this year for certain. This novel follows Marla Mason, lead sorcerer for the fictional city of Felsport, actually battling it out within her own city. (The first novel had her fighting some foe in San Francisco, something I always thought annoying. I mean why create a fictional city and then not even use it in your debut novel?) 
. This story picks up alomst three years after the previous book and finds out favorite necromantic computer hacker has become a somewhat reluctant regular in Field Ops. Stross makes great use of the Bond stereotype in this novel, and there is not a flat character to be found.
in hardback almost two years ago. It quite literally gave me a new outlook for SciFi, his ability to mesh the present with the not-so-distant future was superb. And the tech that he introduced was all too believable. It seemed like I was reading a fiction thriller written 50 years in the future. It was amazing.
had the same effect upon me for Lovecraftian horror that Halting State did for generic SciFI. I am not sure how this series flew under my radar for so long, it is a very enjoyable read. The basic premise of both the novella and short story within the Atrocity Archives is that, yes the eldritch horrors do exist, the government knows this and has set up super-secret intelligence agencies to thwart anyone who might intentionally, or unintentionally, invoke some unspeakable horror from a parallel universe.
