Eldritch Abomination - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Cosmic Horror; Ultra Horrific Monster

See those tiny figures in the circle? Those are people.

Oozing and surging up out of that yawning trap-door in the Cyclopean crypt I had glimpsed such an unbelievable behemothic monstrosity that I could not doubt the power of its original to kill with its mere sight. Even now I cannot begin to suggest it with any words at my command. I might call it gigantic — tentacled — proboscidian — octopus-eyed — semi-amorphous — plastic — partly squamous and partly rugose — ugh! But nothing I could say could even adumbrate the loathsome, unholy, non-human, extra-galactic horror and hatefulness and unutterable evil of that forbidden spawn of black chaos and illimitable night. As I write these words the associated mental image causes me to lean back faint and nauseated. As I told of the sight to the men around me in the office, I had to fight to preserve the consciousness I had regained.
— HP Lovecraft, "Out of the Aeons"

How to describe these unclean mockeries of natural law? There are no words that can encompass such foulness, not in English or any other human tongue. They are other, alien beyond comprehension, their very existence an affront to all rationality. I could speak of ichor-dripping tentacles and yonic voids, painfully dissonant cries and colours of no earthly hue, but those are mere superficialities. Monstrous though these stigmata are, they do not define the abominations; they are merely among the more common symptoms of their underlying wrongness.

What all Eldritch Abominations have in common is their defiance of natural law, as humans understand it. They are the things that should not be, the ultimate aliens. It is this that makes them abominable, and it this that reduces to gibbering madness all but the strongest of those who encounter them.

However, people can get used to anything in time, if they don't die first. If Eldritch Abominations were on every street corner, people's conceptions of natural law would stretch to accommodate them. A lone mile-high soul-consuming monstrosity would be cause for worldwide pandemonium. If there were ten thousand such, descending from the cold stars on umbral wings every new moon to ravage the Earth, then that would just be a fact of life. People wouldn't like the oversized locusts, but they would not be driven to madness by the sight of them.

For this reason, only creatures which people rarely meet, and survive to tell the tale, can qualify as Eldritch Abominations. The creatures may actually outnumber humanity — trillions may dwell in the Stygian abysses far below the ocean waves, trillions may drift between the stars — but they prefer wild and lonely places, where people seldom tread. What qualifies can also depend on who is looking. Some things are so strange that even lesser Eldritch Abominations find them abominable.

Physically, Eldritch Abominations range from almost human, through big ugly monsters, to the unimaginably bizarre. Generally, the weirder they look the more powerful they are, but this isn't a universal rule. Y'golonac (you fool! you doomed us all!) looks approximately human, but just reading its name condemns you to Mind Rape (assuming that your puny human tongue can even pronounce it). If you see it in the flesh, it's too late to run. And while we're at it, never, ever, EVER say Hastur.

The most eldritch of the abominations come from Beyond. Whether they are from beyond the stars, before the dawn of time, or a place incomprehensible to humans, they are alien to this universe and its laws. Other than that, they have nothing in common. The mildest Eldritch Abominations are typically the descendants of greater abominations, or the work of mad wizards (not mad scientists, who have trouble mastering the eldritch, certain AIs notwithstanding). These include some of the rarer varieties of undead, so long as they are rare, and the product of ill-advised breeding programs.

The best known abominations are the big ugly monsters that fit in between these two extremes. Here, the "ugly" in "big, ugly monster" doesn't just mean that it's horrible to look at — it means that there's something about it, about the way it looks, or the spaces it moves through, that violates every law of reality as you know it. "Big" doesn't just mean that it could use the Empire State Building as a toothpick — it means that the... thing doing just that is only the barest fraction of the monster's true form, the tiny piece of it that actually exists in a set of dimensions that our brains were built to handle.

This trope has some overlap with Starfish Aliens. However, Starfish Aliens aren't necessarily horrific or unnatural; they're alien only because they evolved in a different environment than humanity, and can be helpful or neutral, whereas Eldritch Abominations have a deep wrongness to them, no matter where you find them. For example, while Starfish Aliens usually care enough to take on a A Form You Are Comfortable With to avoid breaking your mind, an Eldritch Abomination won't even acknowledge/realize you have one to break. They can still be helpful or neutral, though most of them are way beyond the whole alignment system and are merely uncaring, treating Earth as at best a colourful plaything, and at worst...

Eldritch Abominations are native to the genre Cosmic Horror Story, but they are not confined to it. Mild examples can be found throughout the horror and fantasy genres. Greater abominations can occur in almost any type of fiction, so long as enough Cosmic Horror Story tropes are used. Usually they derive, at least in inspiration, from Lovecraft's work; folkloric origins are rare.

Cold be considered a subtrope of Our Monsters Are Weird, in that the monsters are so weird that looking at them breaks your brain.

Occasionally they lust after our women (and men), resulting in Naughty Tentacles.

For instances where the abomination's reputation is a bit more solid than the actual monster itself, see Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu.