Eldritch Abominations in Real Life

I remember reading a story somewhere about people who disappear after visiting different properties in various locations. There is nothing to connect these disappearences, which do not even occur in the same cities or regions. But someone discovers that the houses on those properties are dimensional gateways... to an elder abomination's stomach (it's eating them). The story unfolds slowly, and the various clues the protagonists manage to gather really do add up to a creepy effect. And it's entirely plausible that no one in a position of authority would ever even suspect the truth. For the life of me I cant remember the title...

" I'd say the goal of not awaking them still falls within the logical problem solving attitude, so that's also something to work with."

Kinda but is easier to tdeal, elderrich abomiantion are more element in the writing that a chararter on is own, is diferent from your tipical monster and slasher movies for that reason.

Quite. Horror is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose. Though I'd say the same applies to slashers in particular, since they rely on their victims being woefully unprepared and oftentimes irrational. For that matter, the Alien franchise features a nice progression of the titular monster, from a borderline eldritch abomination with humanoid features that only make it more terrifying... to a relative lightweight by bug warrior standards, enduring only because everyone in the vicinity has the survival abilities of a soft-boiled egg.

There is one aspect of Lovecraftian writing that's often talked about, often criticized, but I've yet to see it correlated to the stories and characters themselves. Namely, that the guy was racist, even for his time, and that's a lot. Naturally, this translates to his characters... but not uniformly so. If you re-read the stories, I believe you'll notice the trend that the more bigoted and race-conscious a character is, the worse-off they end up. The guy from Innsmouth goes bananas after learning of his lineage, same goes for the one from Rats in the Walls and Dagon. Meanwhile, the scholar from Dunwich Horror, the doctor from Charles Dexter Ward, and of course Randolph Carter himself, all encounter the supernatural without being too much worse for wear.

Essentially, the more people are prone to "othering", aggressively drawing the arbitrary lines characteristic of racist bigotry, the worse they're affected by such lines being blurred or outright erased by new discoveries. Remember, the genre hails back to times when evolution was controversial for saying people could be related to animals - or worse, to "lesser" people; miscegenation was regarded as diluting "pure" races; and Lovecraft himself regarded the mass immigration after WWI as threatening to civilization as he knew it. These fears are easily found embellished in his tales of impending invasion by throngs of "lesser" creatures from the sea; the sense of alienation that one's own people wouldn't even believe such concerns, let alone share them; and the abject horror from realizing that one's own lineage may itself be "impure".

I find this to be an interesting aspect for an eldritch abomination - that the monster is not a monster. It's not inherently destructive, it's not objectively malicious. It's not invincible or omnipotent. The only actual "fault" it has, is existing - because its existence is proof of one's worldview being wrong, with all the loss of self-image that entails. Monsters can be fought. Truth, on the other hand...

edited 21st Feb '18 3:00:33 AM by indiana404

See, this is the part of Lovecraft that really bugs me. Having your worldview disproven is a shock but it's not the kind of thing that makes someone catatonic or inflicts long term neuroses. Well...not unless you're an SJW but let's not make jokes at their expense, it's too easy.

edited 21st Feb '18 5:12:08 AM by Belisaurius

It's not just the worldview, but the self-image shattering that comes with it. For instance, if you define yourself by your race, if you regard yourself as important, your existence as meaningful, your social status as superior to others all because of it... then the reveal that you are "one of them" would be devastating. Consequently, the "insanity" that follows - as mental illness was rather broadly defined back in the day - would be most akin to paranoid schizophrenia, the mind desperately trying to shield itself from the implications of the truth, shutting off virtually any new information lest it lead to further damage.

You see this in real life with conspiracy theorists - people, generally with unimpressive actual accomplishments or social status, who begin feeding a massive inferiority-superiority complex by clinging to obvious falsities precisely because they are obvious falsities... meaning they can impart whatever "truth" they desire underneath. Typically, it's a framework that divides the whole of society into elites that are powerful, but malicious; plebs that are weak and ignorant; and of course themselves - the enlightened few, who in such a world, only need to get out of bed in order to feel morally and mentally superior to everyone else, their lack of accomplishment and social status entirely excused. (Also works for the SJW crowd, in that they similarly divide the world into evil oppressors and enslaved masses, with themselves as freedom fighters heroically hurling hashtags in lieu of anything more consequential.)

Difference, of course, is, in a Lovecraftian story, the conspiracy theorists would be right... sort of. I mean, I'm pretty sure that if some concrete evidence was found that the Moon landings were faked, most people would just shrug it off - Cold War space race antics, big deal. Similarly, if it was discovered that governments were hiding aliens for decades, a lot of people would probably be okay with it - governments hide nuclear launch codes for a reason, maybe they had a reason to hide the aliens too. And of course, the idea that humans have descended from animals is now common knowledge, all without causing uproar... most of the time.

It's this particular framework - a powerful evil, a weak society, and the seemingly innocuous main character™ who secretly knows about it all - that's the basis for Lovecraftian horror... and, for that matter, the vast majority of superhero stories and urban fantasy in general. The only difference is that Lovecraftian characters can't really do anything about the world they now find themselves living in.

Imagine your brain being forced to truely assimilate noneuclidean geometry. You would end up... very different.

Possibly... Lovecraft himself has described certain creatures with that term, so it likely plays a part. I think, more specifically, that the insanity comes afterward, when characters try to reconcile what they saw with their previously held beliefs, and what it means for the world at large. That is, the monsters' appearance doesn't really function like some sort of mental brown note, at least no more than any other gruesomely horrific sight (particularly such that evokes one's instinctive or pathological fears).

Instead, let's say you witness a ripple in space-time, essentially a tear in reality through which a monster appears. Even if you manage to fight it off, there's still the fact that it just materialized out of thin air, with no mechanism you can understand, let alone prevent, in complete violation of every known law of physics. I mean, there goes your faith in the scientific method. It's just that nowadays we're so used to such phenomena in fiction and theoretical sciences, that we take them for granted. In that regard, Lovecraft isn't scary for the same reason that Seinfeld is unfunny.

Black holes arguably qualify as non living/non sentient examples, at least in the sense of breaking universal laws as we understand them.

Elephant's Foot.

Exceptionally dangerous, but not eldritch.

I got a modern day version of an Eldritch Abomination then.

"Internet".

Sure, it sounds like some kind of joke now, but that's because all of us are only exposed to that 1% of it that our computer screens can handle at the time every single day.

Try and take in all 100% of what it truly is and the sheer scope it exists on and not and how it works, and see how long your brain endures before breaking apart from failing to do so.

To you, the Ant will probably disagree.

Maybe to Cthulhu, Nyarlothep and many other abomination they exist just fine and chill and we are just sort of there in the same way ants in your room just sort of exist.

I always said if cthulhu rise and destroy us, it wont done so because he wanted it, but just because we are kind there.

Well now, I was sort of assuming a human perspective, yes.

But the whole point behind Lovecraftian style eldritch abominations is that they conform to a completely different set of universal rules and constants than we do. For example, they do not conform to Euclidean geometry. To an ant, a human may see gargantuan, arbitrary and fatal, but we arise out of the same biological principles. To a scientific ant, a human is just a giant animal, grotesquely shaped but still built on the same principles as ants are. An eldritch abomination is truly alien in a way that a gigantic animal could never be.

By the way, you are right about Cthulhu and company. They don't "want" to destroy humanity (we can't comprehend what they "want", if they "want" anything). Their mere existence cancels us.

Edited by DeMarquis on Apr 22nd 2022 at 8:12:49 AM

That doesn't seem to stop their cultists from liking them. ;)

I cant believe Cthulu believes in Cancel Culture. How hypocritical of him!

I guess Nuclear stuff is also within the bounds of natural laws as well. Maybe something tied to theoretical physics? Like strings.

Are you looking for a "natural" form of Eldritch abomination? Seems like a contradiction in terms to me, but the closest I've ever seen depicted is some form of super intelligent AI that lacks a sense of self awareness. But nevertheless is fully capable of modeling ours. Call it "psychological uncanny valley."

Adding to the subject of black holes, something doesn’t necessarily need to be sapient in order to be alive. Plants, for instance, lack brain cells, but they still grow and reproduce like other organisms do. Black holes may not be made of cells like plants or animals, but they still essentially “feed” by capturing nearby energy, increase in volume from it, and eventually die. Azathoth, the greatest entity in the trope-codifying Cthulhu Mythos, is itself depicted as a mindless mass of destruction located in the center of the universe- something similar to a black hole.

Edited by EldritchAbomination212 on May 31st 2023 at 4:00:55 AM

Edited by EldritchAbomination212 on May 31st 2023 at 4:00:47 AM