Announcing: The All Has Read Project

With the rise in popularity of Lovecraftian icons and tropes in pop culture and entertainment—tentacled alien gods are showing up everywhere from Magic Cards, to the trailer for Stranger Things 2, to Monopoly—the foundational texts of cosmic horror are often misrepresented. The popular mythology built around Cthulhu and his nasty crew of monstrous deities is often attributed to the Great Old One’s inventor, H.P. Lovecraft, but the cephalopod-ish dragon on the front of a pack of cards is rarely representative of his true literary origins. As a nerd, a pessimist, and a recovering know-it-all, the general state of Lovecraft’s legacy irks me in the same way pedants get annoyed when jocks call their Halloween costume “a Frankenstein” when they're really dressed as Frankenstein's monster. That’s why I’ve decided to do something about it. That’s why I am starting The All Has Read Project.

Starting next week, on February 13, I will be writing about my experience as I undertake a task of unknowable consequence. I intended to read all of H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories and novellas, beginning with the works that comprise the author’s Arkham Cycle (where all the tentacles and gods and scary books came from). By writing my thoughts here on Everything Is Scary I hope I can bring a progressive, modern eye to the oft misrepresented texts, highlighting their import ideas and dragging some of Lovecraft’s bigger problems and hypocrisies out into that light (white supremacy, I'm looking at you). I want to dispel my own misconceptions about Lovecraft and the genre he helped inspire, comparing the author’s original ideas to their 21st century counterparts.

So here is how this is going to work: every two weeks I’m going to publish a reading diary of my thoughts on one of Lovecraft’s stories, comparing the content to art and entertainment from today that takes inspiration from it, modern re-interpretations of the material, my previously held misconceptions, and other entries in this digital forbidden book club. Since all of Lovecraft’s work is readily available to read online, I will be posting a link to the next story at the end of every entry, so you can read along with me. And I hope you do. I hop you join me as I dive into the fabled Necronomicon, never to emerge until all has been read.

The first entry in The All Has Read Project: Dagon

Death Stench World: Junji Ito’s GYO

The climate is changing and maybe there’s nothing we can do. Our world is not one that requires us, and as we all start to make that realization we turn to cosmic horror in order to better understand our pessimistic, apocalyptic fears. Elder Things, Dreamlands and colours from out of space all offer us a fantasy window into realities that don’t require human eyes, and perhaps are best viewed with other unspeakable senses. When it comes to these horrific viewing glasses few are as clear as Gyo, by Junji Ito.

A horror manga about an ancient germ from the depths of the ocean, Gyo works as an allegory for climate change. Part pandemic thriller, part creature feature, the story begins with the invasion of Okinawa from the sea. Marine life with sharp, spindly legs begin to crawl onto land and terrorize the human population. The invasion spreads to the rest of Japan and eventually the world, before moving to the next, much more horrific stage.

From the very first chapter, Gyo evokes the creeping feeling of cataclysmic global change by characterizing its monster as an invisible invader. The fish with legs are heralded by a terrible stench, described by characters as being reminiscent of hot human corpses. To the reader, such characteristic makes you double blind. Not only can the menacing germ not be seen, you can’t smell something in a story. You are left knowing that the helpless characters are overwhelmed by a paranormal odour because they are constantly screaming about it, and while you’d think that to be a mercy, there’s something very upsetting in being told about a sign of danger that you can’t notice yourself.

I held my breath while reading Gyo because of the fictional smell. It was a subconscious reaction to the horror on the page, and it amplified my gasps when the book actually left my mouth agape in shock. There are images in Gyo that—while not as deeply nightmarish and intellectually disturbing as some of what’s contained in Ito’s more famous Uzumaki or his one-off the Enigma of Amigara Fault (which is contained at the end of the delux edition of Gyo  from Viz Media and actually keeps me awake at night)—actually left me in disbelief.

The whole effect is a suffocating feeling as you progress deeper and deeper into an adventure that simply can’t have a happy ending for humans. Gyo is the tale of a world turning its back on humanity, taunting us with the stench of our own decomposing bodies as if to say Nothing lasts forever, but you are much more fleeting than I.

What really hammers the whole thing home, and therefore makes Gyo essential reading for the modern horror fan, is the sense of guilt Ito pours into his characters. The humans blame each other for the monstrosities, the stench and inevitably their own failure to save themselves and eachother. Yet, not a single person within its pages did anything wrong. As the need to point fingers recedes, Gyo settles into a passive, contemplative mode only achievable in moments of deepest pessimism. What if no one’s to blame? What if we are so insignificant that we didn’t even cause our own tragic demise? When it’s all over, and we are wiped out by an indifferent entity with nothing we would call memory, did we even exist in the first place?

Gyo is available anywhere you can buy manga. Go get it.

“The Window!” Where is The Horror in DAGON?

Dagon, written by H.P. Lovecraft in 1917 and first published two years later by The Vagrant, is often credited the first of the Providence author’s Cthulhu Mythos building blocks. Part confession, part suicide note, the short story details a nameless narrator's traumatic experience in the Pacific ocean during the first world war.  It’s a fantastic piece of strange fiction, blending history and popular science with hallucinatory nightmare imagery. And while it doesn’t leave one with chills or impending nightmares, thanks largely to its campy purple ending, there is a kernel at the heart of Dagon that functions as true, distilled cosmic horror.

Written in the first person, so as to keep the reader guessing at the veracity of the narrator’s profoundly surreal claims, Dagon sacrifices its shot at an effective ending with its final lines. For Lovecraft, this is an oft cited problem by critics and fans alike. While the beginning and middle acts of stories that employ the possibly insane unreliable narrator trope greatly benefit from the limited perspective given to a reader, there are very few scenarios in which the ending can properly land with a terrifying beat (though there are some fantastic examples of this being written around: House of Leaves solves this with footnotes; The House on The Borderland frames an unreliable narrative inside of yet another; Dracula is a compilation of separate accounts). The most famous Lovecraft fail in this respect is probably in the second last paragraph of The Rats in The Walls, which has its narrator go gibberingly mad during the act of writing.

The same problem is apparent with Dagon. The story concludes with the narrator either hallucinating or witnessing a giant creature he remembered from his nightmare at sea at his window (there is debate among fans and scholars as to which is the case). The cyclopean (in size, not in eye-count) amphibious monster has come for our storyteller, and the last we read is this fantastically Lovecraftian paragraph:

“The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!”

When talking to people about Lovecraft’s fiction I often come across the same criticism: most modern readers don’t actually find his work scary. It’s a difficult remark to debate, given the example above. The author frequently undercuts his spooky verite techniques meant to make his stories seem real by ending them with printed exclamation points following words no person would ever sincerely write. No matter how many times I read The Rats in the Walls—and I adapted it into a play—I will never believe it possible to devolve into a gibbering maniac while writing a personal essay. Still, there is a current of horror before these endings that makes them bone chilling, and it’s there that I find Lovecraft’s fiction still resonates as horrific.

The body of Dagon puts its narrator on a plain of black slime that has risen volcanically from the Pacific ocean under his small boat. It is here, under a bright sun in an oppressive sky, that he encounters a great monolith and a giant, ancient creature of the deep worshiping it. After returning home, our storyteller describes the lasting effect of this vision in his justification for killing himself:

“I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may be at this very moment crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshiping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite.”

The beech! The beech!

The sentence recalls some of the most horrific passages of 20th century literature. To me, it immediately evokes the line from Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting For Godot, which was written decades later:

“Was I sleeping, while the others suffered?”

It’s an existential dread at the core of Dagon, and really the majority of Lovecraft’s work, that makes it so effective as horror. Combining a control freak desire to shed light into every dark corner on earth with the usual signifiers of human frailty (giant creatures, the equating of revelation with madness), Dagon reminds us that even right now, something terrible is happening. We are powerless to see the horrors of the moment in our places of safety, and even more important in preventing them. It’s enough to drive a reader mad! Atys . . . Dia ad aghaidh ’s ad aodann . . . agus bas dunach ort! Dhonas ’s dholas ort, agus leat-sa! . . . Ungl . . . ungl . . . rrrlh . . . chchch . . .

Review: Nick Cutter's THE DEEP

Nick Cutter’s The Deep is the modern epitome of cosmic horror. This is ironic because rather than having to do with the cosmos - the indifferent reality beyond our darkest skies - the Canadian horror novel is set in the deepest depths of the Pacific ocean. It is a 394 page nightmare that never lets up, and from which you cannot wake, combining true human suffering with the bleak sci-fi strangeness that made H.P. Lovecraft into a legend.

The Deep is horror of the highest concept, piling situation on top of situation until the stakes could literally not be any higher. Our planet is ravaged by a new plague called the ‘Gets which causes humans to slowly forget everything until they can’t remember basic bodily functions and die. A possible cure miraculously appears in the eleventh hour of our demise, and a science team is sent to an undersea facility, the Trieste, to study it. Contact is lost, portentous events occur, and the main character Luke is sent down to the station in order to make contact with his AWOL super scientist brother.

What follows Luke’s descent into the Marianas Trench is scream-worthy but also compelling. Cutter doubles down on the theme of memory, making his main character experience intense reveries through which we learn his past. These flashbacks, which tap into the very human horrors of childhood abuse and the life-rending tragedy of child abduction, anchor the larger than life sci-fi setting in a place of relatable pain. For every scene of creative body horror there is another to balance it by tapping into true feelings of pain vulnerability.

Despair oozes from the pages of The Deep. There is a great deal of suspense throughout the book and it delivers on all its nauseating promises. In a way, the whole novel feels like a puzzle box. Cutter, through the present tense of Luke’s flashbacks and the Crichton-esque set up of the Trieste, manages to connect numerous episodes that are chilling on their own, but when combined form a coherent map of utter bleakness.

The Deep is not a happy book. Hope is nowhere to be found, just frailty, tragedy and viscera. Yet, there is a deep vein of humanity at the core. Luke’s relationships with his brother, mother and son squeezed at my heart, and when things got surreal - reality blending with memory - I found myself crying for monsters and soon for the world.

Like the best Cosmic horror, The Deep invokes our latent desire to know that bad things happen for a reason, then toys with it. It conjures a purpose and agency behind the otherworldly horrors beneath the waves and the quotidian horror of everyday life only to then tell you the reasons for our pain and suffering are indifferent to us. The causes behind our pathos, if determined by an intelligence, are as inaccessible to us as the private pain of other people or the secrets at the bottom of the ocean.

Reading The Deep is an exercise in dark thought, filled with the stuff that can keep you up at night. But it is also an exercise in compassion. By accessing the darkness of a thing beyond our understanding, Nick Cutter has propped up out most characteristic and noble trait as a species. We are weak, fragile creatures who come apart easily when under pressure, and understanding this is the best possible victory we can hope for.

The Horror of Inversion in ANNIHILATION

“That night we talked about the tower, although the other three insisted on calling it a tunnel.”

When we reach the limits of language, we find ourselves on the border of madness and contradiction. It is the place of the Lovecraftian gods, where up is diagonal, down is light pink and forward is twirling. The concept of this absurd state of thought is rich in horror, and it is often invoked in the genre - especially in the weird fiction subgenre - to evoke that elusive paradoxical thought we call the void. The trope very rarely is used to great effect (I particularly find it campy and fun to parody) but when it works, like in Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Annihilation, it really makes it tough to sleep at night.

Annihilation is the first entry in Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 weird fiction masterpiece The Southern Reach Trilogy. The best fiction I read last year (I included it on my Best Of 2014 list for Popshifter), The Southern Reach manages to tell a beautiful story about humans encountering the world-without-us - a place at once familiar and impossible to comprehend because it is a thing we cannot behold by virtue of its definition. It’s the goal of cosmic horror, to conjure this paradoxical thought, and VanderMeer does it with style and sublime aesthetic that manages to feel addictive and terrifying all at once.

The key to achieving this negation of humanity for the reader lies in a prominent symbol introduced at the top of Annihilation: the tower. The book is told from the perspective of an anonymous biologist, one member of a four woman team sent on an expedition into the mysterious Area X. The story begins when they encounter a structure within Area X that does not appear on their map of the strange wilderness. This is the tower, but it is also not a tower.

(image via Work in Progress)

Described in the book initially as a circular slab made of coquina and stone with a rectangular opening onto descending stairs, the biologist’s companions all rationally call it a tunnel. That said, the biologist labels it as a tower before even that most basic description, illustrating something tall rather than deep. The word, which effectively describes the exact opposite of what it’s labeling, is used for the duration of the first volume so that as a reader when you see “tower” you picture a tunnel.

What’s more is that through our implicit trust of the narrating biologist, who is incredibly sympathetic despite her cold demeanour and air of mystery, we understand that her dissonant naming is involuntarily affected - a result of being in Area X. She almost immediately admits, through the description of her nomenclature logic, that her insistence on the word “tower” is insane:

“At first I only saw it as a tower. I don’t know why the word tower came to me, given that it tunneled into the ground. I could easily have considered it a bunker or a submerged building. Yet as soon as I saw the staircase, I remembered the lighthouse on the coast and had a sudden vision of the last expedition drifting off, one by one, and sometime thereafter the ground shifting in a uniform and preplanned way to leave the lighthouse standing where it had always been but leaving this underground part of it inland. I saw this in vast and intricate detail as we all stood there, and, looking back I mark it as the first irrational thought I had once we had reached our destination.” p.7

By describing a tunnel as a tower, VanderMeer manages to familiarize readers with negation. By virtue of being wholly visible, a tower has perceivable limits. A tunnel does not have this. Only the parts that have been experienced can be said to even exist, and beyond that anything else is implied or expected based on hope or human estimate. Additionally, by invoking the negative label, the author has avoided the awkward unspeak pitfall of having to write out things like “I fell up and to the right, sliding down, (or was it out?)” Since tower implied height instead of depth, the mind-bending is taken care of in passages like this:

“With the tower, we knew none of these things. We could not intuit its full outline. We had no sense of its purpose. And now that we had begun to descend into it, the tower still failed to reveal any hint of these things. The psychologist might recite the measurements of the “top” of the tower, but those numbers meant nothing, had no wider context. Without context, clinging to those numbers was a form of madness.” -p22

Annihilation and its subsequent volumes (Authority and Acceptance) go on to require the reader to continue thinking difficult, contradicting thoughts, and it is because of the tower that it all works out to such great effect. The Southern Reach Trilogy can be called a magnificent achievement in horror simply for its depiction of that impossible place with a builder that cannot be imagined, a place that cannot exist yet feels so real.

These Children That Come At You With Knives: Ricky Kasso and Charles Manson

Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia In The 1980s is a new book from Spectacular Optical. It includes exactly what it says on the tin: each chapter addresses a different aspect of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Its 300 plus pages cover an entire decade of pop culture, including movies, music, television, gaming, and even Dungeons & Dragons.

The chapter which I contributed, "All Hail The Acid King: The Ricky Kasso Case In Popular Culture," examines the murder of Gary Lauwers in Long Island in 1984 by the titular and self-professed Satanist Ricky Kasso. I became interested in this case thanks to the Wiseblood (a.k.a. JG Thirlwell and Roli Mosimann) song "0-0 (Where Evil Dwells)."

As I delved deeper into the facts surrounding the Gary Lauwers murder, I felt conflicted. The details were truly more horrific than I expected. Ricky Kasso, in a fit of rage over Lauwers' theft of some mescaline, stabbed him to death and then buried him in a shallow grave. Kasso allegedly demanded that Lauwers swear his allegiance to Satan before taking his life. Regardless of the supposed Satanic angle, it was a vicious crime made more gruesome by the fact that Kasso buried Lauwers in a shallow grave and then took local teenagers into the woods for the next two weeks to gawk at the corpse while he gloated over his accomplishments.

Since Kasso committed suicide in jail after his arrest for the crime, the two others present - Albert Quinones and James Troiano - were the only ones left to answer to the judicial system. When Quinones received immunity for testifying against Troiano that made the list even shorter. Their accounts have always been considered unreliable thanks to their copious drug use; in fact, this was why James Troiano was acquitted of Lauwers's murder in the end.

A terrible crime was committed and no one was ever truly held accountable. Spending weeks reading about the case and analyzing the various songs and films that addressed it genuinely freaked me out. Do I think this murder was committed because Ricky Kasso worshipped Satan? No. But that didn't make it any less disturbing to me, especially when I started finding message boards full of people praising Kasso and talking about him as if he was some kind of hero or inspiration.

Perhaps the origins of the Kasso's crime were different and his body count far less, but it reminds me of how Charles Manson has become a pop culture hero over the last 46 years, despite being responsible for the slaughter of seven people over two days in 1969. This man and his followers, who held a city captive in terror until they were caught (and for a good length of time afterwards, considering what happened to people like Barbara Hoyt and Ronald Hughes) appears on T-shirts and has a whole cadre of people who think he was set up, or weirder still, innocent (Google it).

I confess to owning and wearing a button that says PASS THE BUCK TO CHUCK as some kind of impotent "statement" about the US presidential elections. Hell, I even dressed as Elizabeth Short (The Black Dahlia) for Halloween once. Clearly, there is a thin line between academic fascination and fetishized adulation. What frightens me is that I may feel sick reading about poor Gary Lauwers and get angry with those who insist Charles Manson was framed, but that thin line is one I've probably crossed more than once.

If you'd like a copy of Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia In The 1980s, you can order it online. If you live in the Toronto, Ontario area, it's available for sale at the TIFF Bell Lightbox bookstore.
 

Fear of Teleportation and Poe's The Premature Burial

My brother Nick and I, who are of similarly morbid minds, often find amusement in watching our mother squirm when we tell her that the only people tortured by death are the survivors. It’s an idea we both find empowering, I think, because it allows us to assert our rejection of dull afterlife mythologies while at the same time proving our love for humanity. We both have talked at length on why donating dead bodies should be common practice.

We differ on one detail, my brother and I, and it’s on the nature of the border between life and death. It’s an argument that comes up whenever we have hypothetical conversations on the advent of commercial teleportation which we both acknowledge will revolutionize global travel, but only I believe will usher in a new era of mass accidental suicide.

Under the conventional idea of teleportation - which suggests that a person enter a transporting chamber, be dissolved into base components, converted into light, and then reassembled at a desired destination - I see death as an integral part of the process. The human body, when torn apart, would die. Upon reassembly, the person with all your body and memories will be you to the outside world, but I am skeptical that it will be the same “me” that went through the in-door.  My brother doesn’t contest this, but he offers the possibility that it is inconsequential.

My brother has a sexier vision of the future than I do.

Nick says that the present mind is the only one that is real, and that the me of yesterday is as dead as the hypothetical me that entered a teleporter in Toronto only to transfer my continued brand presence to the new me at my futuristic destination (ie. Space-Paris, Space-Berlin, Japan etc). He argues that the continuous living that I assert as my identity, my parts handing off life to the next generation like some sort of billion cell relay race, is false. My brain apparently shuts down when I sleep to the point of practical brain death. While his evidence is that of an impassioned enthusiast arguing with his brother while drinking, I can’t dispute that the reason for my stubborn stance of continuous-being is fear, especially since, as I type this sentence, I realize he is probably right.

The tenuous border between life and death is the subject of Edgar Allan Poe’s aptly titled The Premature Burial. The short story begins with folk philosophy on the nature of history and the important role genre can play in describing unpleasant happenings, then goes on to detail numerous cases of individuals who had appeared dead and thus buried alive, only to revive under darkly comic circumstances. Reading the beginning of The Premature Burial today evokes Mary Roach by way of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - addictively curious, overwritten with the euphemism of the period, and grave-minded.

When the narrator eventually reveals himself to have had a premature burial experience of his own, the story turns to supernatural horror. The storyteller has a condition called catalepsy, which essentially sends him into comas, and therefore stokes his fear of living internment. It is in the one of these near death episodes that he is taken by some nameless gibbering entity and shown the graves of the world, some filled with living bodies.

Inspired by his deadly encounter, the narrator takes every precaution possible to ensure if he is buried alive while catatonic that he will be promptly rescued. Unfortunately, he suffers an episode while away from home and fears he must be burried in a n unmarked grave before finally realizing he is in the berth of a boat travelling down the James River and henceforth changing his life to be less controlled by his phobia. Classic Poe.

Gotta hand it to you:  that's a pretty fucked up way to die.

What strikes me as so prescient about The Premature Burial is its fascination with the border between life and death that’s spurred on my fear of teleportation. There is an entry to the world beyond, a tenure away from the living, and then a return to the world we know. In Poe, this is a much less convenient time for the participant, who will have not travelled very far in his or her flicker between moments of living, but the allegory fits with my brother’s theory more than mine.

The only difference between life and death is self evident, so to continue on in your journey is to negate any deaths you may have momentarily fallen into. The lesson is that death between lives is not truly death, because the only true death is one that puts us beneath the ground never to return

Cat > People: Cecil The Lion and The Cats of Ulthar

Humans are animals, and that doesn’t square well with us. Famously narcissistic and filled with hubris, our species places itself upon a pedestal, defining the worth of other animals through comparison to ourselves. We place an incredible amount of importance on an animal’s  human-like features, going as far to value the life of apes and dolphins hire than uglier, dumber mammals like the wretched naked mole rat. But the truth is, human superiority is a facade. We are not objectively better than other types of animal in any way that goes beyond having evolved thumbs and language, and this lack of importance is frightening.

If you take that assertion back far enough you can see it in the Abrahamic Religion’s creation myth. In the book of Genesis, humans were created in the image of God. It’s a powerful message when categorically differentiating homosapiens from the rest of the animal kingdom, aligning our own species closer to the divine than the lower lifeforms that we cultivate, domesticate, mutilate and consume. But if you pull a Nietzsche and kill God with your brain, come at things from an evolutionary perspective, it becomes very clear that the only difference between us and the jungle cats is that we are uncomfortable with nudity and David Bowie never wrote a good song about being a powerful human.

(Just let this song play for the rest of the post)

This fear of not being special, which is essentially the fear of a godless world, is the closest I can come to a conclusion as to why people hunt big game. It is a fear that is particularly modern, and an act that was just recently a major topic in the human news circuit. Last week a dentist from the Midwestern United States named Walter Palmer went on a hunting expedition in Zimbabwe and shot a lion.

Much ado has been made about the fact that the poached lion had a name, Cecil, and was under protection by the state, but talking about the cat as an individual misses the point. Palmer apologized for killing a known lion, while reaffirming that big game hunting is still a hobby he enjoys legally and responsibly. He cared about the anthropomorphic aspects of the beast, but his statement on the matter, along with his well documented history of killing large animals for sport, implies that he would not have cared about a nameless apex predator. That’s what he had planned to do, and had Cecil not been named I suspect the subsequent controversy would have been fairly muted in comparison to what we saw in the media and across the Internet.

Immediately upon hearing that Cecil had been baited, shot, beheaded and skinned then left for the carrion while his 12 cubs were left to be slaughtered by the next dominant male to take his place, the first thing I thought of was horror. One of the greatest weird tales in the English language, and one of my personal favourite horror stories, The Cats of Ulthar by H.P. Lovecraft is a short, contemplative parable of what happens to humans that hurt cats. Lovecraft was an ardent lover of felines, writing his own pet into The Rats in the Walls, and Ulthar inverts the natural human assumption of superiority over other animals.

(This one's also from Slate.com)

The Cats of Ulthar takes place in the titular fictional town, which is home to an ornery couple who are known to capture and torture stray cats to death. A caravan of ancient nomads pass through Ulthar, and a child from the group has a pet black cat that he loves. One night, the cat is captured by the killers and meets the same fate that awaits all strays in the town. When the townsfolk tell the distressed boy about what happened to his cat (they know because of the noises they heard in the night), the boy turns his head to the sky and prays.

The image of this is sublime, and evokes and inversion between the human God in Genesis and the animal gods we deny out of fear and pride:

It was very peculiar, but as the little boy uttered his petition there seemed to form overhead the shadowy, nebulous figures of exotic things; of hybrid creatures crowned with horn-flanked discs. Nature is full of such illusions to impress the imaginative.

The shadowy figures recall the story’s introduction, in which the narrator outlines the deep divinity of the cat, placing its secret knowledge higher than our feeble human understanding and, in true Lovecraftian fashion, tying the feline form to its Egyptian spiritual roots (a trope that he often employed as a shorthand for lost knowledge and the perils of narrow modern thought).

Sure enough, the night after the boy’s prayer, the living cats of Ulthar converge on the house of the couple who killed their brethren. When the townsfolk notice that the lights in the house on the edge of town aren’t turning back on at night they investigate only to find two skeletons, picked clean of meat. After this event law passes in Ulthar that no human shall kill a cat.

The Cats of Ulthar is a perfect example of how horror can challenge the human hubris seen in horrendous acts like big game hunting, inverting assumed rules of existence to promote humility. It is relevant in the wake of the killing of Cecil the Lion partially because it enables a divine retribution on those who would commit such arrogant crimes against nature (which is satisfying), but also because it challenges our own assumptions of morality (which is humbling).

Due to the place we’ve put ourselves in our own historical narrative we operate under a self serving rule: that which is human is good. But maybe we don’t know any better than the cats. This code, which has its roots in our biological imperative to survive, allows us to destroy beautiful things, other animals that are no less important than us. We’re all just animals, after all, and cosmically you’re no more special than a cat, no matter how many of them you kill