History CosmicHorrorStory / Literature

** In ''Franchise/TheDarkTower'' several hints are dropped regarding entities and realities of this magnitude, especially in regards to "Todash Darkness and the unspeakable things that dwell there in the black never between realities". [[spoiler:The scenes in Book Seven regarding Roland, Susannah, and Oy fleeing through Castle Discordia from one of these things that somehow got OUT of Todash are laced with suggestive themes about what would happen when the Tower falls and Todash sets these critters loose on all the many universes.]]

** ''Literature/TheLaundryFiles'' take place in a world where bureaucratic top secret government agencies even more covert and shadowy than MI5 and the CIA battle {{Eldritch Abomination}}s attracted to reality after Alan Turing discovered a theory that allowed the user to warp reality with computers and the [[{{Ghostapo}} Nazis attempted to summon the Great Old Ones using the souls of those slaughtered in the Holocaust]] to win the Second World War. CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, [[TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt where the Elder Gods devour the world]], is definitely going to happen; the only question is how long we've got, and the best estimates have it as a matter of a few years... if we're lucky. In ''The Labyrinth Index'', [[spoiler:an avatar of Nyarlathotep is the new PM, and Cthulhu is attempting to become the President of the USA]].

* '''''Humans''''', or rather their evolutionary descendants, are the cosmic horrors in Walter Jon Williams' short story [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaurs_(short_story) Dinosaurs]]. Millions of years in the future humanity has been genetically engineered into multiple forms that effectively behave like hive insects; they're intelligent but no longer capable of thinking or acting outside of their programmed roles. They no longer even understand the idea of individuals having any worth, meaning that they nonchalantly slaughter billions of lesser species who just happen to be in the way.

* Several of Creator/ColinWilson's works dabble in this; ''The Mind Parasites'' in particular plunges in head first, and ''The Space Vampires'' was the inspiration for ''Film/{{Lifeforce}}'', described in the film section.

* ''Literature/TheCroning'' by Laird Barron is about an AncientConspiracy involving a race of [[AliensAreBastards rather sadistic]] {{Puppeteer Parasite}}s with very insidious intentions for mankind, who are the spawn of an interplanetary (and possibly interdimensional, and even intertemporal) entity only known as Old Leech. They use human bodies to disguise their true forms and characters unlucky enough to uncover their existence usually wish they hadn't. They can also be found in many of Barron's short stories, including ''The Men From Porlock'', ''Mysterium Tremendum'' and ''The Broadsword''.

* Creator/IsaacAsimov's "Nightfall" invokes this premise not with a paranormal deity, but with a natural and real phenomenon. On the planet Lagash, the night sky is only visible every two thousand years, during an eclipse[[note]]Lagash is in a system with multiple stars, so that only once every 2000 years do they all line up perfectly enough that there are none of them visible - the rest of the time, at least ''one'' of them is always in the sky[[/note]]. The concept of "darkness" is so foreign to them that one of the characters needs the concept explained, and torches are an experimental new technology. These eclipses have seemed to coincide with the collapse of past civilizations. A new scientific theory postulates that the night sky, in all its awesome, terrible wonder, has driven every previous civilization mad. On the eve of the next eclipse, the citizens of Lagash are about to find out whether this theory is correct. [[spoiler:It is.]]
** Asimov's story "Literature/{{Jokester}}" uses this as TheReveal. [[spoiler:An unknown alien power is watching humanity, and is powerful enough to add or remove concepts from the minds of all living beings. The sense of humor was an experiment on the part of this alien power - and as soon as humans taint the experiment by discovering it, humanity's sense of humor is destroyed on the spot.]]

** ''Literature/TheWarOfTheWorlds'', in which a race of [[StarfishAliens Martians]] arrives on Earth in cylinders containing hundreds of them each. They build gigantic fighting machines capable of leveling cities and killing enormous groups of people very quickly. The military uses just about ''everything'' that would have been available at the time, ranging from canons to the ironclad ''Thunder Child'' (the ironclad is even replaced by an [[NuclearOption atomic bomb]] in the 1953 film), and the best they can do is occasionally ''stall'' the Martians before being incinerated. By the second half of the book England is a deserted wasteland with barely anyone left alive. The narrator himself refers to the invasion as "the beginning of the rout of civilization". [[spoiler:The only thing that saves humanity is the Martians' bodies being vulnerable to unfamiliar bacteria.]]

* ''LightNovel/TheUnexploredSummonBloodSign'': The main premise is that the White Queen, the TopGod of the setting who is seen as an incarnation of benevolence, is actually an EldritchAbomination who doesn't care for humanity as a whole. She does love one person, the main character Kyousuke... in an extremely [[BlueAndOrangeMorality inhuman fashion]], as she sees no problem with making his life a living hell. Kyousuke does manage to defeat her and thwart her plans repeatedly, but only because she doesn't mind losing and so never uses her full power.

* ''Literature/{{Worm}}'' has quite a few elements of cosmic horror, particularly in the Endbringers, horrifically powerful monsters that regularly obliterate major population centers. The efforts of all the heroes and villains combined is really only enough to stall them and limit the damage until Scion, the first and most powerful parahuman, shows up to actually push them back. Even then he is apparently unable to decisively defeat them once and for all (it turns out this is actually because [[spoiler:he was never told to actually kill the Endbringers, just to fight them off. When instructed to actually kill them, he does so without trouble]]. Near the end of the series it's revealed that [[spoiler:Scion is actually the avatar of an Entity, one of a race of [[EldritchAbomination Eldritch Abominations]] that devour entire ''planets'' to reproduce. All superpowers in the setting are due to shards of these Entities attaching to people, as part of their reproductive cycle. The final arc is about what happens when Scion learns that EvilFeelsGood]]. The setting ultimately tilts towards LovecraftLite. [[spoiler:Through their combined efforts, the parahumans of multiple dimensions are able to destroy the true body of Scion.]] The SequelSeries ''Ward'' deals with humanity slowly recovering after the results of the original story, although they (unsurprisingly) have a whole host of new horrific things to deal with.

* Several of Creator/ColinWilson's works dabble in this; ''The Mind Parasites'' in particular plunges in head first, and ''The Space Vampires'' was the inspiration for the film ''Film/{{Lifeforce}}'', above.

* ''Literature/{{Worm}}'' has quite a few elements of cosmic horror, particularly in the Endbringers, horrifically powerful monsters that regularly obliterate major population centers. The efforts of all the heroes and villains combined is really only enough to stall them and limit the damage until Scion, the first and most powerful parahuman, shows up to actually push them back. Even then he is apparently unable to decisively defeat them once and for all (it turns out this is actually because [[spoiler:he was never told to actually kill the Endbringers, just to fight them off. When instructed to actually kill them, he does so without trouble]]. Near the end of the series it's revealed that [[spoiler:Scion is actually the avatar of an Entity, one of a race of [[EldritchAbomination Eldritch Abominations]] that devour entire ''planets'' to reproduce. All superpowers in the setting are due to shards of these Entities attaching to people, as part of their reproductive cycle. The final arc is about what happens when Scion learns that EvilFeelsGood]]. The setting ultimately tilts towards LovecraftLite. [[spoiler:Through their combined efforts, the parahumans of multiple dimensions are able to destroy the true body of Scion.]] The SequelSeries ''Ward'' deal with humanity slowly recovering after the results of the original story, although they (unsurprisingly) have a whole host of new horrific things to deal with.

* Literature/ItsJustAScratch features this. Even in a world where humans, wizards, vampires, and werewolves co-exist, there still are things far beyond the main characters' understandings. [[spoiler: The angel that appears to Carmine definitely counts, its presence being malevolent enough that a broken talon of its is what drove the antagonist to literal insanity. Worse, there are implied to be others like it.]]

* ''Literature/ItsJustAScratch'' starts as an urban fantasy with elements of psychological horror. Then [[spoiler: the ''[[EldritchAbomination eldritch abomination]]' angel shows up, and everything goes south fast]]. Worse yet? [[spoiler: The artifact of doom that caused everything to go wrong was just the angel's talon, and there's implication that there are more of them out there.]]

* Literature/ItsJustAScratch features this. Even in a world where humans, wizards, vampires, and werewolves co-exist, there still are things far beyond the main characters' understandings. [[spoiler: The angel that appears to Carmine definitely counts, its presence being malevolent enough that a broken talon of its is what drove the antagonist to literal insanity. Worse, there are implied to be others like it.]]

** ''Literature/TheRedTower'' is about the conflict between an eldritch factory for disturbing novelties, and the surrounding wastelands eroding back it into the natural order of nothingness, as described by a narrator who seems to have [[GoMadFromTheRevelation gone mad from a revelation which they are now trying to explain through metaphor]].

* Liu Cixin's ''Remembrance of Earth's Past'' trilogy, starting from ''Literature/TheThreeBodyProblem'', is a big example of sci-fi Cosmic Horror. Humanity made FirstContact with an alien civilization, the Trisolarians, who intend to colonize Earth to flee from their uninhabitable home world. They are magnitudes beyond Earth in technology and had locked down Earth's scientific development before their invasion even begins, and when they finally arrive, a single probe obliterates the entirety of Earth Fleet in minutes, before the audience is revealed to that [[spoiler:the entire universe operates underneath The Dark Forest Principle: with civilizations being naturally wary of other civilizations that it is far too easy to have [[DoUntoOthersBeforeTheyDoUntoUs the various civilizations completely annihilate all of the other civilizations]] is seen as the universal norm, plunging the entire story into hopelessness as everyone in the universe is hostile to each other by nature, and way beyond anything the Humans ''and'' [[NormalFishInATinyPond the Trisolarians]] could hope to survive against. By the third book, a third civilization having noticed both worlds casually destroys Trisolaran and later obliterates the entirety of Solar System by flattening it into 2D, and all that the few stranded survivors can do is to hide and preserve whatever traces of humanity were left, since the universe is completely hopeless. Even worse is that it is said that The Dark Forest Principle has been in-effect since as far back as when life first manifested in the universe: back when the universe was ''10 Dimensional'': it had been through various destructive conflicts between the advanced civilizations that caused the upper seven Dimensions to be annihilated all the way down to the 3D universe that our story takes place in; with Humankind discovering trace remnants of the Fourth Dimension that are slowly dissolving, and that these very same dimension-destroying weapons are still causing so much destruction across the universe that the Third Dimension is close to being completely destroyed...]]

* [[Literature/ItsJustAScratch. It's Just A Scratch]] features this. Even in a world where humans, wizards, vampires, and werewolves co-exist, there still are things far beyond the main characters' understandings. [[spoiler: The angel that appears to Carmine definitely counts, its presence being malevolent enough that a broken talon of its is what drove the antagonist to literal insanity. Worse, there are implied to be others like it.]]