The true-weird and the dreadful \u201clarge\u201d: post millennium American horror literature

Abstract

Debate is rife on the knowability of “true” horror, especially that which is stemmed into the “beyond”, “vast” or “sublime”. European Enlightenment purports that even the overwhelming Nature can be ultimately recuperated by supersensible reason. It may be the unknown, but knowing that it is so, is a “gift”. You know to die, because you exist and reflect on your transience. The basic idea of the “beyond” always imagined a central role of the sentient “man”— he saw the world, and it has its meaning. We are safe or have an illusion of safety within what we know (even at the moment of peril in genre horror, we are assured that we know the nature of evil). A school of post millennial horror-thought, however, considers H.P. Lovecraft as a formidable dissent to this vein as he opines that the Nature does not care to be known/understood. The present study is on the “world-without-us” in the modern “true-weird” literature—especially in its post-millennial revival. Although Lovecraft has a considerable scholastic heritage, the revival of his peculiar nihilism in modern American horror is largely unexplored. “World-without-us” speaks of “the negative without any positive”—the “true” supernatural is manifested through the cold, relentless and utterly non-caring machinations of the “Large”. The literature axial to the Large is the “true-weird”—says Lovecraft, dealing with a “defeat” of human rationality against the assaults of chaos. Likewise, the resurgence of the uncaring “Large” in literature has an important commentary on the modern society, philosophy and the critical approach to both. The recent trend consisting of Michael Wehunt, Brian Evenson, John Langan, Laird Barron or to a certain extent, Thomas Ligotti treats the eldritch (emerging from the recesses of an uncaring nature) as what Levinas might call the “absolutely other”—never (in)human, not even belligerent: but distant, hibernal and immersive. An invasive entity beyond negotiation that signals the failure of the language of rationality, thus, finds an appropriation in the post 9/11 American Horror. Therefore, is the knowledge of the Large “never one, nor homogeneous, nor totalizable, but… catastrophic”? Is the Large=Nature=Indifferent? Is Nature the “true-weird”? Is the “true weird” viable—thematically or linguistically? Is a total disregard for semantics possible at all? This article aims to open an argument over the “Nature” and the “Being” in the context of American horror literature, and how it transmutes the genre expectations of the canon.