Stonefish by Scott R. Jones

Jones summons forth abstruse theology in the language of dystopian thriller, creating the thinking person’s visceral cosmic dread. Years ago, tech mogul and futurist guru Gregor Makarios disappeared completely from public record. However, Den Secord, a journalist for a minor virtual reality publication, finds a fragment that somehow escaped the purge. Following a hunch that …

Call for Submissions: Outsiders Within

After years of reading cosmic horror and publishing books, I'm fusing the two like some eldritch phenomena. I'm looking for tales of cosmic dread about people with embarrassing secrets, hobbies they don't mention, and other things that make them different from what those around them believe. Full details here. If you know someone else who …

The Call of the Void

Rather enjoying the cosmic dread in The Call of the Void podcast. Set in modern day New Orleans, the story follows Topher, a young man trying to save his father from a mysterious condition affecting him physically and mentally, and Etsy, a young woman who must confront a dark past and overcome the destructive forces …

Cosmic Head Scratch

One of the common themes of Lovecraft's oeuvre and cosmic dread in general is that the threat comes not from some moral imperfection or defined antagonism but from mutual incomprehension, from a universe filled with intelligences so different from humans in outlook and scale that we are irrelevant. The analogy of humans seeming as ants …

Twelve Rules for Life in an Uncaring Cosmos

All who bear the burden of unholy knowledge know that Yog-Sothoth, the gate and the key, is perceived in congruence, and that the reasoned half of the mind is our protection from horrific truths. Thus, when I encountered a headline about a forthcoming Lovecraftian project and read the producer not as Jordan Peele but as …