What Is Cosmic Horror?

Cosmic horror is the name readers give to the kind of account in which the threat is the size of the universe and not the malice of a villain. This office does not use the term in its own filing. The accounts it holds, though, share three features that explain why the term was coined, and the three are easy to point to in the record.

Scale

The things in these accounts are older than anything the witness has a measure for. R'lyeh was built by the Great Old Ones in ages before terrestrial life existed. The city beyond the Mountains of Madness is a dead metropolis of stone towers, older than any life on land. The ruin in the Arabian desert predates every other the witness had studied by an order of magnitude, and its builders were reptilian. The effect on the witness is that his own history stops mattering.

Indifference

Most of what the witnesses meet does not hate them. The dossier for Azathoth describes a blind, mindless entity at the centre of infinity, kept in slumber by a court of flutes, that does not act with intent and is less a character than a constant. The Great Race of Yith took five years of a professor's life for its own purposes. The Colour Out of Space fed. The exception on file is Nyarlathotep, whose motives read as something like malice, and the Archive files that difference in its own right.

Knowledge as the hazard

In these chronicles the danger is often finding out. The Necronomicon's ledger of readers is mostly a list of fates. The leader of the Antarctic expedition set down his account to dissuade a second expedition from sailing. Nathaniel Peaslee's dreams of the library city did not stop when the exchange ended. A witness who learns the truth about Innsmouth is not given a way to unlearn it.

Where it sits in the filing

The Archive's classification scheme separates the Great Old Ones from the Outer Gods, and the Dispatch on that difference is the best companion to this one. The chronicles named above are all filed, and the Dispatch on reading order gives a way into them.