A common trope in cosmic-leaning horror is the existence of things which are incomprehensible to either humans as whole or to the viewpoint character in particular. Books which irreversibly twist the minds of those who read them, creatures whose accursed forms drip with madness—
But of course this presents an issue:
How do you write about something that's supposed to be impossible for people to understand?
There are two routes which I tend to prefer: either psychedelic horror (with all the dreamy false-logic that implies) or weird horror.
I've talked before about psychedelic horror, and how I try to create a feeling of slippery unease with the way the world shifts around the reader. "Contamination" and "Antlion" are both attempts to play with that, but I think you can see traces of it in almost everything I write. Especially the smut. I just love psychedelic horror, you know?
On the other hand, you have surreal horror. A different sort of dream logic: an almost childlike world where there's no particular reason that something that seems normal and familiar can't suddenly twist to become hostile and strange. The rubber ducky in your bath bares its teeth hungrily; vegetables scream in terror. One of the most memorable examples of weird horror, one that's never far from my thoughts, was a short story in which the viewpoint character's shit screamed and suffered as he flushed it down the toilet—fecal matter recast as living afterbirths, misshapen and bloody (I believe it was in Pseudopod, but I haven't been able to find it. Maybe it was in The Drabblecast?).
It's the same sort of horror that brings you stuff like Persephone Possum's A Quickie for Cockcaged Cowboys, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard's rock opera Murder of the Universe, and an absolutely dizzying array of similarly horrific stories. It proceeds according to its own internal logic with no concern for its readers' comfort or comprehension: it simply is.
Done badly, it's just stuff happening for no apparent reason.
I think that the implication of internal logic is an absolutely necessary part of it—the creeping suspicion that everything that's happening makes perfect sense, the invitation to try to understand it even though you know that you'll inevitably fail and that success would distort you into something that isn't quite you any more—
I adore it.
