Best Weird Fiction & Cosmic/Eldritch Horror (without H.P.) ?

[Von Ether]

Richard Chambers's Yellow King?

 

[TheSword]

From an RPG point of view, the Runelords trilogy of adventure paths feature Mythos creatures and ideas.

More specifically the AP Strange Aeons is directly influenced and is pretty damn good.

 

[Tun Kai Poh]

Reading his stuff, maybe one could tell he was gay? A friend's wife was convinced early on, I never really could tell. I know his later books were more fantasy than anything else, which I was not terribly interested in, vs the sci-fi, and horror as my guilty pleasure type reading.

I remember working in a computer game development studio in the early 2000s, and I was casually retelling the story of how Clive Barker joined the Undying computer game project and immediately asked them to turn the edgy tattooed lead into a more conventionally attractive investigator, someone that Barker "would find more sexy." One of my colleagues, who was a "huge Barker fan" was stunned and shocked to learn that Barker was "ew, GAY!"

So he gave away all his books and they ended up in the hands of a less homophobic friend. Win!

Yeah, I guess it's not immediately obvious that Barker is gay, from some of his fiction!

 

[dragoner]

Yeah, I guess it's not immediately obvious that Barker is gay, from some of his fiction!

It didn't make me like him any less, and from what people said, it made some of the scenes make more sense. It would be a bummer if that is why he became less popular though. Then again, I never much repeated the thing of him being gay as I never heard it officially. It is cool that you worked on a project with him, did you meet him and everything? Was he a nice person?

 

[Hussar]

The best written cosmic horror I’ve ever read is Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy: Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance.

That is some SERIOUSLY TRIPPY fiction. Watched the movie on a flight a year or so back and I was half awake watching it. I had some bloody weird dreams I'll tell you.

 

[Tun Kai Poh]

It didn't make me like him any less, and from what people said, it made some of the scenes make more sense. It would be a bummer if that is why he became less popular though. Then again, I never much repeated the thing of him being gay as I never heard it officially. It is cool that you worked on a project with him, did you meet him and everything? Was he a nice person?

No, no, I read an interview with Barker where he specifically talked about wanting his protagonist to be someone he would find attractive. I appreciated a lot of design decisions behind Undying.

 

[TheIdeaOfGood]

I love Barker's works and I would not consider them cosmic horror. But they all had a certain sense of wonder to them, something that deeply resonated within me and which is one of the reason why I would probably not shy away if the supernatural were revealed as real. A dark miracle is still a miracle. Not sure if that's a lesson one should take away from his works, but there you have it.
It's interesting, actually, but I enjoy cosmic horror not for its nihilism in most cases, but for the hint at a greater cosmos than we can perceive. So we are insignificant, the universe holds no special place and we might never get some answers...but there are at least beings which can, which do have some significance, who can make sense of it all. I find that thought oddly comforting.

 

[dragoner]

I suppose cosmic horror has an epic quality? Horror in itself is somewhat ill defined, a lot is just slasher fiction. I think Barker's truck with the supernatural is that he takes it, and makes a reason behind it, which makes it more mundane.

 

[Mallus]

Doesn’t Barker’s The Great and Secret Show contain elements of cosmic horror? The malevolently elemental Iad Ouroboros invading from the other side of the sea of dreams and all.

 

[dragoner]

I think Hellraiser, Damnation Game, and Lord of Illusions as well speak to a larger unseen universe existing, that could be seen as horror; though it's more set to each novel itself, and not unified in the way Lovecraftian mythos are.