Lovecraft Mythos - Cosmic Horror

The balancing point of “cozy Lovecraftian horror” is going to be subjective. It needs to at least work as a weird tale on its own; it needs to be a part of or allude to the Mythos in a way that the readers can recognize and respond to. Jose Cruz’ four elements of Familiarity, Sensuousness, Distance, and Fun are all important—but three of those, at least, are typical of most Mythos stories by default. Readers rarely identify with finding our great-great-great-grandma was a Deep One or Ape Princess, or experience the anxiety of living in the attic room of a witch house and dealing with an extradimensional rodent infestation when they really should be focusing on their finals. The Fun aspect of cozy horror is probably the trickiest and most argumentative aspect of the whole business.

That being said, I believe “On Safari in R’lyeh and Carcosa with Gun and Camera” (2020) by Elizabeth Bear stands out as a very good representation of cozy Lovecraftian horror. The overall shape of the narrative is intensely familiar: how many scions of Innsmouth (never mentioned under that name) have come back home, in how many different variations? Yet the way the story is told is relatively light and novel: a fifty-something female physics professor with tenure and a penchant for sushi. A perfect setup for any number of funny-because-its-true comments about the lives of women in academia.

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It is the kind of good, clean fun that you can have when you learn to stop worrying and love the Lovecraft Mythos—and it managed to do it without naming Deep Ones, without running across a copy of the Necronomicon, and only mentioning Miskatonic Univeristy once and in regards to a failed graduate thesis in genetics. If the rules at play seem to owe a little more to the Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game than Lovecraft’s original, then at least Bear has the good sense not to recapitulate the entire Mythos, August Derleth style. She gives just enough lore to keep things moving, and no more.