An essay about God, Christmas, and the birth of Jesus Christ is a strange place to find a discussion of H.P. Lovecraft, but that's where I came upon another Lovecraft sighting. As a bonus, there is also the phrase cosmic horror in the title of the essay. The essay is called "It's All Cosmic Horror Without Christmas," and it's by Brandon Morse. Go to the website RedState in order to read it. Mr. Morse's essay is dated today, December 23, 2025.
I'm planning to write more about cosmic horror in 2026. I'm afraid I haven't exhausted that topic yet. There is always more to read, more to learn, more ideas about which to think and write. One of my topics in the new year will be August Derleth on H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, also a possible difference between horror and terror.
August Derleth was a Roman Catholic. H.P. Lovecraft was famously an atheist or materialist, at least at the surface, or at least a few layers down from the surface. I doubt that they would have agreed very much on what constitutes cosmic horror. I'm not sure that Derleth would have had the same kind of depth in his thinking as Lovecraft. In any case, in his essay, Brandon Morse approaches cosmic horror from the side of the believer. His approach gives us something different to think about in terms of cosmic horror. He even mentions the horrors of the Abyss. One difference between the Christian and Lovecraftian viewpoints is that Lovecraft did not allow for a protector. We live at the mercy of malign entities. The Christian on the other hand believes that in God we have a protector of matchless power, thus Mr. Morse's title.
The following quotation is from Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). Since reading it, these words and the idea underlying them have been on my mind:
"I am mighty tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man [Is Hard to Find] brutal and sarcastic. The stories are hard, but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. . . . When I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror." (From a letter to Betty Hester, July 1955; presumably the ellipses are not in the original.)
An atheist or materialist is certainly capable of apprehending horror on a cosmic scale, but can his apprehension compare to that of a Christian, or perhaps more specifically to that of a Roman Catholic? I don't know. But I would like to read more from Flannery O'Connor's letter and to learn more about her conception of horror, in other words, what in her view is the "right" horror. She may or may not have been writing about horror on a specifically cosmic scale, but in Christian teaching is there much space that separates personal from cosmic horror? Or does cosmic horror descend into our lives when given a chance, distilled from vastness into potent, earthly, personal horror?
Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley
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