Weird Murmur

Junji Ito, Remina  (Shogakukan and VIZ Media: 2005, 2020). Ito’s work surgically draws a sharp contrast between human-caused horror and cosmic horror. The cosmic horror of this story hits on a grand scale, highlighting our insignificance in terms of time, speed, size, and causal impact. As Remina nears Earth, it remains totally indifferent, utterly destructive, but morally neutral and uncriticizable. But, despite our insignificance, humans cause an immense amount of suffering. Even our loving connections turn poisonous and lead to disaster. This book is horror through and through. It manages to show how vulnerable and insignificant we are and, at the same time, how much terror and pain we have the power to cause. We are immensely horrible, pathetic and feeble. 

  Mark Samuels, "Apartment 205" in The White Hands and Other Weird Tales  (Tartarus Press, 2003). Stories of cosmic horror are often most effective when the specifics of the terrifying discovery (or the collation of the facts) are ambiguous. The reader is typically left in the dark with only a vague hint of what drove a protagonist to lose their mind. We don’t see the horrifying passages in the Necronomicon. We don’t peek behind the veil and see the Great God Pan. We don’t get to read Act II of the “King in Yellow.” There is a good reason for this, as readers, we would almost certainly be disappointed. It is much better to leave the details vague because anything that can be said will undermine the great mystery and the horror the reader injects. These are usually truths that we aren’t supposed to be able to handle anyway! With that said, Mark Samuels pulls off the impossible. He reveals the mind-blowing discovery made by the protagonist in “Apartment 205” and still preserves...