Apartment 205

 

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 the maddening horror of it all. Slokker (our point-of-view character), using a psychomantium, discovers that our conscious life and what we take to be reality is all a lie. Moreover, Samuels goes on to reveal the nature of that lie, and not only is the revelation cool, but it is also frightening as hell.