I’ve been on a cosmic horror kick lately, and what I’d really like to read is stories or novels of the awful and unfathomable on a spaceship. Stories where we go to them, poke what shouldn’t be poked, scan what shouldn’t be scanned, and things proceed from there.
Blindsight by Peter Watts. One of the few books in recent memory to genuinely give me the creeps.
Blindsight by Peter Watts (firewall series)
Hyperion by Dan Simmons
Revelation Space series by Alastair Reynolds
Alien by Alan Dean Foster
Thanks for the recs.
It’s not exactly Cthulhu but the revelation space has ships that are monstrous and so old that people barely ever go to most of the parts of them. Could be worth a read.
Alastair Reynolds is the author. It’s not really horror exactly but some screwed up stuff in em. That’s all I got for you sorry! I’ll follow this to see what others suggest
I’m surprised, because there’s some obvious answers to this I don’t see here.
Blindsight A bunch of zombies, led by a vampire fly into deep interstellar space to rendezvous with an alien object that doesn’t understand or care about them.
The God Engines by John Scalzi. VERY different from Scalzi’s other work. FTL works because of psionic aliens who are horrifically tortured by priests to force them to warp space.
The Outside by Ada Hoffman. AI gods rule the universe and are horrific.
The Sollan Empire books by Christopher Ruocchio have MANY elements of this (and other SciFi tropes). The alien race at war with humans worship dark gods from outside the galaxy who want to destroy reality. They also consider humans to be an edible slave race and you’ll encounter the horrific things they do to humans right in book 1, but they really get into that in the most recent book.
Hyperion If the Shrike isn’t a form of cosmic horror, IDK what is.
Sphere by Michael Crichton. Ok, technically a submarine base, but there IS a space ship…
Not quite cosmic horror, but kind of fitting what you’re looking for in the “shouldn’t have been poked” sense:
The Three Body problem – but particularly the second book The Dark Forest – which has a somewhat novel solution for the Fermi paradox. Don’t shine your flashlight in a forest full of monsters, real or imagined. Become the monster.
The Stars are Legion is a sort of body horror writ on a space colony scale. Won’t spoil it too much, but have you ever wanted human mutation taken to the extreme – to the point of megastructures made of humanity?
The Sparrow, sometimes referred to as Jesuits in Space, is sort of a Heart of Darkness type tale where well meaning missionary/anthropologist types poke things they shouldn’t. They don’t unleash cosmic horror, but just the horror of truly unknowable otherness. It resonates with some and falls flat with others.
I haven’t read the book, but watched the movie. I think Event Horizon might be what you’re looking for.
I’ve heard references to these sorts of stories in the 40k universe, but again I haven’t read the books.
There’s a theory that Event Horizon happened in the distant past of the WH40k universe.
