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 (firewall series)
Hyperion by Dan Simmons
Revelation Space series by Alastair Reynolds
Alien by Alan Dean Foster
Thanks for the recs.
Haven’t seen it suggested yet, so I’ll throw out Linda Nagata’s Inverted Frontier series. Without giving away too much, explorers on the periphery of a collapsed posthuman civilization launch an expedition back towards its center, and along the way find various eldritch monstrosities – of human origin and otherwise – as they try to solve the mystery of the collapse. It’s more thriller than horror in tone, but it checks your other boxes quite well.
Blindsight by Peter Watts. One of the few books in recent memory to genuinely give me the creeps.
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.
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 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.
