About the Class
Cosmic horror is built on a particular premise: that there are things in the universe so vast, so indifferent, or so structurally incomprehensible that encountering them doesn't just frighten you — it unmakes something in how you understand the world.
This class takes that premise seriously as a craft problem. How do you write the unknowable without just being vague? How do you build dread through accumulation rather than announcement? How do you make an empty hallway scarier than a monster?
We also push back on the genre. Cosmic horror has a complicated history — Lovecraft invented it, and it's not fair to simply reduce someone to their biography, but it is interesting that his cosmic horrors emerged in the aftermath of his racism, when he tried and failed to live in New York City. Who benefits when something is declared unknowable? What gets hidden inside the idea that some things can never be understood?
The class moves between writing, reading, watching, and questioning. No horror background needed — just a willingness to sit with something uncomfortable and write from inside it.
What We're Asking
"We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
— H.P. Lovecraft
That's one answer. This class asks for others. What happens when the thing that seemed unknowable turns out to be knowable after all — just inconvenient? What happens when the monster isn't indifferent, but watching? What happens when horror isn't cosmological but structural — built into systems, inherited through memory, hidden inside the ordinary?
What We Read & Watch
qntm's There Is No Antimemetics Division — on information that erases itself from memory
Stephen King — how to make something visceral without looking away
Kane Pixels' The Backrooms — how slowness and empty space generate dread
Liminal space imagery — what makes familiar places feel structurally wrong
Donald Barthelme's numbered fragments — how form can enact disorientation
David Livingstone Smith's Making Monsters — on dehumanization and what we call a monster
What You'll Explore
How to build atmosphere through accumulation, not announcement
How to write something unknowable without just being vague
How inherited memory, bureaucratic language, and ordinary spaces become vectors of horror
How to slow a scene down until the reader feels the wrongness before they can name it
How to use the genre to ask political and structural questions, not just cosmological ones
How to listen to what your own sentences are telling you — and follow them into the dark
Sessions & Pricing
When
Thursdays, 5:30–7:00PM EST. New students welcome to join a currently running session.
Pricing
$70–100/month depending on what works for you. First session is free. No one turned away for lack of funds.