I’ve been told that nautical horror is having a moment.
What that means, or what any of us should do about that fact, is a little bit oblique, mainly because oceanic terror has been the quiet backbone of the horror genre for almost as long as it has existed. Stories that linger somewhere between cosmic and nautical horror loom large over our current understanding of weird fiction and dark fantasy. The subgenre has been feeding the imaginations and nightmares of readers since Stoker told us of the doomed voyage of the Demeter in Dracula. So much so, that nautical horror’s presence is sometimes taken for granted by contemporary writers and readers. I’m inclined to say that it’s existed as long as humans have been afraid of the sea and what dwells below the waves; it taps into a primordial fear that seems older than literary genre, maybe even older than the written word.
This isn’t to say that nautical horror is a marginalized or forgotten category—just the opposite. But our current conception of what the “nautical” is, or was, can sometimes artificially limit what it can be, both today and in the future. I’m more interested in a muddying of meaning, and of finding avenues through which writers, readers, and critics of all stripes can engage in the oceanic in ways that would make Lovecraft turn purple. It’s nearly impossible to talk about nautical, cosmic horror without dealing with him, so let’s follow that mention of Lovecraft. His influence clearly comprises a huge proportion of what the Anglophone genresphere thinks of as the “foundation of nautical horror.” Lovecraft’s cosmic, sea-dwelling Cthulhu mythos penetrates to a degree which seems as all-encompassing as the elder gods themselves. A lot of ink has been spilled on the man’s personal and professional racism, ableism, xenophobia, and classism, and I’m not invested in either dissecting those elements or defending his literature from those points. What I am interested in is the ways in which Lovecraft—with his own paranoia about almost everything outside of his immediate experience—was able to pull on the fears of, well, more regular folks not quite as imbued with his particular stripe of virulent prejudice. I’d argue that Lovecraft often gets away with simply tapping into anxieties about a nebulous and incomprehensible Other, which can at any time represent his personal phobia of immigrants, Black and Brown people, Jewish people, folks with disabilities, or poor people. These cloudy Others can represent the overwhelming fears of whoever happens to be reading at that moment. It’s a vacuous kind of terror, with no beginning, no end, and no real rationale other than to convey that Bad People are conspiring to Do Bad Things to you, the reader safe in your nice middle-class home. Wouldn’t it be convenient if those Bad People were not only incomprehensibly bad, but subhuman? The possibilities are boundless.
On a different axis, I’d argue that a different fundamental tenet of nautical horror can be found within Melville’s Moby Dick. The doomed voyage of Ishmael and Ahab, while mainly living in the nebulous, genre-less space that “classic literature” tends to occupy, contains elements of the spectacular and the horrific. These echoes ring in many corners of cosmic horror and literary-genre crossover. The manner in which Ishmael hopelessly narrates Ahab’s quest against a monstrous, evil, incomprehensibly huge whale sounds not altogether dissimilar to how Lovecraft would come to describe his pantheon sixty-some-odd years later.
While Melville was operating at a different juncture of history than Lovecraft, their medium for emotional catharsis is similar. Moby Dick is not a horror novel, but it could be perceived as a tragedy just as much as an adventure tale. Melville takes us on a long journey—which Ishmael initially tries to convince us is a young man’s tale of valor and adventure—but is unable to hold back the hints of tragic horror which begin to drip in through Ahab’s incessant hatred of the whale. The terror of inevitable doom, of fighting against God and nature itself, grows impossible to ignore. This brings an undeniable connection to the cosmic that Melville pulls on with the pure, spectacular enormity of the titular white whale. The inevitable tragedy and futility of man’s machinations in the face of an unerring, maybe-evil, maybe-godly force of nature lays a foundation for Lovecraft’s all-powerful pantheon of malevolent, uncaring deities. Although I feel comfortable stating that Melville’s work has considerably more depth and metaphorical rigor than Lovecraft’s stories, both loom just large and specific enough to cut off discursive awareness of other traditions in the nautical horror subgenre.
Even with such a deep history, horror is still often cursed with timeliness. The ongoing and persistent apprehension of Others can represent any number of sociopolitical fears, while the prejudice and outright xenophobic racism of authors like Lovecraft does not help the reputation of nautical (and, by extension, cosmic) horror. The looming presence of such a history begs a variety of authors to return to the sea, and the temptation to fall back on these past influences is often irresistible. Rubbing off the labels on a “Lovecraftian” cosmic horror, while repurposing the thematic and metaphorical vagueness of the Cthulhu mythos is easy. Done thoughtlessly, it reasserts those fears, paints minorities of all kinds with a dull, boring, and stereotypical brush. What’s harder, but doubtless more rewarding, is crafting an entry in the subgenre which draws from your own specific influences, literary interests, and unique metaphorical capacity. We could do with a lot more of that.
Thankfully, though, there are quite a few contemporary novels which make the subgenre their own. Rivers Solomon’s The Deep and An Unkindness of Ghosts both pull from history and from the history of horror to craft something new and stunning in oceanic horror. In John Langan’s The Fisherman, the author seeks to carry on the foundations of nautical horror by pairing it with a new cosmology all his own. Meanwhile, Ally Wilkes’ All the White Spaces and Where the Dead Wait have brought a laser focus to the queer potentialities of historical, nautical-adventure horror. Cassandra Khaw’s The Salt Grows Heavy plays with mermaid mythology with room for queer fantasy and terror in equal measure. Most recently, perhaps, Daniel Kraus’s Whalefall lingers in between the intersection of thriller, literary bildungsroman, and commercial horror in a way that defies genre classification. It’s not an accident that so many contemporary writers are building away from these perceived masters of the genre—it’s just a matter of whether the rest of the community can follow.
In taking it for granted that Lovecraft, and even more acclaimed white dude authors like Melville, Machen, or Blackwood, are an irrefutable part of the bloodline of every story, we effectively limit our own reading of contemporary cosmic and nautical horror by authors who are often working with distinct artistic lineages. In doing the work of making one scared, limited man colossally relevant to the genre, we do Lovecraft’s job for him: we prioritize the presence of monstrosity in the lineage over anything more human, or humane. We can and should look outwards, to understand different points of cultural inspiration, and not make the subgenre something as small as “Lovecraftian” horror.
Creating a new nautical horror without leaning on the racism, classism, and xenophobia of the genre’s history is by no means a light task. As difficult as it is, it’s important that we have empathy for the monstrous Other, because what we also learn throughout the fictions of Lovecraft is that there are far fewer divisions between “us” and “them” than we could ever know.
