Retro Review of Algernon Blackwood's "The Man Who Found Out" (1912) up at Fantastic Worlds

[jordan179]

"The Man Who Found Out" is an excellent example of "pure cosmic horror" in that the horror derives totally from knowledge which is (in-story) so terrible that it forever blights the minds of the knowers.  First Professor Ebor and then Dr. Laidlaw learn the contents of the Tablets of the Gods, and even though this information is short enough to be

Comments

[persephone_kore]

I think my comment over there got eaten, so I'm going to try to reproduce it in brief here.

You may be able to expand point 5 regarding the contents of the message, about contradicting the Bible: "Scriptures of the World" is sometimes used to refer to translations of the Bible into many vernacular languages, but it can also refer to collections of the writings belonging to multiple religions. The latter strikes me as a more likely thing for Dr. Ebor to have, although you could certainly make an argument for his being linguist enough to appreciate the former.

I find it interesting that while Dr. Ebor despairs by abandoning both forms of his lifelong devoted efforts to discover and disseminate the truth, Dr. Laidlaw starts off by destroying markers of time and referring to both time and death as cruel delusions -- these being things he has probably taken somewhat for granted up to this point -- and then pitches from the window books that he has apparently never taken very seriously up to this point, only tolerated out of respect for their owner/author.

[jordan179]

You may be able to expand point 5 regarding the contents of the message, about contradicting the Bible: "Scriptures of the World" is sometimes used to refer to translations of the Bible into many vernacular languages, but it can also refer to collections of the writings belonging to multiple religions. The latter strikes me as a more likely thing for Dr. Ebor to have, although you could certainly make an argument for his being linguist enough to appreciate the former.

That's a very good point! This implies among other things that the Horrid Truth was even worse than, say, the Sumerian or Mexican cosmologies -- which is a terrifying thought indeed!