• Note: The first backlinks should take you to the FINAL annotations doc for this source.

My annotations:

The importance of SETTING in horror

• [*] Horror fiction is deeply concerned with ambiance, place, and environment. . . . While lesser horror uses stock scenarios (haunted houses, misty graveyards), ”most of the finest pieces of horror writing explore the expression of place in highly specific and deeply innovative ways” (Page 1) // purple highlight
  • my thoughts: the backrooms are a PERFECT example of this!

The “Natural” vs. the “natural”

• [I] insistence that horror does not deal with the natural but rather with the supernatural, as the editors of these volumes focus on the general literary strategies at work that rely on nature and naturalism . . . But as we will see, this overlooks and misunderstands the functioning of explorations of place in horror.

• [i] The Natural: The Natural, on the other hand, we might take to refer to this “outside” as it appears to reflecting subjects via the mediation of our cultural, scientific, and linguistic representations. (Page 2)

  • tl;dr: The Natural = reveals itself as a reflection of the “outside” world (Through a cultural, scientific, and linguistic lens ?? Check interpretation / distinction with notebookLM?

• [I] The point is not that there is there is no ultimate autonomous reality outside of our heads, but rather that the ideas and representations that we have about this reality, what we call “nature,” are not identical with the real, and in taking them to be identical we precisely occult the real and so miss out on a deeper and perhaps more satisfying form of realism. (Page 2) // green highlight

  • my thoughts: This is a very interesting rabbit hole
  • tl;dr: basically, it sounds like what we THINK is “reality” (a.k.a., “nature”) is NOT synonymous with what IS “real” … and equating the two (reality vs. the real) robs us of a deeper and more satisfying form of realism

• [I] In other words, the nature that we think, and think that we see, is a deformed version of the real, transformed by complex perceptual and cognitive processes. As Graham Harman has somewhat paradoxically put it : “nature is not natural and can never be naturalized” (Page 2) // purple highlight

  • tl;dr: Our faculties determine our reality.
  • tl;dr: we only perceive the “natural” as a deformed version of the “real” (warped by our faculties)
  • tl;dr: “Weird fiction is an expression of fidelity towards the real, demanding a deformation of the natural.“
  • my thoughts: Double slit experiment.
    • Come back to this!!!

• [*] Weirdly enough, this meta-natural realism, not in its reality but in its expression, often seems to evoke what we call the supernatural, if indeed we understand this word to designate something that stands opposed to, or beyond, the Natural. (Page 3) //

  • my thoughts: Dissonance and incongruence between our minds and the outer world as it appears.

• [*] The genius of horror and the supernatural precisely lies in its refusal to accept the Natural as ultimate or identical with reality. (Page 3) // green highlight

“When you stare into the void, it stares back at you” — Discerning “reality” with our faculties

• [I] the inutility of trying to naively suture together the real and the Natural (Page 17) //

  • my thoughts: futility

• [I] The weird expressionism of horror, in its striving to express the unnamable while leaving it dark, at least leads us towards a real appreciation of the difficulty of thinking and representing places (Page 17) //

• [*] we only blindly touch upon the real look for the overlooked (and not just to look at the overlooked). Re-encountering familiar scenes after having read horror is to see these scenes with heightened senses, straining for sight beyond sight. Thus the weird hardly leads us away from the places in which we dwell. On the contrary, it brings us back to them with x-ray attentiveness and extraordinary humility. (Page 17) //

  • my thoughts: BOOM!!!

• [I] an encounter with reality, not a dream or delusion — as seen in Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" (Page 5)

• [*] The same inversion is suggested by the figure of the veil, a trope that, as Pierre Hadot has explored, was long used in alchemical and other occult circles to refer to the concealed secret orders of the natural world. (Page 5) //

  • Look more into this!

• [*] few will deny that their senses have ever achieved such knife-edge sharpness as they do in moments when they confront the terrifying and unknown (Page 3) //

  • my thoughts: This slaps.

• [I] the otherness that we are attending to echoes the strangeness of other human beings

• [I] Objects slip through our fingers in both a literal and theoretical sense, and when they do they reveal more of themselves to us, present us with new depths and concealed aspects, aspects of the object independent from any theoretical or practical grasp that we might have of them, but which might matter with respect to the combinations that they can compose. (Page 5-6) //

  • What do the objects (i.e., chair, captains stuff, shoes, furniture, stop sign, etc) & the architecture itself say in the backrooms?

• [I] (Partially) Skipped: an account of reality in which what we call the natural is but one interpretation of past possibility, and not in any way an expression of the ultimate nature of the real. (Page 6) //

  • my thoughts: The backrooms misremembering itself is only one interpretation of reality, albeit somewhat seemingly memorized w/ people but yet somehow not levels.

• [I] it is the gap between the real and the natural that opens the space for a criticism that does more than envision literature simply as a sweetened means for delivering the dry truths of scientific discoveries, but rather as an art that alludes to an all-important yet obscure reality to which we must learn to attend (Page 3) //

  • my thoughts: The science/function of reality is not as interesting/compelling as delivering the same truths in storytelling form.

• [I] Reckoning with the fact that reality is sometimes stranger than fiction, however, sometimes means accepting that the actual can be confounded with the delusions of an unhealthy mind. (Page 4) //

  • [*] our inadequate hold on the real generates fictions that examine the mental state of individuals tortured by their obsessions with realities that do not exist (Page 6) //

• [I] an attunement, a straining after or intensified awareness of the presence of others that also relate, beyond our perceptions and cognitions // We might say that this is an awareness, and not a knowledge, of the weird reality of ecosystems. (Page 4) //

• [I] These are all, admittedly, gaps that are glimpsed between the Nature of science and the Nature of the lifeworld of ordinary perception, but they do remind us of the horrifying uncanniness of the cosmos, and the complicity of our ordinary ways of perceiving in the perpetuation of our collective ecocide. (Page 4) //

  • tl;dr: our complacency is complicit in watching the world burn // “some men just want to watch the world burn”
  • What might be the collective greater harm of the backrooms, then?

• [I] Even what seems most present to us, the objects around us, our surroundings, are apt to dupe us, to seem one thing and to actually be another. (Page 6) //

  • my thoughts: Our minds can play tricks on us.

• [I] No object is ever revealed to us in its totality, each has another perspective from which it might be viewed, or a concealed otherness, and that is only speaking of the object from the viewpoint of a vision without dynamism. (Page 6) //

• [*] Nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates (Page 6) //

  • my thoughts: cosmic horror
  • What other theories touch on this?! Double slit experiment??

• [I] It seems that we are encountering things that shatter all knowable categories. (Page 9) //

• [I] the ways in which our scientific knowledge of these deeper dimensions of reality already humiliate us, … correspond to the limited and limiting spatial and temporal capacities of our brains. (Page 9-10) //

• [*] we are possessed by nature, and that nature, for want to a better word, is possessed, ready to annihilate us for the unthinking ways in which we have tried to impose our mark upon the real (Page 10) //

  • my thoughts: The backrooms are hostile to us and trying to kill us.
  • what is the etymology of “annihilation”?

Non-Euclidean Geometry

• [I] What, after all, does it mean for something to “not be supposed” to be someplace ? (Page 11) //

  • [I] “The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth in a place just before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp and then the reeds and wind-gnarled trees of the marsh flats. Beyond the marsh flats and the natural canals lies the ocean and, a little farther down the coast, a derelict lighthouse.” (3) (Page 11)

• [I] After all, a tower is athing that extends up out of the ground, and yet this ‘tower’ is said to plunge into theearth. The tower would thus seem to be inverted, indeed to be something other than atower, perhaps to be a tunnel, which is indeed what some of the other characters in the story do call it, albeit not the narrator. (Page 12) //

• [*] whatever it is does not fit with any of our names or descriptions, that it is a thing with no proper analogue in our language and no proper precursor in our past perceptions (Page 12) //

  • my thoughts: It's like asking someone who's never seen a dog to draw a dog. It’s indescribable & incomprehensible

• weird writing is always in the end naturalized, and that is to say retuned to the world of reason, order, and anthropomorphically ordered representations, if only in the inverted sense of presenting us with the supernatural. Doubtless the supernatural is no more the real than the Natural, and perhaps the problem with horror is that it may tend to produce a kind of paralysis and existential nihilism within its readers, in the way that a blood-curdling scream can freeze us in our tracks. (Page 17) //

  • my thoughts: To describe/experience “the weird” as we perceive, it would inherently violate our understanding of it — we cannot truly articulate this world, we can only attempt to communicate in the ways we (already) know how

• [I] Living in the Anthropocene implies that we are no longer at home, or that our home is no longer comfortable but filled with terrors and depths that are perhaps best captured by the metaphysics of the weird that we have uncovered in our explorations of weird fiction. Living in the Anthropocene implies not only that we are aware that the world has dimensions that exceed the grasp of our senses, but also that there are dimensions or depths to the real that exist beyond even those of science

  • my thoughts: the ULTIMATE mind fuck

• [I] When we strive to render ourselves conscious of the ways in which we are bound up in this world, … , we may feel that we have replaced a more typical or alienated opposition between subjects and objects with one in which humans and things are tightly bound in relationships of mutual co-implication. (Page 14) //

  • add handwritten note(s)

• [*] the more vividly we seem to see the thing, the less sense that we have of its being clearly nameable or even identifiable. (Page 12) //

• [I] the consummate inadequacy (Page 12)

• [I] This in turn suggests to us that the “real” Real is beyond that which is presented to us, situated in a withdrawn place that cannot be reached via the categories of language or even the categories of our perception. (Page 12) //

  • my thoughts: Hence, the uncanny valley effect.

• [I] Instead they render the entire place a zone of disorientation, though this disorientation might be said to spring not from an absence of reality, but from an excess of the real. (Page 12) //

  • my thoughts: Too much familiarity = horror.

• [*] Yet what scientists do to create order is to impose limits, separating the known and knowable from the unknown and irrelevant. (Page 13) //

  • my thoughts: ASYNC

• [I] a “mandala,” a circle in the forest in order to make sense of the larger forest itself (Page 13) //

  • my thoughts: The levels in the labyrinth contain multitudes. Each level = circle/mandala.

• [I] Where is the absolute point of transition ? (Page 13) //

  • my thoughts: The threshold.

• [I] ecosystems that are somehow of two kinds at once and which are neither at once, ecosystems that confront us with the multiplicity of the real in its disorder rather than a reduction of this real into order via artificial delimitations and interpretative frameworks.

  • my thoughts: Everything begins to melt together.
  • Everything Everywhere All at Once

Uncanniness

• [*] Example: when visiting Chernobyl, found himself discombobulated, as if nature itself was going on normally despite the disaster … (emphasizing) that nature has the power to reclaim the world after we are gone, but a more uncanny point might be made here, namely that the world we live in is getting ever weirder, the disconnections between our felt experiences of places and their deeper realities ever more gaping. (Page 15-16) //

Famous influences

• [*] H.P. Lovecraft
• S.T. Joshi ???

Terms mentioned

• [i] Timothy Morton (2013) has thus described ours as the Age of Asymmetry. What he means by this is that we have suddenly entered an epoch where the gap between appearances and realities has grown to the point that we no longer understand the world of the senses as the real world, but rather as a cover over another world of depths that we can fathom with science. That is to say that our lives are more and more oriented around responding to dimensions of reality that do not form part of Nature, at least insofar as Nature corresponds to the world of our situated senses and ordinary perception (Page 16)

• [i] non-Euclidean geometry

• • [I] alien landscape (Page 11) //

Horror & Madness

• [i] supernatural horror (Page 3)

• [i] psychological horror (Page 6)

  • the psychological aspects of horror (Page 8) //

• [i] In cosmic horror, madness is generated by a violence exercised by “outer, unknown forces” (Lovecraft 1973, 15)

  • (Page 6-7)

• [I] In Lovecraft, Madness is thus the testament and seal of having experienced the real. (Page 8) //

• [*] “THE MOST MERCIFUL THING in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. 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.” — Lovecraft (Page 7) //

  • [I] TL;DR: Lovecraft's interest is in the "background" or "terrifying vistas of reality."

Realism: Natural vs. natural

• [i] The “natural”: the world outside of our minds

• [i] The “Natural”: the world (as we individually and collectively) perceive it inside of our minds

• [i] Weird realism involves the insistence that there is a reality outside and beyond the senses, while at the same time claiming that this reality can, in occult and incomprehensible ways, interfere with and challenge our reality, altering it and transforming it in sometimes inscrutable, contingent, or weirdly super-Natural (my note: supernatural) ways. (Page 3) // green highlight

• [I] The encounter with the weird real thus brings about the dissolution of the subject, a collapse or foundering of self-knowledge. But if this is all the case, then the weird real also makes us conscious, as in the lines above, of the fact of our consciousness as reductive. It is hence in itself a thing of danger to our ecological well being, since it is productive of an illusory knowledge of place, where the reality itself lies further outside. (Page 15) //

  • my thoughts: Cosmic horror 101
  • my thoughts: This is deep & meta AF
  • “Reductive” = inadequate?

• [i] the real, while never fully present to our minds or our senses, appears to us as dark, weird, veered, or uncanny (Page 4) //