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.
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.
“The Final Architecture” series by Adrian Tchaikovsky has some elements of this.
There’s a couple of short story collections on Kindle called Space Eldritch. It’s been years since I read them, but I remember enjoying them. A little on the pulpier side, but fun.
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.
Although I wouldn’t consider it an amazing book by any means I found “Infinite” and its sequel very unsettling.
The Horus Heresy
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.
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
Clark Ashton Smith has some cosmic horror stories fitting this description.
I’m surprised, because there’s some obvious answers to this I don’t see here.
Blindsight A bunch of zombies, led by a vampire fly into deep interstellar space to rendezvous with an alien object that doesn’t understand or care about them.
The God Engines by John Scalzi. VERY different from Scalzi’s other work. FTL works because of psionic aliens who are horrifically tortured by priests to force them to warp space.
The Outside by Ada Hoffman. AI gods rule the universe and are horrific.
The Sollan Empire books by Christopher Ruocchio have MANY elements of this (and other SciFi tropes). The alien race at war with humans worship dark gods from outside the galaxy who want to destroy reality. They also consider humans to be an edible slave race and you’ll encounter the horrific things they do to humans right in book 1, but they really get into that in the most recent book.
Hyperion If the Shrike isn’t a form of cosmic horror, IDK what is.
Sphere by Michael Crichton. Ok, technically a submarine base, but there IS a space ship…
