Review: A Cosmology of Monsters by Shaun Hamill

A Cosmology of Monsters by Shaun Hamill
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Publication Date: September 17, 2019



For all its Lovecraftian references, A Cosmology of Monsters is a deeply human story: of monsters both literal and figurative, of the petty pains and beautiful heartbreaks of the horror-haunted Turner family and the monsters they meet, embody, and unleash. The scourges of mental illness, the soul-sucking micro-pains of a life lived at the ragged edge of the middle class, and the daily suffocations that family---the people that you can never truly escape---require . . . these things combine with rather more tangible horrors, some very literal monsters in the dark, to create a story that manages depth without sacrificing its fantastical elements for the sake of its metaphors. (As I began reading this, part of me was afraid the monsters would be figurative. Rest assured, this is literal horror. The monsters that stalk the Turner family are very real, though much of the book is devoted to the more mundane monstrosities we ordinary folk experience: poverty, sickness, conflicts within the family, etc.).

Overall, I enjoyed this quite a lot. I won't speak too much about the plot, as the mystery of what's actually going on is part of the fun. Suffice to say, we follow here the lives of an ordinary American family whose lives are drenched in horror. From a father's love of horror fiction and haunted houses, passed down to his children and eventually serving as a family business (in the creation of a haunted house called The Wandering Dark), to the more more mundane horrors of poverty, sickness, and familial clashes, to literal horrors in the dark that haunt each generation of Turners, this is a horror novel quite literally about horror.

It takes a lot of skill to mesh the mundane with the fantastical in a way that that diminishes neither, and this depiction of American life is almost as unsettling as the eldritch City that haunts and hunts our characters. The marriage that 'should' have every element needed for success and fortune, smashed against the rocks of small dreams, smaller incomes, and the lack of fulfillment so endemic to so many lives. The running of a small business, the closest thing to a religion that America has, treated like the daily grind of precariousness that it oh-so-often is. The institution of the family, that most sacred thing, twisted and rotted into an inescapable prison.

I see this is being categorized under cosmic horror, but that's not an entirely accurate description. This story's bones lie in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, not in what I'll refer to as the Innsmouth/Cthulhu 'shelf' of cosmic horror. In other words: this isn't really about the horror of the unknowable, the madness of glimpsing what man is not meant to know---it's about the riders on the night winds, monsters both seen and touched, and an eldritch, inescapable land which we must, and must never, visit.

I did have some quibbles. A group of characters appear that I found rather plot device-y, and the ending, which I found (overall) to be very appropriate and satisfying, did have a couple of illogical elements and some things I thought should have been fleshed out a bit more. But overall, this was a well-told story with an interesting plot, something horror fans and non-horror fans should definitely both enjoy.