A Cosmology of Monsters

by Shaun Hamill

“Noah, there is no such thing as a happy ending. There are only good stopping places.”

She ran along with the kite of their relationship held over her head, trying to get it aloft on its own. It always seemed to need a little extra help.

Stephen King, Angela Carter, Peter Straub, Shirley Jackson, William Peter Blatty, Ira Levin, James Herbert, Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Tryon, and, of course, H. P. Lovecraft.

It had since become shorthand between them, part of the internal language of marriage, a phrase both ironic and sincere, something uttered with a roll of the eyes and a thump of the heart.

Madness rides the star-wind…claws and teeth sharpened on centuries of corpses…dripping death astride a Bacchanale of bats from night-black ruins of buried temples of Belial….Now, as the baying of that dead, fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder, and the stealthy whirring and flapping of those accursed web-wings circles closer and closer, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my only refuge from the unnamed and unnamable.