Mike Thorn
The contemporary world all too often looks like nothing but a series of breathlessly converging existential crises: far-right autocracies, genocides and wars, intensifying climate disasters, the sweeping threats of generative AI, and the online erosion of collective truth. Two new books use literary horror both to explore our world’s widespread evils and to imagine other ways of being. Connections do not immediately announce themselves between Stephen King and Peter Straub’s Other Worlds Than These and Dr. Raymond Thoss’s Rebellion Against the Conspiracy Against the Human Race; the first is a sprawling dark fantasy epic whereas the latter is an intensely confessional work of pessimistic autotheory. However, these books share a set of core concerns about morality, narrative, and speculative “worlding.” Both titles offer not so much competing positions on the existence of evil as differing perspectives on its limits. Thoss, Straub, and King all agree that evil exists: Rebellion calls it the Monster; Other Worlds calls it the Gullet. Both books explore multiversal metaphysics, not in a Marvel Comics “shared universe” fashion, but in a manner of reflection on evil’s boundless potential proliferations. Where King and Straub most starkly differ from Thoss is in their belief that maybe, just maybe, a multiversal metaphysics might contain true antidotes to evil. Terrifying as they might be, King and Straub’s literary imaginations lean toward hope, whereas Thoss—whose autotheory builds upon the cosmic horror and pessimistic philosophy of Thomas Ligotti—is almost unilaterally hopeless.
