The Abyss We Carry
My daughter has been into horror stories lately. First Poe, with his whispering chambers and creeping pendulums, the slow suffocation of being trapped in your own mind. Then Lovecraft, with his gods asleep beneath the sea, his alien indifference, his vast and cold universe. She told me what she liked was not the jump scare but the feeling of something so much larger than us, the shiver of recognizing how small we are.
Then she turned, almost without warning, to Hitler. She asked questions about him — about his personality, about the people who worked for him, about the strange way he could seem polite and even kind to those close to him, while directing monstrous acts. And I realized she was onto something: she was moving from the horror of fiction to the horror of history. From cosmic horror to human horror.
Hitler’s Reich was not built by monsters but by clerks, secretaries, train conductors, neighbors. Bureaucracy became the weapon. The monster was the routine.
Stalin’s purges hollowed out trust until the air itself felt poisoned. Quotas, confessions, gulags. The terror was not a beast in the shadows but a system, faceless and total, everywhere.
Vlad Țepeș staged his cruelty like a theater. Forests of impaled bodies against the sky, fear turned into spectacle.
The Khmer Rouge dreamed of Year Zero, of purity so absolute that it erased reality itself. Cities emptied, families torn apart, millions killed in the name of an idea.
These are not fantasies. They are not demons in the sea. They are what happens when human beings build systems so vast, so cruel, that they look as indifferent as any Lovecraftian god. Poe showed us the claustrophobia of madness, Lovecraft the coldness of the universe — but history shows us something worse: ordinary men and women creating a machinery more monstrous than anything the imagination has ever conjured.
The abyss is not outside us. The abyss is carried within us.
And when fear, power, or ideology strip away empathy, that abyss becomes real — not as a story, but as history.
My daughter sensed it before I did: the bridge between cosmic horror and human horror. And the question her curiosity leaves hanging is the one that matters most: what horror will come next?