Eldritch Abomination/Literature

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Examples of Eldritch Abominations in Literature include:

Cthulhu Mythos - the Trope Codifier

  • The writings of H.P. Lovecraft (and the Mythos they spawned) are, of course, the Trope Codifier for much of literature and fiction in general, as well as much of the language used to describe these things: "eldritch", "gibbering", "squamous[1]", "rugose[2]", et. al. Examples are usually divided into three groups based on distinctions that were somewhat present in his original works, and emphasized more by later writers:
  • The Great Old Ones (most famously Cthulhu), which are immensely powerful beings made not wholly of flesh and blood but of something that can only be called matter in the most basic sense. They traveled from world to world when stars were right, but now sleep, waiting until the stars are right once more so they may rule again (incidentally, when they wake up, they plunge the world into madness and terror).
  • The Outer Gods, which Lovecraft referred to as the Other Gods, exist outside our universe and seem to be embodiments of various cosmic principles. They are far more powerful than even the Great Old Ones, and seem to be responsible for the creation of ours and other universes, albeit unwittingly. The most famous ones are the mindless leader Azathoth, the "Blind Idiot God" who resides in the center of all infinity, and Yog-Sothoth, who exists simultaneously in every point in space and time. Their soul and messenger is the Crawling Chaos Nyarlathotep.
  • The pantheon of Elder Gods were almost entirely created and named such after Lovecraft's time; a major exception in the former case is Nodens, Lord of the Abyss, created by Lovecraft himself. Nodens appeared in a humanoid form, which may either be his true form or one he took in order to not drive mortals insane, and was an enemy of Nyarlathotep. Later authors, particularly August Derleth, made Nodens the head of a pantheon called the Elder Gods, who were all mortal enemies of the Great Old Ones; some stories seem to place them at the same power level as the Outer Gods.
    • In Derleth's works, the Elder Gods were good and the Great Old Ones evil in a stark contrast to Lovecraft's cosmology, where human morality was rarely if ever a factor for such beings. Most other writers who have used them make them somewhat benevolent to humans, but only because they share the mutual goal of wanting to keep the Great Old Ones asleep.
    • Hypnos is another Lovecraft creation-turned-Elder God, whose nature (or existence) is unclear thanks to Unreliable Narrator. Other Elder Gods in post-Lovecraft stories include the cat deity Bast, the siblings Vorvadoss and Yaggdytha (both Energy Beings) and Cthulhu's own sibling Kthanid.
    • Some Mythos stories suggest that the Great Old Ones or their spawn were responsible for the creation of mankind, leading to frequent descriptions of creatures of whom the most horrifying thing is that there is something "damnably human" in their appearance.
  • Towards the end, Herbert West had a vat of reanimated reptilian flesh which he used to animate body parts, producing minor Eldritch Abominations.
  • There are also many species of lesser abominations in the Mythos, some independent (like the Flying Polyps) and some subservient (like the Nightgaunts) towards the above God-Things.

Discworld

  • In Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels (especially the early ones), a constant danger of the use of magic is that of accidentally opening a rift into the "Dungeon Dimensions", regions with "very little reality", inhabited by nightmarish Lovecraftian monstrosities that crave the reality that those in more solid universes take for granted. They lack a physical form and try to invade the Discworld in the vain hope of obtaining one - that they look like an incomprehensible mass of tentacled horrors is because of this, and the narration describes this phenomenon as having "the same effect as the ocean trying to warm itself around a candle". The old dark god Bel-Shamharoth is sometimes presumed to be one of the very few aforementioned creatures that found a way to survive in the Discworld.
    • It should also be added that, for some reason, on Discworld, eldritch has the additional meaning of "oblong". Pratchett also won't let us forget that "eldritch" and "elven" have the same linguistic root.
  • While Ponder is revising for an exam on them at the start of Pyramids, he mentions various old, dark gods, such as Yob Sodoth and Tshup Aklathep, Infernal Star Toad with A Million Young. Discworld Noir introduced Nylonathotep and makes reference to other dark gods, including Drunken Cthubopalulu.
  • In Jingo Leshp is described as a city which sank, and rose, and sank, each time settled by different people. It also has a lot of pictures of squid, there are slithering sounds, and the earliest buildings look like people tried to make sense of geometry they did not fully understand.
  • There's also Dagon (cf. the Cthulhu Mythos) in Moving Pictures. Dagon used to be worshipped in the city that was there before Ankh-Morpork, which covered all the way from present day Ankh-Morpork to Holy Wood; the city is now gone, and this is speculated to be related to the Things awakening. It's also mentioned in an anecdote within The Folklore of Discord describing someone trying to set up a sushi bar on the site of an old temple on Dagon Street during the solstice. (This did not end well.) Folklore also mentions that the Things may have been some manner of dark gods before they were exiled from existence.
  • While the Things have not appeared for a long time due to the themes of the Series shifting, in Thief of Time we see statues of them in the History Monks' gardens. The Auditors of Reality are said to be the deadliest of all, indicating that despite their unassuming appearance, they are of a similar nature to the Things but worse. Where the Things are mindless and have no feeling about humanity, and thus see no meaning in our death, the Auditors actively despise, loathe, and want the nonexistence of every member of the simplest creature eking out a life in the bottom of the deepest trench of the ocean just for living!
  • The Eldritch Abomination in Reaper Man is a result of the Auditors canning the too-amiable Death. They start off as objects that people would collect and forget about, specifically snowglobes; these snowglobes would "hatch" into useful, traveling objects (shopping carts) that then collect people into the enormous monster-queen-THING that turns out to be a SHOPPING MALL. It's funny, yeah, but also terrifying. Just think of all the shopping malls you've ever been in where you could be anywhere in the world for all the difference it makes, absorbing your time without you realizing it, being herded about like cows. Brr.
  • Pterry's newer novels have offered more esoteric variants of this trope: the Hiver and the Summoning Dark seem more like sentient ideas than tentacled mishmashes. Still freakin' weird and disturbing, yet more insidious than the above examples, and more frightening in their own way -- ideas are, after all, indestructible.
  • One could even include Great A'Tuin is the Giant Star Turtle (the colossal turtle who carries four slightly-less-colossal elephants on its back who, in turn, carry the world on theirs) as a more benevolent version of this Trope.

Perdido Street Station

  • The slake-moths - monstrous, insectoid creatures that feed on the very sentience of their prey, leaving their victims utterly mindless shells. How terrible are these abominations? At one point, the government of New Crobuzon attempts to strike a deal with Hell to get them to intervene and stop the threat, and the demons are too frightened to get involved.
  • And then you have the Weaver, who the New Crobuzon government turns to when the demons turn them down. It's a gigantic spider that exists between dimensions and is capable of traversing them as easily as we would walk down the street. It is also batshit crazy, speaking in the "flight of ideas" style most often seen in unmedicated schizophrenics and capable of doing anything to anyone, friend or foe, merely because it seems "fitting". During the brief time that the heroes are in its presence, the Weaver cuts off the ears of everyone in the room for reasons known only to itself. It also repaired the ears of some of the people, again for reasons unknown. It also has an obsession with scissors and happily accepts them as gifts, if the term 'happy' can be applied to it; apparently it enjoys collecting things in general, as it is mentioned that before its obsession with scissors, it collected chess sets.
  • And then there is the Torque, described by one character as a tumour which aborted itself from the womb that produced the forces of Birth and Death. Whilst not evil per-se, it is a natural force that is almost totally uncontrollable which warps and mutates matter and biology into unrecognizably horrifying things, including anyone simply trying to research it. When it was used as a weapon, the results of the "Torque Bomb" were so awful that even after a generous application of Magitek versions of nuclear weapons, there's a country-sized region of the world which isn't going to be inhabitable by anything but abominations ever again. The protagonist pulls out a book of photos taken at ground zero of the inhabitants (though it may have been implied that they could be survivors) to show to a client. "That? We think it used to be a goat. Or a train."
  • In the middle of a city there are The Ribs, the partially-exposed skeleton of some enormous creature that has been dead for a very, very long time. Attempts to build over it resulted in seemingly structurally sound houses that just fell apart and tools that break long before they should, and attempts to excavate the whole skeleton tended to result in the workers suffering horrifying nightmares or disappearing suspiciously. It was decided that whatever it is was best left buried and uninvestigated.
  • Then in The Scar, the second book in the series, there's the avanc: something from another universe that is big enough to pull an entire floating city... and all that anyone knows about it is that it swims and has at least one thing that could be described as a limb.
  • The creature from the short story Details is this in spades. It lives in all detailed surfaces, and if you look deeply enough into them you can see it. The problem is that once it notices you, it will try to get you through all detailed objects, including those in your memories. The only 100% sucessful ways of keeping it away from you are cutting your eyes out or killing yourself, which may be better than what it'll do to you once it gets you.

Other works

  • Among Lovecraft's many influences that have examples themselves:
  • The Shrike from the Hyperion Cantos.
    • The Lions and Tigers and Bears (oh my!) might also count, though they are benevolent towards humans and try to help them as much as they can. The Technocore certainly thinks of them as Eldritch Abominations.
  • Offal, from Hell's Children by Andrew Boland, is a baby one of these.
  • Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files has the Outsiders, beings that exist beyond 'The Outer Gates', or basically the limits of known reality. They can only be summoned by mortal magic and are considered so dangerous that not only is summoning them forbidden under the Laws of Magic, but a member of the Senior Council (The Gatekeeper) has the full time duty of monitoring any possible incursions.
    • In fact, just learning about how to summon Outsiders is punishable by death. With good reason.
    • Also, Outsiders eat magic and destroy reality just by being present. It takes wizards hundreds of years to learn how to even hold their own against them in battle.
    • And there's the skinwalker from Turn Coat, which reduces Harry to a gibbering mess when he sees it with his Sight. It's pretty much a demigod and is a walking source of very, very nasty dark power.
    • In Ghost Story, we see Harry's encounter with He Who Walks Behind. It introduces itself by stating its name, which is best described as a paragraph of emotions and sensations relating to contempt and pure alien hatred for mortal life.

"That," a cultured British voice whispered in my ear, "is the closest your mind can come to comprehending my name."

  • In The City and the Stars, Arthur C. Clarke gives us the Mad Mind, an artificially created disembodied intelligence with near-godlike powers, whose creation goes very wrong. So terrifying is it that humans create another one (and do a better job this time) in order to (hopefully) stop it, and end up trapped between Scylla and Charybdis on a grand scale: the conflict between the two might destroy the entirety of creation, but implicit in the decision to create the second being is that what the Mad Mind will do if it makes its way back to inhabited space - or remains unchecked for a sufficient length of time - is worse.
  • Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth series has its own Ultimate Evil: a galaxy-sized region of total nothingness, where all light and matter are absorbed. Moreover, this nothingness possesses sentience and is capable of movement. Naturally, our galaxy is in its path and only The Chosen One has any chance of stopping it.
    • The same series also gives us the Vom, which are more on the world-devouring scale but still fit several of the requisite criteria: inscrutability (it's a huge, black... mass), exponential power growth, alien thought process (it lives only to devour all life on the worlds it comes across), strange origin (possibly extragalactic), immunity to conventional weapons, and Mind Control/Mind Rape abilities.
  • Peter F. Hamilton's The Night's Dawn Trilogy incorporates a positive slew of eldritch abominations: an incident involving a satanic ritual and a passing energy being creates a cross-dimensional link that allows the souls of the dead to come back and possess the living, before secreting entire planets away to their own pocket dimensions. Even worse, the trans-dimensional powers of the possessed, as well as the fact that they have absolutely no idea what they're doing, opened the door to a range of other semi-scientific eldritch horrors - by far the worst of them is a dimension of almost infinite entropy known as the "Dark Continuum" which, if intersected with our universe, would suck it dry like a vampire. Things get so hopeless that it pretty much takes a literal Deus Ex Machina to sort the whole mess out.
    • To expand, the "Dark Continuum" has a... phenomenon called the "Melange" at its center of mass. It's made out of the immortal souls of everyone ever trapped in this continuum, all of them writhing in eternal agony at well below zero degrees Kelvin, most of them incapable of accumulating enough energy to break free. Those that do temporarily become vampiric bird-like Orgathe, doomed to wander the empty continuum until they eventually re-join the others in the Melange.
    • The resident super-civilization of the Night's Dawn universe is so powerful that their empire consists of a collar of planets orbiting the same star, and they feel horrified and threatened at the prospect of our Universe intersecting the Dark Continuum. That's how bad it gets.
  • Stephen King is, as we all know, particularly fond of creepy-ass creatures.
    • In IT, the eponymous monster is perceived as a Giant Spider by the protagonists, because this was the closest analogue that their rational minds could find for Its appearance. Attempting to fight IT can result in one's mind being flung beyond the edge of the universe, then being driven mad by the Deadlights (which IT is merely an appendage of). After the protagonists succeed in killing IT, they magically forget about the entire incident; apparently, this was the only way they could have lived a normal life afterward.
    • Stephen King and Peter Straub got together to write The Talisman, a horror fantasy novel which is chock full of horrific creatures and mutants; the most disturbing amongst them is probably a mewling tentacle creature that bleeds ichor filled with biting white worms.
    • The burial ground in Pet Sematary could very well be one of these outright if it isn't possessed by one. Either way, it's pretty safe to say that it's more than just mere haunted ground. This is likely true of the buried bodies that it brings back from the dead as well.
    • The short story "I Am The Doorway" is about a former astronaut who becomes the conduit for an Eldritch Abomination, manifesting in the form of golden eyes on his hands. In an unusual spin on the trope, though, said Abomination isn't malevolent -- it's terrified and disgusted by our world, which is as alien to it as it is alien to us, lashing out violently at the horrors it's forced to witness.
    • In From a Buick 8, the titular car... isn't a car. And things come out of it... Possibly his most believably creepy work, since the object's origin and purpose remain a mystery to the very end.
    • And of course "He Who Walks Behind The Rows" from Children of the Corn.
    • Tak from Desperation and The Regulators os a sadistic, incorporeal monstrosity heavily implied to have no true form; it has no apparent motive other than causing chaos and killing everything it comes across. The effects it has on those it possesses are... disconcerting, to say the least.
    • Another short story, "N", is told through the journals of a psychiatrist analysing a patient who believes that by keeping objects "in order" obsessive-compulsive style, he is keeping cosmic horrors at bay (which doesn't seem so strange at first, since that's a pretty common reason why obsessive-compulsives do the things they do). Following the patient's suicide, the psychiatrist eventually takes over his "duty" of keeping things in order and ends up killing himself as well, due to the stress involved in keeping the cosmic horror CTHUN and the rest of its reality out of ours. It's implied that even if more people continue the duty, the barrier keeping CTHUN at bay will stop working anyway. In this making-of featurette, King also cites Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan (mentioned previously) as his main inspiration.
    • In The Dark Tower Book Three, Illustrated Edition, a print shown during their trip aboard Blaine shows the part of Roland's world that has yet to even begin to recover from the wars that made it what it is. The bird-things may not reach cosmic-level, but what they indicate about the greater cosmos could snap those old neurons pretty damn fast.
    • Speaking of which, Randall Flagg is implied to be an Expy for Nyarlathotep...
    • One could also say that the Crimson King is an Expy for Azathoth. Both are all-powerful, the source of evil, and pretty much brain dead.
    • The creatures in the todash darkness from The Dark Tower series.
    • The abominations from The Mist.
    • King gives a direct Shout-Out to Lovecraft in "Crouch End", where a newlywed American couple honeymooning in London wander into the Cthulhu mythos. Shub-Niggurath, to be precise.
    • There's also the Langoliers.
    • Another fine King creation: in the short story "Home Delivery", a thing best described as a gigantic ball of crawling worms decides to camp over the South Pole's hole in the ozone layer... and causes a worldwide Zombie Apocalypse just by being there.
    • The Long Boy from Liseys Story qualifies as well. That thing... when it eats you, you don't die. You just get eternally digested, and you are conscious.
    • The titular mansion from Rose Red.
  • The works of Clive Barker frequently include Eldritch Abominations.
  • Nasu Kinoko's early work, Notes, has "The Ultimate Ones": aliens - well, representations of planets - who come to destroy the future humanity and reclaim the planet after Gaia dies. The Nasuverse itself is almost a Cosmic Horror Story if you delve into the Backstory: Gaia herself is extremely similar to The Ultimate Ones, with the main difference being that the reality she creates happens to be one where humans evolved and can survive in. She has also not yet created her Ultimate Being, Type Earth, and it is not clear that she can, especially considering that her Blue Marble is the only planet to bear life which tries to exerts its own reality against her own. (It would be interesting to see what Type Earth's reality would be like; probably similar to what Arcueid can do on Earth.)
    • Fate/Zero has a Caster hero who's basically a guy with the Necronomicon summoning different Eldritch Abominations.
    • ORT, the Ultimate Being of planet Mercury, is mentioned in Tsukihime. Its raw power is considered far greater than that of any Dead Apostle. Infamous in the fandom for being the Strongest Being by Word of God, ORT is only here because it responded to the dying message of Gaia before Gaia died and decided to wait it out here. ORT changes the laws of the universe around it, which isn't all that impressive on its own since mages can learn spells with the same effect - except when mages do it, the effect only lasts for a few seconds because reality fights back. In ORT's case, reality is losing. It also technically holds a position as a Dead Apostle vampire, but only because it instantly obliterated the previous holder who wanted to study it (and supposedly has "vampire-like qualities"). Yeah...that's probably a lifetime membership right there.
    • The father of all vampires, Type Moon Brunestud, is the same type of being as ORT and could similarly warp reality, but is also quite humanoid and pretty. Also, Zelretch killed him, apparently by dropping him into a reality where his home (the fucking Moon) fell on his head. Some of what he spawned are more overtly terrifying, though not all of them are vampires: One of them is a giant padlock; one of them is a kid with a whale, a jellyfish, a golem, and a mouse in place of normal limbs (that he usually disguises as such), one of them is a forest, and another is a living curse that looks like Count Dracula.
    • While Nrvnqsr (Nero) Chaos isn't quite there yet, becoming one is quite obviously his main goal.
    • The thing about the Types: even if you destroy their physical bodies, they still exist, and they may be able to reform them. Part of the reason Type-Moon helped create the True Ancestors was because he could use them as new bodies if he was killed; he still possesses Arcueid on occasion. In Notes, Type-Venus is killed by a gun that attacks with the concept of death itself and still manages to manifest itself in a new but powerless form.
    • In Kara no Kyoukai:, Toko Aozaki's most powerful summon is a gibbering, amorphous mix between a Shoggoth and a Colour out of Space, which (in the movies, at least) eats Cornelius Alba alive.
  • The "angels" from The Space Trilogy works of C. S. Lewis show some of these traits. They exist on a profoundly different level than us, have strange geometries, and dealing with them can be terribly unsettling. One of the characters even notes that the fact that they're benevolent makes it worse; no matter how terrible the evil you're facing, there's always the hope that good will swoop in to save you... but what do you do when facing good turns your brain inside-out?
    • The Oyeresu are this on occasion. In explaining what they mean by "manifesting to humans", they use the analogy of the ways a stone can manifest in human perception. The glorious statue is one possible perception, but so is the sensation you have after it's fallen on your head. The Oyeresu are unambiguously good as well, but have to try a few times before they figure out acceptable, vaguely humanoid manifestations; their first try is a bad acid trip -- eyes, talons, hurtling shapes in a void full of vertigo. This is, presumably, near the hit-in-the-head end of the manifestation spectrum. If it's not, that's even scarier.
    • The Un-man in Perelandra is a zombie-like human whose evil is so pure and different from that of any other human that it made the protagonist pass out when he first saw the expression on its face. It is controlled by a being who is invisible to us and whose true form is literally indescribable to humans, not fitting into any of our mental categories. It is strong enough to destroy worlds, and yet subtle enough to pass through matter and manipulate human minds. The Un-Man also views intelligence as just another 'tool' and will alternate between an eloquent speaker and a childish being that enjoys killing small animals and annoying people by saying their name over and over.
  • Another C. S. Lewis series of works, The Chronicles of Narnia has the chief Calormene god Tash. He's the only Satanic figure in the series without a given origin or at least hints of what he is. Plants die in his presence, and just looking at him can turn talking, intelligent animals into normal, mindless ones.
  • The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross and its sequels take place in a world where divisions that MI6 and the CIA don't even know they have battle Eldritch Abominations and their own bureaucracy - said abominations were attracted to reality after Alan Turing discovered a theory that allowed the user to warp reality with computers, and the Nazis attempted to summon the Great Old Ones using the souls of those slaughtered in the Holocaust to win World War II.
  • J. R. R. Tolkien also took a few stabs at this.

Far, far below the deepest delving of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things. Even Sauron knows them not. They are older than he. Now I have walked there, but I will bring no report to darken the light of day.

  • The Watcher at the gates of Moria may be one of those things that managed to crawl its way up to the surface, or it may be one of Morgoth's creations, but either way it is a borderline abomination.
  • Ungoliant from The Silmarillion is descibed as one, as is her daughter Shelob. Ungoliant is said to have "descended from the Outer Darkness, maybe, that lies in Ea beyond the walls of the World"[3]" after breeding with other... things... [4] in a valley somewhere before she just... wandered off. "Some have said that she ended long ago, when in her uttermost famine she devoured herself at last." But they Never Found the Body. Said valley is so corrupted by her presence that 400 years later, Beren is the only mortal to have passed through it and survived.

Then the Unlight of Ungoliant rose up even to the roots of the Trees, and Melkor sprang upon the mound... and their sap poured forth as it were their blood, and was spilled upon the ground. But Ungoliant sucked it up, and going then from Tree to Tree she set her black beak to their wounds, till they were drained; and the poison of Death that was in her went into their tissues and withered them, root, branch, and leaf; and they died. And still she thirsted, and going to the Wells of Varda she drank them dry; but Ungoliant belched forth black vapours as she drank, and swelled to a shape so vast and hideous that Melkor was afraid.

  • Ungoliant once attempted to eat Melkor, and she would have succeeded if the Balrogs - servants of Melkor, the strongest of the Valar (powers of the world/god-like beings/Angels), superior of Sauron and a being only subservient to creator and supreme God Eru himself - hadn't pulled a Big Damn Heroes.
  • It's sort of implied that any fallen Ainu will take on eldritch characteristics also associated with more "garden variety" devils: Morgoth did, and Sauron has a fair few - becoming a 'shapeless, dormant evil' after the destruction of his body, causing a 'shadow of fear' to fall by beginning to manifest himself again, and his spirit towering over Mordor like a black cloud after his final downfall. Even after Sauron's downfall, he becomes a 'spirit of malice that gnaws itself in the shadows', as Gandalf puts it. Even Saruman may have gone this way given enough time, as there is a recurring theme of him being a kind of lesser Sauron, much like Sauron is a lesser Morgoth.

...greater than a mountain with its head above the clouds, crowned with smoke and fire, and the light of his eyes drove the lesser Ainur to madness.

  • Dan Abnett's Eisenhorn series of Warhammer 40,000 works contained a short story in which the inquisitor leads a mission into [[Alien Geometries|an alien-infested space that has been perverted to the point of there being more than 360 degrees in a circle. It disorients the humans and makes the inquisitor all the more anxious to kill the Alien.
  • The Minotaur in House of Leaves, maybe. There's also the House itself. While looking at it isn't immediately maddening, all attempts to understand it or classify it fail, and it moves, reshapes, and exists in manners that should not be possible. It is possible that The House actively attempts to avoid comprehension by humans and, by doing so, drives everyone vaguely related to it insane.
    • Alternately, if we take the poem that ends the book into account, yet another explanation emerges: The House is the interior of Yggdrasil, the "tree" that holds the universe, and the Minotaur is, naturally, the demon-serpent Nidhoggr, gnawing at its roots. All things considered, this may not be much better.
  • The Blight from Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep is a post-Singularity version. It's a five billion years-old god-virus, with no apparent goals except endless expansion. The effect of any form of contact with the Blight proper is nowhere near as merciful as simply driving you mad. Instead, you are instantly turned into the Blight's fleshy terminal, and then are eventually driven mad by becoming a helpless prisoner in your own mind. And it can propagate through computer networks, including interstellar ones. And it can kill the local equivalents of Physical Gods, to whom it appears hideously disgusting even before revealing its true nature; mere mortal minds cannot even comprehend the true nature and complexity of the Blight, of course.
  • The Ancient Enemy from Dean Koontz's Phantoms is a massive, lake-sized mass of black sludge older than the dinosaurs; it consumes other life forms as sustenance, and is able to perfectly mimic any creature it consumes. It can create small "probes" or "phantoms", imitating consumed life forms, to go forth and hunt more prey, obeying the orders of its "hive mind". In addition, the creature absorbs the mental capacity and memories of those it consumes, so its mind grows more powerful, intelligent, and self-aware over time. Besides being able to mimic real animals and people, the creature can also form phantoms based on mental images from its victims; it takes sadistic delight in creating phantoms in the shape of religious demons and monsters to terrorize its victims before killing them. The creature also apparently likes to think of itself as The Devil, and even has human cultists.
  • Another Koontz example is the extraterrestrial known as "the Giver" in Winter Moon. Its method of interstellar travel is completely incomprehensible (it seems to have torn a hole in reality), You Cannot Grasp the True Form, and it literally does not understand the existence of death.
  • Inverted in the Blind God of The Acts of Caine. It is as impersonal, awful, powerful, and horrifying as anything from the Lovecraft mythos. The inversion is that it's not really alien. Played straight with the Outer Powers worshipped by the Black Knives in Caine Black Knife.
  • Skulduggery Pleasant has the Faceless Ones, so named because they cannot be looked upon in their true forms without driving the observer mad, and can only manifest by possessing humans and melting all features from their faces in the process. They are the former rulers of this reality before the Ancients, their slaves and the first mages, managed to find a weapon capable of driving them into another reality. They are described as being so evil and sadistic that even their own shadows were afraid of them. A creature cobbled together from several monster parts that included the torso of a Faceless One's host took a small army of mages to kill. When the Faceless Ones themselves finally appear, Valkyrie gets only a passing glance at one and is temporarily driven into a catatonic state by its impossible geometry and biology. Skulduggery explains that if they successfully return, they will wipe out half of humanity and then work the other half to death, before destroying the Earth.
  • In The Power of Five, the main antagonists are the Old Ones, godlike creatures clearly inspired by Lovecraft that used to rule Earth before the humans defeated them ten thousand years ago and sealed them in another universe. The Nazca Lines were created as the seal, and the animal shapes drawn into the Earth were actually representative of each of the Old Ones, the familiar animals being the closest approximation the human mind could come to the Old Ones' horrifying appearance.
  • Part of the Doctor Who Expanded Universe declared H.P. Lovecraft's creatures canonical and had their names originally bestowed by Rassilon. As if Cthulhu, Hastur (aka Fenric, apparently), and the Fendahl weren't enough, a number of characters (most notably the creators of the Land of Fiction and Compassion, an EU companion who became a TARDIS) have been upgraded to this kind of thing.
    • The Faction Paradox spin-off expanded on the Yssgaroth, things from another version of history accidentally accessed when the Great Houses set up their version. Totally inimical to the existing universe, no one's sure if they were multiple creatures or just different aspects of one entity, or even if they were alive at all and not just "symptoms of a timeline that had already started ripping chunks out of its own flesh", and if they took people into their own universe...well, they've been known to string a victim's nervous system out over an entire planet while keeping it alive and able to sense pain. And it's implied that the Great Houses are secretly studying a way into their universe for military purposes. Just for additional horror, they're connected with the Great Vampires from Doctor Who, which came out of nowhere and swarmed all over the universe, each one capable of sucking a planet dry.
    • Continuing on Faction Paradox, we have the extradimensional realm known as the Eleven-Day Empire (created by mutilating Earth's history and erasing eleven days that never existed). Moments after its creation, the Faction went there to set up shop. They found the place was already occupied. Which didn't stop them from making a deal with the Very Nice Gentlemen and settling down like they liked. And, of course, they even got several of their new friends (implied to be the living embodiments of multiversal laws) to defend their new home.
    • The novel Sky Pirates! stated the early Time Wars were against creatures so utterly different that they were considered to be Eldritch Abominations. It also heavily implies that the Timelords (and especially the Doctor) are just Eldritch Abominations that have figured out the trick of not instantly destroying the psyches of lesser creatures as soon as they are seen. Their TARDISes are examples, too: At one point, the disguise that prevents human companions from wanting to pull their eyes out collapses, and we're told one of the controls tries to bite him.
  • Star Wars Expanded Universe:
    • There's an arguable case in the novel The Crystal Star with Waru. "Hethrir's scientists breached the walls between dimensions and brought into existence a massive slab of meat covered with shining golden scales. Though this entity, Waru, lacked discernible sensory organs, it was highly intelligent and could communicate in a deep resonating voice." The scales were variable in size and a syrupy ichor oozed from between them. The ichor could be breathed by humans, and it was Bigger on the Inside. It was promised a way home by the man who summoned it, and it worked with him and healed the sick, was worshipped, and ate people to replenish its healing energy. It was always lonely and ended up eating the guy who summoned it before collapsing in on itself.
    • Abeloth from the Fate of the Jedi series most definitely qualifies. The mention of tentacles and the associated imagery does not help... Her home planet: a place in the Maw where plants eat animals which also happens to be the location of Force purgatory. Useful for something that sustains itself by eating force-sensitive souls. The name, incidentally, is a Shout-Out to the aboleths from Dungeons & Dragons, which are also examples of this trope.
    • The 2010 Unknown Regions RPG supplement also added the Mnggal-Mnggal. It's a formless black goo that takes over a host and devours them. It wants to consume all worlds in existence, which would be bad enough... but it delights in tormenting sentient beings even more than it does taking them over. Doesn't sound too bad by the standards of alien horrors in Star Wars... until you learn that the reason the Unknown Regions have been cut off from the rest of the galaxy since time immemorial is that the Celestials thought that the Mnggal-Mnggal was too much for them to deal with!
  • In Barbara Hambly's Sun Wolf And Starhawk novel The Ladies of Mandrigyn, we have Altiokis's power source. It gets him in the end.
  • The passageway between the worlds in Coraline. At first seeming to be a relatively normal, if strangely unsettling hallway, by the end it's a wet, furry... thing that's very much alive and incomprehensibly vast and ancient. It makes The Other Mother look trivial, and she's a particularly nasty fairy. It's also implied that it's far older and more powerful than her and that, even though she found it and temporarily used it, she has no goddamn idea what it is or how it works.
  • The never-seen-and only very obliquely described-Todal in James Thurber's The 13 Clocks.
  • Simon R. Green's Forest Kingdom books contain several types of Eldritch Abominations in addition to the regular evil demons. In Blue Moon Rising, there is a giant worm thing that devoured an entire mining town; in Down Among The Dead Men, the Big Bad is explicitly named as an evil from beyond the dawn of time; Blood and Honour has an entire castle slowly turning into one (an entire room digests its occupants at one stage, and a person is turned into a living doorway to a dimension full of eldritch abominations).
  • Simon R. Green's Deathstalker series also has multiple occurrences of such abominations.
    • The massive AI planet Shub exists in more dimensions than humans can perceive, and is extremely unnerving for them to look at and capable of causing insanity in some.
    • The Recreated are entities formed from the disembodied spirits of billions of sentient beings who died when the Darkvoid Device destroyed their planets. Driven insane, they merged with the subconscious mind of the Darkvoid Device and used its power to manifest as civilization-destroying abominations.
    • The Terror is an entity capable of not just destroying planets, but it actually eats suns to refuel itself; its mere presence is enough to drive entire planets into insanity.
    • One human esper was so vile and twisted that when she was broken into four individual beings, the Uber-Espers, each manifested as an eldritch abomination.
  • Examples of these also turn up in Simon R. Green's Nightside series, although that's got more of a comedy flavor, so its hero usually winds up either having tea with them or flipping them off. Or both: it's that kind of series.
  • In Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series, the "Nameless" are entities that the wizards refer to as the dark powers of the Earth, which are the focus of the oldest religion of the Kargad lands in The Tombs of Atuan. And in a later book, the main antagonist turns out to be some crazy wizard who tried to achieve immortality -- by creating a hole which nearly sucked the entire world inside it.
  • The Final Destination franchise spin-off book Dead Reckoning has the main character Jess enter what appears to be Death's realm in a dream. There she encounters what is presumably Death's true form - the vaguely humanoid Death is gigantic, composed of constantly shifting, crumbling, and regenerating bones from seemingly "every creature that ever lived", and is covered in what could be loosely described as robes made from what appears to be still living flesh that twitches and squirms. From afar, it just looks like a dark mass, and it's constantly emitting a noise that sounds like static and "thousands of birds all taking flight at the same time", while its eyes are completely blank, dark voids. Also, anything in proximity of it ages rapidly.
  • Arguably, the "rough beast" from William Butler Yeats' "The Second Coming" counts, by virtue of the Christian apocalypse imagery used to describe it. The poem is about the aftermath of World War One, anticipating the further horrors of the Twentieth Century.
  • In the Bionicle novels by Greg Farshtey, there is a character called Tren Krom, a crimson blob with hooked tentacles. It was reputed to be so horrifying it would literally drive you insane to look at it.
  • Blindsight by Peter Watts has Rorschach: an intelligent, city-sized, incredibly scary vessel. Its "inhabitants", the scramblers, are one of the best examples of Starfish Aliens in fiction.
  • The Bugs from Phillip Palmer's Debatable Space. Their name isn't very evocative of what they are, but immediately after discovering them, humanity sacrificed millions of people to put up thousands of indestructible, uncrossable walls between the Bugs and the rest of the universe. Despite this, the leaders of the government live in unending, justified and mortal fear of them. The Fire Beasts are also implied to be remarkably friendly, apathetic versions of this.
  • The Repairman Jack novels of F. Paul Wilson had the Ally and the Otherness (who see the world as a poker chip) and The Lady (who seems to be the personification of Earth's life).
  • The Vord Queen from the Codex Alera is an example of a Humanoid Abomination, but as far as the characters are concerned, she's the full trope, being immensely powerful, completely alien and amoral, and a threat to all else that lives in the world. Then she gets it into her head that she wants to be human - and that just makes her even creepier.
  • Ruin from Mistborn. While he does take a human form a couple of times to talk to characters, it's made plain that this is just a mask - he exists on a level far beyond mortal comprehension and seeks to destroy the world not out of malice, but because destroying worlds is just what he does. Ruin is in reality a cosmic force controlled by a human intelligence, like all the other Shards of Adonalsium. However, the Shards warp the personalities of their holders based on their Intent. Ati, the man who held Ruin, was originally a kind, decent person, but becoming Ruin transformed him into an Omnicidal Maniac.
  • Tais Teng's Glass Spears anthology features Nesquaam, the Elemental Darkness. He is literally that - pure darkness and absolute cold, but sentient and hateful. His presence will break any mind that is exposed to him long enough.
  • In The Neverending Story, we have the Nothing. Born from distortions in Fantastica caused by The Childlike Empress's sickness, it's not exactly a creature, but is as eldritch as anything else. There are quite literally no adequate words to describe it. In chapter one, a messenger tries to explain what happened to a lake that was consumed by the Nothing. It's not that the lake was drained, or that it dried out, because then, there'd be a hole or a dry lakebed there, wouldn't there? It's just...nothing. Later on, Atreyu runs into some wood trolls that came into contact with it. One lost his lower body, one lost the left half of his body, and one had a giant hole eaten away. Only... they're still alive. They just can't... feel anything that was removed. When Atreyu tries to take a look at it from afar, he can't even glance at it straight on, and it pains him to see it even from the side, because his brain simply cannot comprehend the sight of nothing. It is quite simply something that should not exist, and that's because it doesn't.
  • A. Lee Martinez's Too Many Curses gleefully wallows in this trope, giving us The Thing Which Devours, The Beast Which Annoys, The Black Plook, The Monster That Should Not Be, The Hideous Impaler, and The Door At The End Of The Hall.
  • The Ro from the Species Imperative trilogy: beings that exist outside of normal space and whose very speech makes one feel as though they are being ripped apart.
  • The Spectres of His Dark Materials are semi-corporeal creatures which devour the consciousness or soul of adults (they are invisible to children and have no interest in them). They not only come from the Abyss, but they are a section of it, effectively manifestations of emptiness itself. Arguably, the angels are also eldritch themselves, their real forms resembling architecture more than living things, but they assume a humanoid form for our convenience anyway.
  • Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian ran into some - of course, Howard was a friend and correspondent of Lovecraft.
  • Thomas Ligotti has created a truly prodigious number of these, most fairly unconventional in presentation and overall manifestation. Perhaps the strangest is the entity central to "Ten Steps to Thin Mountain". Think about the implications of the House of Leaves entry above. Apply this to a meme. Or a stray thought. This is what Thin Mountain is.
  • The Gaiaphage/Darkness in Gone (novel).
  • The various works of Terry Brooks are full of them:
    • The Mist Wraith, a swamp-dwelling tentacle monster.
    • The creature encountered in the Wolfsktaag in The Sword of Shannara, which was a composite of machine and monster flesh. It is likely that this is the prototype for the Creeper that appeared in later books.
    • The Maelmord, a living valley of toxic plant life created by the Ildatch to protect itself.
    • The Creepers, created by the Shadowen, were, again, creatures of composite machine, insect, and mammal.
    • The Morgawr. A warlock of disputable origin, humanoid but with scaly skin and shapeshifting properties, apparent immortality, and other powerful magics, including the power to reach inside human skulls and tear out the part of the brain that the soul was anchored to and then eat it, this being how he survived.
  • The parasites that infect the protagonists in Scorpion Shards.
  • The Storm King from Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn; though ostensibly one of The Undead, his apocalyptic dark power and terrible physical manifestation put him quite in line with the trope.
  • The Eidolons from Bitter Seeds are essentially sentient (and malevolent) chunks of the universal substrate.
  • Mother from Argo is essentially a robotic version of this.
  • The "Cold Thing" from 10 A BOOT STOMPING 20 A HUMAN FACE 30 GOTO 10. Whatever it is is so alien that even part of it begins warping physics locally, and its presence terrifies even Jim freaking Morrison. To further the creep factor, it only communicates with some autistic kids, and on its last encounter with Earth millennia ago, it left an egg, which the villain plans to smash to get its attention.
  • The Tamuli:
    • "We do not speak of 'it', nor do we speak of 'him'. We speak of Klæl."[context?]
    • Notably, there's also Azash, a minion of the Big Bad from The Elenium. An utterly alien creature that comes from someplace else, it's a creature so bizarre and alien that even its boss, an elder god and Eldritch Abomination in his own right, can only control it in its larval form. In its larval form, it's a man-sized humanoid... thing with an utterly alien face that mortals can be hypnotized by just by looking at the glow radiating from it, and has powerful magical abilities. Once matured into adulthood, it is utterly uncontrollable, invulnerable to any force, whether man, god, or demon, and it is stated that if ever a male and female were brought into the world at the same time and given the chance to mature, there would be no way to stop them, and they would ultimately turn the entire world into a nest. Thankfully, once matured, their first and foremost desire is to find a mate to the exclusion of all else, and it will search until it literally starves to death if one is unavailable.
  • While the titular children in Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children possess startling unnatural abilities themselves, they pale next to the hollowgasts: former peculiars that, through some horrifying means, have made themselves immune to the passage of time, feed on the souls of peculiars (though they will eat normals and animals if pressed), and are only visible to a few peculiars as horrible masses of eyes and tentacles. If they eat enough souls, they become wights, which can pass for humans but are only slightly less horrifying.
  • The Funhouse inhabitants from The Pilo Family Circus.
  • Chaos and Old Night from Paradise Lost by John Milton. Lucifer passes through their domain on his way to Earth, and as they obviously bear a grudge against God, they allow him safe passage. The weird thing is, we never find out exactly who or what they are: they just are.
  • An Elegy for the Still-living: The dragon.

Wind raced as breath or darkness formed a figure. Something large and unfathomable. As deep as the ocean and more vast. A drum as slow as time and as fast as now. Steady, like a pulse, but greater than any pulse or all. Two wings rose and fell. They rose, he saw the past. They fell, he saw his future. And he saw that the shape before him was endless and that its wings made a great circle in heaven. He saw his own death in those wings, and knew that it had already happened, and that it was still to come.

  • The Skaslois in Greg Keyes' Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone.
  • Big Bad Orannis the Destroyer in the Old Kingdom series. He is Sealed Evil in a Can alternately described as a sphere of light and a column of fire, and is totally immortal. His can is his own frozen body, split in half and buried under a hill, and encased by a seal of seven different materials, including bone. He destroyed the world several times before the Seven finally imprisoned him. Yes, that's correct: it took seven gods to to hold this thing. And his only real restriction is his power and movement - he can still communicate with and manipulate those around him. This is the most terrifying, unnatural thing to come from the terrifying, unnatural Kingdom.
  • Yog-Sothoth makes a brief appearance in the Illuminatus! Trilogy, as well as the Lloigors, Tsathoggua, and the Shoggoths from the Cthulhu Mythos. Towards the end there is also the Leviathan: a ridiculously immense, vaguely pyramid-shaped, single-celled, pre-Cambrian monstrosity with a single eye towards the top of each of its four sides, as well as far too many tentacles. Of course, this being the Illuminatus! Trilogy, that's not the weirdest thing in the novels...
  • Final Days has the growths. Massive metal flowers that grow out of the seabed and spreads across Earth, bringing earthquakes, violent storms, and strange lights with them. Nobody knows what they are or what their purpose is, or even if they are sentient or not. The only thing that is known is that they will destroy Earth. Though Stone claims they are actually benevolent.
  • John Hodgman's That Is All features a whole host of Ancient And Unspeakable Ones (AAOUs for short) that awaken from their slumber in 2012 to usher in the Global Superpocalypse.
  • Kim Newman's Dark Future novels feature appearances by Azathoth, Nyarlathotep, and some unpleasant beings from beyond human reality like the Jibbenainosay, a dark spirit which usually manifests as a sort of giant, evil jellyfish.
  • The Eddorians of the Lensman series. They came from another universe (bringing their planet along with them), they have third-stage minds and so can lethally Mind Rape any lesser mind, and the concept of their very existence was so disturbing that it had to be kept secret from both Civilization and Boskone, even though the Eddorians were the founders and ultimate rulers of Boskone.
  • The Old Ones in the Monster Hunter series by Larry Correia (Monster Hunter International, Monster Hunter Vendetta) are classic Eldritch Abominations.
  • A Certain Magical Index:
    • The Cthulhu Mythos is a system of magic in the setting. One side story has the main villains being magicians who use this magic. Cthulhu himself (technically, a lesser copy) is summoned at one point.
    • Sample Shoggoth is a strange amorphous parasite found in Antarctica. It enters a human's body, consumes their body fat and replaces it. Since it takes over the normal functions of fat, it can't be removed without killing the host, and it also has a powerful Healing Factor, capable of regenerating from having portions of its body erased from existence. It turns out to have been created by humans, however.
    • The "Invisible Thing" is a mysterious and extremely powerful entity. It has appeared as either a white dragon or a transparent mass (though these could be separate entities), the latter being the source of its nickname. It is capable of frightening a person who had temporarily become more powerful than God. It's also sealed inside the main character Touma, seemingly by his power.


  1. ↑ scaly
  2. ↑ wrinkly
  3. ↑ Outer space, for those of the scientific nature.
  4. ↑ Giant Insects? Maia? Monsters created by Morgoth?
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