A Colder War by Charles Stross and The SCP Foundation website can scare us in a nebulous, basal way that would make popular author H.P. Lovecraft proud.

The great priest Cthulhu—ruiner of worlds and devourer of souls, whose black wings silence the sun and whose tentacular maw drives men to madness—is in vogue.

H.P. Lovecraft, writer of horror and science fiction in the early part of the twentieth century, never enjoyed a terrific amount of success during his lifetime.  But in this modern time, when gore-horror and blatant exploitation—like that found in productions such as Saw and The Vampire Chronicles series—is most prevalent, Lovecraft’s bizarre, minimalistic, and subtle way of inspiring dread has begun to gather greater appeal and a wide audience.

Because the majority of Lovecraft’s works are in the public domain, contemporary authors have expanded upon his mythos with tales and adaptations of their own.  These works often featuring Lovecraft’s most popular creations, like the colossal Cthulhu and the corrosive shoggoths.  But many derivative productions diverge dramatically from the stylistic techniques that Lovecraft employed in the 1920s, distorting the beasts so that they conform to our modern moral ideas, or to form a basis for humor (as in Francois Launet’s Unspeakable Vault (of Doom) or plush Cthulhu).

However, there are a few places where the discerning aficionado of horror can find fiction that sticks closely to H.P. Lovecraft’s original, creepy style.  I’d personally like to recommend Charles Stross’ A Colder War.  It’s a brilliant blend of immersive spy fiction, and squamous, unimaginable cosmic horror.

The novella tells the story of weary, distressed CIA desk-jockey Roger Jourgensen, assigned time and time again to analyze the intelligence reports coming out of the Soviet Union, and summarize them for the higher-ups…

…But lately something’s been amiss.  Spy work across the iron curtain has revealed that the Soviets are dabbling in forces that they don’t fully comprehend—formless engines of consumption and long-sleeping beings of godlike power.

The ingenuity of this work comes from the fact that though Roger and his allies can put together the clues and determine exactly what’s happening half a world away, there’s likely nothing he or anyone can do about it.  And in the end, when the Soviets set their ill-understood forces in motion, a terrible atmosphere of hopelessness pervades the setting and seeps out to affect the reader.  Project Koschei is loose, and XK-PLUTO has failed to stop it.

Adding to the experience is the military and spook lingo sprinkled conservatively throughout the text.  The aforementioned ominous intelligence reports are lovingly detailed, to the point where illustrations would add little more to your feelings of terror, and each one is prefaced by a security command sequence—if you do not have SECRET GOLD JULY BOOJUM clearance, leave the auditorium now…

You have sixty seconds to comply.

A production of a different sort is The SCP Foundation, a Wikipedia-like website of a decidedly unusual flavor.  Anyone can contribute to the effort and attempt to improve the database with their own variety of unsettling material (and sometimes it seems that everyone has contributed, given the current number of articles included).  Instead of cataloging concepts and ideas which actually exist, the Foundation website is all about things which don’t exist…and are terrifying.  The site is ostensibly created to mimic a sort of database for the titular foundation, which has dedicated itself to secretly observing, classifying, and containing anomalous objects, creatures, and phenomenon.

There are hundreds of reports to be found within the database, the majority of which detail the methods by which SCP Foundation personnel should contain each unusual threat.  Some of these things are hilarious, like SCP-018 (the super ball) and 168 (the sentient calculator), but some of them are downright creepy (such as the attention-seeking statue no. 173 and the song of genesis no. 407).

Other articles cover related subjects.  There are the all-too-common SCP escape reports, and experiments performed on some of the more puzzling phenomenon.  Along the way readers get to know some of the key researchers who presumably work for the foundation, like the genre-savvy and enigmatic Dr. Clef, or the shrill but repressed Dr. Rights.

The foundation site is also engrossing because when authors write an article, they usually follow a very specific protocol designed to imitate a top-secret kind of mystery; articles are rife with references to the history of the foundation, various related SCPs, and CIA highlighter (long black streaks where vital information once was, like ██████).  Readers really have to work to understand the various related plotlines that interweave throughout the entire website, but in the end it’s worth it.   Aspiring writers can use the repository as inspiration, providing their genre is science fiction, horror, or weird.  It’s possible to kill hours on this site, too.

Were H.P. Lovecraft living in this Internet era, I think he’d be surprised at widespread popularity that he’s finally garnered.  I would also wager that he’d be pleased to read stories like these, which so faithfully utilize the kind of terror that he pioneered long ago.

…Run-on sentences?  Really?