I'm working on a story about an omnipotent creature that speaks in truths, riddles, secrets, and info hazards.
Aside from Lovecraftian works like The Necronomicon or The King in Yellow, are there any short stories or books that explore similar themes? Specifically, something so overwhelmingly truthful that the human mind can't handle it?
I'm looking for inspiration or something terrifying, where the creature's words alone can break the protagonist's mind.
I just plugged your post into ChatGPT. Here is the response:
Truths That Fracture the Mind
1. “The Great God Pan” by Arthur Machen
- A foundational weird tale where a scientific experiment opens a woman’s mind to a reality so vast and terrible it drives her mad.
- Lovecraft himself called it one of the best horror stories ever written.
- The horror lies not in what is seen, but in the implications of what
can be seen.
2. “The White People” by Arthur Machen
- A young girl’s diary reveals her descent into forbidden knowledge and occult practices.
- The story is a slow-burn meditation on innocence, evil, and the terror of understanding too much.
3.
Songs of a Dead Dreamer and
Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti
- Ligotti’s stories are dripping with cosmic nihilism and info-hazardous prose.
- Try “The Last Feast of Harlequin” or “Vastarien”—the latter is about a man who discovers a book that describes a dream he thought was uniquely his own.
- Ligotti’s horror is philosophical, often echoing Zapffe and Cioran in tone.
4. “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges
- A universe-sized library contains every possible book, including ones that reveal unbearable truths.
- The story explores epistemological despair and the madness of infinite knowledge.
5. “The Egg” by Andy Weir
- A short, deceptively simple story that delivers a metaphysical gut-punch.
- The final truth it reveals is both awe-inspiring and deeply unsettling.
7.
The Fisherman by John Langan
- A novel that blends grief, folklore, and cosmic horror.
- The antagonist’s words and stories are laced with truths that warp reality and perception.
---
Bonus: Obscure but Potent
“The Red Tower” by Thomas Ligotti– A surreal meditation on a factory that may or may not exist, producing horrors that defy comprehension.
- “The Face That Must Die” by Ramsey Campbell– A descent into paranoid psychosis, where the protagonist’s perception of truth becomes a weapon against himself.
---
Then it asked me this:
Would you like me to help you craft a riddle or info hazard for your creature—something that feels like it
shouldn’t be said aloud? Or maybe a Borges-style fragment from a forbidden book?
I said, "sure go ahead"
Response:
Excellent. Let’s try on a few voices that could ooze from your creature’s mouth—truths wrapped in riddles, laced with psychic poison. These are designed to feel like linguistic paradoxes or ontological traps: fragments of thought that fracture rather than illuminate.
---
Riddle: The Truth That Hunts Its Knower
> “What begins in the mouth of gods and ends in the silence of graves—
> is shaped like a name but cannot be spoken—
> and once known, never unlatches its teeth?”
(The answer isn’t meant to be solvable. Its horror lies in how plausible it
feels, like the shadow of a forgotten language scratching the edge of comprehension.)
---
Excerpt from a Forbidden Codex
> “The mind is not the seat of thought, only its echo.
> You have never had an original idea—only echoes of an intelligence that died before time.
> Language is not a tool—it is the scar tissue of something that tried to scream and was sealed shut.”
Ideal for a moment when a character reads a “truth” and can no longer speak in coherent sentences, their own words fracturing into glossolalic entropy.
---
Info Hazard in Poetic Form
> “He dreamed of a sphere with a center everywhere and circumference nowhere.
> He woke, mouth full of dust, and remembered that he was once a city.
> Not a man *in* a city. He *was* the city.”
This borrows from Borgesian and Ligottian surrealism—the horror of misidentifying oneself, of slipping into ontological instability.
---
Would you like one tailored to a character's specific fear—like death, memory loss, erasure, or infinite recurrence? Or something tied to a deeper philosophy, like Cabrera’s discomfort ethics or the impossibility of living authentically under systemic illusion? Let’s dig deeper.
ChatGPT always prompts you to keep you on the platform.
