Ed Simon in The Hedgehog Review:
The Earth’s oceans remain a source of anxious uncertainty. For all that we’ve chartered upon the waves of the sea, that which lies beneath remains as dark as the impenetrable barriers through which surface light does not penetrate, a black kingdom of translucent glowing fish with jagged deaths-teeth and of massive worms living in volcanic trenches. More than even interstellar space, the ocean’s uncanniness disrupts because the entrance to this unknown empire is as near as the closest beach, where even on the sunniest days a consideration of what hides below can give a sense of what the horror author H.P. Lovecraft wrote in a 1927 essay from The Recluse, when he claimed that the “oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is a fear of the unknown.” The conjuring of that emotion was a motivating impulse in Lovecraft’s weird fiction, in which he imagined such horrors as the “elder god” Cthulhu, a massive, uncaring, and nearly immortal alien cephalopod imprisoned in the ancient sunken city of R’lyeh, located approximately 50 degrees south and 100 degrees west.
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