“The idiot Chaos blew Earth’s dust away”: H. P. Lovecraft’s Cosmic Horror in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

ABSTRACT This article argues that H. P. Lovecraft’s tales of cosmic horror, a resurging literary mode focusing on mankind’s dread of the unknown, are an important inspiration for Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. It first identifies the much-debated coiner with the creator deity Azathoth in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. It then connects the novel’s narrative strategy and characterization with Lovecraft’s unique aesthetic. The approach sheds a new light on the narrator’s odd use of the present tense by seeing him as a typical Lovecraftian narrator having access to an unseen reality that the author fabricates out of paradoxical cutting-edge science to create a sense of the unknown. It also offers a new reading of the novel’s key character Judge Holden as Azathoth’s messenger Nyarlathotep, whom he closely resembles in both appearance and behaviors. Last, through the lens of cosmic horror it illustrates how well McCarthy’s thoughts on human-nonhuman-environment relationships fit recent ecological discussions.