I was attracted to this book by a glowing quote from Thomas Ligotti, one of my favourite modern horror writers, who described it as: ‘an encyclopedic grimoire instructing us in the varieties of esoteric thought and infernal diversions that exist for the reader's further investigation, treating us to a delightful stroll down a midway of accursed attractions that alone are worth the ticket of this volume’. Your mileage may vary, but if that's what you're into, give it a shot.

This is a work characterized by eclectic references, horror and occult themes, and conceptual provocations. It clearly takes itself seriously, despite its occasional sense of irony, but it doesn't move beyond the standard philosophical motif that governs all horror-oriented theoretical projects: The universe is defined by an absolutely unknowable Other, which engages us in paradoxes of alterity when we try to approach it. When no continuous thread is discernible, it makes the whole work feel like a stream of consciousness of provocations and obscurity. I would have rated this work higher, but the ideas didn't gel, or build in any intelligible way. There are compelling conceptual turns and clever treatments, so it's certainly worth a shot, especially for fans of horror and theory, speculative realism, etc. The work deserves a star, simply for its ambition, given its experimental structures and unconventional ways of organizing its ideas.

For Thacker, the genre of supernatural horror is the key site in which this paradoxical thought of the unthinkable takes place.Īn interesting look at some philosophical themes - essence, reality, negation, alterity, myth - with horror and occult themes used as a framework. This relationship between philosophy and horror does not mean the philosophy of horror, if anything, it means the reverse, the horror of philosophy: those moments when philosophical thinking enigmatically confronts the horizon of its own existence. Likewise, Thacker takes horror to mean something beyond the focus on gore and scare tactics, but as the under-appreciated genre of supernatural horror in fiction, film, comics, and music. In Thacker’s hands, philosophy is not academic logic-chopping instead, it is the thought of the limit of all thought, especially as it dovetails into occultism, demonology, and mysticism.

In the Dust of This Planet explores these relationships between philosophy and horror. To confront this idea is to confront the limit of our ability to understand the world in which we live – a central motif of the horror genre. In this book Eugene Thacker suggests that we look to the genre of horror as offering a way of thinking about the unthinkable world. The world is increasingly unthinkable, a world of planetary disasters, emerging pandemics, and the looming threat of extinction.

In the dust of this planet