Welcome to the Cosmic Mystery Club
The mysteries you've been searching for are searching for you, too!
WHAT’S THE COSMIC MYSTERY CLUB?
Recently I’ve developed a certain hunger for weird mysteries. Books like China Miéville’s The City and the City, Sara Gran’s Claire DeWitt series, Nick Harkaway’s Gnomon. Games like Disco Elysium, shows like Twin Peaks and True Detective, even immersive art installations like Meow Wolf. Mysteries that are all about the possibility of something big moving around under the everyday world, occasionally breaching the surface.
As I tried to answer two questions—Why do I like this? and Where can I find more of it?—I found I wasn’t the only person looking for more of whatever this was. From that sense of possibility and riffing off ‘cosmic horror,’ I started to call this genre ‘cosmic mystery.’
Unsurprisingly, making up a term and assigning it a definition doesn’t make the search any easier. So every third Thursday of the month, the Cosmic Mystery Club will look at a story, make the case for it being a cosmic mystery, and explore that mystery in a new way.
WHAT’S A ‘COSMIC MYSTERY’?
In a cosmic mystery, the investigator treads on the parameters of their reality in search of answers. The investigator thinks and feels in ways they’ll struggle to articulate, which creates dissonance: their clues and their perceived reality don’t match up. This leads the investigator to believe that the answer to their mystery may lie outside their ordinary world.
The answer doesn’t need to be found in the cosmic. All it requires is that the investigator stands at the border to beyond and asks, “Do you have what I’m looking for?”
In an interview with Random House included in my paperback edition of the speculative crime novel The City and The City, author China Miéville notes the oneiric nature of noir fiction. A cosmic mystery takes this dreamlike tendency to (un)natural conclusions. They often have unquiet atmospheres, rich in idiosyncratic interiority and unexpected observations, filled with asynchronous details scattered throughout the story like minor chords.
As in hardboiled detective fiction and noir, cosmic mysteries often involve an unorthodox investigator. If they work in law enforcement, as in a crime procedural, they have a unique approach, or else the laws or procedures themselves are strange. They could also be a private eye or amateur sleuth, or simply someone caught up in the mystery’s current. They’ll have unresolved troubles, or their own intensely personal compass, or another source of belief or fixation that opens them to cosmic forces.
Even after the investigator is exposed to the cosmic, it’s often the case that they must still examine the unknown via those affected—people, their choices, and the strange borders of social contracts that the cosmic only makes stranger.
SO, IT’S SCI FI/FANTASY/HORROR?
It depends—the key to finding a satisfying cosmic mystery is to meet the characters in the world they believe they’re in.
Erin E. Adams’ Jackal takes place in a contemporary, predominantly white Rust Belt town in which a series of young Black girls have had their lives cut short. Black protagonist Liz Rocher’s world feels like our world. As she investigates, she comes to understand that something beyond racial injustice intrudes on her life. Something unexplained, something else that has affected her from when she was young. She discovers that this force is connected to the disappearances and brutal deaths. If Jackal were set in a world where such forces are known to intermingle with mundane prejudices in Rust Belt towns, then Liz’s investigation would be less likely to challenge her parameters of reality.
In stories that are obviously set in a speculative world from page one, it may be the case that the cosmic mystery gets presented as more of a howdunit. This is the case with Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, in which the eponymously-named narrator is a rare human living in an unearthly world of endless halls and statues. However, the attitude of another inhabitant makes it clear that humans don’t belong here. The mystery is, how did Piranesi come to inhabit this world?
WHY COSMIC MYSTERIES?
Mysteries are made with two-way mirrors. Both the reader and the investigator are trying to figure out what’s going on, but the reader benefits from the characters’ perspectives without reciprocation (usually). Both interrogate the truthfulness of the details the author provides, even as the author steers that interrogation. So even in the coziest of mysteries, it sometimes feels like you’re brushing up against some larger apparatus moving the world around you.
Of course, the real world feels like this too. Which is why there’s something about the presence of cosmic elements in a mystery that simply feels right. The cosmic serves as an expression of forces of incomprehensible scale, manifesting in staggering ways, reflecting how forces like late-stage capitalism, systemic injustice, global conflict, and climate disaster shape our lives.
A well-suited mystery is a balm to the soul. When you’re holding a mystery in your hands, you’re also holding the solution. Even if you can’t guess it from the start, you know that you’ll eventually get enough clues, or be steered into the right line of inquiry. In fiction, at least, a mystery almost always promises that there’s an explanation for the most unreasonable actions.
Cosmic mystery joins genres like noir that test the limits of this promise. In cosmic horror, people often glimpse just enough of a larger truth to see how much more is beyond them. Cosmic mystery isn’t limited to the eldritch incomprehensions of its cousin, but it can have a similar effect—the cosmic provides a possible solution that intensifies the frisson of uncertainty that makes the investigation so thrilling.
MORE SOON
This upcoming third Thursday the Cosmic Mystery Club will be digging into China Miéville’s The City and The City, one of the books that got this conversation started—and a book with so many genres that there’s no reason not to add one more.