Christians allowed to write eldritch abominations?

[Kessie]

So I had the bright idea to make the Big Bad in my current story a world-devouring eldritch abomination.

Not being very familiar with them (I tend to stay away from Lovecraft), I hopped on TV Tropes and found the short story Nethescurial.
www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=433
(Warning--story is disturbing without ever showing anything graphic.)

Now I'm rethinking the whole eldritch abomination idea. They're not so much a monster as an entire worldview. It goes like this.

The universe is an illusion.

Behind the illusion is empty, seething EVIL that will ANNIHILATE YOU. If it comes through into our reality it makes things EVIL and you see EVIL EVERYWHERE until you GO MAD and DIE.

Evil tends to look like stuff that lives in the oceans. Crabs, octopi, starfish, things like that. Because that's ALIEN and EVIL.

Which is contrary to the Christian worldview, that beyond our reality is the spiritual reality of a good and loving Creator. Although there is a vast evil that hates us specifically and personally, it's not as all-encompassing as Lovecraftian horror supposes.

So!

Are Christians allowed to touch on mind-blowing, madness-inducing Horror Of That Which Is Beyond?

And if so, how do you win without being campy?

[Divides the Waters]

August Derleth was a Catholic who added a dimension of good vs. evil to the Cthulhu mythos, so I would say yes, you can absolutely write in that genre. I have attempted something like that, but it came off a little more like Paradise Lost than The Call of Cthulhu. While God is generally portrayed as sovereign even in fantasy stories, the actual Battle tends to come more to the forefront, and the struggle against inner and outer darkness is intensified.

[fluke]

Kessie,

All things are permissible, but not all things are profitable.

I have read some Lovecraft and even started working on a Christian story where the heroes were pulled into a pocket universe where Lovecraft's rules reigned. They were investigators like in Call of Cthulhu, in fact all the modern-day-pulled-into-the-past characters were players in RPGs. One of them was even a CoC keeper (GM) who helped the others get their bearings in the setting. He says to them after he realizes where they are (sees a road sign that says "Arkham"), "In the games you have played, you were expected to win. You would fight, struggle, be wounded, but in the end, you would overcome the Big Boss. Don't expect that here. In CoC, most investigators will die horribly or be rendered insane by what they discover."

I stopped writing it. I got depressed. Like CS Lewis comments about his state of mind after writing Screwtape Letters, everything was too dark.

However, others can write and I commend them. At Cross and Cosmos, we received a submission of Christian, Lovecraftian horror. It was, in fact, so Lovecraftian, we rejected it. I enjoyed it. It was a modernized, rewriting of The Dunwhich Horror.

How do you win without being campy? That's the tough part. When working on my abandoned story, I didn't want a Jesus vs. Cthulhu show down. For the show down, I planned on the investigators' faithful prayers preventing the horrors from coming through the portal. They would be at the portal, praying together, but I would make that very different from a spell.

They weren't going to use magic in the show down. I had planned on them having discussions on should they/shouldn't they. Naturally, the Necronomicon was going to make an appearance. Probably a side quest to get the thing from the little bads.

[Kessie]

Fluke: Yeah, that depression of writing something so dark is what I really want to avoid.

I was thinking how something like that could exist in the real world. I suppose if you took one of the seraphims, the things with all the wheels and the "eyes all around and within", and had it join in the fall with Satan ... one of those things could totally pass as Lovecraftian. It's so weird our minds can't even grasp it.

What was it Lewis said in the beginning of Perelandra, about it's an awful thing that the bad is horrible, but the good is horrible, too. It's as if water was the one thing you could not drink and food was the one thing you could not eat. (Badly paraphrased.)

My point being, if we could see into more dimensions than three, and see the beings that surround us constantly, good and evil, we'd lose our minds.

Lovecraft is depressing because there's no good anywhere and Evil Wins. I think I'm going to go the easy route and just have it possess somebody, so they don't fight the Big Monster, they just fight the possessed guy. Less insanity that way.

[firestorm78583]

I haven't read any of the Lovecraft lore, but I have a take on the perception of evil;
You could write it from the perception of the one interacting with evil. Remember that evil doesn't always appear to be ugly, it can be very pretty to the perception of the victim. You could treat the Lovecraftian percepton of evil as a blanket hypnotic vision, akin to the old saying "Tell a lie loud enough and often enough, and soon it becomes the truth". You then have an unmasking moment at the end of the story, where the evil is revealed for what it truly is.
Just my 2 cents.