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There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm (SCP Foundation)
This book is hard to tag - it's basically cosmic horror, or horror scifi. It is also one of the creepiest and trippiest things I've read in a long time and maybe ever.
I kinda vaguely knew about SCP as a collaborative wiki project from the 2000s, with user-submitted descriptions of imaginary (and frequently extradimensional) objects. This book is based on it. It's about a group of characters who work for the Antimemetics Division of the SCP Foundation, a department most people don't know about (because it's impossible to remember it for more than a few minutes after finding out about it) that handles "antimemes," which are the opposite of memes - if memes are catchy and transmissible, antimemes are intentionally unmemorable, to an extent where you need to use extraordinary measures, such as memory-enhancing drugs, just to recognize that they exist at all. It's information that functions as anti-information. And it turns out there are living creatures with antimemetic properties, as well as weapons that use it ...
This book was so WEIRD. SO SO SO WEIRD.
But in a fun and trippy way.
In the early chapters - each of which is a more or less standalone creepypasta-style story - the fact that none of the characters know what information they've forgotten is part of the book's weirdness and also its charm. We meet a new employee on his first day, who is welcomed by a charming fellow employee ... and gradually realizes he can't answer any of the other man's questions (like "Where are you from?") and then realizes that his memories are being eaten, including his coworkers' memories of him. Fleeing, unable to get help from people who forget him as soon as they see him, pursued by an implacable memory-phage that can walk through walls, he finds his way to a room with its walls covered in crazywall-style notes from other people this has happened to, and realizes that not only is this not his first day, he's been working here for years ...
Characters encounter recordings of themselves talking about people they don't remember. Their memories of their childhoods, their coworkers, etc vary from chapter to chapter. They walk in and out of rooms that erase all memory of what happened inside, and use various techniques to either remember or forget. Many antimemes erase themselves from paper or recording devices as well. There is a drug that causes you to relieve all your memories vividly in reverse order (and then die); there's a drug that makes it impossible to forget anything ever, which rapidly kills you. ("And then you die" is a frequently recurring theme in this book.)
At one point, one of the protagonists is interrogating the retired founder of the organization (who is also her mentor) to try to uncover his missing memories of how their organization came to be, which no one remembers anymore. She ends up uncovering intentionally erased memories of a cosmic horror that perceives you as soon as you perceive it, and then kills you and erases everyone else's memories of you. As her interviewee and mentor dies instantly and horribly in front of her, she realizes that she has seconds to save herself by erasing her own memory of the incident. By the end of that story, she not only doesn't know how the organization was founded, but she doesn't know by whom, either; she and everyone who ever knew him have forgotten him utterly.
(In an unfortunate bit of real-world synchronicity, I read that chapter, in which you first learn of the cosmic horror, then IT sees YOU and you immediately get lancing pains in your eyes, then spider legs grow out of your eyes and every other orifice, and then you die .... and immediately got lancing pains in my eyes, which I realized were happening because I was holding the book at a bad angle and my glasses prescription is a little out of date, but it really could not have come at a less convenient time.)
I liked the first half of the book a lot better than the second half, in which we know a lot more of what's going on, and the eerie, trippy horror becomes a more typical post-apocalypse narrative in which the eldritch horrors won, the world is now a hellish cosmic nightmare, and a person who is naturally immune to the eldritch horrors' mind-bending effects is trying to unravel the various clues left behind by the Antimemetics Division, all of whom are now dead, in order to figure out how to stop it. It did have a reasonably satisfying ending, allowing for the fact that every single character you met in this book is now dead and no one remembers them.
The version of this book that I read was the self-published version, but apparently it was recently picked up by a major publisher and (rather appropriate given the subject matter) had to have all the SCP material scrubbed out of the book and any SCP characters' names changed, since the SCP is Creative Commons and the publisher was not going for that. So I'm glad I read the original. That being said, according to the blog post talking about the publishing deal, the original version remains available to read online.
I kinda vaguely knew about SCP as a collaborative wiki project from the 2000s, with user-submitted descriptions of imaginary (and frequently extradimensional) objects. This book is based on it. It's about a group of characters who work for the Antimemetics Division of the SCP Foundation, a department most people don't know about (because it's impossible to remember it for more than a few minutes after finding out about it) that handles "antimemes," which are the opposite of memes - if memes are catchy and transmissible, antimemes are intentionally unmemorable, to an extent where you need to use extraordinary measures, such as memory-enhancing drugs, just to recognize that they exist at all. It's information that functions as anti-information. And it turns out there are living creatures with antimemetic properties, as well as weapons that use it ...
This book was so WEIRD. SO SO SO WEIRD.
But in a fun and trippy way.
In the early chapters - each of which is a more or less standalone creepypasta-style story - the fact that none of the characters know what information they've forgotten is part of the book's weirdness and also its charm. We meet a new employee on his first day, who is welcomed by a charming fellow employee ... and gradually realizes he can't answer any of the other man's questions (like "Where are you from?") and then realizes that his memories are being eaten, including his coworkers' memories of him. Fleeing, unable to get help from people who forget him as soon as they see him, pursued by an implacable memory-phage that can walk through walls, he finds his way to a room with its walls covered in crazywall-style notes from other people this has happened to, and realizes that not only is this not his first day, he's been working here for years ...
Characters encounter recordings of themselves talking about people they don't remember. Their memories of their childhoods, their coworkers, etc vary from chapter to chapter. They walk in and out of rooms that erase all memory of what happened inside, and use various techniques to either remember or forget. Many antimemes erase themselves from paper or recording devices as well. There is a drug that causes you to relieve all your memories vividly in reverse order (and then die); there's a drug that makes it impossible to forget anything ever, which rapidly kills you. ("And then you die" is a frequently recurring theme in this book.)
At one point, one of the protagonists is interrogating the retired founder of the organization (who is also her mentor) to try to uncover his missing memories of how their organization came to be, which no one remembers anymore. She ends up uncovering intentionally erased memories of a cosmic horror that perceives you as soon as you perceive it, and then kills you and erases everyone else's memories of you. As her interviewee and mentor dies instantly and horribly in front of her, she realizes that she has seconds to save herself by erasing her own memory of the incident. By the end of that story, she not only doesn't know how the organization was founded, but she doesn't know by whom, either; she and everyone who ever knew him have forgotten him utterly.
(In an unfortunate bit of real-world synchronicity, I read that chapter, in which you first learn of the cosmic horror, then IT sees YOU and you immediately get lancing pains in your eyes, then spider legs grow out of your eyes and every other orifice, and then you die .... and immediately got lancing pains in my eyes, which I realized were happening because I was holding the book at a bad angle and my glasses prescription is a little out of date, but it really could not have come at a less convenient time.)
I liked the first half of the book a lot better than the second half, in which we know a lot more of what's going on, and the eerie, trippy horror becomes a more typical post-apocalypse narrative in which the eldritch horrors won, the world is now a hellish cosmic nightmare, and a person who is naturally immune to the eldritch horrors' mind-bending effects is trying to unravel the various clues left behind by the Antimemetics Division, all of whom are now dead, in order to figure out how to stop it. It did have a reasonably satisfying ending, allowing for the fact that every single character you met in this book is now dead and no one remembers them.
The version of this book that I read was the self-published version, but apparently it was recently picked up by a major publisher and (rather appropriate given the subject matter) had to have all the SCP material scrubbed out of the book and any SCP characters' names changed, since the SCP is Creative Commons and the publisher was not going for that. So I'm glad I read the original. That being said, according to the blog post talking about the publishing deal, the original version remains available to read online.
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I had no idea there was a book! I read far too much of the original archive in 2012.
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Also if I'm petty, going with a spiders = evil shorthand was a pink flag for things becoming less interesting from the very start lol
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I think cosmic horror especially is hard mode because striking that balance between mysterious spooky ineffable cosmic horror-ness and some kind of semi-explanation for wtaf is going on must be difficult. Most of the cosmic horror I read "fails" for me in the back half in either one direction or the other. Thomas Ligotti is maybe the only author I've read in this space (and admittedly, I only read limited horror because I'm a GIANT CHICKEN lol) who consistently tilts a little too much "wait, no, what's going on OH NOES!!!" mysteriousness rather than too much explanation, and that's probably because his horror is so aggressively weird (complimentary).
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(I don't know Thomas Ligotti's stuff at all; I'll have to look it up!)
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Ironically, I feel like a lot of H. P. Lovecraft did stick the landing for me - I encountered him in high school, in a collection with a loving foreword/introduction, and by "loving" I mean that it was pretty damn clear about Lovecraft's weird family issues AND HIS RACISM, as a way of contextualizing (not apologizing) for the material, and I appreciated that SO MUCH. I think some of this doesn't "land" for people today who are too genre-savvy :) but as a teenager who had not read much horror, it was in fact a good ~gateway because things that modern/more genre-savvy readers would probably find "too obvious" were my introduction to the "too obvious" tropes, if that makes sense? "The Whisperer in Darkness" I'd find "too obvious" now, but as a first experience it was great!
TV Tropes on Thomas Ligotti, including
He's also apparently notable in nihilism philosophy circles (as in, academic philosophy) although not technically a philosopher? Regardless, I learned of him via his story "Teatro Grottesco" in one of the Datlow & Windling Year's Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies but he's so consistently...himself that pretty much ANY story you hunt down (or any collection) by him is bound to be basically The Ligotti Experience. He's actually an author for whom binge-reading a collection DOESN'T leave me vaguely bored/dissatisfied because all the stories start to feel "too same-y" - that is, they're all consistently Ligotti, but they're SO AGGRESSIVELY WEIRD in the same yet different ways. XD XD
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