The Metaphoric Meaning

Ginny had a way of asking questions that made people nervous. Not because she was mean, quite the opposite. She had this calm, polite tone that made folks realize she wasn’t going to let them wriggle away from the truth.

So when she asked, “So, Mr. McMaster, you write about cosmic horror and dystopian futures, but what does it all mean?” she said it like she was asking about the weather.

McMaster, who was not actually a master of anything but enjoyed the title because it made him sound like a man who knew things, leaned back in his chair and smiled. It was the kind of smile people wear when they’re about to either say something profound or something deeply foolish.

“Think political,” he said.

Ginny blinked. “Political?”

“Yup,” McMaster said, folding his arms. “Everything’s political. Even the monsters.”

Now, if you’d read his stories, you might not have reached that conclusion on your own. His articles were full of shapeless things that crept out of oceans, whispered madness into dreamers, and rearranged the stars into patterns that spelled doom for the human race. The governments in his tales didn’t last long enough to vote on anything, much less form a policy committee.

Ginny tilted her head, pen hovering over her notebook. “You mean like a metaphor?”

McMaster’s grin widened. “Ah, you caught me.”

He had been giving this same answer, in one form or another, for the past twenty years. The real reason he wrote about cosmic horror was that he’d once looked at the state of the world and figured it already looked plenty dystopian.

The creatures, the madness, the crumbling empires, those were just exaggerations of what he saw on the evening news. But he liked to let people think there was a grand political philosophy behind it. It made him sound smarter, and it saved him from having to admit he mostly just liked scaring the hell out of people.

Ginny tapped her pen against the notebook. “So, if your stories are political, what do the monsters represent?”

McMaster squinted, as if searching for the answer among the coffee stains on the table.

“Well,” he began slowly, “sometimes the monsters are the government. Sometimes they’re the people. Sometimes they’re just the result of what happens when both sides refuse to admit they might be wrong.”

Ginny wrote this down, nodding as though she’d just been handed a key to the universe.

McMaster chuckled softly. He didn’t mind interviews like this.

They reminded him why he started writing in the first place, not to teach lessons, but to get people to think. Readers loved digging for meaning, even if all they found was dust and tentacles.

He leaned forward.

“You know, Ginny, most folks think cosmic horror is about things too big for us to understand, ancient gods, infinite voids, the whole universe not caring if we exist. But I think it’s the opposite. It’s about how small we make ourselves when we stop trying to understand anything at all.”

Ginny’s pen stopped moving. She looked up. “That’s actually kind of beautiful.”

McMaster shrugged, feigning embarrassment. “Don’t tell my editor. He likes to think I’m a pessimist.”

She laughed, closing her notebook. “So if I quote you, I should say you believe horror can be hopeful?”

He thought about it. “Sure. Why not? Just spell my name right.”

Later, when Ginny had packed up and left, McMaster sat for a while, staring into his coffee cup like it might whisper something profound back at him. Perhaps it was political, or the meaning was just what people built to make sense of chaos. Either way, he figured, it made for a good story.