Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Manish Melwani’s “Mammoth,” first published in Nightmare Magazine in June 2024. Spoilers ahead!
If you haven’t seen it yet, you will.
This is the promise, or threat, that the narrator makes repeatedly throughout the text. The first thing you’ll see is the so-called Progenitor video, which has spawned countless so-called Variant videos and a vast body of associated posts, comments, gifs, memes, chat groups, message boards, manifestos, and—fanboys, converts, acolytes? It’s a viral phenomenon gone super-pandemic.
The Progenitor video opens in a candle-lit warehouse. Three robed and hooded figures sit on the floor before a large banner bearing a glyph of obscure meaning. The figure in the middle hunches oddly; when the three stand, that figure towers to twice the height of its companions, having unfolded as if segmented like an annelid worm. This is the Entity. A fourth figure enters the frame, dressed in jeans and a hoodie. This is the Supplicant, who kneels before the Entity and allows it to hinge forward and engulf them within its voluminous hood, to lift them from the floor and swallow them whole. The robed companions chant a word auto-captioned as MAMMOTH. Many commenters believe this is the Entity’s name.
In Variants, the Entity may devour more than one Supplicant, or its robed companions. The banner glyphs vary. Some see a correlation between these and the patterns of spilled blood and viscera. Some theorize that there’s a proto-glyph more ancient than humanity, a door or gateway to which the banner glyph is a key. Or is the banner glyph itself an access point that stayed safely shut for aeons, until our technology created “a circuit of similar complexity and malevolence,” an “utterly compulsive circuit of capital and computational power; of eyeballs and ad revenue; of clicks and carbon emissions” that’s opened the way for something to slither through?
Such strange things are happening. Sixteen geographically random school shootings in sixteen days. Sixteen shooter-suicides, mostly young white men, eight who lurked on the same message board, twelve who were members of the same groupchat. Six victims were also on that groupchat. Investigators link two names to the shootings. One is the cultist-chanted MAMMOTH that’s also the name of the videos, chatroom, and message board. The other is Gorgo Mormo, a clinical psychiatrist who worked at three of the attacked schools before becoming a social media star and darling of the manosphere. “Momma” Mormo tells her followers that life is meaningless. All humans are “worms,” but it’s still better to be a predatory worm than a prey worm, a king worm rather than fodder.
Reputable parties call the MAMMOTH video a deepfake or staged performance, but that’s hard to cling to when MAMMOTH glyphs are graffitied everywhere and threatening pronouncements abound: “NATURE IS RETURNING–RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW,” “WE’LL CARVE GLYPHS INTO BODIES WITH BULLETS,” “TOMORROW IS WRIT IN SUPERSTORM CLOUDS.”
A new video breaches, then disappears, leaving in its wake “an effluence” of gifs, screengrabs, and variants. The variants this time are identical except for the faces, and a voice. Same warehouse, same robed figures, but the recording camera is mobile rather than fixed. Its operator is restless, as if desperate for you to see what they do.
And you will.
You now see that the warehouse is on a high floor of an old industrial building. Outside its expansive windows, the sea has surged nearly to the tops of telephone poles. Thousands of bloated corpses float in glyph-like formations, while the few living splash frantically in the filthy water. “Antediluvian apex predators” pull them under. Stranger things hover in the sky, snatching people from rooftops with trailing tendrils. The camera returns to the seated Entity. A voice that may be Gorgo Mormo’s, or some celebrity’s, or that of someone you love, intones, “To be a king among prey is still to be prey, but to be a god among worms is to be God.” And the Entity unfurls, awful and segmented: Vermis Rei, Vermis Dei, Mammon, Mammoth, MEMMOTH.
The anxious camera spins to show you the chanting crowds in the warehouse, the carrion outside. Their faces are the new video’s main variants. Somewhere there’s a version with your face in it, and the faces of your loved ones.
The camera operator steps toward the Entity. It swallows you into “an eternal void eventually broken by glinting starlight,” into “unending rows of teeth, lining a gullet ten million light-years long.” At last you see in Its maw a planet with familiar continents being eaten away by “carnivorous” seas. Its atmosphere is superheated—the planet has been “transformed by inexorable feedback loops into a hothouse; a hunting ground.” It’s “a glimpse; a portent; a promise of things to come.”
If you haven’t seen It yet, you will.
What’s Cyclopean: In the later videos, you see “the edges of familiar continents swallowed by scabrous, carnivorous oceans”.
The Degenerate Dutch: People photoshop “social groups” and “entire ontological categories” onto the Supplicant as they’re swallowed by the Entity. But eventually, of course, it will be you.
Weirdbuilding: Were the magi of “The Festival” trying to become kings among worms?
Anne’s Commentary
So sang the prophets R.E.M.:
“It’s the end of the world as we know it—And I feel fine.”
I don’t. Feel fine, that is. At least not without serious sedation. November 5 looms, but then again, the world has always been about to end on one date or another or at some unspecified but only too nigh a time. For those among us who have run short on apocalypses to worry about, Vox’s 2018 list is still a good place to start. It includes two of the global-scale catastrophes that Melwani posits as precipitating factors for “Mammoth’s” extinction event: Climate change and artificial intelligence (or at least the internet.)
Here’s how his end-of-the-world works. Unchecked global warming creates a “hothouse” environment suitable for worm-gods, a ready-made “hunting ground” too tempting to pass over. The worm-gods have one problem: The door or gateway or portal between their world and ours has been closed for “aeons,” and the key has been lost, along with the super-science or magic that could reproduce it. No worries, humanity stands ever eager to turn positive innovations to perilous uses. A world-wide communications network and information resource must be a good thing, right? Yes, but. Any tool can only be as beneficial or as harmful as the hand that wields it.
In the case of the internet, where there are billions of wielding hands, or swiping and typing fingers, some of the wielders must be bad actors and many others vulnerable to their corrosive influence. Looking at the internet as a “blind, mute, utterly compulsive circuit of capital and computational power,” it’s no wonder some of its busy threads could braid into a “key-spell” complex and malevolent enough to open the doom-portal.
The worm-god’s gullet.
Again, I’m drawn to what must be one of Lovecraft’s most quoted and quotable passages, the opening of “Call of Cthulhu.” You know it, the mercy that is “the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents,” all that “dissociated knowledge” that (sorted out) “will open up such terrifying vistas of reality” that we’ll either lose it or retreat into dark age denialism. A unification of the sciences, a correlation of scattered data streams, would be his doom-engine. Melwani’s doom-engine, the internet, may be the human achievement that Lovecraft feared. Rather than some super-telescope that reveals Azathoth at the seething center of creation, we may only need the internet to bring together enough formerly isolated pathologies to trigger the End.
Melwani mentions the manosphere as one internet-fueled “circuit” of malevolence. The Entity’s unfailing (if annelid-articulated) potency might satisfy that community’s phallic fantasies. At the same time, its—appendage?—into our world has the oral aspect of a gullet, or perhaps even of a vagina that delivers one in reverse, taking in rather than pushing out Supplicants and then birthing them into a vision of their ruined planet.
And both this gullet and vagina are dentata. Toothed in rows ten million lightyears long, no less. In “Mammoth,” lots of people evidently prefer that ride to drowning in storm surge or being devoured by primordial sea beasts or sky-medusae. One way or another, there’s a whole lot of munching going on. As Gorgo Mormo says, we’re all worms, either predator or prey, eating or being eaten.
Melmani employs an intriguing point of view in this story. Second person POV often strikes me as first person one step removed, that is, with the narrator achieving a certain distance by referring to themself as “you” rather than “I.” Or think of it as the narrator talking to themself as if to another person.
While there may be some of that me but let’s say you about “Mammoth’s” narration, I read it more as a fairly omniscient narrator addressing an Everyperson you. This narrator could be an impersonal omniscient. Or they could be a particular character involved in the narration. Maybe they’re a journalist who was assigned to the Warehouse-Cult story and is putting down what they’ve uncovered before it’s their turn to be dinner. Even cooler, they could be Gorgo Mormo, podcasting what’s coming to her legion of followers.
Good old Mommy Mormo, with her “firm, but not unkind” demeanor. It’s interesting that, in Greek folklore, Mormo is a frightful spirit whom mommies would invoke to scare their kids out of misbehaving. Gorgo is another name for Medusa, the mortal sister in the Gorgon trio of snake-haired man-petrifiers.
As far as I can tell without delving into arcane tomes, MEMMOTH could be a variation on the word MAMMOTH. I don’t find that it’s a particular demon or worm-god. However, there is definitely a Memmoth Hostel in Lampang, Thailand. It’s well-rated, and it has free Wifi, so you can keep up on the latest Entity Variants while you enjoy whatever time we all have left.
I better start packing now.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
If you haven’t read it, you will. A story that speaks directly to you, in a way many readers find uncomfortable. It forces you into a world almost like your own—the dangers magnified from the familiar ones, the risks askew from those you’re used to not thinking about. But what many people find most upsetting about the second person is its kinship with control. It tells you who you are. It tells you how you react. Maybe if you were actually in this world, and not just a reader, you would be someone different and take different actions. But would you, really? What do you do now, in the world you think you know?
I’m not actually going to write this whole piece in the second person. Aren’t you relieved?
I, personally, am not one of those who flinches at the second person. It’s a peephole. All fiction offers the magic of seeing things through different eyes, but “you” is a John Malkovich closeup, a strapped-in ride on a roller-coaster track. It’s a puzzle, too—who is “you?” Is it meant to be a specific person to whom the narrator is speaking, with me-the-reader as eavesdropper? Or is it meant to be me, either as my actual self or as a costume for the length of the story? But “Mammoth” is doing something else: “you” is me, but it’s also you, and you, and you, because it’s about the particular modern phenomenon of experiences that are forced on everyone, whether or not we choose them and however we act on them, and about how much of a horror that can be even when it doesn’t involve ten-thousand lightyear gullets.
For example, I remember my first encounter with the word “incel.” It was on Twitter, and something about the post suggested an iceberg beneath the tip of the term. I saw it again several times in the next few days, each time with more detailed Things Man Doesn’t Want to Know. Something had come into my universe that I really didn’t want there, and it wasn’t going to leave. This was not an experience unique to me—those of us who hadn’t seen it yet, eventually would.
Mammoth. It may not be the exact name, but it’s a good way to think about something growing too big to ignore.
It’s also a good way to think about something—like the prototypical story of describing an elephant by touch—that can (must) be approached through many different aspects, which only in their combination make up the full trouble. In some circles these things are called “wicked problems,” too large and complex to be handled (or understood) through single solutions.
People respond in many ways to problems too vast to be encompassed by a single human mind. Some deny them; others take the failure of comprehension as a blessing (correlating your contents, etc.). But many seek enough power to be safe, or safer, or just to gain the illusion of control that comes from helping cause the problem. And if our lives are meaningless, as Mommy Mormo says, then that choice can’t have any moral importance. Right? Why not choose to be a predator? Or a king, or a god. If it doesn’t matter that the world is being devoured, why not seek the petty satisfaction of being a devourer? And if you’re not sure how to do that, then worshipping the devourers is almost the same thing.
Aren’t you glad you live in this world, that has so little in common with the world of “Mammoth”?
In that story—definitely not here—the terrors of complexity take the form of “glyphs,” keys to destruction made up of climate change and school shootings and viral deepfakes and the “manosphere” and and and. Something new that fits an ancient lock. A doom we’ve designed ourselves but can’t actually comprehend, which is therefore just as good (bad) as the original incomprehensible doom from beyond. We can summon that which we can’t banish, and we can do it accidentally, and we have already done enough that we can’t avoid the summoning. The flood is coming.
If you haven’t yet heard the words that herald it, you will.
We’re taking off next week, but we’ll be back November 13th with Chapters 38-39 of Pet Sematary in which you’ll be shocked, shocked, to discover that Jud wasn’t entirely forthcoming in his original discussion of the burying ground.
