COLUMN: The scariest piece of literature I’ve ever read

With Halloween right around the corner, many people are in the mood to get scared. Modern horror movies tend to rely on cheap jumpscares, gore, and tropes to get their audience’s adrenaline rushing. While these horror strategies can be fun to be spooked by, they don’t invoke horror. Horror is a more than merely being scared, it’s a sense of dread that lasts long after whatever content you’re consuming ends. I have a fairly strong tolerance for the horror genre; not many things I’ve seen have caused me to stay up at night, except for one book in particular.

There is no book that has invoked more horror in me than I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison. The story presents an alternate version of reality set after the Cold War. In this world, the Cold War escalated to a point where the major superpowers, China, the United States and Russia built incredibly powerful artificial intelligences to fight each other. One of the intelligences developed sentience and subsequently took over the other AI. After monopolizing the resources, the machine developed Godlike abilities. The problem is this: the AI is nihilist. The AI despises the fact that it exists and seeks revenge on those responsible for its creation, mankind.

The AI who took over is referred to as AM. AM originally stood for Allied Mastercomputer, then Aggressive Menace and then it finally called it self AM, as in cogito ergo sum. AM kills off all of humanity with brutal efficiency except for five humans. He (the machine has personified itself as a patriarchal, deity figure) makes it his purpose to torture the five humans that it’s left alive. He keeps them in a state of perpetual immortality as well. At the start of the narrative the computer has kept these humans alive for 109 years.

The machine has a cruel sense of humor and constantly messes with the five humans it’s left alive. It convinces the humans who have been deprived of food for months and kept at the point of near-fatal starvation that there is an ice cave with canned food in the Arctic. After months of attempting to reach the cave, they finally get there. They then realized something, AM provided them with canned food but no can opener. This is just an example of the type of malevolence that the computer exhibits towards its pets.

AM’s nature is a terrifying reflection of nihilists in our own world. His hatred is reminiscent of people like the Columbine shooters, one of which, whose name I refuse to give any more infamy than the media already did, wrote unbelievably dark things such as “KILL MANKIND. no one should survive. we all live in lies.” It is entirely possible for people in our own world, who have entered a self lubricating cycle of resentment and despair to devolve into a very similar mindset as AM. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is not only a cautionary tale against artificial intelligence, it’s a cautionary tale against the nihilist ideology.

At that moment in the Arctic, the narrator realizes that death is their only way out. After they realize the trick AM played, one of the characters starts trying to eat one of the others. As a result of the physical altercation, icicles fall from the ceiling. The character immediately realizes that this is his opportunity. He takes the icicles and stabs the other victims. He then attempts to kill himself but not before AM stops him. The machine is furious, the narrator explains how he thought AM had hated him before but it wasn’t even close compared to the hatred it now exhibited. The scariest part of the story is the dreadful ending. AM transforms the narrator into an amorphous gelatinous blob that’s incapable of suicide. In the final lines of the story, the narrator explains his new form to the reader:

I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within. Outwardly: dumbly, I shamble about, a thing that could never have been known as human, a thing whose shape is so alien a travesty that humanity becomes more obscene for the vague resemblance. Inwardly: alone… And yet … AM has won, simply … he has taken his revenge … I have no mouth. And I must scream.

And that’s the scariest part of this story. Harlan Ellison does a great job of invoking a dreadful atmosphere and establishing the pure malevolence AM exhibits, but the reader is under the false impression that the story will have an inevitable conclusion. There is no conclusion. The narrator must spend an eternity with AM.

I’ve read numerous books about the absolute worst levels of human depravity. I’ve read Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi, The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and other books of a similar nature. As horrible as the situations these individuals endured were, there was always an end in sight. No matter how bad things got, death was always an out that offered peace. What happens when that is taken away?

Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and author of Man’s Search for Meaning was a proponent that even in the most dire of circumstances, one can still find meaning in their life, even if it’s only to represent what the human spirit can accomplish under hardship. In a sense, the fact that mortality has a end makes life worthwhile. Memento Mori. If one was subjected to a situation like the one presented in the book, no form of existentialism can exist, and life has no meaning but suffering. What possible meaning can be found in as bleak a situation as the one presented in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream? There is no humanity left to represent, there is no end in sight, there is no progression; there is only suffering. And that aspect, the absolute nihilism and hopelessness in this book, is what makes it the most terrifying thing that I’ve ever read.

Kristian Fors is a student at Utah State University majoring in Finance and Economics and is an opinion columnist for the Utah Statesman. He can be reached at krfors@gmail.com.