Beyond Lovecraft's Horror

There is probably nonexistence after human death in plenty of stories like Call of Cthulhu, or the issue is simply never explored in many Lovecraftian cosmic horror stories.  The entities like Azathoth, the unwitting divine creator of the cosmos, and Cthulhu, the great dreamer of R'lyeh, outlive humans and far exceed them in power, but the god of this universe only resembles the Christian Yahweh in that he is the logically necessary uncaused cause and does not violate axioms (logical necessities and scientific laws are not the same and the former alone cannot be false or different, no matter what fools believe about Lovecraftian storytelling).  Azathoth is not said to have any kind of afterlife waiting for anyone whether out of moral judgment or sheer power, and he is actually blind to the physical worlds he unintentionally created in his sleep.

To die as a person in this kind of universe is almost certainly to cease to exist as a consciousness and leave the body to be claimed by natural deterioration.  If Lovecraft had envisioned an afterlife for humans in his mythos, though, it would likely have been oppressive or hostile to humanity, full of alien beings, bizarre structures, and psychological or physical torments for at minimum a time.  Inspired by Lovecraft's ideas while going beyond them, a 2014 novel by Stephen King combines the cosmic horror of eldritch supernaturalism and dimensions with the concept of an afterlife.  Very few specific examples of fictional afterlives rival the Null of King's Revival.  With its potentially unending march of the human dead under the bites of "ant-things" that serve incredibly powerful beings like Mother, the Null is a grim destination even if a person's experience in it does not last forever as Mother insists or if it does not collect all humans as protagonist Jamie assumes.

There is still some genuine ambiguity about how the hellscape of the Null and its Lovecraftian Great Ones relate to the blatant depictions of much more peaceful afterlives in other King stories--and it is absolutely not a universal human afterlife at the very least if it is connected with the other narratives as is all but explicitly stated.  In the tale of Revival, there is the possibility that Mother was only projecting an illusion to Jamie's perceptions like Pennywise/It would or, as utterly terrible as this would still be, that the Null is only the afterlife of those who were cured or otherwise in contact with the "secret electricity" that Charles Jacobs suspected was but a part of an even greater force of the universe.  In either case, to just see or think about such a place drives some of the characters who were healed from diseases or addictions by this secret electricity to murder and suicide, which perhaps only brings them to face Mother and her inhuman ant-like slaves for eternity.

The Null goes far beyond Lovecraft's horror because it does not present death as an escape from earthly suffering to nonexistence of the mind or to a pleasant afterlife.  Yes, this fate is all but certainly not for everyone or is a complete fabrication by Mother, but characters nonetheless have visions of this hellish world that is said to be more foundational to reality than the world of terrestrial human life.  They react with despair or terror to its otherwise hidden metaphysics.  Stephen King offered a taste of what a Lovecraftian afterlife could be like, and, in the words of Mother, there is no death and no rest.  There is instead service and suffering for the Great Ones.  Of course, traditionalist and actual versions of religious afterlives like those of the Bible (the true afterlives of which are vastly different from the traditionalist distortions) are very much Lovecraftian, but in the broader sense that there is cosmic horror relating to the nature of reality.  Superhuman beings, human powerlessness, and even the fright of moral condemnation are the source of terror here.  

The last of these is not even a part of the cosmic horror championed by Lovecraft.  This is religious cosmic horror, and yet there are significant distinctions between the cosmic horror of the Bible or general religious cosmic horror as a philosophical issue and the horror of Lovecraft's personal stories.  Stephen King goes farther than both Biblical cosmic horror and that of Lovecraft himself.  Revival is silent on exactly how the Null continues in spite of King's own seeming uncaused cause Gan.  If it awaits anyone in this world, the Null is a non-theological hell.  It is not about justice or even the injustices of supernatural beings who have the power to impose what they irrationalistically think is justice in their eternal conscious torments (which is not what the Bible actually promises the unsaved).  It appears to be something a person could not escape from even if they physically become conjoined with Mother as their soul experiences extreme agony.  It is, again, beyond Lovecraft's specific type of cosmic horror in ways that amplify the stakes infinitely.