Before you is a rock. A slab. A monolith hundreds of feet high, several city blocks wide. You’ve walked through and around this forest for years, and yet, this is the first time you’ve ever seen this behemoth. But how can that be? How could you have missed this behemoth when it’s the size of a city skyscraper and there isn’t a tree even close to being half the height of it? You wander around the mass, looking for any indication of what it is. You spend hours trying to decipher the carvings and markings etched into it, but get no closer to answering any of your questions. Eventually, you need to head back home, but you swear that you will be back and that you will not forget this. You will commit to memory what you saw here today and feel motivated, even possessed, to determine what this titan really is and how come you’ve never seen it before today.
After walking several hundred feet, you blink and realize the sun has nearly gone down. Weird, you were just out on your normal early afternoon walk! Where did the time go? You turn around at the path you’ve come from, realizing it isn’t your normal path. You look to the sky as if you are missing something. A dull ache at the edge of your mind catches hold of you for a moment. Then you realize how hungry you are, and go about your day to have dinner.
You have just encountered and forgotten about an “Antimeme”. An Unknown entity, cloaked with powerful amnestic powers to make anyone and anything forget its existence the moment it is no longer observed. You’ve brushed with the expansion of the universe of which you will never remember despite encountering it dozens upon dozens of times. You have accidentally stumbled into the wonderland-esque rabbit hole jurisdiction of the Antimemetics Division.
There is No Anitmemetics Division by Sam “QNTM” Hughes is a cosmic horror novel heavily inspired by the internet forum/Creepypasta, SCP Foundation (even being written partially on the SCP forum initially, and if you don’t know what SCP is, I recommend checking this video explanation out), and its bureaucratic styling in handling the odd, unexplainable, and unknown entities of the universe. It is about a clandestine global organization, simply called “The Organization”, that oversees the study, containment, and elimination of “Unkonwns”, which can be anything from garden-variety SCP-esque creatures, concepts, and objects, viral infections of ideas that can take over the world, or in the book’s case, things that are impossible to remember unless you’re on the right cocktail of mnestic drugs. The head of the Antimemetics Division, Marie Quinn, is in the process of trying to remember the fact that she and her division are fighting an unseen, unremembered, and impossible-to-win war that’s been going on for several decades.
First, I want to highlight how much I appreciate what this book does with its structure. The first few chapters act as vignettes to set the tone and themes of the book, introduce the concept of inconceivable entities, and the different types that exist in this universe, along with how the Antimemetics Division is able to manage these entities, study them, and even combat them if necessary. The book also implements the writing style of SCP documentation by having sections dedicated to the written records of certain Unknowns, along with the visual gag of having redacted sections of those documents as well as redacting actual parts of the prose to demonstrate the impactfulness of the amnestic powers of certain Unknowns and play with the perception of the narration. I really appreciate that novels, especially horror novels, are getting more comfortable with testing out the formatting, style of communication, and visual elements of the text.
Now, I gotta admit something. Horror novels are a bit of a blind spot for me. I was A HUGE scaredy-cat when I was a kid, and I can pinpoint the actual moments that I started to get into horror. In 8th grade, at a friend’s birthday, we all played Dead Space together. Eventually everyone fell asleep, but I kept playing for hours. I was terrified but compelled to keep going, to learn all I could about this cosmic horror, the cult surrounding it, and a way to save the protagonist from this hell. Then in 2012, I watched my first horror movie, Sinister. The movie scared me so much that my friend and I stayed up all night, and when we went to breakfast at 6 a.m., I was CERTAIN I was seeing the monster from Sinister out of the corner of my eye. It took another decade after that to start actually reading horror with Our Share of Night, which is a Latin American horror novel that I have a lot of complex feelings about (a blog post for another day), but each of these milestones helped make horror one of my all-time favorite genres, and I’m so happy to be delving even further into horror lit.
So with that out of the way, when it comes to horror, the two things I’m looking for are how effective the horror elements are in scaring me and what themes the book is trying to communicate via its horror. I have a deeply shitty memory and forget things all the time. The sheer panic I feel when I finally get comfortable and relaxed, but my brain spikes in adrenaline and panic that I’ve forgotten something and need to remember what it is now or else I’m fucked is a regular occurrence for me. To read a book that deals with entities that can make you forget it existed, or can even obfuscate you from existence, created a primordial dread in me that made it honestly difficult to get through certain sections. Our protagonist, Marie Quinn, has an Unknown that is attached to her at all times that she has WILLINGLY taken on to protect others from it. It is invisible, always on the fringes of her vision, and feeds on her memories. She is able to maintain it by feeding it random facts, puzzles, or even full books that she has read, but is constantly wiping her mind of details bit by bit, and this is just a small example of the type of mind erasure that occurs. There are truly heartbreaking and heart-pounding moments when discovering what the characters have been forced to forget, and the book often doesn’t acknowledge the change in the universe or the hole in the narrative’s memory. It will simply glaze past certain details in the expectation that the horror will dawn on you as you remember what the characters cannot.
Forgetting something isn’t the only horror that this book presents, though! It’s filled with insane monstrosities beyond human comprehension. Writing is… hard. And to describe something vividly enough to elicit dread, or fear, or terror from a reader seems borderline impossible to me. But Sam Hughes is able to eloquently write about transdimensional creatures and concepts that bend the universe to their whim and break human memory in half. He masterfully constructs several interesting and unique Unknowns with full development of how they operate, their history, and in some cases, how to contain/defeat them. However, Hughes’ monster mastery is most evident in a terrifying “antagonist” for the Antimemetics Division to go up against, one that pulls the reader, as well as the cast, into a sense of deep hopelessness. How can we win against that which refuses to be remembered? How do we break out against the loops that continue to happen and stop something instead of perpetuating it? What happens when the person you’ve known for a decade is nothing but a stranger, or your beloved coworker succumbs to something uncontrollable?
What Antimemetics Division does best is its themes. We’re going to get into spoiler territory here, so I recommend skipping to the end for the conclusion if you want to avoid them. Unknown-3125 is the designation for a being behind our universe that, once someone is made aware of it, the Unknown either kills them or possesses them. It doesn’t want to be known, but once you are made aware of it, it eradicates your mind, and it is an enemy the Antimemetics Division has been fighting in a loop for decades, losing people in droves to it. Each loop, though, has bought some time and allowed the next iteration of the Antimemetics Division to advance its technology, find brilliant and tenacious people, and adamantly pursue its goal of protecting the world from Unknowns.
It might be the easiest interpretation, but it really feels indicative of the current political situation in the United States. A force that wants to disguise itself to take over the world and infect people’s minds when exposed to it. Something that causes a complete change in people when possessed by it, so someone you’ve known for years is all of a sudden unrecognizable and monstrous. The feeling of absolute hopelessness as world powers manipulate one another to perpetrate war and influence the zeitgeist into trying to accept that they aren’t the aggressors. The sudden realization that the world has changed for the worse and it happened without you even noticing. It’s so easy to let yourself wallow in that hopelessness, the magnitude of the situation feeling insurmountable, but something that There is no Anitmemetics Division works so hard to prove is that despite the odds, the human soul is indominable and there is always hope as long as there is someone left to fight. Love and memory are our strongest weapons, and as long as we pass on our knowledge, there’s hope in the face of the unknown.
In short, the book is an excellent piece of horror and yet another amazing work in the “Oh shit, there are horrible monsters and concepts that we can’t comprehend on this planet, but thank god there’s a cold, uncaring, and underfunded bureau tasked with saving us” genre a la SCP Foundation, Control, and the X-Files. This insanely specific subgenre of Sci-Fi Horror has become one of my all-time favorites, and There is No Antimemetics Division fits perfectly into the canon. I highly recommend checking this one out!
