Enduring Horror (Age of Conan)

Abstract

The three concluding chapters memorialize three members of the same family who died together in a horrible accident, each expressing a very different reaction to an identical death. This chapter concerns the wife; the next chapter concerns the husband, and the final chapter, their daughter. Every human being embodies culture, yet modern societies are culturally complex tapestries of interwoven cultural strands. This chapter illustrates how a computer game may be suitable for revival of a particular sattva precisely because it belongs to a subculture that was very important to her in real life. The game is the MMO Age of Conan and the sattva was a fan not of Robert Howard, the author of Conan whose own life ended in a psychotic suicide, but of A. Merritt, a much more successful author in the same fantasy-horror tradition, that also included H. P. Lovecraft. Appropriately, the particular religion that she joined in Age of Conan focused on resurrection not through the ministry of a merciful god, but in the application of horrible magic. As a Stygian necromancer, she constantly resurrected corpses to serve as her bodyguards, thus accomplishing transmigration, resurrection by means of technology, rather than religion.