Abhuman is a term used to distinguish a separation from normal human existence. This is different frominhuman, which typically connotes an ethical or moral separation from others.
The term was used byWilliam Hope Hodgson in his 1912 novelThe Night Land and hisCarnacki stories.[1][2][3] Similar concepts, although not the term itself, also appear in the works ofArthur Conan Doyle,Rudyard Kipling, andBram Stoker among other notable American and British authors.[4] The term is also used within the fictional universe ofWarhammer 40,000 to refer to populations of humans who have mutated, naturally or otherwise, to adapt to extreme environmental conditions.
In literary studies ofGothic fiction, abhuman refers to a "Gothic body" or something that is only vestigially human and possibly in the process of becoming something monstrous,[4] such as avampire[5] orwerewolf.[6] Kelly Hurley writes that the abhuman subject is "a not-quite-human subject, characterized by its morphic variability, continually in danger of becoming not-itself, becoming other".[7]
Allan Lloyd-Smith writes that among "the sources of abhuman Gothic horror for many writers at this time were theurban squalor and misery of overcrowded cities".[8]
^Hurley, Kelly (1996).The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 168.doi:10.1017/CBO9780511519161.010.
