So what is Cyclopian Horror?

[LoA]

I keep googling the term, but I wind up running into Hearthstone websites.

I hear it bandied around here on this forum sometimes, and I'm curious.

[Steerpike]

Though rendered "cyclopian" in Hearthstone, the term is usually written as "cyclopean," as in, the adjectival form of cyclops. It refers to cyclopean masonry and was much used by H.P. Lovecraft and other weird fiction authors to mean gigantic, strange, otherworldly, and irregular, usually in reference to architecture. Because of this, the term is generally associated with cosmic/Lovecraftian horror, i.e. horror connected to the vastness of the universe, our insignificance within it, and what Thomas Ligotti has called the "MALIGNANT USELESSENESS" of existence. Cosmic horror is often connected to primeval epochs, incomprehensible scales of time and space, and alien, totally inhuman beings that are to humans what humans are to insects (Cthluhu etc). Along with terms like squamous, rugose, non-Euclidean, nameless, and unnameable, it's become a kind of short-hand for "Lovecraftian."

EDIT: A classic use of "cyclopean" from At the Mountains of Madness:

Walking cautiously downhill over the crusted snow toward the stupendous stone labyrinth that loomed against the opalescent west, we felt almost as keen a sense of imminent marvels as we had felt on approaching the unfathomed mountain pass four hours previously. True, we had become visually familiar with the incredible secret concealed by the barrier peaks; yet the prospect of actually entering primordial walls reared by conscious beings perhaps millions of years ago—before any known race of men could have existed—was none the less awesome and potentially terrible in its implications of cosmic abnormality. Though the thinness of the air at this prodigious altitude made exertion somewhat more difficult than usual, both Danforth and I found ourselves bearing up very well, and felt equal to almost any task which might fall to our lot. It took only a few steps to bring us to a shapeless ruin worn level with the snow, while ten or fifteen rods farther on there was a huge, roofless rampart still complete in its gigantic five-pointed outline and rising to an irregular height of ten or eleven feet. For this latter we headed; and when at last we were actually able to touch its weathered Cyclopean blocks, we felt that we had established an unprecedented and almost blasphemous link with forgotten aeons normally closed to our species.

[LoA]

Thanks Steerpike!

I was in an Art History class, and we just got to Aethean art, and Cyclopean Masonry was brought up. So it just means horror set in early civilizations, and have been lost to time.

[Steerpike]

It's not really formal subgenre of horror, but yes, "primordial horror" or "ancient horror" might be a good way of putting it.