As Deleuze-Guattari establish, it is catatonia - simulated or artificial death - rather than death itself that is Poe's obsession: “Horror-story writers have understood, after Edgar Allan Poe, that death wasn't the model for schizophrenic catatonia, but that the contrary was true, and that the catatonic was one who made of his body a body-without-organs, a decoded body, and that on such a body there is a kind of nullification of the organs.” (Deleuze, http) 'Mesmeric Revelation' is presented in the form of a simulated dialogue between 'Poe' and Vankirk, the victim of a terminal disease, who has, like Waldemar, allowed himself to be hypnotised. The 'mesmeric revelation' that the trans alive-dead Vankirk furnishes Poe with turns out to be a Spinozist disquisition on the nature of God and matter.

'Death', Vankirk tells 'Poe' in 'Mesmeric Revelation', is far from being the end, since 'There are two bodies - the rudimental and the complete ... what we call 'death' is but the painful metamorphosis.' ('Life is a lower form of matter.' [Artaud, 1965, 216]) The passage from 'life' to 'death' is not a journey from Being to (phenomenologically-construed) Nothingness, but a movement from the organism to the desolated but populous body [without organs] of zero. In Vankirk-Poe's hypermaterialist metaphysics, the 'ultimate life' is 'unorganized' since 'organs are contrivances by which the individual is brought into sensible relations with particular classes and forms of matter, to the exclusion of other classes and forms.' (Poe, 1982, 93) Either everything is alive, or nothing is. Either way, the distinction between living and nonliving, vital and mechanical is illegitimate and unworkable. 'To rudimental beings, organs are the cages necessary to confine them until fledged.' (Poe, 1982, 93)

And what is the Horror?

'me unconscious = me outside = Me noumenon.' (Grant, ibid.)

'Strip-out everything human, significant, subjective, or organic, and you approach raw K- Matrix, the limit-plane of continuous cessation or Unlife, where cosmic reality constructs itself without presupposition, in advance of any natural order, and exterior to established structures of time. On this plane you are impossible, and because it has no end you will find - will have ultimately always found - that you cannot be, except as a figment of terminal passage, an illusion of waiting to be changed for cthulhoid-continuum of destratified hypermatter at zero-intensity.' (Carver, 1999, html)

Even though we know that - at some level - we are becoming It, we confront the Horror of 'cthuloid continuum' only through the 'black mirror.' It's like death, since wherever It is, we cannot be. We sense that It includes us, but we [know we] cannot know It, since to admit It is to become It and to become It is to cease to be who we are