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otherworlds-inside-my-mind · 1 year

Text

Xenofiction (& similar) Media Masterpost

Editable Google Doc Link here

PS. This list is for keeping track only. This is not a recommendation list and I won't be advocating for any Work, Author or Company listed. There will be footnotes about a work/author for undesirable behaviour or themes if necessary.

This is a WIP and will be updated whenever I have the time to. Feel free to recommend works or inform me about an author so I can update the post. Be Aware works on this list might have been cancelled or on indifinitive Hiatus and not all works are available on English.

Sections:

Literature

Comic Books & Graphics Novels

Picture Books

Indie Written Works

Webcomics

Manga

Animated Series

Live-Action & Hybrid shows

Webseries

Short Films

Animated Films

Live Action & CGI Assisted Movies

Documentary

Theather

Videogames

Online Browser Games

Table Top Games

Music

Other Online Projects

Youtubers

Gen. Videos

Worlds

Franchises

To search is Ctrl + F (Windows) or Command-F (MacOS), on phone browser you have "Find in page" (Drop menu at top right)

Literature

Age of Fire - E. E. Knight

Adventure Lit their Star - Kenneth Allsop

Alien in a Small Town - Jim Cleaveland

Alien Chronicles (Literature) - Deborah Chester

Animal Farm - George Orwell

Animorphs - K. A. Applegate

Am an Owl - Martin Hocke

At Winters End - Robert Silverberg

Avonoa - H.R.B. Collotzi

Astrid and Cerulean: A Parrot Fantasy - Parasol Marshall-Crowley

A Wolf for a Spell - Karah Sutton

The African Painted Wolf Novels - Alexander Kendziorski

The Alchemist's Cat - Robin Jarvis

The Amazing Maurice and his educated rodents - Terry Pratchet

The Amity Incident - C. M. Weller

The Ancient Solitary Reign - Martin Hocke

The Animals of Farthing Wood series - Colin Dann

The Art of Racing in the Rain - Garth Stein

The Author of Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of Therolinguistics - Ursula K. Le Guin

A Magical Cat Named Kayla: Whiskers of Enchantment -Carlos Juárez [AI Cover]*

The Animal Story Book - Various Authors [Editor: Andrew Lang]

Abenteuer im Korallenriff - Antonia Michaelis [DE]

Bambi: A life in the forest & Bambi Children - Felix Salten

Bamboo Kingdom series - Erin Hunter

Bazil Broketail - Christopher Rowley

Beak of the Moon & Dark of the Moon - Philip Temple

Bears of the Ice series - Kathryn Lasky

Beasts of New York - Jon Evans

Beautiful Joe - Margaret Marshall Saunders

Beyond Acacia Ridge - Amy Clare Fontaine

Birddom - Clive Woodall

Bird Brain - Guy Kennaway

Black Beauty - Anna Sewell

Blitzcat - Robert Westall

Blizzard Winds - Paul Koch

Books of the Raksura - Martha Wells

Braver: A Wombat's Tale - Suzanne Selfors & Walker Ranson

Bravelands series- Erin Hunter

Broken Fang - Rutherford Montgomery

Bunnicula series - Deborah Howe & James Howe

Burning Stars - Rurik Redwolf

A Black Fox Running - Brian Carter

A Blue So Loud - Tuesday

The Ballard of The Belstone Fox - David Rook

The Bear - James Curwood

The Bees - Laline Paull

The Biography of a Silver Fox - Ernest Thompson Seton

The Blue Cat of Castle Town - Catherine Cate Coblentz

The Book Of Chameleons - José Eduardo Agualusa

The Book of the Dun Cow - Walter Wangerin Jr.

The Book of Night with Moon - Diane Duane

The Books of the Named series - Clare Bell

The Bug Wars - Robert Asprin

The Builders - Daniel Polansky

Call of the wild - Jack London

Callanish - William Horwood

Catwings - Ursula K. Le Guin

Cat Diaries: Secret Writings of the MEOW Society - Betsy Byars, Betsy Duffey & Laurie Myers

Cat House - Michael Peak

Cat Pack - Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

Cats in the city of Plague - A.L Marlow

Celestial Heir series - Chester Young

Charlotte's Web - E. B. White

Chet and Bernie mysteries - Spencer Quinn

Chia The Wildcat - Joyce stranger

Child of the Wolves - Elizabeth Hall

Clarice the Brave - Lisa McMann

Cry of the Wild - Charles Foster

Coyote's Wild Home - Barbara Kingsolver; Lily Kingsolver & Paul Mirocha

Coyote Series - Michael Bergey

Crocuta - Katelyn Rushe

Coorinna: A Novel of the Tasmanian Uplands - Erle Wilson

Cujo - Steven King

The Calatians Series - Tim Susman

The Cats of Roxville station - Jean Craighead Georde

The Chanur Novels - C. J. Cherryh

The Cold Moons - Aeron Clement

The Color of Distance || Through Alien Eyes - Amy Thomson

The Conquerors - Timothy Zahn

The Council of Cats - R. J. F.

The Cricket in Times Square - George Selden

The Crimson Torch - Angela Holder

The Crossbreed - Allan Eckert

The Crucible of Time - John Brunner

Darkeye series - Lydia West

Deadlands: The Hunted - Skye Melki-Wegner

Demon of Undoing - Andrea I. Alton

Desert Dog - Jim Kjelgaard

Dinotopia - James Gurney, Alan Dean Foster

Doglands - Tim Willocks

Dimwood Forest series - Avi

A Dog's Life: The Autobiography of a Stray - Ann M. Martin

A Dog's Porpoise Duology - M. C. Ross

Dogs of the Drowned City - Dayna Lorentz

A Dog's Purpose series - W. Bruce Cameron

Dolphin Way: Rise of the Guardians - Mark Caney

Domino - Kia Heavey

Douglas' Diary - Andrew John

DragonFire series - Lewis Jones Davies

Dragon Fires Rising - Marc Secchia

Dragon Hoard and Other Tales of Faerie - Cathleen Townsend

Dragons and Skylines series - Rowan Silver

Dragon Prayers - M.J. McPike

Dragons of Mother Stone series - Melissa McShane

Dragon Girls Series - Maddy Mara

The Deptford Mice series - Robin Jarvis

The Dogs of the Spires series - Ethan Summers

The Dragons of Solunas series - H. Leighton Dickson

The Duncton Chronicles - William Horwood

The Destiny of Dragons - J.F.R. Coates

The Diary Of A House Cat - Ileana Dorobantu

Dogtown - Katherine Applegate & Gennifer Choldenko

Die schwarze Tigerin - Peer Martin [DE]

Die weiße Wölfin - Vanessa Walder [DE]

Die Wilden Hunde Von Pompeii - Helmut Krausser [DE]

Das wilde Mäh - Vanessa Walder [DE]

The Eyes and the Impossible - Dave Eggers

Eclosión - Arturo Balseiro [ES]

Ein Seehund findet nach Hause - Antonia Michaelis [DE]

Fantastic Mr. Fox - Roald Dahl

Faithful Ruslan - Georgi Vladimov

Feather and Bone: The Crow Chronicles - Clem Martini

Feathers & Flames series - John Bailey

Felidae series (1) - Akif Pirinçci

Fifteen Rabbits - Felix Salten

Fire, Bed & Bone - Henrietta Branford

Fire of the Phoenix - Azariah Jade

Fluke - James Herbert

Firefall series - Peter Watts

Firebringer - David Clement-Davies

Flush: A Biography Book - Virginia Woolf

Fox - Glyn Frewer

Foxcraft series - Inbali Iserles

Frightful’s Mountain - Jeanie Craighead George

Frost dancers: A story of hares - Garry Kilworth

The Familiars series - Adam Jay Epstein

The Fifth - Saylor Ferguson

The Firebringer series - Meredith Ann Pierce

The Fox and The Hound - Daniel P. Mannix

The Forges of Dawn - E. Kinsey

Freundschaft im Regenwald - Peer Martin [DE]

(1) Felidae's Author - Akif Pirinçci - is known to be a Xenophobic, Anti-muslim, Anti-Lgbt and Extreme Right-Wing guy (A N4zi by his on words). Won't be going onto details just know he has a non-fiction work called "Germany Gone Mad: The Crazy Cult around Women, Homosexuals and Immigrants." His works has been out of print ever since.

Guardian Cats and the lost books of Alexandria - Rahma Krambo

Guardians of Ga'Hoole series - Kathryn Lasky

Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett

Griffin Quest - Sophie Torro

Gryphon Insurrection series - K. Vale Nagle

The Ghost and It's Shadow - Shaun Hick

The Golden Eagle - Robert Murphy

The Golem and the Jinni - Helene Wecker

The Good Dog - Newbery Medalist

The Guardian Herd series - Jennifer Lynn Alvarez

The Goodbye Cat - Hiro Arikawa

The Great Timbers - James A. Kane

Haunt Fox - Jim Kjelgaard

Haven: A Small Cat's Big Adventure - Megan Wagner Lloyd

Heavenly Horse series - Mary Stanton

Hive - Ischade Bradean

Horses of Dawn series - Kathryn Lasky

House of Tribes - Garry Kilworth

Hunter's Moon/Foxes of First dark - Garry Kilworth

Hunters Universe series - Abigail Hilton

A Hare at Dark Hollow - Joyce Stranger

The Hundred and One Dalmatians & The Starlight Barking - Dodie Smith

The Hunt for Elsewhere - Beatrice Vine

Hollow Kingdom Duology - Kira Jane Buxton

I am a Cat - Natsume Sōseki

I, Scheherezade: Memoirs of a Siamese Cat - Douglass Parhirst

In the Long Dark - Brian Carter

The Incredible Journey - Sheila Burnford

Im Reich der Geparde - Kira Gembri [DE]

Joe Grey series - Shirley Rousseau Murphy

Jonathan Livingston Seagull - Richard Bach & Russell Munson

Julie of the Wolves - Jeanie Craighead George

The Jungle Book - Rudyard Kipling

Journey to the West - Wu Cheng'en

Kävik the Wolf Dog - Walt Morey

Kazan duology - James Curwood

Kine Saga - Alan Lloyd

Kona's Song - Louise Searl

The Killers - Daniel P. Mannix

Kindred of the Wild - Charles G.D Roberts

König der Bären - Vanessa Walder [DE]

Lassie Come-Home - Eric Knight

Last of the Curlews - Fred Bodsworth

Lazy Scales - D.M. Gilmore

Legends of Blood series - Ethan Summers

A Legend of Wolf Song - George Stone

Luna the Lone Wolf - Forest Wells

Lupus Rex - John Carter Cash

Lutapolii: White Dragon of the South - Deryn Pittar

The Last Unicorn - Peter S. Beagle

The Labrador Pact & The Last Family in England - Matt Haig

The Last Dogs - Christopher Holt

The Last Eagle - Daniel P. Mannix

The Last Great Auk - Allan Eckert

The Last Monster on Earth - L.J. Davies

The Life Story of a Fox - J. C. Tregarthen

The Lost Rainforest series - Eliot Schrefer & Emilia Dziubak

The Lost Domain - Martin Hocke

The Last Whales: A Novel - Lloyd Abbey

Mammoth Trilogy - Stephen Baxter

Manxmouse: The Mouse Who Knew No Fear - Paul Gallico

Marney the Fox - Scott Goodall & John Stokes

Mattie: The story of a hedgehog - Norman Adams, & G.D. Griffiths

Matriarch: Elephant vs. T-Rex - Roz Gibson

Midnight's Sun - Garry Kilworth

Migon - P.C. Keeler

Minado The Devil - Dog - Erle Wilson

Monkey Wars - Richard Kurti

Mouseheart Series - Lisa Fiedler

The Mistmantle chronicles - M.I. McAllister

The Mountain Lion - Robert Murphy

The Mouse Butcher - Dick King-Smith

The Mouse Protectors Series - Olly Barrett

Maru - Die Reise der Elefanten - Kira Gembri [DE]

New Springtime series - Robert Silverberg

Nightshade Chronicles - Hilary Wagner

Nugly - M. C. Ross

Nuru und Lela - Das Wunder der Wildnis - Kira Gembri [DE]

Old One-Toe - Michel-Aimé Baudouy

Of Birds and Branches - Frances Pauli

Outlaw Red - Jim Kjelgaard

The Old Stag - Henry Williamson

The One and Only Ivan - Katherine Applegate

Painted Flowers - Caitlin Grizzle

Pax & Pax: Journey Home - Sara Pennypacker

Petrichor - C.E. Wright

The Plague Dogs - Richard Adams

The Pit - Elaine Ramsay

Pride Wars Series - Matt Laney

A Pup Called Trouble - Bobbie Pyron

The Peregryne Falcon - Robert Murphy

Pork and Others - Cris Freddi

Queen in the Mud - Maari

Quill and Claw series - Kathryn Brown

Rak: The story of an Urban Fox - Jonathon Guy

Ramblefoot by Ken Kaufman

Rats of Nimh series - Robert C. O'Brien

Raven Quest - Sharon Stewart

Ravenspell Series - David Farland

Raptor Red - Robert T. Bakker

Red Fox - Charles G. D. Roberts

Redwall series - Brian Jacques

Rose in a Storm - Jon Katz

Rufus - Rutherford Montgomery

Run With the Wind series - Tom McCaughren

Runt - Marion Dane Baeur

Rustle in the Grass - Robin Hawdon

Rusty - Joyce Stranger

The Remembered War series - Robert Vane

The Rescuers series - Margery Sharp

The Red Stranger - David Stephen

The River Singers & The Rising - Tom Moorhouse

The Road Not Taken - Harry Turtledove,

The Running Foxes - Joyce Stranger

Revier der Raben - Vanessa Walder [DE]

Salar the Salmon - Henry Williamson

Scary Stories for Young Foxes Duology - Christian McKay Heidicker

Scaleshifter series - Shelby Hailstone Law

Shadow Walkers - Russ Chenoweth

Scream of the White Bears - David Clement-Davies

Seekers saga - Erin Hunter

Serpentia Series - Frances Pauli

Shadows in the Sky - Pete Cross

Shark Wars Series - EJ Altbacker

Silverwing series - Kenneth Oppel

Silver Brumby series - Elyne Mitchell

Sirius - Olaf Stapledon

SkyTalons Series - Sophie Torro

Solo's Journey - Joy Aiken Smith

Sky Hawk - Gill Lewis

Snow Dog - Jim Kjelgaard

Song of the River - Soinbhe Lally

Spirit of the West series - Kathleen Duey

Survivors series - Erin Hunter

Stray - A.N Wilson

String Lug the Fox - David Stephen

Swashbuckling Cats: Nine Lives on the Seven Seas - Rhonda Parrish & Co.

Swordbird series - Nancy Yi Fan

The Sheep-Pig - Dick King-Smith

The Sight & Fell - David Clement-Davies

The Silent Sky - Allan Eckert

The Silver Claw - Garry Kilworth

The Stoner Eagles - William Horwood

The Stink Files - Jennifer L. Holm & Jonathan Hamel

The Snowcat Prince - Dina Norlund

The Story Of A Seagull And The Cat Who Taught Her To Fly - Luis Sepúlveda

The Story of a Snail Who Discovered the Importance of Being Slow - Luis Sepúlveda

The Story of a dog called Leal - Luis Sepúlveda

The Story of a Red Deer - John Fortescue

The Summer King Chronicles - Jess E. Owen

Schogul, Rächer der Tiere - Birgit Laqua [DE]

Stadt der Füchse - Vanessa Walder [DE]

Tailchaser's Song - Tad Williams

Tarka the Otter - Henry Williamson

Three Bags Full - Leonnie Swann

Thy Servant a Dog - Rudyard Kipling

Tomorrow's Sphinx - Clare Bell

Torn Ear - Geoffrey Malone

Thor - Wayne Smith

Trickster - Tom Moorhouse

Two Dogs and a Horse - Jim Kjelgaard

The Tale of Despereaux - Kate DiCamillo

The Travelling Cat Chronicles - Hiro Arikawa

The Trilogy of the Ants - Bernard Werber

The Trumpet of the Swan - E. B. White

The Tusk That Did the Damage - Tania James

The Tygrine cat - Inbali Iserles

Ultimate Dragon Saga - Graham Edwards

Under the Skin - Michel Faber

Varjak Paw duology - S.F Said

Vainqueur the Dragon series - Maxime J. Durand

War Bunny series - Christopher St. Jhon

War Horse - Michael Morpurgo

War Queen - Illthylian

Warrior Cats series - Erin Hunter

Watership Down/Tales of Watership Down - Richard Adams

Ways of Wood Folk - William J. Long

Welkin Weasels series - Garry Kilworth

West of Eden - Harry Harrison

Whalesong Trilogy - Robert Siegel

Whale - Jeremy Lucas

Whispers in the Forest - Barbara Coultry

White Wolf - Henrietta Branford

White Fang - Jack London

White Fox Series - Jiatong Chen

Wings trilogy - Don Conroy

Wild Lone - Denys Watkins-Pitchford

Wild Animals I Have Known - Ernest Thompson Seton

Willow Tree Wood Series - J. S. Betts

Wings of Fire series - Tui T. Sutherland

Winterset Hollow - Jonathan Edward Durham

Wolf: The Journey Home | Hungry for Home: A Wolf Odyssey - Asta Bowen

Wolf Brother series - Michelle Paver

Wolf Chronicles - Dorothy Hearst

Wolves of the Beyond Series - Kathryn Lasky

Woodstock Saga - Michael Tod

A Whale of the Wild - Rosanne Parry

A Wolf Called Wander - Rosanne Parry

The Waters of Nyra - Kelly Michelle Baker

The Wolves of Elementa series - Sophie Torro

The Wolves of Time - William Horwood

The Wolf Chronicles Series - Teng Rong

The Way of Kings - Louise Searl

The White Bone - Barbara Gowdy

The White Fox/Singing Tree - Brian Parvin

The White Puma - Ronald Lawrence

The Wild Road & The Golden Cat - Gabriel King

The Wildings & The Thousand names of darkness - Nilanjana Roy

The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

The Wind Protect You - Pat Murphy

The Wolves of Paris - Daniel P. Mannix

Yellow eyes - Rutherford Montgomery

The Year Of The Dinosaur - Edwin H. Colbert

Zones of Thought series - Vernor Vinge

Z-Verse series by R.H

Comic Books/Graphic Novels

Animosity - Marguerite Bennett

Age of Reptiles - Ricardo Delgado

Legend - Samuel Sattin Koehler

Mouse Guard - David Petersen

Pride of Baghdad - Brian K. Vaughan & Niko Henrichon

Rover Red Charlie - Garth Ennis & Michael Dipascale

Stray Dogs - Tony Fleecs & Trish Forstner

We3 - Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely

Beasts of Burden - Evan Dorkin & Jill Thompson

LOBO: Canine Crusader of the Metal Wasteland - Macs-World-Ent

The Sandman: Dream of a Thousand Cats - Neil Gaiman

Animal Castle - Xavier Dorison & Felix Delep

Blacksad Series - Juan Díaz Canales & Juanjo Guarnido

Scurry - Mac Smith

The Snowcat Prince - Dina Norlund

Rankless - Maggie Lightheart

Animal Pound - Tom King & Peter Gross

Animal Castle - Xavier Dorison & Felix Delep

BlackSad - Juan Díaz Canales & Juanjo Guarnido

Picture Books

Steve the Dung Beetle: On a Roll - Susan R. Stoltz & Melissa Bailey

Hot Dog - Doug Salati

The Rock from the Sky - Jon Klassen

Whoever Heard of a Flying Bird? - David Cunliffe & Ivan Barrera

A Cat Named Whiskers - Shana Gorian

Ocean Tales Children's Books Series - Sarah Cullen & Zuzana Sbodová

Jake the Growling Dog - Samantha Shannon

Indie Written Works

Fins Above Series - MIROYMON

Journey of Atlas - Journey of Atlas

Webcomics

Africa - Arven92

After Honour - genstaelens

Awka - Nothofagus-obliqua

Arax - Azany

Amarith - Eredhys

The Apple's Echo - Helianthanas

Alone - Magpeyes

The Blackblood Alliance - KayFedewa

The Betrothed - Kibisca

Black Tyrant - Zapp-BEAST

Blue - HunterBeingHunted

Beast Tags - TheRoomPet

Spy - Utahraptor93

Be Reflected in my Eyes - Aquene-lupetta

Carry your voice - TacoBella

Caelum Sky - ALRadeck

Crescent Wing - Mikaley

Crescent Moonlight - AnimalCrispy

City of Trees - SanjanaIndica

Corpse - doeprince/ratt

Darbi - Sherard Jackson

The Devils Demons - Therbis

Doe of Deadwood - Songdogx

Dyten - Therbis

Desperation - PracticelImagination

Equus Siderae - Dalgeor

Empyrean - Leonine-Skies

Enchantment - FeralWolf1234

Fox Fires - Pipilia

Forget me Not - Nitteh

Fjeld - Dachiia

Felinia - Rainy-bleu

Golden Shrike - doeprince/ratt

Ghost of the Gulag - David Derrick Jr.

Horse Age - BUGHS-22

Hiraeth - AFlameThatNeverDies

Half-Blood - majkaria

Horns of Light - ThatMoonySky

I Hope So - Detective Calico

The Ivory Walk - TacoBella

I'm not Ready - Wolfkingdom372

Jet and Harley - doeprince

Kestrel Island - Silverphoenix

Kin - Fienduredraws

KuroMonody - IrisBdz

Krystal - Nitteh

The King of Eyes - CloverTailedFox09

Legend of Murk - Azany

LouptaOmbra - Loupta Ombra (OngakuK, MlleNugget & joeypony)

Leopards bring rain - Kyriuar

Mazes of Filth - petitecanine

Minimal All You Are - mike-princeofstars

Nine Riders - SpiriMuse

No Man's Land - TacoBella

Never seen the Day - R3dk3y

Norra - shadowmirku

Obsidian Fire - SolinaBright

Oren's Forge - teagangavet

Off-White - Akreon

Out Of Time - IndiWolf

Rabbit on the Moon - Songdogx & Nitteh

The Rabbit Hole - Detrah

RunningWolf Mirari - Mirella Menciassi

Raptor - ElenPanter

Redriver - FireTheWolf777

Repeat - Songdogx

The Rabbit's Foot - riri_arts

Scurry - Mac Smith

Simbol - Zoba22

Spirit Lock - Animal Crispy

The Sylcoe - Denece-the-sylcoe

Sunder - Aurosoul

Tainted Hearts - Therbis

Taxicat - owlburrow

That's Freedom Guyra - Nothofagus-obliqua

Three Corners: A Kitten's Story - Lara Frizzell

Tofauti Sawa - TheCynicalHound

Two of a Kind - ProjectNao

To Catch a Star - SleepySundae

Under the Ash Tree - ChevreLune

Uninvited - Nothofagus-obliqua

Water Wolves - LuckyStarhun

What Lurks Beneath - ArualMeow

Water Wolves - LuckyStarhun

Wild Wolves - Lombarsi

White Tail - SleepySundae

What's your damage? - FrostedCanid

The Wolves of Chena - Yamis-Art

Waves Always Crash - Hellhunde

The Whale's Heart - Possumteeeth [Warriors Fancomic]

Manga

A Centaur's Life - Murayama Kei

Beastars - Paru Itagaki

Chi's Sweet Home - Kanata Konami

Ginga Series [Silverfang] - Yoshihiro Takahashi

Gon - Masashi Tanaka

Houseki no Kuni | Land of the Lustrous - Haruko Ichikawa

Inugami-Kai - Masaya Hokazono

The Jungle Emperor - Osamu Tezuka

My roommate is a cat - Minatsuki & Asu Futatsuya

Crimsons – The Scarlet Navigators of the Ocean - Kanno Takanori

Rooster Fighter - Shū Sakuratani

Simoun - Shō Aikawa

The Fox & Little Tanuki - Mi Tagawa

Yuria 100 Shiki - Nobuto Hagio

Massugu ni Ikou - Kira

Cat Soup

The Amazing 3

Cat + Gamer - Wataru Nadatani

Animated Series

101 Dalmatians: The series & 101 Dalmatian Street

A Polar Bear in Love

Baja no Studio

Bagi: Monster of Mighty Nature

Bannertail: The Story of Gray Squirrel

Bluey

Centaurworld (2021)

Chirin's Bell

Chironup no Kitsune

Dokkun Dokkun

Gamba no Bouken

Hazbin Hotel

Invader ZIM

Inu to Neko Docchi mo Katteru to Mainichi Tanoshii

King Fang

Koisuru Shirokuma

Kemushi no Boro

Kewang Lantian

Konglong Baobei: Shiluo De Wenming

Little Polar Bear

Manxmouse's Great Activity

Mitsubachi Maya no Bouken

Mikan Enikki

Massugu ni Ikou -

My Life as a Teenage Robot

Mikan Enikki

Ore, Tsushima

Okashi na Sabaku no Suna to Manu

Primal

Polar Bear Cafe

Robotboy (2005)

Seton Doubutsuki: Risu no Banner

Simoun

The Amazing 3

Tottoko Hamtarou

The Adventure of Qiqi and Keke

Tama & Friends: Third Street Story

Watership Down (2018) & Watership Down (1999)

What's Michael?

Wolf's Rain

Wonder Pets

Live-Action/Hybrid show

Fantasy High

A Crown of Candy

Burrow's End

Good Omens

Webseries

Dinosauria - Dead Sound

My Pride - tribbleofdoom

Whitefall - Chylk

The Stolen Hope - Galemtido

Dragon's Blood - FluffyGinger

Helluva Boss -

Murder Drones -

Short Films

Alone a wolf's winter

Baja's Studio

Beautiful Name

Burrow

Cat Piano

Cat Soup

Chicken Little

Far From the Tree

Ferdinand the Bull

Frypan Jiisan

Genji Fantasy: The Cat Fell in Love With Hikaru Genji

Gaitou to Neko

Hao Mao Mimi

Houzi Dian Bianpao

Je T'aime

Kitbull

Lava

Lambert the sheepish lion

Laoshu Jia Nu

Mahoutsukai no Melody

Monmon the Water Spider

Mushroom - Nakagawa Sawako

Of Mice and Clockworks

Osaru no Tairyou

Piper

Robin Robin

Rusuban

Sauria - Dead Sound

Smash and Grab

Street of Crocodiles

She and Her Cat

Space Neko Theater

Shiroi Zou | White Elephant

Shi | Food

Sugar, With a Story

Straw-saurus NEO

The Chair

The Blue Umbrella

The Shell Shocked Egg

The Dog Door

The Dog In The Alley

That's Why They Were Made

Ushigaeru

With a Dog AND a Cat, Every Day is Fun

Zhui Shu

Animated Films

101 Dalmatians duology

A Monkey's Tale (1999)

All Dogs go to Heaven

The Adventures of Lolo the Penguin

Alpha and Omega saga

An American Tail

The Aristocats

Antz

Animals United

Annabelle's Wish (1997)

Alakazam the great (1960)

Back Outback

Balto

Bambi / Bambi II

Bolt

Brother Bear / Brother Bear II

A Bug's Life

The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales

Bee Movie

The Brave Little Toaster

Birds of a Feather

Back to the Forest

Cars

Chance

Chicken Run

Dinosaur

Speckles: The Tarbosaurus || Dino King: Journey to Fire Mountain

Dumbo

DC League of Super-Pets

Elemental

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Fantastic Planet

Felidae

The Fox and the Hound

Finding Nemo/Finding Dory

Free Birds

The Fearless Four

The Good Dinosaur

Ghost in the Shell

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio

Happy Feet/Happy Feet Two

Help! I'm a Fish

Home on the Range

Hoero! Bun Bun Movie

Hokkyoku no Muushika Miishika

Ice Age Franchise

Isle of Dogs

I Am T-Rex

Jungledyret Hugo

Koati

The King of Tibetan Antelope

Kuma no Gakkou trilogy

Lady and the Tramp

The Land Before time Franchise

The Last Unicorn

Leafy, A Hen in the wild

Little Big Panda

The Lion King Franchise

Lucky and Zorba

Lilo & Stitch

Luca

Last Day of the Dinosaurs

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

Marona's Fantastic Tale

Millionaire Dogs

My Friend Tyranno

Minuscule: Valley of the Lost Ants || Minuscule - Mandibles from Far Away

Mouse and His Child

Nezumi Monogatari: George to Gerald no Bouken

Oliver & Company

One Stormy Night

Over the Edge

Padak

The Plague Dogs

Pompoko

Pinocchio by Guillermo del Toro

Pipi Tobenai Hotaru

Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure

Rango

Ratatouille

Raven the Little Rascal

Reynard the Fox (1989)

Rio

Robots

Rock a Doodle

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1998)

The Rabbi’s Cat

Samson and Sally

Sahara

The Secret of Nihm

The Secret Life of Pets/The Secret Life of Pets II

Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron

Sheep & Wolves

The Seventh Brother

A Stork's Journey

Stowaways on the Ark

A Turtle's Tale

The One and Only Ivan

Toy Story

Twilight of the Cockroaches (1987)

The Trumpet of the Swan

The Enchanted Journey

Unico

Underdog

Vuk the Little Fox

WALL·E

Watership Down (1978)

White Fang

Wizards

The Wild

Wolf Children

Wolfwalkers

You Are Umasou

Zootopia

Live Action/CGI Assisted Movies

Au Hasard Balthazar

Beverly Hills Chihuahua franchise

Cats & Dogs franchise

Charlotte's Web

Fluke (1995) - Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Homeward Bound duology (1963 & 1996) - Disney

The Legend of Lobo (1962) - Disney

Strays (2023) - Universal Pictures

Pride (2024) - BBC

101 Dalmatians duology (1996 & 2000)

Documentary

March of the Penguins

Meerkat Manor

Lemur Street

Gangs of Lemur Island

Orangutan Island

Prairie Dog Dynasty

Chimp Empire

Monkey Thieves

Monkey Kingdom

Theather

Cats

Videogames

Animalia Survival - High Brazil Studio

Cattails - Falcon Development

Endling: Extinction is Forever

Gibbon: Beyond the trees - Broken Rules

The Lonesome Fog - Might and Delight

Meadow - Might and Delight

Niche - Stray Fawn Studio

Shelter / Shelter 2/ Shelter 3 - Might and Delight

Paws - Might and Delight

Stray - BlueTwelve Studio

The WILDS - Gluten Free Games

Wolf Quest - eduweb

Golden Treasure: The Great Green - Dreaming Door Studios

Spirit of the North - Infuse Studio

Ōkami - Clover Studio

Rain World - Videocult

Feather - Samurai Punk

Eagle Flight - Ubisoft Montreal Studio

Copoka - Inaccurate Interactive

Untitled Goose Game - House House

PaRappa - NanaOn-Sha

Night in the Woods - Infinite Fall & Secret Lab

Monster Prom - Beautiful Glitch

Them's Fightin' Herds - Mane6

Toontown

E.V.O.: Search for Eden - Givro Corporation

(Pretty much most of Might and Delight games)

Online Browser Games

Lioden

Wolvden

Flight Rising

Lorwolf

Table Top Games

Bunnies & Burrows

Chronicles of Darkness

Wanderhome

Mage: The Awakening

Werewolf: The Apocalypse

Pugmire

Three Raccoons in a Trench Coat

World Tree (RPG)

Pawpocalypse

Heckin' Good Doggos

Humblewood

Dungeons & Dragons (Depends on the GM)

Music

In My Eyes You're a Giant - Sonata Arctica

It Won't Fade - Unia

The Cage - Winterheart's Guild

Other Online Projects

Youtubers

Cardinal West

Xenofiction Reviews

Gen. Videos

Trope Talk: Small Mammal on a Big Adventure by Overly Sarcastic Productions

youtube

Worlds

Mirolapye - Varverine

Franchises

Sonic the Hedgehog

My little pony

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Hamtaro

Pokemon

Digimon

Kirby

Monter High

Tom & Jerry

Baldur’s Gate

Maya the Bee

The Little Polar Bear

#xenofiction #fantasy #masterlist #wip #scifi #fiction #Youtube

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duckprintspress · 29 days

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Celebrate Romance Month with Queer Books!

August is Romance Month, and so we’re back with another rec list, this time featuring our favorite romance books and/or books with prominent romance subplots. This list builds on the one we did last year for Romance Month, which you can view by following this link. These books don’t necessarily fall into the romance genre, but they’re centered around romantic love and have a happy ending. Contributors to this list are: Meera S., Sebastian Marie, Terra P. Waters, Shadaras, Nina Waters, Tris Lawrence, Dei Walker, E. C., Shea Sullivan and two anonymous contributors.

I Want to be a Wall by Honami Shirono

A Lady for a Duke by Alexis Hall

Heaven Will Be Mine from Pillow Fight Games and Worst Girl Games

start;again from Two and a Half Studios

A Strange and Stubborn Endurance by Foz Meadows

How to Find a Princess (Runaway Royals series) by Alyssa Cole

Satisfaction Guaranteed by Karelia Stetz-Waters

Cover Story by Rachel Lacey

Truly, Madly, Deeply by Alexandria Bellefleur

Those Who Wait by Haley Cass

A Marvellous Light (The Last Binding series) by Freya Marske

Limerence by Jiang Zi Bei

If You’ll Have Me by Eunnie

My Summer Of You by Nagisa Furuya

Something Fabulous (Something Fabulous series) by Alexis Hall

Triple Sec by T.J. Alexander

Beating Heart Baby by Lio Min

Never Ever Getting Back Together by Sophie Gonzales

So This Is Ever After by F.T. Lukens

Otherworldly by F.T. Lukens

Consort of Fire & Queen of Dreams (Bound to Fire and Steel series) by Kit Rocha

Blood on the Tide (Crimson Sails, #2) by Katee Robert

The Lady or the Duke? by A.L. Heard

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

Witchmark (The Kingston Cycle series) by C.L. Polk

Winter’s Orbit & Ocean’s Echo (Winter’s Orbit series) by Everina Maxwell

The Charm Offensive by Alison Cochrun

Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers

What are your favorite queer stories with romantic plots? Tell us in the comments!

Want to chat your favorite reads with us? Join our Book Lover’s Discord server!

Update your Goodreads TBR with any of these books by visiting our queer romance shelf on Goodreads! Or, jump straight to buying your own copies by visiting our affiliate shop recommendation list on Bookshop.org.

#duck prints press #romance month #book recommendations #queer book recommendations #queer books #queer romance books #bookblr

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wolffyluna · 2 months

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My art for the @mcytblraufest, of Bushranger/1850s Australia AU Cleo and Pearl!

Go check out @aliteral-ghost's fic for the art, it's really good: link.

Web Weave Credits: 'Waltzing Matilda' by Banjo Patterson' / 'The Man from Snowy River' by Banjo Patterson' / 'The Blind Assassin' by Margaret Atwood / Cultural Cringe on Wikipedia / Dingo photographed by Sam Fraser-Smith / 'The Anglel in The House' by Coventry Patmore / Zombie Cleo's Double Life Episode 1 / PearlescentMoon's Double Life Episode 1. / British Pattern 1853 Rifle by the Smithsonian / Ned Kelly's Armour at the State Library of Victoria / 'Ned Kelly's last words: 'Ah, well, I suppose'' by Stuart E Dawson / ZombieCleo's Double Life Episode 6 / 'Reminiscences of a Victoria Mounted Constable (A Narrative of the Kelly Gang and Other Bushrangers)' by Thomas McIntyre / 'Bushrangers on St Kilda Road' by William Strut / 'Bailed Up' by Tom Roberts / 'Bushrangers Attack a Gold Escort' by McFarlane and Erskine / 'Death of Ben Hall' by Patrick Maroney

#double life #double life smp #traffic life #pearlescentmoon #zombiecleo #web weave #my art

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liesmyth · 5 months

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Books of the month!!!

(for the past 3 months) (forgot to do this for February and March so they're all here)

April

Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel — MORE blorbo Thomas Cromwell! Unreliable narrator tortured evil meow meow goes VROOM!! Genuinely hilarious on top of it. More thots. Fave read of 2024 so far. READ IT.

Dimenticare Berlinguer: La sinistra italiana e la tradizione comunista, Miriam Mafai — Essays on Italian political history. Probably not relevant to tumblr's interests. Very relevant to mine.

Mademoiselle de Maupin, Théophile Gautier — Gender! 1835s epistolary novel with Gender and crossdressing and musings on the value of Beauty! I loved this but it's rambly in a period-typical way. The Italian translation has very witty pretty prose; no idea about the original French, but I've heard the English translation isn't great.

The Angel of Indian Lake, Stephen Graham Jones — Third book of a trilogy. Do rec only if you love Jade Daniels as much as I do. Otherwise, it might get a bit confusing. I DO enthusiastically rec the first book in the trilogy, My Heart Is a Chainsaw, so you will all come to love Jade Daniels as much as I do. You're welcome.

The Manicurist's Daughter, Susan Lieu — A memoir about grief and families and the immigrant experience (Vietnam to west coast US). It's not usually my wheelhouse but I appreciated so many things about it, especially because of the audiobook version. Nonspoilery goodreads review here.

March

Bride, Ali Hazelwood — I don't like werewolf tropes enough to have enjoyed this. Fun romp if you like mates and knots.

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, Philip Gourevitch — Nonfiction; a partial account of the Rwandan genocide. (I say partial bc I think it lacks context if you, like me, don't know much about the topic going in.) Very poignant, unfortunately remains relevant; do NOT go for the audiobook version because it's dull as dirt.

Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel — The book that blorbifies Thomas Cromwell and it's also laugh-out-loud funny. Do yourself a favour and read it.

February

Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronthe — somehow I'd never actually read this in English before? Absolute banger. The first half remains superior.

American Elsewhere, Robert Jackson Bennett — I have screamed about this on tumblr before. COSMIC HORRORS TAKE OVER NEW MEXICO TOWN! Do rec.

Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier — Amazing incredibly showstopping etc.

Clarkesworld, Issue 209 — Love me some cool sff short stories. Standouts: Lonely Ghosts (Meghan Feldman); The Enceladus South Pole Base Named after V.I. Lenin (Zohar Jacobs); Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole (Isabel J Kim)

january books || let's be goodreads friends! here

#book talk #bookblr #book review

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reigningqueenofwords · 4 months

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The Perfect Arrangement

Pairings: Prince Dean x Princess Reader, King John x Queen Mary, King Bobby x Queen Karen Word count: 2,541

Read on AO3

“Y/N.” Your father, King Robert, fondly called ‘Bobby’, spoke gently, his voice full of sorrow.

Taking a deep breath, your Y/E/C eyes went from the window of the carriage, to your parents. “Yes, father?” You replied, your voice barely above a whisper.

Your mother, Queen Karen, gave you a sad smile. “We picked the best suitor for you, dear.” She told you lovingly. “Many princess and knights asked for your hand.” She went on, watching the anger flash across your face, your jaw tensing for a moment. In that split second, you looked as if you were the ruling queen. It was a bittersweet moment.

Your long Y/H/C hair was flowing down your back, two small simple braids holding the front from hanging in your face. You were sitting up perfectly straight, having it drilled into your head since you were a child. Looking back out the window, your displeasure was clear. “I have yet to see a reason why I should be celebrating being traded like livestock, mother.” You said simply.

Bobby groaned, having a love/hate relationship with your attitude. While he was grateful there was no way you would ever let anyone take advantage of you, he was often on the receiving end of it at the moment. “We have put this off long enough, young lady.” He said firmly. “Many young women your age are mothers by now!” He pointed out. “You are two years past when you were to be wed, and I cannot stall any longer.”

Raising an eyebrow at him, you gave him pure attitude. “Well, thank you so much for that, father.”

Your mother patted his hand and shook her head at him as you looked back out at the passing greenery. It was clear nothing they were saying was helping, and it was making it worse in her opinion.

It was just after nightfall when you approached the castle that would be your new home. You felt your heart rate speed up, and your rage spike. While you knew your parents had been an arranged marriage, that meant nothing to you. That had been many, many years ago. Shouldn’t things have changed by then? Not that your opinions seemed to matter any to them.

Pulling to a stop, your father was the first to exit the carriage, then your mother, and finally, yourself. You were greeted by a fairly attractive looking king, the father of your groom to be, you presumed. “Welcome to the Kingdom of Lawrence!” He boomed, a grin on his face, arms outstretched. “I am King John, and I am very pleased at your arrival. I trust your journey was safe?” He asked, looking to your father.

Bobby gave him a tight smile, and a nod. “Of course, and we thank you for having us.” He said politely.

John’s smile put you at ease, ever so slightly, but not enough to lesson the feelings you held inside you. “And you must be my future daughter.” He turned to you, holding out his hand for you.

As you took it, and curtseyed, you bowed your head. “My King.” You said kindly.

He kissed your hand quickly, but kept hold of your hand. “Let me lead you to your chambers.” He told the three of you.

“Shouldn’t you have servants to do that for you?” Your mother asked, admiring his dedication to his guests.

King John smiled, and shook his head. “Staff is limited after dark, and you are my personal guests.” He replied. “Let us talk, and get to know each other better as we move through the halls.” He motioned towards the large front doors.

Prince Sam was sitting in the library, reading by candle light when he heard his father’s voice. Grinning, he slid out of the chair and ran to him. He slid to a stop when he saw he had guests. “Oh, forgive me.” He gave them a bow. You gathered he was about 16, but could have been wrong. “Father, if you have a moment later, I’d like to discuss something with you?” He looked at John, hopeful.

“Of course.” He nodded. “I presume you’ll be in the library, as usual?” He asked, pride written on his face. Sam nodded quickly, smiling, causing John to chuckle. “Get back to your reading, son. Proper introductions at breakfast.” He shoo’d him, knowing he’d be getting rushed off to bed in the next hour or so.

Sam bowed. “Yes, father.” He turned to you and your parents. “Welcome to our home.” With that, he went back to the library, eager to finish what he was reading.

Your parents chambers were the first that you came to, and yours were closer to the King’s and Queen’s. “If there’s anything you require, think of this as your home, dear.” John told you as he opened your chamber doors for you.

Looking around, your eyes took in every detail. You looked up at him, a small smile on your face. “Y/F/C is my favorite color.” You told him, as that’s what many of the fabrics were in. They had tiny gold accents on them as well.

John grinned. “I know.” He told you. “Your father and myself have been corresponding for months, and I have taken every opportunity to learn what I can about you.” He saw the look of surprise on your face, and it amused him. “I also learned that you are very against this, and I want you to feel as at home as you can.”

You glanced back over the room. “Thank you.” You said sincerely.

“You’re welcome, my dear. Get some rest. One of our best servants will be in here to help you ready for breakfast.” He told you before you walked in further, allowing him to shut the doors.

When there was a knock on your door, you were already sitting in front of your vanity, brushing your hair out. “You may enter.” You looked over your shoulder, watching a pretty red head come in.

“Good morning, milady.” She greeted you. “I’ll be your personal lady in waiting.” She smiled. “My name is Celeste, but many call me ‘Charlie’.”

You smiled in return. “My name is Y/N.”

She shut the door behind her, giving you a small bow. “Yes, princess.” She nodded. “Shall I assist you in preparing for breakfast, princess?” Charlie offered.

“Simply help me lace up the back of my dress, if you would?” You asked her, moving your hair to the side.

“Of course, milady.” Charlie agreed, moving forward as you stood.

Your hands were together in front of you as she began to work. “May I ask you a question, Charlie?” You asked her, your eyes watching the pair of you in the mirror.

Her eyes met yours, and she gave you a genuine smile. “Of course you can, milady.” She nodded.

“What is my betrothed like?” Your voice held the tiniest bit of worry. “I mean, is he kind? Is he cocky?” You blushed.

Charlie couldn’t help but chuckle a tad at that. “We’re the same age, Prince Dean and I, actually.” She began. “When we were children, we would often play together.” That made you smile, knowing many princes were stuck up and cruel before they were old enough to see over the table. “He actually taught me to fight, as well.” Your eyebrows went up, making her laugh. “My mother had the same reaction, milady, but the King found it endearing, and allowed it.” She went on. “He’s loyal, but a bit of a flirt.” She giggled. “When we grew older, he attempted to flirt with me. I believe he was simply trying to find his way.”

“What happened?” You asked, curious.

She blushed. “I told him I had eyes for his mother’s hand maiden.” She said quietly. “She was just a few years older than us, actually.”

You gasped, an amused look on your face. “What did the prince say?”

“He said ‘me, too’.” She stepped back, admiring her work. “You’re all ready, milady.”

Turning, you gave her a grateful smile. “Thank you, Charlie. I can see us becoming good friends.” You earned a proud look from her.

“I would enjoy that.” She told you. “Shall I show you to the dining hall?”

The King and Queen were already seated when you were led in, your cheeks turning pink when you realized that you were the last to arrive. “I’m so sorry I’m late.” You gave them a bow.

John smiled as he rose. “Not to worry, my dear.” He assured you. “Now we may introduce everyone!” He sounded so happy. You hoped that he wasn’t the only one like that in this castle.

“My sons, this is Princess Y/N. Dean’s future bride.” Your eyes looked to his son’s, and your breath caught in your throat. You had seen the younger boy the night before, and highly doubted that was your groom to be. The man with green eyes winked at you with a smirk, and you were certain that was him. Charlie had said he was a flirt. “And these are her gracious parents, King Robert, and Queen Karen.” He motioned to where your parents sat. “These are my two boys, Dean, and Samuel.”

Samuel groaned lightly. “Please, call me Sam.” He muttered, making you smile.

“Please to meet you, my lords.” You greeted them.

Mary clapped her hands once, happily, a smile on her face. “The wedding will be in one month’s time, and I am personally assisting dear Y/N in planning the event.” She looked so excited.

Your eyes went wide. “I-I’m helping plan this?” You asked, shocked. You had never planned any event before. Rarely had you even had any say in your birthday parties, much to your dismay.

“Of course.” Mary chuckled lightly.

“Thank you, your highness.” You said softly before being led to your seat by your betrothed.

He looked at you, licking his lips. “It’s nice to finally meet you, sweetheart.” He greeted you.

You looked taken aback at his greeting. “And you, my lord.” You blushed.

John chuckled and shook his head. “Feast up!” He announced, letting everyone know to begin their meal.

pending time with Mary as you planned your wedding was relaxing. She made you feel like you’d known her your whole life. It made it easy to voice your opinions to her when you didn’t like the direction something was going.

You had been in the Kingdom of Lawrence for a week when she took you by surprise one morning. “You’ll not be assisting me today, my dear.” She smiled.

“What? Have I done something wrong?” You asked, confused and a tad worried.

She shook her head. “Nothing, I assure you. You’ll be spending the day in the country with the Prince.” Mary smirked. “A little picnic, some fresh air, and the chance to get to get better acquainted.” She explained simply. “I’d hate to have you entering your marriage to a complete stranger.”

You chuckled lightly. “It is appreciated, my lady.” You agreed.

“Good! It’s settled.” She beamed. “We’ll see you back in time for dinner.”

You were approaching the carriage and grew nervous as Dean stood there, his eyes on you. “You look ravishing, sweetheart.” He told you with a smile when you were just a couple feet away. “That color suits you.” He motioned to your gown.

Blushing, you smiled and glanced down at the royal blue color of the fabric. Looking up, you chuckled lightly. “I’ll tell Charlie you said so.”

He grinned, nodding. “Good ol’ Charlie.” He motioned to the carriage. “Shall we?” With his left hand, he opened the carriage door, and helped you in with his right.

“Thank you.” You said sincerely as you stepped in, getting comfortable. Once he was in, and the door shut, the carriage began moving right away. “To be honest, when your mother told me that today would not be spent assisting her, I assumed I had upset her.” You admitted.

Dean smiled at your opening up to him. “This was my idea, actually.” He chuckled at the shocked expression on your face. “My father told me about your unhappiness with this arrangement. I was hoping to at least start our marriage off as friends.” He admitted. “We will be sharing chambers, and our lives.”

You nodded at that. “It’s very appreciated, my lord.” You wanted to be sure he knew that his kindness was not being met with ungratefulness. “To be honest, I was terrified of who I’d be wed to.”

“Understandable.” He nodded. “I felt that way, too. Then I saw you.”

Raising an eyebrow, you had a slightly amused look on your face. “What if I had a truly vile personality?” You asked teasingly.

Dean chuckled, shrugging. “Well, I guess we’ll never know, now will we?” He answered.

“I guess not.” You smiled.

The morning of the wedding quickly approached, and you found yourself surrounded my maids. Your hair was done just so, your dress was perfection, flowers being checked over, and Charlie was there assuring you every step of the way. You’d begun to fall for your betrothed, and it honestly scared you. “Can everyone give me a moment?” You asked when you were just about done getting ready. “Charlie is capable of finishing up. I assure you, I will be out of my room on time.” You smiled softly at the others. They gave you a small bow and left the room.

Once it was just the two of you, Charlie saw you visibly relax. “Take a deep breath.” She told you with a small smile.

You looked at her and bit your lip. “I’m about to get married, Charlie.” You breathed, your hand on your stomach. “A-and it’s a huge deal! I do care about the prince, I really do…” You went on. “But, this is the rest of my life. There will be sharing our chambers, there will be children, and oh boy…”

She moved over to you and put her hands on your arms gently. “And you will face that as the brave and amazing woman that you are, milady.” Charlie grinned. “The prince is very lucky to have you as a bride, and I’m sure he knows that.” You smiled softly at her. “Besides, I’m always here for you, as well.”

“That is a comfort.” You nodded. “Alright, let’s get me to this wedding.” You chuckled lightly.

Charlie nodded. “If you get too nervous we can always run away.” She teased with a wink, making you laugh. “Good. Keep that pretty smile.”

Your hands were shaking lightly as you stood outside the large doors of the cathedral, your palms sweating as you gripped your flowers. Charlie was no longer by your side, having other duties to attend to for the feast that would follow. Nodding to the two guards that were standing there, they began to open the doors.

Swallowing, you worked on calming your nerves, your eyes going straight to the prince. Your soon to be husband grinned the moment he saw you. “Just breath.” You reminded yourself before your feet began to carry you towards him, and the rest of your life.

#dean x reader #dean winchester x reader

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ther3allyra · 3 months

Note

Can you write about Joel meeting *you* as a Firefly member?

The Season Of Fireflies

☾Joel Miller X F!Reader

☾Summary: When Tess and Joel go to confront Robert, what will he think when they come across not only Marlene and Ellie. But you too?

☾Word Count: 1k (or to be specific, 1042)

☾A/N: Than you Anon, for requesting this!, this one one of my most fun writes to do. Please keep requesting, I’m loving all of this!

Everything had happened so quickly, from smuggling Ellie to Tess becoming infected. Not once did you think you’d end up dating, someone like Joel. To be truthful to yourself, it all happened so quickly.

It was evening as usual, fireflies always done everything at night. It’s how they kept things a secret, for so long. You and the others such as Kim and Marlene were preparing, to move Ellie to the state house. Yet unexpectedly FEDRA officers, came storming in starting a shoot up. This left most people dead, Kim without an ear, Marlene with a gunshot wound to her stomach. And you? Well surprisingly you were all right, you were with Ellie at the time. Thankfully the officers were dumb as fuck, they shot out most people and thought they’d got them all.

Telling Ellie to stay where she was, you quickly left the room to see what mess had been caused. What you didn’t expect was to have Marlene leaning on your shoulder, on one end of the hall. While Joel, and Tess were on the other side. Guns raised. Using her knife Ellie had shot out of the room, some sort of act in trying to protect you yet it didn’t end well. Once Marlene had convinced Joel not to point his gun at her, yet instead the three of you. Things were different.

You’d seen Joel maybe once our twice in the street, smuggling buisness of course. And you’d even bought a few things off Tess, she always had good supplies. Yet neither of them knew you were a firefly, and now that made things awkward. You could tell by the look on his face, Joel never intended to hurt anyone. Certainly not Ellie, something in his eyes you noticed, made him look more daringly when he shot his head towards her.

You knew what the plan was, everyone who was in the building did. But now with the majority of them dead or injured there was not a chance, you’d make it there like this. So what happened? Marlene begged, she begged Joel and Tess to take her there, that they’d get what they want if they helped them. And for a moment you thought, that they’d laugh in your face and shoot all of you. Make off with the car battery Robert was about to sell you, when FEDRA officers stormed the place. Yet they accepted, on one condition.

You didn’t have a chance to argue, you were really the only non injured firefly there at the time, and so when Marlene said that you’d go with Ellie to make sure they didn’t kill her. Your stomach felt as if it were doing backflips, because if they were to kill Ellie. Then surely they’d kill you to? No?. Yet, you grabbed your things along with Ellie, and headed out without complaint. You hadn’t realised that it started to rain, so when you were walking back to what presumed was their apartment, the rain soaked right through to your bones. You dared not complain though, frightened at the thought of being shot to death, instead you opted to hurry Ellie along to make sure you kept up with them.

It wasn’t that far of a walk luckily, until you’d made it to the top floor of one of the buildings. Tess opened the door to what presumed was their apartment, and held it open for you and the rest to go through, before entering and locking it behind her. Ellie had followed Tess as she pointed to the bathroom, as if to say she could take a shower if need be. While she headed to the kitchen, to make some tea possibly or to map out their journey. Yet you? You followed Joel into the living room. The room was certainly homey, decorated in soft colour furniture, while they even had a sun catcher on the window.

‘What’re you staring at?’, a gruff the voice said behind you causing you to jump. Even though it was just Joel, he moved quietly. ‘Oh, I erm, nice room’ you stammered out quickly, you didn’t want to seem like a creep. The only response you got from him was a huff, as he took a seat on the sofa.

‘Look.’ You began roughly, ‘I don’t want any, funny business from you, I know what you fireflies are like.’ He warned, of course which left you a little insulted. You thought that you and the others were just trying to do good, yet you knew not everyone was onboard with your views. Honestly, it was if he could read your mind with the words that came out of his mouth. ‘We won’t kill her.’ He states, ‘or you, as long as we get our things when we had you guys over’. You nod at him, as he shifts his position to lay down. It wasn’t as if you were accustomed, to threats yet something felt…different.

To this day, you never really understood why you. Why he fell for you, and why he loved you dearly. Yet at the same time you wouldn’t have had it any other way. After leaving the apartment and making it outside the QZ, it was a bumpy ride. Especially when you all had the run in, with a fucking clicker zombie. It was even hated now Tess was gone, she’d been bitten and had chosen to sacrifice herself to save the three of you. You were forever grateful. And that’s where you had ended up, where you were now. Sat in one of the chairs, at the dining table in Bill and Franks. Ellie had gone for a shower, and a much needed one considering how long she was taking.

‘What you thinking about?’ Joel hums, as he wraps his arms around you embracing you. He could always sense the mood you were in, one of the great things about him. You tilt your head to the left, leaning it on his forearm and taking in the feeling. ‘Just how we met’. Joel chuckled in response, even he to this day. Wouldn’t have thought he’d end up with a member on the fireflies.

Yet here you both were, in the spring. The season of the fireflies.

#joel miller #joel tlou #firefly #fireflies #tlou hbo #tlou fic #joel miller x reader #joel miller x you #tess servopoulos #tess tlou #ellie williams #ellie williams tlou #joel miller fluff #the last of us #the last of us x reader #joel miller the last of us #joel and ellie

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campoverlook-if · 6 months

Text

Progress Update #4// 4/3/24

Hey everyone, just wanted to update you all on the story.

I've started a new process for the past few days where I write for two hours and then take fifteen-thirty minute breaks in between. I'm still blanking on what to write for a section sometimes, but I'm really trying not to have grayed out choices again. That was NOT fun.

Still, the writing process shouldn't be forced, but sometimes you just really need to kick your own ass and grab that text file by the ears. Plus, this is the most productive I've felt since getting my wisdom teeth removed.

In celebration of this new bout of inspiration, here's a sneak peek of an upcoming scene you may encounter in the update.

Alright, that's it. This girl can't just bully you away because she doesn't like you. You hadn't even done anything when she first started acting nasty towards you. Yes, you may have walked away in the middle of a conversation, but she had been so…aggressive. You weren't just going to stand there and take it, and you definitely weren't going to start now. So, you take a step closer to Claire, giving her a leveled glare of your own. "Last time I checked, this table doesn't belong to you." Tension quickly fills the air around the two of you. Claire doesn't respond to your retort, but she doesn't need to. Her body language gives you all the information you need to know.

Ooooh boi, what the hell did you do to make Claire this mad at you. And on the first day? Tragic.

Along with that we'll be getting into a few things before finally ending episode 1:

Reworked the gender system of the counselors. Now you can choose from the beginning how you want them to be.

Added the choice to be non-binary (a new batch of campers, hooyay!). Also need to add onto scenes with Asher, Claire, and Lucas.

Meeting the final two counselors (Ruby and Silas).

An added scene with E for returning MCs during your walk to the mess hall.

Going through orientation, including a fun scavenger hunt (Uncle Robert said it would be fun, don't believe him).

A small scene with your new roommates in your cabins.

I'm so excited just thinking about it, and I'm the one writing the dang story.

If you hadn't seen it yet, I answered an ask a little bit ago about doing visuals for the blog. I'm not the best at visual media (that's more my mother's thing) but I can use a character maker like a mf if I have too.

It was kinda nice, a little limiting, but it was surprisingly helpful for me to have it. I've thought about how these characters look for so long it's strange to suddenly see them brought to life in any type of way except text. The character bios have been updated with these pictures now.

(UPDATE: LITERALLY MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT DECISION: SLEEP DEPRIVED AF BEHAVIOR)

So, I wrote this update yeaterday and was planning for it to just post through queue like I normally do, but the situation has changed. The demo will be updated again, however the stopping point is literally the same. The only major changes are the gender system, adding being non-binary, and having everything on one file (pray for me). The stopping point is still the same.

All in all the word count is now at this point: 57k (W/O Code), 14K (average). Not a huge jump average wise, but I'm happy anyway.

Link to demo here.

(END OF EMERGENCY UPDATE)

That's all I wanted to talk about for now, if you run into any bugs just let me know and I'll fix it lickity split.

See you all on the next update!

P.S. - I love it when new people follow and only like the posts of certain counselors. I know who you're into now ;).

#camp overlook #update #interactive fiction #if wip #updates

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lapetitemortarts · 5 months

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Robert McGinnis

Nació en 1926 en Cincinnati, Ohio y se crió en Wyoming, es un artista e ilustrador americano. Conocido por sus más de 1200 Ilustraciones y más de 40 carteles de cine, incluyendo "Desayuno en Tiffanys" (su primer cartel de la película), Barbarella y varias películas de James Bond y Matt Helm. McGinnis se convirtió en un aprendiz en los Estudios Walt Disney, luego estudió Bellas Artes en la Universidad Estatal de Ohio. Después del servicio durante la guerra en la marina mercante entró en la publicidad y un encuentro casual con Mitchell en 1958 le llevó a ser introducido a Dell Publishing donde inició una carrera de una variedad de rústica de cubiertas para libros escritos por autores como Donald Westlake (que firmaba como Richard Stark), Edward S. Aarons, Erle Stanley Gardner, Richard S. Prather, Shayne Michael y Carter Brown. En 1985, fue galardonado con el título de "Artista Romántico del Año" por la revista Romantic Times. Él es miembro de la Sociedad de Ilustradores del Salón de la Fama.

.....................

Born in 1926 in Cincinnati, Ohio and raised in Wyoming, he is an American artist and illustrator. Known for his more than 1200 Illustrations and over 40 movie posters, including "Breakfast at Tiffanys" (his first movie poster), Barbarella and several James Bond and Matt Helm films. McGinnis became an apprentice at Walt Disney Studios, then studied fine art at Ohio State University. After wartime service in the merchant marine he went into advertising and a chance meeting with Mitchell in 1958 led to his introduction to Dell Publishing where he began a career of a variety of paperback covers for books written by authors such as Donald Westlake (signing as Richard Stark), Edward S. Aarons, Erle Stanley Gardner, Richard S. Prather, Shayne Michael and Carter Brown. In 1985, he was awarded the title of "Romantic Artist of the Year" by Romantic Times magazine. He is a member of the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame.

The White Pengnoir

#Robert McGinnis #vintage art #art #arts #pintura #arte #artist

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forasecondtherewedwon · 4 months

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seven degrees east - final chapter

Fandom: Masters of the Air Pairings: multiple Rating: E Chapter: 8 / 8 Word Count: 5219 Total Word Count: 35,724

Robert Rosenthal married Phillis Heller on a scorching Tuesday. It was late afternoon, and nothing broke up the pulsing blue of the sky but a few white streaks that were more like a feathery suggestion of clouds than the real thing. Rosie wore shorts and a polo shirt—the collar of which had been fixed by Nash before the City Hall ceremony. Liss’s white halter top (borrowed from Sandra’s closet) was a last-minute bridal touch.

Standing before the Justice of the Peace, Rosie could feel himself grinning like a maniac and worried they’d be tossed out, assumed to be doing this as a joke. They were too happy, he was sure. Nobody was ever this happy. They wouldn’t be believed. Liss was grinning back at him, squeezing his hands. While the bride- and groom-to-be had waited to go in, the boys had scoured the nearby shops and come up with a pair of rings from an antique store. Now, Rosie was sliding one onto Liss’s finger. Curt whooped and Gale sent an elbow into his ribs to silence him.

The boys had also come back with a discoloured drinking glass. They’d forgotten something to wrap it in, but John had fished a forgotten beach towel from the back of the Wrangler, and it was in this that they swaddled the glass for Rosie to stomp outside City Hall. Now they all cheered, and people passing by turned and stared.

Crosby took photos throughout. He’d become, somehow, the group’s documentarian, even if it didn’t feel very official to be using a Polaroid camera to capture the wedding of one of his best friends. John claimed to have won the camera from Kidd in a darts match at the Barracks. As John’s dart game had never seemed to improve no matter how many times he played, Crosby doubted this and assumed he’d stolen it from Kidd instead. In all likelihood, Kidd was aware and couldn’t find it in himself to give enough of a shit to take it back. If the mood struck him, he would probably get revenge for the theft in a different way, maybe misspelling John’s name the next time he got a piece in the journal.

Snapping and flapping the printed photos, Crosby thought of his own potential contribution to the journal’s summer edition. Bubbles had mentioned ages ago that there were a few spaces left. There almost certainly still were, since most of the student body was gone and there was no one left to ask who hadn’t been asked already.

As it happened, Crosby had begun writing something. It was a way of coping with the looming deadline of their final essay. The process of writing something else helped him both put off and grapple with the class assignment, tricking his brain into believing itself productive by writing rapidly, copiously, wildly… just about the wrong thing.

While Crosby took the photos, Helen organized them. Quite a few of Rosie and Liss alone on the steps of City Hall. The couple with Helen and Nash, who’d stood up as their friends’ maid of honour and best man. Rosie with the boys (Helen took that one). Liss with her friends. Unfortunately, this did not include Sandra, who Crosby had learned was currently in France. “Bummer,” he’d said after Liss had told him—after he’d inquired, trying hopelessly not to be weird about it.

They decamped to a restaurant with a patio after. Liss had called and left messages on the answering machines of other friends she hadn’t been able to reach on such short notice, and some of these had since picked up the message, joining them for a boisterous dinner, their rowdy laughter filling the perfect evening. The Thorpe Abbotts boys began to tap one another on the shoulder when a few familiar faces appeared.

“Isn’t that…?”

“I think it’s…”

“Remember when we…?”

It was Curt who moseyed to the table at which the newcomers had seated themselves. He nudged one of their plates out of the way and perched on the table’s edge.

“Well, well, fuckin’ well,” he said, crossing his arms and staring down at the trio. “You fuckers always travel in a pack?”

The man to whom Curt had so thoughtfully addressed this question glanced from Curt to the rest of the boys (Gale flicked a hand up in an ironic wave), then back. His eyes had widened, but it only took him a moment to control his features and adopt a haughty expression.

“Look who’s bloody talking,” the Brit shot back.

Because it had been more than a month since the fight, and because a month on summer time actually counted for much longer, and especially because it was Rosie’s wedding day, Curt greeted this remark with a benevolent grin. As the last sight of Curt the Brit had enjoyed had been Curt’s fist coming fast at his head, his smile now understandably evoked a quick, alarmed intake of breath.

“Easy, guy,” Curt coached. “You keep your shirt on, I’ll let you keep those teeth in your head.”

“How generous,” was the stiff reply.

“You want generous? Fine.” Curt knocked the back of his hand playfully against the Brit’s shoulder. “I’ll buy ya a drink.”

A few tables over, Crosby leaned in to whisper to Gale and John.

“Uh, what the hell’s Curt doing?”

“Can’t make it out,” Gale said, though he was smiling loosely. “Lulling them into a false sense of security would be my guess, but I hope I’m wrong. I don’t want to have to embarrass these assholes by mopping the floor with them again.”

“Good news,” John announced. “You are wrong.” He turned to Crosby. “C’mon, Croz. You’re Casanova enough to know flirting when you see it.”

Crosby didn’t know which part to protest first.

“You think Curt’s flirting with the guy he beat the hell out of?”

Gale shrugged, hands spread.

“Stranger things,” he said, prepared to accept John’s theory.

“It’s no surprise Buck here called it wrong,” John said without provocation.

His best friend frowned at him.

“Why’s that?”

“Because you wouldn’t know a sexual advance if it stared you in the eyes while it shot its load.”

“Jesus, John.”

“Some of us are eating,” Bubbles mumbled around a slice of pizza.

Gale had flushed at John’s words, and his blush only deepened as John continued to hold his gaze. John lifted his own slice to his lips and took a large bite, smirking as he chewed. He wasn’t getting desperate, he wouldn’t say, just assertive. He needed Gale to be the one to make the move that would change it all. If he wasn’t, John was afraid Gale would convince himself that whatever happened after was never really what he’d wanted. It would be like Marge: an idea so good at the time that it might’ve been too good, and therefore doomed to brevity. Too perfect and it wouldn’t last with Gale. It never did. John had been around long enough to know that about his friend. He was suspicious of perfection, and of any choice he felt had been made for him.

But John was not above a little goading. He would splash Gale with the waters Gale was as yet too afraid to test.

At some point, they had ordered more beers than pizzas, and at some point, comfortably tipsy, somebody suggested speeches. The blue of the afternoon had deepened into the denim shades of evening, and the restaurant had turned on its patio lights. The future Dr. Rosenthal sat beneath the glow with his arm around the future Mrs. Rosenthal, Esq., her head on his shoulder. They looked like they’d been together longer. Everyone thought so—and they said so, moments of tenderness escaping between inside jokes and embarrassing stories as they gave their speeches. It was simple: these two people were beloved.

Later, the mood shifted, and man and missus betrayed signs of wanting to get away. But they couldn’t just leave; Rosie had a dormmate and Liss shared a house. There were logistics to consider. What they worked out in the end for the couple’s impromptu honeymoon was that they would stay at the house in Cringleford. With Sandra already in France, there was only Helen to relocate, and she was transparently eager to stay with Nash while Rosie vacated the dorm. Helen would get some clothes and things tonight to avoid intruding on the newlyweds. Rosie could not have appeared less interested in going anywhere Liss wasn’t. He would borrow a toothbrush. He would go without trimming his mustache. And why the hell would he need a change of clothes? He didn’t even plan on using the ones he was wearing after they got through the front door.

“Which is why I really need to get back to the house first,” Helen emphasized.

To which John cavalierly replied, “Ah, Helen, you don’t really know Rosie until you’ve seen him in his underwear.”

“We speak from experience,” Gale was quick to stress, before Helen could ask.

“And your boyfriend’s no better.” John leveled an accusatory finger at Nash who shrugged, shameless.

People began to discuss paying the bill, meeting again, sharing a ride to whatever place they called home at the moment. They were mostly students, so home was a rental of some sort, maybe with roommates, maybe with a pet whose head would lift sleepily from the floor when its owner walked in.

As purse straps were slung onto shoulders and back pockets patted to check for wallets and keys, Gale stood from his seat and felt months of his life rush to catch up with him. The sensation was so bittersweet that the breath caught in his throat. This was the best there was, and it was so fleeting. He saw how it would be preserved in his memory: friends hugging, the glint of light off earrings and eyeglass frames, Rosie and Liss in the background with their heads tilted together, speaking softly below the goodbyes.

And Gale saw John.

He saw John reach gracelessly above his head to crack his back. He saw him squeeze Crosby’s shoulder, catch Curt’s elbow to whisper something in his ear that made Curt smile slyly before slipping away with their erstwhile enemy, the Brit from the bar. He saw John turn around, looking for someone, and realized John was looking for him. His eyes glittered when they landed on Gale’s face, his smile full of the satisfaction of locating him, and Gale experienced perhaps his most purely happy thought since childhood: We’re going home.

He was ten years old again, following the train tracks by the light of the moon, turning into the driveway of the house with the warm light coming from the kitchen.

“I have some things to say to you,” he told John.

And John sighed like he was savouring the air, and said, “Finally.”

—

They didn’t turn on the light. The moon offered some through the blinds at the far end of the room though, enough that Gale could hit the kitchen counter when he tossed the keys. He could hear the soft sound of John’s breathing behind him. Slowly, Gale turned and placed a hand on John’s hip. John bowed his head in offering. Gale found his mouth.

John was just a weight in the kiss at first, a pressure to show he was there. It was up to Gale to nudge and suck, to gently bite, to run his lips down over John’s chin, then back up to kiss the underside of his nose. All the time, the heat came off John, and Gale felt the prickle of sweat between his own shoulder blades.

But John was too still; it was making Gale anxious. Impulsively, he sank to his knees and brought his hands to John’s belt. He’d probably waited too long, been too cautious. Who the hell let weeks go by after watching their… their John Egan (because there was no single word in the English language that could say all he meant) come? He would make John see that he did want him.

Gale didn’t so much as get his belt unbuckled before John’s hands were gripping his, pulling them away.

“You want it?” John asked. And his face was half in shadow, but Gale could hear that John didn’t mean the question to be crude, wasn’t demanding Gale beg for his cock. You want this, he meant. You want now, you want me?

“I want all of it,” Gale muttered, and John helped him to his feet.

“Then take me to bed like you mean it.”

Gale slipped his fingers through John’s, then savoured the feeling of how they fit together, stroking his fingers back and forth between John’s.

John said, “That tickles.”

Gale smiled in the darkness. “Sensitive, huh?”

“Did Hemingway love to fish?”

Gale made a noise of exasperation and said, “Come on.”

By the hand, he brought John to his room. John had been inside most days since they’d moved into the dorm together—that much wasn’t new. He had even lain on the bed, so when Gale backed him towards it, John instinctively picked his usual side and sat. Standing before him, Gale pulled the t-shirt over his head, but then John stopped him.

“Hang on,” he said, and went to raise the blinds. Again: the moon, heavy and cool. John resumed his seat. “I just…” He rubbed his cheek in what looked like sudden and unexpected shyness. “I wanna see everything.”

“I bet you do,” Gale replied, slightly saucy to cover his creeping nerves.

“You just look… I think you look…” Shy and at a loss for words.

Rather than stand there self-consciously or leave John to fumble forward alone, Gale sat next to him on the bed.

“It’s not a big deal,” he said.

This had the desired effect of making John laugh. Gale kept talking calmly.

“Friends fall in love all the time. We’re not special.” Gale nudged John with his elbow. “John Egan, we are so fucking unspecial. You know how many people in this country, on this planet are getting laid tonight? You and me, we’re just blendin’ in.”

He knew he was rambling, but slowly, the words like the hypnotic roll of surf against the shore of John’s consciousness, he hoped. The more he said, the less nonchalant Gale was sure he sounded. But why should he be? He kept forcing himself forward. He would sit there on that hard mattress and take it—take whatever he could put himself through, whatever was telling him to stop now and risk no more. He had stopped himself enough, held himself back enough. There was nothing more for him on that safe road, in clear skies. He would abandon the cerebral for the bloody and immediate. He would play with John. He would act—pretend and perform and take charge. All of it. And he would confess. And everything would be real.

“We’re under the radar, John,” Gale said. “It changed my life just to kiss you out there in that kitchen we never clean right. So what? A little perspective.”

“Have a little perspective?” John checked, the laugh still there in his voice.

“Yeah.”

“After you say you love me?” John leaned back on his hands.

“That’s not unusual,” Gale pointed out. His hands were shaking. “You love me too.”

“No big deal?”

“No big deal.”

John sighed loudly and reached for Gale’s hand, laying it on his chest. Gale could feel John’s heartbeat, not as rapid as he imagined it had been a minute ago.

“How long should we pretend?” John asked.

“I’m done if you are.”

When John’s hand tightened around his wrist, Gale pushed him down onto his back and crawled over him.

There was supposed to be dancing at weddings, Gale knew, and it felt like dancing, the way he and John navigated one another in that narrow dorm-room bed. Kissing, getting naked, getting lube from John’s room, getting John to quit moaning like that so Gale wouldn’t end the first time he’d ever done this far too soon as he eased inside him. Once he was buried though, he didn’t mind John’s moan. The snug fit around Gale’s cock was so good he had to fight to get his blurred vision to refocus on John’s face. And that was before they really started to move.

Partway through, slick with sweat from effort and humidity and the heat of each other’s body, Gale slowed his thrusts. John’s cock throbbed needily against his stomach. But Gale slowed further, stopped entirely. His face was so close to John’s. He felt the flex of John’s thighs around his hips and dug his blunt fingernails into firm muscle.

“How long ago did you start thinking this would happen?” Gale mumbled.

“I never thought it.”

“You knew it?” Gale searched his eyes.

“No. I wanted it, which meant it probably wouldn’t happen.” John’s laugh was pained.

“Tell me what you wanted,” Gale requested. He stared down at John, so comfortable on his pillow. The blue shades of moon-bright night folded around his features. He just looked… Gale thought he looked… He understood what John had meant, watching him undress. There was immense beauty in a man who was so vulnerable and brave. “Since I’m the moron who took this long.”

“I just wanted us,” John said simply. “I wanted you to see that, if anybody could make each other happy in this stupid world, in these stupid fucking novels we read… it’d be me...” He tapped his own chest with his finger. “…and it’d be you.” He tapped Gale’s.

John’s hand flattened over Gale’s heart and lingered there.

“How long did you want it then?” Gale asked, pushing his hips forward to distract from how choked up he was by John’s assertion. John gasped and grabbed hold of his ass.

“Every day before this one,” John professed. “All the way to the end.”

“The end of what?”

“I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out when we get there. Kiss me for now.”

“I can do that,” Gale said, and, cradling John’s cheek, he did.

—

Hey, Croz. You know

Crosby, buddy, I think

Harry, before you go

Bubbles had woken before dawn, when the sky had been bruised, when he’d blinked against the bathroom light and squinted at the dark circles under his eyeballs.

For all Crosby’s hard-boiled paperbacks, all his little pulp novels, he also owned a sturdy, hardback Arthur Conan Doyle collection—a sucker for one of the Brits after all. This book Bubbles had taken from the desk in their common area. He’d stuffed a bunch of blank sheets between its pages, tucked a pencil behind his ear, and left the dorms.

He had scuffed across the sidewalk, then swished through the grass, dampening the hem of his pajama pants with dew. The sky had started to lighten by then. Bubbles had held his head up as he’d walked and thought of the airfield. He’d looked at the twinkling stars giving way to the day. High up, black had been fading out to blue, but near the horizon, where the sun would appear, the sky had been a smoldering purplish-reddish-brown, like a hot plum. The day would be a scorcher, Bubbles had predicted. Sometimes, you could just tell.

But it had still been cool then, and when Bubbles had gone beneath the tree—the big tree, the one tree—he’d pulled off his sweater to sit on, so he wouldn’t soak his pants through. The sun had cracked the sky open like that big ol’ star was peering through a door into the dark room that was England. There had been just enough light to smooth a sheet of paper across the cover of the book, take the pencil from behind his ear, and begin.

Despite his false starts, Bubbles was a patient man. He let himself get all those wrong beginnings out of the way and waited for the right one to come.

It—whatever this letter would contain when he got it right—had been burning low inside him ever since Crosby had mentioned that he hadn’t slept with Sandra the night of the Cringleford party. He’d shared this offhandedly after Rosie and Liss’s wedding, when Bubbles had cautiously asked whether he was ok with not seeing Sandra that day—with not seeing her, actually, since the party. (Roommates, they knew each other’s movements well.) Crosby was ok, he’d assured Bubbles. It had only been a crush, if an intense one. At least nothing had happened. He could go back to Jean for the remainder of the summer with a clear conscience. Bubbles had felt slightly stunned. It wasn’t that he expected the worst of his best friend, but he’d felt, lately, that he was losing him somehow. Or that Crosby was flitting around and he, Bubbles, was standing still.

The news was good. It was good for Jean, and for Crosby. It was good for Bubbles, insofar as it meant he didn’t need to worry so much, he supposed. A passing physical attraction was actually very understandable.

Bubbles couldn’t help wondering though, had it been more than that, would Crosby have strayed? Would he have tried? Would he have tested the capacity of his heart and head to fall in love with somebody else? With every attempt he made to write the letter, Bubbles asked himself these questions. He wanted to know if there was space in that heart of Crosby’s, or if the most there would ever be was the idea of a single room, let for the night.

The sun rose red like a wailing throat and Bubbles carried his letter back to the dorm. He saw that Crosby wasn’t up yet, and heard no sounds of waking coming from his room. Bubbles got dressed, then reemerged from his bedroom and walked around their space as though for the first time.

Harding’s class was over. They were done until September. Bubbles wouldn’t fly out for another two days—he would be helping the eternally put-upon Kidd get a few things in order—but Crosby’s flight left that afternoon. They’d see each other. They would call. Before either of them knew it, they’d be back at Thorpe Abbotts and the trees would turn and Bucky would spread his arms to greet friends and buildings both and quote that line from The Great Gatsby about life starting over in the fall.

Bubbles thought about slipping the letter into the suitcase Crosby had hauled out the night before. It stood just inside their door, next to the single pair of shoes they’d each left themselves, packing the dress shoes they kept for presentation days and the boots they kept for the winter mornings when classes weren’t cancelled but the grounds were knee-deep in the white stuff. Bubbles unzipped the side and dropped the letter in.

He went out of the dorm, heart in his throat, and got as far as the door to the stairwell before going back. He retrieved the letter. The dorm was still silent. He went out again.

He was sitting in a coffee shop at the hour he knew Crosby was heading to the airport. The letter was folded in two in his pocket. Bubbles sighed over a cappuccino and made himself quit looking at his watch. He picked up the book he’d set down on the table and kept reading.

—

November

Although it wasn’t quite snow cover, the frost was crisp, and Crosby nearly slipped on the way to the student centre. He’d worn the wrong shoes. Jean had said as much. The transition from fall to winter was harsher over here; just one year away and he’d forgotten stuff like that.

He spotted a pair of familiar silhouettes walking up ahead. With a shout, Crosby hailed them, and Macon and Alex turned at the sound of his voice.

“Are you alright, Croz?” Alex asked.

Hands buried in his pockets, Crosby gave him a shivering shrug.

“It’s this bullshit Connecticut weather,” Macon noted in commiseration. “S’posed to be autumn.”

Alex chuckled.

“Alabama boy.”

“As if your Michigan ass could survive a ’Bama summer.”

Crosby listened to them go back and forth until they reached the centre. Inside the doors, they stamped and wiped their boots on the wide black mat. They were early; later, this mat would be sodden. They were expecting a big audience for today’s Veterans Day events—back-to-back presentations from morning into the afternoon.

He was grateful for Macon and Alex, for how quickly they had all become friends. Of course, the other two had had a head start, beginning their PhDs on this main Connecticut campus while Crosby’d opted to go abroad. But they had welcomed him back like a disoriented soldier returning to the home front after a cessation of hostilities. They had seemed to understand that he needed time to readjust, to take back up this new-old life, before he’d revealed much of anything besides the mid-semester transfer that was already obvious by his appearance in their seminar, “Special Topics in African American Literature: Toni Morrison”—as sudden and unexpected as Beloved’s from the river. That had been barely a month ago.

He had returned to school stateside in October, once Jean had been sure. Every day he’d been back, Crosby had worked not to feel like a coward for the way he’d clung to Norfolk, indirectly hoping the pregnancy scare would go a different way. He had finally felt at home there. Leaving, he’d known, meant missing an English autumn. Rain on grey stone. Brown leaves on that one solid oak. The smell of smoke coming from the Dean’s chimney—part of Thorpe Abbotts’ borrowing of English aesthetic and tradition. The thought of missing any of it had made Crosby want to grind his skin into those stones, so that some of him might stay.

But the baby had been conceived in August while Crosby’d been home for the summer, and it was a real baby, not some selfish fantasy of a faraway life. So he had packed, and though it had felt like breaking his own fingers to do it, he had let go.

He entertained, at first, some idea of going back. Gradually, he had come to accept this was impossible. He would keep his place at the university when the baby was born; he only had a few classes left to take, and he’d earned a scholarship that had been transferred back here when he had, and he made some money on TA pay, besides. There would be time, this way, to be home with Jean and the baby. By the time the three of them were able to make some kind of sense of their life, he would have propelled himself through his dissertation with blind determination and a good amount of fear, and it would be done. There would be no reason to walk those other halls again. There would be no old friends to rejoin in the place where they’d tried to learn something together—of books and, more than that, of each other, of themselves.

Crosby found a quiet place to pace and read over the pages he’d stuck in his presentation folder. Alex and Macon were presenting together, speaking about the Tuskegee Airmen in WWII. He wished he weren’t doing this alone, but at least they were all on the same panel, sitting in the same room. His focus was also WWII. He would be giving a personal account blended with history, offering the audience a portrait of an airfield, then and now.

He never had written that piece for the journal. In consequence, Kidd probably had his school photo pinned up somewhere, tossing darts at it. He’d written a lot before leaving England, but back in the States, Crosby had gotten wrapped up in family and Jean and all the little pursuits that swallowed the end of summer like a rapidly-melting popsicle. This paper, though it had grown into something else, finally felt like coming back around to what he’d meant to do months ago.

When it was almost time, one of the undergrad gophers for the event waved him into the room. Crosby had left his coat on an empty chair in the back row; he straightened his shirt collar, grateful for Jean’s steady hands, which had knotted his tie. He went up on the stage with the other student speakers. There were opening remarks. He was introduced and went to the podium on quivering legs, but he breathed deeply and smoothed his pages out in front of him, collecting himself before he glanced up at the modest assembly.

“I wanna say first,” Crosby began, off book, “that this paper was inspired by a very large, very important tree, and by my friend Bubbles, who used to sit under it with me. He was always thinking about how our school sat on the grounds of an old airfield. He thought about it a lot more than I did. I actually tried to call him today…”

Realizing how far he’d wandered, Crosby cleared his throat and held up a hand in apology. He began the speech he had prepared.

He had tried Bubbles before going out. He’d called the old landline number for their dorm. When Bubbles hadn’t picked up, he’d tried the other guys, finally getting Nash. Crosby had sniffed and touched the bottom of his nose when he heard in Nash’s voice that he was eager to be someplace. But Nash was kind, and he wouldn’t let Crosby off the line without saying whatever he’d called Bubbles to say.

“I’m giving my presentation today,” Crosby had said. In case Nash didn’t remember (and if he didn’t, Crosby didn’t blame him), Crosby had explained it as succinctly as he could: about the airfield, the pilots, and the crews, and later the school, and students. Peace. History. These places that had formed the lives of young men and women.

“You’re telling our story,” Nash had said.

And Crosby had quickly replied, “Yes,” not knowing whether “our” was meant to be Thorpe Abbotts or just seven students in particular.

“Like Little Women.”

Crosby had laughed.

“Come on, Croz,” Nash had said, from way down the line. “You know we’re just like that.”

“Like what?”

“A family.”

Crosby would make it clear later, when what he said in his presentation evolved again, into what he published. Bubbles would be first in his dedication—his best friend—encouraged in his pursuit of a certain ex-royal whose divorce had been finalized that August. The others’ names would be there too. Next might be Curt, who’d joined an exchange program that took him farther into Europe, ever the Kerouacian wanderer. Then Rosie who, enviably to Crosby, always seemed to know what he wanted. Nash would come right after, not quite as certain as Rosie, but just as determined once he’d decided on something. John and Gale… Crosby would have to keep them together, the way they kept themselves: Bucky and Buck.

And they would all stay together that way, there on his dedication page. To the Bloody Hundredth, Crosby would write. Then, for Bubbles, And to Princess Diana, wherever she may be tonight!

#my writing #seven degrees east #MotA #Masters of the Air #MotA fic #Robert 'Rosie' Rosenthal #Herbert Nash #Curtis Biddick #Gale 'Buck' Cleven #John 'Bucky' Egan #Harry Crosby #Joseph 'Bubbles' Payne #Alexander Jefferson #Richard Macon #Bucky x Buck

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bracketsoffear · 1 month

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Spiral Leitner Reading List

The full list of submissions for the Spiral Leitner bracket. Bold titles are ones which were accepted to appear in the bracket. Synopses and propaganda can be found below the cut. Be warned, however, that these may contain spoilers!

Abbott, Edwin Abbott: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions Amato, Mary: The Word Eater

Barker, Clive: Abarat Basye, Dale E.: Fibble Borges, Jorge Luis: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

Calvino, Italo: If on a winter’s night a traveler Carroll, Emily: A Guest in the House Carroll, Lewis: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland/ Through the Looking Glass and what Alice found there Chambers, Robert W.: The King in Yellow Coltrane, John: Giant Steps Cortázar, Julio: Rayuela (Hopscotch) Cutter, Nick: The Deep

Dahl, Roald: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Danielewski, Mark Z.: House of Leaves de Cervantes, Miguel: Don Quixote DeLaney, Samuel R.: Babel-17

Eliot, T.S.: The Waste Land Ewing, Frederick R.: I, Libertine

Gaiman, Neil: Neverwhere Gilman, Charlotte Perkins: The Yellow Wallpaper

Hall, Steven: The Raw Shark Texts Hamilton, Patrick: Angel Street/Gas Light Hawke, Marcus: Grey Noise Hodgson, William Hope: The House on the Borderlands Hunter, Erin: Warriors

Ito, Junji: Uzumaki

Joyce, James: Finnegans Wake Juster, Norton: The Phantom Tollbooth

Kte'pi, Bill: The Cheshire

Lovecraft, H.P.: The Color Out of Space Lyons, Steve: The Stealers of Dreams

Mathers, Edward Powys: Cain’s Jawbone Mearns, William Hughes: Antigonish Miles, Lawrence et. al.: The Book of the War Morrison, Grant: Doom Patrol Moore, Christopher: Sacré Bleu: A Comedy d’Art Muir, Tamsyn: Harrow the Ninth

National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers: Common Core Math Textbook Nikolson, Adam: Life between the tides

O’Brien, Flann: The Third Policeman Ogawa, Yoko: The Memory Police Orwell, George: Nineteen Eighty-Four

Pelevin, Victor: The Helmet of Horror Pratchett, Terry: Moving Pictures Pynchon, Thomas: The Crying of Lot 49

Ryukishi07: higurashi no naku koro ni (When The Evening Cicadas Cry)

Sachar, Louis: Wayside School Is Falling Down Schwartz, Alvin: "Maybe You Will Remember" (short story from Scary Stories 3: More Tales To Chill Your Bones) Serafini, Luigi: Codex Seraphinianus Shakespeare, William: A Midsummer Night's Dream Shakespeare, William: King Lear Shakespeare, William: The Winter's Tale Silberescher: SCP-1425: Star Signals Stine, R.L.: Don't Go to Sleep!

Unknown, Voynich Manuscript

Wells, H.G.: The Door in the Wall West, A.J.: The Spirit Engineer Whorf, Benjamin Lee: Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language Wyspiański, Stanisław: The Wedding

Abbott, Edwin Abbott: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

Both a satire on Victorian hierarchies and a mathematical examination of lower and higher dimensions, Flatland's narrator has strange dreams of a one-dimensional Lineland where he can only be seen as a series of points on a line. Following this, he meets A. Sphere, whom he in turn can only see as a circle, and is exposed to the three-dimensional space of Spaceland. When he returns home to try and explain what he has seen, he is thrown into an insane asylum.

Amato, Mary: The Word Eater

The titular Word Eater is a worm born with eyes and the magical ability to eat words instead of dirt, named Fip. Whenever Fip eats a word, the object or subject that word was referring to vanishes, at one point accidentally erasing a recently discovered star. When used on a subject, erasure removes any ontological effects, as when used on a torturous dog training method the dogs it was used on all suddenly become docile instead of vicious. The conflict of the story comes in the fact that words are the only thing Fip can eat, so keeping anything else from being erased becomes a matter of starving him. There's also some disgruntled students who almost use him to erase their school, with the protagonist worrying that the effect could abstractly extend to the staff and students, necessitating their thwarting.

Barker, Clive: Abarat

Candy lives in Chickentown USA: the most boring place in the world, her heart bursting for some clue as to what her future may hold. She is soon to find out: swept out of our world by a giant wave, she finds herself in another place entirely...

The Abarat: a vast archipelago where every island is a different hour of the day, from the sunlit wonders of Three in the Afternoon, where dragons roam, to the dark terrors of the island of Midnight, ruled by Christopher Carrion. (...)

Abarat is an extremely Spiral coded place working so differently from the real world and being extremely nonsensical that I think this book deserves to be the Spiral Leitner.

Basye, Dale E.: Fibble

"When Marlo Fauster claims she has switched souls with her brother, she gets sent straight to Fibble, the circle of Heck reserved for liars. But it’s true—Milton and Marlo have switched places, and Marlo finds herself trapped in Milton’s gross, gangly body. She also finds herself trapped in Fibble, a three-ring media circus run by none other than P. T. Barnum, an insane ringmaster with grandiose plans and giant, flaming pants. Meanwhile Milton, as Marlo, is working at the devil’s new television network, T.H.E.E.N.D. But there’s something strange about these new shows. Why do they all air at the same time? And are they really broadcasting to the Surface? Soon Milton and Marlo realize that they need each other to sort through the lies and possibly prevent the end of the world—if Bea “Elsa” Bubb doesn’t catch them first."

The Fauster twins are caught up in yet another apocalyptic scheme as hellish figures plot to stoke a ratings war into a holy war, using elaborate lies and propaganda to provoke the end of humanity itself.

Borges, Jorge Luis: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

A short story concerning the author and his friend stumbling upon a mention of the Uqbar region in an encyclopedia, a place which is found in no other literature. One of the myths of Uqbar concerns Tlön, a fantastical place where people do not believe in the reality of the material world, and only the most outre scholars would dare suggest that objects have permanence. Objects there "grow vague or sketchy and lose detail" when they begin to be forgotten, culminating in their disappearance when they are completely forgotten. One year later, Tlönian objects begin to appear in the real world. Then a complete encyclopedia of the world turns up, transforming the human understanding of science and philosophy. As the author writes his postscript, the world is transforming entirely into Tlön.

Calvino, Italo: If on a winter’s night a traveler

The postmodernist narrative, in the form of a frame story, is about the reader trying to read a book called If on a winter's night a traveler. Each chapter is divided into two sections. The first section of each chapter is in second person, and describes the process the reader goes through to attempt to read the next chapter of the book they are reading. The second half is the first part of a new book that the reader ("you") finds. The second half is always about something different from the previous ones.

Carroll, Emily: A Guest in the House

"After many lonely years, Abby’s just gotten married. She met her new husband—a recently widowed dentist—when he arrived in town with his young daughter, seeking a new start. Although it’s strange living in the shadow of her predecessor, Abby does her best to be a good wife and mother. But the more she learns about her new husband’s first wife, the more things don’t add up. And Abby starts to wonder . . . was Sheila’s death really by natural causes? As Abby sinks deeper into confusion, Sheila’s memory seems to become a force all its own, ensnaring Abby in a mystery that leaves her obsessed, fascinated, and desperately in love for the first time in her life"

While most riffs on the Bluebeard story are probably slaughter, buried, or eye aligned, much of the horror in this story is the uncertainty and loss of a clear sense of reality. Also the art of Sheila feels very spiral.

Carroll, Lewis: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland/ Through the Looking Glass and what Alice found there

Both books have a similar structure and are spiral for the same reasons: little Victorian child Alice founds herself in a strange world with rules vastly different from hers (for example, there’s no real geography and the scenery changes suddenly from one place to another very much like in a dream). The characters she crosses constantly defy her understanding of the world and applies logics she struggles to understand. Even though she ends up going with the flow most of the time she never ceases to question whether she’s experiencing real life or a dream; sanity is brought up a few times, and there’s also the popular quote "We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad", delivered by the grinning cat that appears and disappears like a slippery distortion. Lastly I may add that the TMA episode whose title references the book (Mag 177, Wonderland) is a spiral episode.

Chambers, Robert W.: The King in Yellow

A collection of short stories, most of which revolve around a fictional two-act play of the same title: The King in Yellow. Although the play is never described in any great detail, anyone who reads it is driven to madness.

Coltrane, John: Giant Steps

At first a reader simply sees the rapid changes, seemingly random and discordant. Further investigation will begin to reveal patterns, the chords begin to outline other chords, that in turn outline further chords, only to loop back to the beginning. A master or his craft, the creator can seemingly effortlessly navigate this fractal of potential sound. You, can only hope to keep up as the endless, rapidly twisting patterns give you no time to comprehend the page in front of you.

This is specifically against tournament rules, but I still wanted to at least give it a submission.

Cortázar, Julio: Rayuela (Hopscotch)

The story of two young writers whose lives are playing themselves out in Buenos Aires and Paris to the sounds of jazz and brilliant talk, Hopscotch, written in 1963, was the first hypertext novel. Anticipating the age of the web with a non-structure that allows readers to take the chapters in any order they wish, Hopscotch invites them to be the architects of the novel themselves.

Cutter, Nick: The Deep

A strange plague called the ‘Gets is decimating humanity on a global scale. It causes people to forget— Small things at first and eventually their bodies forget how to function involuntarily. There is no cure.

But far below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, a universal healer hailed as “ambrosia” has been discovered. In order to study this phenomenon, a special research lab has been built eight miles under the sea’s surface. But when the station goes incommunicado, a brave few descend through the lightless fathoms in hopes of unraveling the mysteries lurking at those crushing depths."

At first glance you might think this book is much more aligned to The Buried than The Spiral and while it does have a lot of claustrophobic elements, the true horror the protagonist (Luke) faces, comes from slowly losing your perception of reality. The relatively small laboratory soon becomes a labyrinth, as he moves from room to room he also moves through memories that become more and more vivid as time goes by. He has hallucinations, falls asleep and dreams of being awake while sleepwalks, he is chased by monsters that are very real and some that are just his own demons.

(spoilers) At the end we find out he and all the other people in the laboratory were lured by two ancient creatures trapped both at the bottom of the sea and another dimension and needed Luke's body to be free. The Figmen are tricksters, they enjoy doing "experiments" seeing how much a body can twist and what it takes to break a mind. The people inside the laboratory were little more that mice they wanted to see run around for their amusement before being freed

Dahl, Roald: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

I want off Mr. Wonka's wild ride. Why the fuck is this man dragging children through his acid trip pun-tastical Saw movie. OSHA get his ass

Danielewski, Mark Z.: House of Leaves

The novel is written as a work of epistolary fiction and metafiction focusing on a fictional documentary film titled the Navidson Record, presented as a story within a story discussed in a handwritten monograph recovered by the primary narrator, Johnny Truant. The narrative makes heavy use of multiperspectivity as Truant's footnotes chronicle his efforts to transcribe the manuscript, which itself reveals the Navidson Record's supposed narrative through transcriptions and analysis depicting a story of a family who discovers a larger-on-the-inside labyrinth in their house.

***

Come on, its the book that gaslights you. Some pages are literally typed in spirals. Its about a beautiful new house that breaks the laws of physics and also eats some people- Helen Richardson would be PROUD. Its a story in a story IN A STORY. The introduction of the book is about how the man annotating the manuscript of the documentary and his friend used to pick up girls by telling fantastical and false stories about their lives. Everyone in the books universe thinks the documentary was faked. What can i say that hasn't been said before? The “M” in Mark Z. Danielowki stands for “Mr. Michael Distortion”

***

I mean, look at the book. Look at it. I feel like I'm going mad every time I see its pages.

de Cervantes, Miguel: Don Quixote

After reading too many courtly romances, Quixote's perception of reality is warped, and he seeks to become a knight and restore the courtly chivalric graces. Also he thinks windmills are evil giants.

DeLaney, Samuel R.: Babel-17

Rydra Wong is a top linguist, acclaimed poet, and former military cryptologist. When the Alliance military come across a new code used by the enemy, which is beyond their ability to crack, they come to her for help. She informs them that it is not a mere code, but an actual language, and agrees to accept the challenge.

Quickly assembling a crew, Wong heads to the Alliance War Yards to study the raw data on this new language, which the military calls Babel-17. However, shortly after she arrives, an enemy attack forces her to flee in disarray, and she falls in with a privateer, who is, fortunately, on the Alliance side.

Or mostly so. On board the privateer's ship, she begins to learn more about Babel-17, and the surprising benefits and dangers it offers to someone who learns to speak it. The language literally twists the thought pattern of its speakers, making it easier to conceptualize certain ideas, but more difficult to translate your thoughts into anything others can understand.

Eliot, T.S.: The Waste Land

Here's a link to the text if anyone is curious

The Waste Land is a poem that describes a...place? state of mind? an arc of history?...in a series of fragments. It weaves together fractured dialogue, mythology, language, and popular culture of its day into a bizarre but beautiful landscape that defies easy explanation.

Ewing, Frederick R.: I, Libertine

New York Times Best Selling novel by acclaimed author, Frederick R. Ewing, “I, Libertine” tells the story of a social climber who styles himself as Lance Courtney.

I highly recommend those voting seek out the book to read for themselves, as it is truly one of the great works of modern American literature.

Gaiman, Neil: Neverwhere

"Under the streets of London there's a world most people could never even dream of. A city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, knights in armour and pale girls in black velvet. "Neverwhere" is the London of the people who have fallen between the cracks. Strange destinies lie in wait in London below - a world that seems eerily familiar. But a world that is utterly bizarre, peopled by unearthly characters such as the Angel called Islington, the girl named Door, and the Earl who holds Court on a tube train. (...)"

Extremely weird world that unsuspecting civilian can be stuck in, and there is a door motive. This is a Spiral Leitner if I ever saw one.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins: The Yellow Wallpaper

Link

From Wikipedia: "The story is written as a collection of journal entries narrated in the first person. The journal was written by a woman whose physician husband has rented an old mansion for the summer. Forgoing other rooms in the house, the couple moves into the upstairs nursery. As a form of treatment, the husband forbids the journal writer from working or writing, and encourages her to eat well and get plenty of air so that she can recuperate from what he calls a "temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency", a common diagnosis in women at the time. As the reader continues through the journal entries, they experience the writer's gradual descent into madness with nothing better to do than observe the peeling yellow wallpaper in her room.”

***

Epistolary novel about a woman who's being made to live in a single room to treat her post-partum depression. Over the course of the story, she becomes increasingly obsessed with the patterns of the room's wallpaper, spending hours gazing at it and trying to make sense of it. By the end of the story, she believes that there's a woman trapped in the wallpaper, or perhaps that she is the women trapped in the wallpaper. Throughout the story, she's also gaslit by her husband.

***

It's a short story and I highly recommend that you read it. Spoilers (of course) are ahead, so if you want an unspoiled experience, skip past.

This story follows the narrator, as she is locked up by her husband who cares for her and ultimately makes all decisions for her. He makes her doubt her state of mind as she suffers from a nervious disorder. As she stays in the ex-nursery attic, she writes of the horrendous yellow wallpaper. She becomes obsessive of it, watching it night and day amd watching as the colours change with the lighting of the room. She begins seeing a woman locked behind the twisting patterns, and in the end she becomes it - or it becomes her, and she has a hysteric breakdown.

Hall, Steven: The Raw Shark Texts

Eric Sanderson wakes up with no memory of who he is or any past experiences. He is told by a psychologist that he has a dissociative condition known as fugue but a trail of written clues purporting to be from his pre-amnesiac self describe a more fantastic and sinister explanation for his lack of memories. According to these, he has activated a conceptual shark called a Ludovician which "feeds on human memories and the intrinsic sense of self" and is relentlessly pursuing him and will eventually erase his personality completely.

Also at one point there's about 30 pages of an ASCII shark moving towards the reader. Could easily be interpreted as the Ludovician actually approaching the reader in a Leitner-ized version.

[SPOILERS] When the Ludovician attacks Eric, he decides to go in search of a doctor named Trey Fidorous, identified by the letters from his previous self, in the hope he may be able to help to explain what happened to him and how to defeat the shark. Eric travels through Britain in search of clues and is contacted by a mysterious figure called Mr. Nobody, who is part of a megalomaniac network intelligence called Mycroft Ward. Mr. Nobody attempts to subdue and control Eric but Eric manages to escape with the help of an associate of Fidorous named Scout. Scout takes Eric to meet Fidorous, travelling through un-space (an underground network of empty warehouses and unused cellars). They begin a romantic relationship during the journey but Eric feels betrayed when he discovers that Scout has brought him to Fidorous to use him as bait for the shark in the hope of destroying Ward.

With their help Fidorous builds a conceptual shark-hunting boat and they sail out on a conceptual ocean. After a battle with the shark they throw a laptop hooked up to the Mycroft Ward database into its mouth, destroying both Ward and the shark. Eric and Scout remain in the conceptual universe while Eric's dead body is discovered back in the real world.

Hamilton, Patrick: Angel Street/Gas Light

Under the guise of kindness, Jack Manningham is slowly torturing his fragile wife Bella into insanity in his efforts to cover his search for treasure from his diabolical past. He makes her think she is forgetting things and rattles her nerves with the flickering gaslight, which he controls from another room. One day, when Jack is out, Bella has an unexpected caller: kindly Inspector Rough from Scotland Yard. Rough is convinced that Jack is a homicidal maniac wanted for a murder committed fifteen years earlier in this very house. Gradually the Inspector restores Bella's confidence in herself and as the evidence against Jack unfolds.

The play that inspired the movie 1994 "Gaslight" which brought the term "gaslighting" into the public eye.

***

The literal origins of the term "gaslighting," the play follows the recently-married protagonist as her husband tries to convince her that she's going mad.

Hawke, Marcus: Grey Noise

Evan is just trying to get his store, REWIND VIDEO, up and running. Fate, unfortunately, often has other plans. Then he finds something that would be the perfect touch, an old vacuum tube TV. One that keeps turning to static. And it too has other plans. It follows you. Drives you. It’s already inside you. Lose yourself in...GREY NOISE.

Hodgson, William Hope: The House on the Borderlands

Fishing buddies Tonnison and Berreggnog didn't bargain for what they found while on holiday near the remote Irish village of Kraighten. While walking along the riverbank, they're astonished to see that the river abruptly ends. It reappears as a surge from a chasm some 100 feet below the edge of an abyss, where also stand the remains of an oddly shaped house, half-swallowed by the pit.

Exploring the ruins, the friends discover the moldering journal of an unidentified man--the Recluse--who had lived in the house with his sister and faithful dog years ago. Its pages reveal the man's apparent descent into madness--how else to account for his chronicles of otherworldly visions, trips to other dimensions, and attacks by swine-like humanoid creatures that seem to have followed him home? After one particular vision in which he witnesses the end of the earth and time itself, the Recluse awakens in his study to find nothing has changed--except that his dog Pepper is dead, dissolved into a pile of dust. And then the "swine things" return...

Hunter, Erin: Warriors

Can you keep track of who the fuck is related to who and who died when and what these cats look like and what they're named? No you fucking can't, there's four writers all sharing a pen name and metric shit ton of books in the main series alone, let alone the spinoffs. Continuity is dead and these cats murdered it.

Ito, Junji: Uzumaki

Uzumaki follows a high-school teenager, Kirie Goshima (五島桐絵); her boyfriend, Shuichi Saito (斎藤秀一); and the citizens of the small, quiet Japanese town of Kurouzu-cho (黒渦町, Black Vortex Town), which is enveloped by supernatural events involving spirals.

As the story progresses, Kirie and Shuichi witness how the spiral curse affects the people around them, causing the citizens to become either obsessed or paranoid about spirals. Shuichi becomes reclusive after both of his parents die from the horrific psychological and physical powers of the spirals, but also gains the ability to detect when the spiral curse is taking place, although he is often dismissed until the next paranormal effects of the curse become obvious. Eventually, Kirie is affected by the curse as well, when her hair begins to curl into an unnatural spiral pattern, drains her life energy to hypnotize the citizens, and chokes her whenever she attempts to cut it off. Shuichi is able to cut her hair and save her. The curse continues to plague the town until a series of typhoons conjured by the curse destroys most of its structures. The only remaining buildings are ancient abandoned terraced houses, which the citizens are forced first to move into, and then begin expanding as they grow more and more crowded.

As a series of increasingly powerful earthquakes and additional destruction from delinquents able to utilize strong winds strike the town, Kirie and Shuichi devise a plan to escape Kurouzu-cho, but when they attempt to escape, their efforts are unsuccessful. After returning to the town, they discover that several years have passed since they left, as time speeds up away from the spiral. The other citizens have expanded the terraced houses until they connected into a single structure forming a labyrinthine spiral pattern, but have become mutated as a consequence of overcrowding, their limbs twisting and warping into spirals. Kirie and Shuichi decide to search for Kirie's parents, which brings them to the center after many days of walking through the labyrinth.

At the center, Shuichi is hurled down a pit leading deep beneath the earth by a mutated citizen, with Kirie herself descending via a colossal spiral staircase to find him. She falls but is saved by countless bodies making up the ground of a vast, ancient city consisting entirely of spiral patterns in various arrangements. As Kirie looks for Shuichi, she finds her parents twisted and petrified, resembling stone statues, along with many other citizens of Kurouzu-cho who have met the same fate. Then, she hears Shuichi call for her and goes to him. Both are overwhelmed by the ancient spirals surrounding them and Shuichi points out how it seems as though the spiral ruins have a will of their own. Noticing that the petrified citizens of Kurouzu-cho are all facing the spiral city, Shuichi theorizes that this is the source of the curse; the city expands on its own periodically and has cursed the land above out of jealousy from having no one to view it.

Shuichi urges Kirie to leave without him as he can no longer walk, and that the curse should be over soon, but she replies that she does not have the strength and wishes to stay with him. The two embrace with their bodies twisting and intertwining together, signifying their acceptance into the never-ending curse. At the same time, a stone tower in the shape of a drill bit rises out of the city, and breaches the surface, forming the centerpiece of the abandoned town. As Shuichi and Kirie lie together, Kirie notes that the curse ended at the same time it began, for just as time speeds up away from the center, it freezes at the center. The spiral's curse is eternal, and all the events will repeat when a new Kurouzu-cho is built where the previous one lay.

***

I was debating if I should just do the first volume but three in one horrors sounded great to me. So Uzumaki is largely about spirals, to put the most obvious reasoning first. That's that Uzumaki translates to, after all. Spirals begin enveloping this small town, causing supernatural events. But the madness side of things comes as quickly as the spirals are there. You see it first in completely opposite ways with Shuichi's father and mother, with one becoming obsessed with spirals to the point of madness and eventually becoming one himself and the other being so terrified of spirals that it turns into its own psychological torment as she tries to remove spirals from her life and eventually realizes that those spirals are part of her naturally, causing her to try to take apart those aspects of her as well. Over chapters, characters become warped and characters succumb to the madness of spirals. Some fear the spirals, while others embrace them. Escaping the spirals is proven futile, and through that, it is also proven how out of sync the town is from reality as a whole, with time being sped up. Also, it has a labyrinth at this point, built by those suffering from the curse, so I think the Spiral would love that. In the end, the spirals are proven inescapable, and the two main characters warp together into a spiral of their own. The curse seems to end here, but really, it's a never ending cycle, and a curse which will never go away. The curse and the madness it brings won't fade.

***

Kurouzu-cho, a small fogbound town on the coast of Japan, is cursed. According to Shuichi Saito, the withdrawn boyfriend of teenager Kirie Goshima, their town is haunted not by a person or being but a pattern: UZUMAKI, the spiral—the hypnotic secret shape of the world.

***

Plot is about a town cursed by spirals which make you go insane

Joyce, James: Finnegans Wake

Considered to be one of the great literary mindscrews. The plot is covered in about a tenth of the chapters in the book. The rest tell a series of unconnected vignettes, describe minor characters in excessive detail, give allegories for the main plot, and teach you geometry. One chapter was described by Joyce as "A chattering dialogue across a river by two washerwomen who, as night falls, become a tree and stone." Some chapters feature random doodles in the margins. The first sentence is the ending part of the last sentence, making the book circular. Finally, it's written in a combination of five dozen or so different languages, random puns that you need a doctorate in ancient mythology and the aforementioned languages to understand, and general stream of consciousness. In short, it makes no sense. Which is awesome. Joyce stated that it was supposed to be a dream-like "night book" in comparison to his "day-book", Ulysses, which described a day in the life of some ordinary Dubliners but whose style and construction was almost as weird.

***

Finnegan's Wake is one of the most experimental novels of the twentieth century. Rather than write using conventions of novels--or of the English language--Joyce structured his book on language itself. The result is surreal, dense, and famously difficult. To get a sense of just how strange and dreamlike the whole thing is, even its Wikipedia page compares it to Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" before pointing out the the book begins with the second half of a sentence, which it gives the first half of at its end. Tl;dr Finnegan's Wake is so unsettlingly experimental that Joyce had to break the English language down to its components to get his vision down on the page.

Juster, Norton: The Phantom Tollbooth

Milo receives a package one day, from an unknown source. The package takes him on a journey where he meets the judge jury and executioner, the princesses rhyme and reason, and more

Kte'pi, Bill: The Cheshire

If you don't want to read this whole summary, here's a song based on the story

Alice Little came out of a showing of Disney's Alice in Wonderland sixteen years ago with nothing but a blue gingham dress, a faded daguerrotype of cats, and jumbled memories of being Alice Liddell. Specifically the fictional character: "she'd never thought of herself as the 'real' Alice, the one Charles Dodgson wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for - she had no memories of that Alice's life, only of the life chronicled by Lewis Carroll - madness and tea parties and talking animals. Worse, her memories conflicted, as she remembered Alice's Adventures Underground, Wonderland's first draft, as vividly as she did the two published novels." After years of attempting to return to Wonderland failed--she'd "tried every drug she could, hallucinogenic and otherwise [...] meditation, trances, pain rituals, sweat lodges, prayers and madness and hypnosis and psychotherapy"--Alice tells herself that her memories are merely symptomatic of a dissociative disorder and tries to go clean. But she puts an ad in the paper asking "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" (which includes a coded message saying "SAVE ME"), searching for answers despite herself, and eventually gets an answer. She meets a grinning man "in a purple-striped turtleneck, with odd-shaped nails and a tattoo of a mushroom on one of his knuckles" at a bar and they talk about her struggles, with him eventually getting her to ask what she really wants to know--if he can take her back. The man replies, "'There's no back to take you. You never left [...] Maybe we recognise each other because you're Alice and I'm the Cheshire Cat. Maybe we're descendents of the originals. Maybe we're brother and sister, separated after our parents' deaths and so traumatised we sought refuge in the books Father read to us as children. Maybe we're simply mad.'" After giving her LSD, the man tells her that a raven isn't like a writing desk at all, "And he faded away, leaving nothing but a grinnnnnnnnnn."

Lovecraft, H.P.: The Color Out of Space

An indescribable color leaches the life out of a patch of farmland and everyone on it.

Lyons, Steve: The Stealers of Dreams

Synopsis: "In the far future, the Doctor, Rose and Captain Jack find a world on which fiction has been outlawed. A world where it's a crime to tell stories, a crime to lie, a crime to hope, and a crime to dream.

But now somebody is challenging the status quo. A pirate TV station urges people to fight back. And the Doctor wants to help -- until he sees how easily dreams can turn into nightmares.

With one of his companions stalked by shadows and the other committed to an asylum, the Doctor is forced to admit that fiction can be dangerous after all. Though perhaps it is not as deadly as the truth... "

Why it's Spiral: A society where lies and fictions are forbidden is, evidently, a society that will fall for anything. The repression of any untruth -- by threat of violence and by invasive brain surgery to paralyze the region that dreams -- means that people are more desperate than ever to believe in anything. Fiction has consequences on this planet. And what could be a more obvious lie than the time-traveling man in his blue box...?

Mathers, Edward Powys: Cain’s Jawbone

I'm just going to quote an article from The Independent: "Cain’s Jawbone, originally published in 1934, is a murder mystery puzzle composed of 100 pages – all assembled in the wrong order. The only way to solve all six murders in the prose narrative is to reorder the pages and correctly identify the crimes, their victims, and who perpetrated them."

Here's the link to the article

Mearns, William Hughes: Antigonish

It's all pretty much all in the TMA episode (Upon the stairs). The little man who "wasn't there" in the stairs.

Miles, Lawrence et. al.: The Book of the War

Synopsis: "The Great Houses: Immovable. Implacable. Unchanging. Old enough to pass themselves off as immortal, arrogant enough to claim ultimate authority over the Spiral Politic.

The Enemy: Not so much an army as a hostile new kind of history. So ambitious it can re-write worlds, so complex that even calling it by its name seems to underestimate it.

Faction Paradox: Renegades, ritualists, saboteurs and subterfugers, the criminal-cult to end all criminal-cults, happy to be caught in the crossfire and ready to take whatever's needed from the wreckage… assuming the other powers leave behind a universe that's habitable.

The War: A fifty-year-old dispute over the two most valuable territories in existence: "cause" and "effect."

Marking the first five decades of the conflict, THE BOOK OF THE WAR is an A to Z of a self-contained continuum and a complete guide to the Spiral Politic, from the beginning of recordable time to the fall of humanity. Part story, part history and part puzzle-box, this is a chronicle of protocol and paranoia in a War where the historians win as many battles as the soldiers and the greatest victory of all is to hold on to your own past."

Propaganda: A text which purports to be a constantly shifting and updating guide to The War, a conflict so overarching and complete that every other conflict is but a pale shadow thereof; the Time War. Of course, since it would shift retroactively with the changing timelines, there is no way to prove or disprove this claim. Notable entries include cities built from days stolen from shifting calendars, the secrets of removing yourself from history while still leaving yourself free to interfere, Grandfather Paradox, the location of the exact centre of history, how to weaponize banality, and Parablox.

Oh, and there's something else in there. Something that seems to be talking to you...

Morrison, Grant: Doom Patrol

The series in general could easily fit in the Spiral, but I'll focus on a certain arc. A great new evil emerges! The Brotherhood of Dada! Its members: a woman that has super strength when she's asleep, a man that is made of fog and swallows his victims(and then has to put up with their voices inside his brain forever), a woman that has every super power you haven't thought of and is deathly afraid of dirt and an illiterate man that can turn into a hurricane. And their intrepid leader! Mr Nobody! He used to be a boring, average man. With the help of a very criminal doctor he tried to turn into a new man...but he went so insane he's always slightly left of reality and 2D. He doesn't mind though, he rather enjoys the meaninglessness of it all, which is a bit Vast of him. He also calls cops fascists.

The bad guys steal a painting that swallows everything and anything and they put Paris inside it. One of the funniest panels ever is various super heroes sitting around a painting wandering what they're supposed to do. Thankfully, Doom Patrol knows how to deal with the weird stuff. They go into the painting, get separated in different artstyles and beaten up.

But the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse is coming, so they cooperate and put him in the dadaist section, making him lose all meaning and turning into a wooden horse.

A big part of the arc is also narrated by the illiterate hurricane guy, which makes it harder to understand since he writes phonetically.

The whole thing is absurdity, the first bad guys are absurd and the second bad guy gets beaten by the absurd. After a few more arcs Mr Nobody runs for president(with some members of the Doom Patrol endorsing him) and gets killed by the CIA in a similar manner to Jesus. For his campaign he drove a bus that made everyone behind it feel like they've taken lsd.

Moore, Christopher: Sacré Bleu: A Comedy d’Art

The story surrounds the mysterious suicide of Vincent van Gogh, who famously shot himself in a French wheat field only to walk a mile to a doctor’s house. The mystery, which is slowly but cleverly revealed through the course of the book, is blue: specifically the exclusive ultramarine pigment that accents pictures created by the likes of Michelangelo and van Gogh. To find the origin of the hue, Moore brings on Lucien Lessard, a baker, aspiring artist and lover of Juliette, the brunette beauty who breaks his heart. After van Gogh’s death, Lucien joins up with the diminutive force of nature Henri Toulouse-Lautrec to track down the inspiration behind the Sacré Bleu. In the shadows, lurking for centuries, is a perverse paint dealer dubbed The Colorman, who tempts the world’s great artists with his unique hues and a mysterious female companion who brings revelation—and often syphilis (it is Moore, after all). Into the palette, Moore throws a dizzying array of characters, all expertly portrayed, from the oft-drunk “little gentleman” to a host of artists including Édouard Manet, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Muir, Tamsyn: Harrow the Ninth

Harrow the Ninth is, above all, really fucking confusing. Roughly every third chapter is actively gaslighting the reader about what happened in the last book. The main character is fucking struggling to maintain any sort of grip on reality all throughout the story, and more often than not, she fails miserably. This is due to several factors, including, but not limited to - sleep deprivation, latent schizophrenia, ruthless emotional manipulation from everyone around her, being full of a frankly alarming number of ghosts from several entirely unrelated sources, childhood parental and religious trauma, and a self-inflicted amateur lobotomy.

***

Takes place post(sometimes pre) DIY lobotomy; leaving our protag, who already struggles identifying between reality and hallucination, a paranoid, constantly questioning wreck. It's written in second person and does not follow events chronologically, leaving the reader questioning everything almost as much as the protag.

National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers: Common Core Math Textbook

Drives me up the damn wall insane. This is mostly a joke suggestion but also I think there’s something to be said about fractals’ place in mathematics, and the widespread range of common core math’s influence. To be honest, submitting this is a gut feeling of dread to me.

Nikolson, Adam: Life between the tides

Look this probably shouldn’t even make it into the bracket and this is mostly a very dull book about shoreline ecosystems but there’s this one chapter where the dude gets positively poetic about I think?? winkles?? (a kind of snail) and it absolutely reads like a statement like we are talking fractal winkles-all-the-way-down insanity. I need to tell someone about it bc it was like suddenly reading another book. A better and also worse book. I’m pretty sure he quoted philosophers in it. I wish I had taken notes. He would get along with Ivo Lensik’s dad.

O’Brien, Flann: The Third Policeman

Synopsis from Goodreads: "The Third Policeman is Flann O'Brien's brilliantly dark comic novel about the nature of time, death, and existence. Told by a narrator who has committed a botched robbery and brutal murder, the novel follows him and his adventures in a two-dimensional police station where, through the theories of the scientist/philosopher de Selby, he is introduced to "Atomic Theory" and its relation to bicycles, the existence of eternity (which turns out to be just down the road), and de Selby's view that the earth is not round but "sausage-shaped." With the help of his newly found soul named "Joe," he grapples with the riddles and contradictions that three eccentric policeman present to him."

Ogawa, Yoko: The Memory Police

The story is set in an alternate Japan where people's memories of certain things and concepts (e.g. birds, hats, winter, books, seasons, even their sense of self) are slowly taken away from their collective minds for 'their safety' by the titular Memory Police, a government force of sorts. This forced forgetting goes to the point where they can't physically perceive that concept; birds are weird creatures because no one remembers what a bird is like, and it's always winter because no one remembers what spring is. The story even ends with the unnamed protagonist (along with several others) eventually fading away from existence (read: forgetting) as memories of certain body parts and finally the concept of the human body is taken away by the Memory Police. It's like if the vase from MAG 38 formed and entire task force to do its job.

This one has narrative potential too; imagine a statement where someone slowly lose memories of certain things after reading this Leitner, gradually becoming an unreliable narrator as reality slips away from their conscious.

Orwell, George: Nineteen Eighty-Four

Pelevin, Victor: The Helmet of Horror

Eight people find themselves in eight different rooms with a labyrinth behind them and a computer in front of them. They try to communicate via the computer that allows them to chat with one another, but has nicknames set for them(IsoldA, UGLI 666, Ariane...) and blocks their personal information. They(and us) can't know if they are lying. When two of them try to see each other by visiting a spot in the labyrinths that should be the same they each then recount a completely different experience and accuse each other of lying. Another character claims they all must be figments of his imagination, he must be very drunk. And they're all afraid of the minotaur. It is a book where no one, even the reader knows what's real, everyone is afraid of what might appear if they turn a corner and no one knows what's going on.

Pratchett, Terry: Moving Pictures

"‘HOLY WOOD IS A DIFFERENT SORT OF PLACE . . . HERE, THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS TO BE IMPORTANT.’

A new phenomenon is taking over the Discworld: moving pictures. Created by the alchemists of Ankh-Morpork, the growing ‘clicks’ industry moves to the sandy land of Holy Wood, attracted by the light of the sun and some strange calling no one can quite put their finger on…

Also drawn to Holy Wood are aspiring young stars Victor Tugelbend, a wizarding student dropout, and Theda ‘Ginger’ Withel, a small-town girl with big dreams. But behind the glitz and glamour of the clicks, a sinister presence lurks. Because belief is powerful in the Discworld, and sometimes downright dangerous…

The magic of movies might just unravel reality itself."

Pynchon, Thomas: The Crying of Lot 49

Oedipa Maas spends the whole book trying to figure out if the conspiracy she’s trying to unravel about the US postal service and a conter-postal service via plays, signs/images, and history is real or if she’s being gaslit by her ex, who just died and made her executor of his will.

Ryukishi07: higurashi no naku koro ni (When The Evening Cicadas Cry)

The series explores paranoia and deceit among friends. It uses its POVs incredibly well, limiting your view of the situation so much that it is genuinely incredibly hard to figure out what happened or why (until you read the answer arcs ofc). Several key plot points involve characters getting so consumed by their own madness that they cannot see reality for what it is and wildly assume false things. This madness repeats and repeats and repeats, consuming the friends group over and over and over, leading them to do horrific things to each other. Many a character become so consumed by suspicion and fear that the world distorts and details change in their mind to match what they think is happening. I am desperately trying to describe the series without spoilers rn

Sachar, Louis: Wayside School Is Falling Down

Obviously all of Wayside School is a little Spirally -- the weird architecture, the cow invasions, occasional hypnosis, and more -- but this one tells a story of the nineteenth floor. Wayside School has no nineteenth floor. There is one teacher on the nineteenth floor, and only one class, who learn about how to alphabetize every number. Sometimes, new students arrive...

Schwartz, Alvin: "Maybe You Will Remember" (short story from Scary Stories 3: More Tales To Chill Your Bones)

A girl, Rosemary, and her mother are on vacation in Paris. Rosemary's mother is ill, so Rosemary is sent to get medicine, but ultimately has her time wasted by the driver on the way back, and when she returns to the hotel, nobody recognizes her, telling her she has the wrong place. Her mother is gone, too, and when Rosemary asks to see the room they stayed in as proof they were there, the clerk shows her a completely unfamiliar setup, making Rosemary wonder what happened to her.

In the appendix of the book, the scenario is explained. Rosemary's mother was sick with the plague, and the doctor, recognizing it, knew she would be dead very quickly. Rosemary was put on a wild goose chase for the medicine and given a driver who would delay her, with the doctor and hotel staff working to dispose of her mother's body and re-decorate the hotel room while Rosemary was away. With Rosemary unable to verify that she was in the hotel, and unknowing that her mother died of plague, the hotel avoided any negative publicity that would have occurred if anyone were to find out a guest had the plague. The hotel's PR was saved, but Rosemary was left doubting her sanity.

Serafini, Luigi: Codex Seraphinianus

The Codex is an encyclopedia in manuscript with copious hand-drawn, colored-pencil illustrations of bizarre and fantastical flora, fauna, anatomies, fashions, and foods. The illustrations are often surreal parodies of things in the real world, such as a bleeding fruit, a plant that grows into roughly the shape of a chair and is subsequently made into one, and a copulating couple who metamorphose into an alligator. Others depict odd, apparently senseless machines, often with delicate appearances and bound by tiny filaments. Some illustrations are recognizable as maps or human faces, while others (especially in the "physics" chapter) are mostly or totally abstract. Nearly all of the illustrations are brightly coloured and highly detailed

***

It's an encyclopedia for a universe that doesn't exist, treated as if it does exist in another universe while being written in a nonsense, impossible to understand language. The things it depict doesn't make sense either, ranging from swimming trees and eye-shaped fishes to absolutely bizarre creatures and technology, like a rainbow-making cloud shaped like Da Vinci's aerial screw. The entire thing comes off as surreal nonsense because it's meant to symbolise the feeling of trying to understand something that you can't understand, but finds cool because of the visuals. It's a book that you aren't meant to read understand, but simply look at, because trying to understand it just... doesn't work.

***

The Codex is an encyclopedia in manuscript with copious hand-drawn, colored-pencil illustrations of bizarre and fantastical flora, fauna, anatomies, fashions, and foods. It has been compared to the still undeciphered Voynich manuscript, the story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" by Jorge Luis Borges, and the artwork of M. C. Escher and Hieronymus Bosch. The illustrations are often surreal parodies of things in the real world, such as a bleeding fruit, a plant that grows into roughly the shape of a chair and is subsequently made into one, and a copulating couple who metamorphose into an alligator. Others depict odd, apparently senseless machines, often with delicate appearances and bound by tiny filaments. Some illustrations are recognizable as maps or human faces, while others (especially in the "physics" chapter) are mostly or totally abstract. Nearly all of the illustrations are brightly coloured and highly detailed.

The false writing system appears modeled on Western writing systems, with left-to-right writing in rows and an alphabet with uppercase and lowercase letters, some of which double as numerals. Some letters appear only at the beginning or end of words, similar to Semitic writing systems. The curvilinear letters are rope- or thread-like, with loops and even knots, and are somewhat reminiscent of Sinhala script. In a talk at the Oxford University Society of Bibliophiles [...] Serafini stated that there is no meaning behind the Codex's script, which is asemic; that his experience in writing it was similar to automatic writing; and that what he wanted his alphabet to convey was the sensation children feel with books they cannot yet understand, although they see that the writing makes sense for adults. Take a look for yourself:

Shakespeare, William: A Midsummer Night's Dream

The way the fey play with the perceptions and emotions of the wandering youths in the woods is peak Spiral, as their loves and disdains change with the machinations of Oberon and Puck.

Shakespeare, William: King Lear

The play has everything: real descents into madness, fake descents into madness, betrayal by trusted loved ones, loyalty from betrayed loved ones, and would-be wise men who turn out to be fools.

Shakespeare, William: The Winter's Tale

Imagine that you are absolutely, completely, 100 percent certain that your wife is cheating on you with your best friend. Now imagine you're the king, and your best friend is the king of a far-off kingdom. Now imagine that the consequences of your actions spiral outward: your wife and son die, one of your trusted advisors has disappeared with daughter on your orders to kill her.

This first half of this deeply underappreciated play explores the consequences of one man's fear of betrayal. Coincidentally, it is one Shakespeare's more surreal works. It's the origin of the infamous "Exit pursued by a bear," a stage direction that concludes a scene set on the coast of a kingdom that in real life was landlocked. And--spoiler alert--the play concludes with a statute coming back to life.

Anyway, it's a surprisingly Spiral-like play with a dream-like atmosphere, fairy-tale logic, and a Distortion-esque look at the fear of betrayal.

Silberescher: SCP-1425: Star Signals

Stine, R.L.: Don't Go to Sleep!

"Matt hates his tiny bedroom. It's so small it's practically a closet! Still, Matt's mom refuses to let him sleep in the guest room. After all, they might have guests. Some day. Or year. Then Matt does it. Late one night. When everyone's in bed. He sneaks into the guest room and falls asleep. Poor Matt. He should have listened to his mom. Because when Matt wakes up, his whole life has changed. For the worse. And every time he falls asleep, he wakes up in a new nightmare... "

Inception, for kids! Whenever Matt falls asleep, he changes reality -- and a group of special agents want to stop him by putting him to sleep, permanently.

Unknown, Voynich Manuscript

Many call the fifteenth-century codex, commonly known as the “Voynich Manuscript,” the world’s most mysterious book. Written in an unknown script by an unknown author, the manuscript has no clearer purpose now than when it was rediscovered in 1912 by rare books dealer Wilfrid Voynich. It's a strange code describing alchemical formulae and unknown life forms, and no one understands it. It's a mystery waiting for you to lose yourself in its pages.

Wells, H.G.: The Door in the Wall

This short story is about Lionel Wallace, who at the age of 5 encountered and entered a weird door. Behind it he found a beautiful and peaceful garden and felt such happiness and bliss, that when he was transported back on the street and escorted back to his home, he was very upset. He would see the door again many times later in life, but every time he will refuse to enter it due to his responsibilities (for example, to not be late to class, to catch a train, to be on time for an appointment). He grew up and became a successful politician, but the perfect world behind the door haunted him, and his success felt dull and boring. The book ends with people finding his lifeless body at the bottom of a pit, and that he had in poor light walked through a small doorway that led onto it. The narrator then speculates that maybe Lionel saw the perfect garden behind the doorway and was finally able to find happiness.

West, A.J.: The Spirit Engineer

Based on a real story about a guy who was convinced that one particular medium was the real deal. He completely upended his career for it, and wrote a paper on the science of the ghostly plane.

He did several shows, and got relatively famous. Eventually, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [someone who wanted to believe] and Harry Houdini [An avid non-believer] invite him over to convince them that séances were real. In the process, Houdini completely disproves him, and outs the medium he thought was real as a fraud.

It turns out his wife and coworker had convinced the 'medium' and their family to run a prank on him. In his fury, he kills everyone involved, and then drinks Poison to try - one final time - to proove his theory.

Tldr: A real story who unknowingly changed his life and ruined his reputation because of the lies of the ones he trusted. When he realises, he looses his sanity and kills everyone around him, including himself.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee: Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language

The famous text about language as a symbol that can never truly reflect reality can kinda fuck with your perceptions about how our language serves to construct our own realities. We're programmed to experience the world in different ways according to the way we interpret language.

Wyspiański, Stanisław: The Wedding

Relevant parts from Wikipedia

"The play's action takes place at the wedding of a member of the Kraków intelligentsia (the Bridegroom) and his peasant Bride. Their crossclass union follows a then fashionable trend of chłopomaństwo ("peasant-mania") among some Polish intelligentsia, who were often scions of the historic Polish szlachta (nobility). (...) Among the live guests are ghosts of personae from Polish history and culture, representing the guilty consciences of the living. The two groups engage in dialogues. The wedding guests are hypnotized by a rosebush straw-wrap (Chochoł) from the garden which comes to life and joins the party. (Offending a chochoł, according to folk beliefs, could provoke the thing to play tricks).The "Poet" is visited successively by the "Black Knight" (a symbol of the nation's past military glory); the "Journalist"; the court jester Stańczyk, a conservative political sage; and the "Ghost of Wernyhora" (a paradigm of leadership for Poland). (...)Thus the wedding guests, symbolizing the nation, waste their chance at national freedom. They keep on dancing a "chocholi taniec" (a "straw-wrap's dance") "the way it's played for them" (a Polish folk saying), failing in their mission." This play is as if patriotically motivated Spiral avatars crashed somebody's wedding, and I think it deserves consideration as Spiral Leitner.

#leitner tournament #reading list #spiral poll

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