#it is a discworld novel. or gideon the ninth which I really liked up until the end. or another satirical fantasy series I really liked as a

[marypsue]

I think maybe, in general terms, I just don’t really enjoy constructed-world fantasy unless it is also funny.

[bestworstcase]

what are some of your eldritch horror inspirations?

oh hm lets see

in no particular order: 

my first introduction to the genre was actually a kim possible fanfic series? i remember reading it as a teen and being like woah

the discworld series to an extent? pratchett’s riffs on the genre are excellent, in particular those from later novels in the series eg the summoning dark. (thud! was actually my first discworld novel for some baffling reason and i spent the whole book like “i have no idea what’s going on but i love this” skjdffklshsdk). this has also definitely had an impact on my lean into the more humanist or optimistic end of the scale

gideon the ninth is not eldritch horror per se but hot damn if it doesn’t have some glorious imagery. 

annihilation (the book much moreso than the film, though the film has some nice visuals too). i keep meaning to read the other books in the trilogy but haven’t got around to it yet. the crawler hoo boy 👀👀👀

a pretty large assortment of books and short stories and plays actually. probably too many to list really; not all of them are eldritch horror themselves but anything with the right atmosphere or aesthetic or lore tends to work its way into my brain as an inspiration for my own particular blend of eldritch horror and dark fantasy; as a random selection off the top of my head, poe’s entire oeuvre, the road, the bacchae, euripedes in general actually, pretty much anything that was inspired by the year without a summer lmao, the dragonoak trilogy and sam farren’s work in general... magical realism anything, marisol comes to mind in particular just for its extra closeness to theatre of the absurd... 

this one is a bit silly and honestly mostly just because it’s the Queen Hyperfixation and i will find a way to connect it to every single one of my other interests somehow, but alice’s adventures in wonderland, through the looking glass, and the hunting of the snark have all had a pretty marked influence on my development as a writer and have absolutely contributed to how i approach eldritch horror tropes in my own writing; and also nonsense literature is basically absurdist eldritch horror for children. 

(especially the hunting of the snark, tbh. like go read it now if you haven’t before; it’s a treat and it’s gay and boojums are 100% just your classic eldritch abomination presented through a light-heartedly witty, child-friendly lens.)

relatedly: i love the american mcgee alice games. they riff on some aiw-related tropes that irritate me but idc that much because the atmosphere and aesthetic is just. so good and the gameplay is fun

relatedly again: a blade so black and the subsequent books in the trilogy (one of which isn’t due out until next year i’m suffering) do some really great stuff with nightmares as creatures that are empowered by humanity’s fears and, esp in the second book, the weird mystery of wonderland itself. and is just a neat urban fantasy take on alice in wonderland in general.

pathygen’s work and especially strings has been a big source of inspiration for me in the last, like, eight or nine months since we met. read it.

adhd distractibility has me stalling out in the middle of season 3 of the magnus archives but. yknow. it’s my jam 👌

like, theatre of the absurd and theatre of cruelty? in particular i recall a production of waiting for godot which i saw in college that leaned very hard into a horror-esque reading of the play and that was kind of a game-changer for my own creative outlook; in general these forms of theatre and the experiences they seek to evoke and the narratives they center share a lot of emotional overlap with the experience of good eldritch horror and, like aiw, have had a significant influence on my writing generally.

darkest dungeon is really fun and has a great aesthetic and strikes exactly the right balance between bleak and hopeful. the crimson court dlc especially was a total game-changer for how i think about vampires because holy shit

it’s not eldritch horror per se but subnautica is like. its ability to provoke dread is second only to the trial of blindness in hellblade (which is also def an inspiration, though again not eldritch horror per se. the enemy designs are really good tho) and the creature designs and lore are super cool and it does an excellent job of of getting across that... feeling of being insignificant in a vast uncaring cosmos (or in this case: ocean planet infected with virulent water-borne bacteria) and that’s enough to make it like, eldritch horror-adjacent in my mind.

tyranny is? another odd one in that it isn’t eldritch horror by any stretch of the imagination but idk. there’s something about the lore surrounding the archons and the spires + oldwalls that speaks to me and i love that so much of it is simply left unexplained. not in a way that feels half-assed or like the lore wasn’t well thought out, but rather in a way that truly gets across the feeling of an ancient civilization whose culture and magic/technology have decayed and been suppressed to the point of being completely lost by the time of the game; that’s a hard balance to strike and it’s totally my jam. 

my gf got me into pathologic and i am veeeery slowly playing my way through the original game rn and holy shit. holy shit. the atmosphere and the slowly unfolding lore and increasingly bizarre plague itself and the despair and the grind it’s all so good.

i still need to actually play bloodborne, it’s been on my list forever, but every image and video i’ve ever seen is. hoo boy. hoooooo boy. 

and honestly??? growing up as a very non-spiritual person in an evangelical family i think definitely predisposed me toward this genre because, idk. god as presented by evangelical christians is an eldritch abomination and i don’t have the spiritual inclination to convince me otherwise. so that’s something i draw from a bit as well lol

also as a final note i think it’s v important when talking about eldritch/cosmic/lovecraftian horror and inspirations thereof to say that hp lovecraft (and many of the contemporaries of his who participated in the expanded/shared universe we now call the cthulhu mythos) was virulently racist and xenophobic and this absolutely had an impact on his creative work. they codified this genre and that means that racism and xenophobia is kind of baked in to a lot of the basic tropes and they must be very rigorously, very critically evaluated when we use them to create new fiction.