Canon Fodder is an ongoing series in which I return to authors and bodies of work over time, reading them closely and piece by piece. This essay forms part of the Lovecraft strand; a chronological index of my Lovecraft writing can be found here. Other Canon Fodder posts can also be browsed via the series category.
A minor Lovecraft collaboration turns into a major fault line. This essay takes aim at “Out of the Aeons”, arguing that beneath its surface of cosmic intrigue lies a surprisingly careless piece of work, riddled with inconsistencies, thin characterisation, and structural shortcuts. Framed as a challenge to S. T. Joshi’s more generous reading, it traces how Lovecraft’s collaborative habits and late-career limitations converge here into something far less than the sum of its parts. What emerges is not just a critique of a single story, but a sharper claim: that reverence for “pure” Lovecraft has obscured the point where his craft began to slip.
Next Incarnation is an on-going series in which I engage with material produced in support of my all-time favourite game: Nephilim. Created by Fabrice Lamidey and Frederic Weil, Nephilim was first published in 1992 and has since seen five separate French editions (yielding close to 100 supplements) and an English-language translation produced by Chaosium. The rest of the series can be found here.
L’Atalante Fugitive is an anthology of four adventures for the French urban fantasy RPG Nephilim, themed around the Greek myth of Atalanta and the Renaissance alchemical masterwork Atalanta Fugiens by Michael Maier. Ambitious in intent, the supplement represents a deliberate attempt to re-orient Nephilim away from its roots in socially-grounded regional fantasy and towards a more literary and occult-focused mode of play, using thematically-interwoven scenarios to give concrete shape to the game’s otherwise purely mechanical pursuit of enlightenment. The results are mixed at best: while the supplement’s erudition is genuine and occasionally one of the adventures shows real understanding of how active player engagement generates meaning, the majority of the book falls back on cinematic railroading and a top-down model of significance in which the designer tells the players what to find meaningful rather than creating the conditions for meaning to emerge. As someone who was run through some of these adventures as a player in the nineties and has since spent years working as a critic, I find myself better placed than ever to appreciate what the authors were attempting — and no more convinced that it works.
For Real is an occasional series about scary, horrific, and unsettling stuff that presents itself as non-fiction. This might include the paranormal as well as true crime and odd occurrences. The rest of the series can be found here.
Will Maclean and Joel Morris’s Broken Veil is a podcast about paranormal investigation that presents itself as documentary fact. It isn’t — but knowing that turns out not to be much protection. This essay traces the podcast’s roots in Britain’s long, recurring habit of re-enchanting itself whenever its institutions fail, from Victorian folklore revivalism to Scarfolk, and connects its method to John Keel, the UFO writer whose books always start out grounded and end up consuming their author. I started out listening to Broken Veil but, by the time it was finished, I had started to wonder whether it might not be listening to me too.
Canon Fodder is an occasional series in which I write about classic works of horror fiction. This particular part of the series is devoted to the complete published works of Thomas Ligotti which I will slowly be working my way through.
What if the horror in Ligotti’s fiction isn’t that the world is broken, but that it works perfectly? “I Have a Secret Plan for This World” begins with familiar images—corporate restructuring, a decaying city, a creeping contamination—but gradually strips away the illusion that these are separate things. As the story unfolds, distinctions between inside and outside, self and system, body and institution dissolve, revealing a universe that has always operated according to a single, inescapable logic. The most unsettling part is not the narrator’s plan for the world, but the quiet suspicion that it is already underway.
Field Report is an infrequent series tracing physical zines that move in the same circles as this blog: Folk Horror, Forteana, Weird History, Occultism, and Roleplaying Games. It takes the place of my earlier Zine Corner series. The rest of the series can be found here.
VIBE:
A beautifully produced historical artefact from a strange and revealing moment in Lovecraft fandom, where rationalism, occult enthusiasm, and personal testimony collide. Both intellectually curious and quietly amusing, it captures a point at which Lovecraft’s legacy was still being actively contested and reinterpreted.
Things Resurface is an occasional series in which I write films and TV series from in and around the ‘Folk Horror’ genre. While the spine of this series comes from the Severin films’ ‘All The Haunts Be Ours’ box-sets, it will also venture further afield. The other posts in this series can be found here.
Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General occupies a curious position in horror history: canonical enough to sit alongside The Blood on Satan’s Claw and The Wicker Man as one of Folk Horror’s founding texts, yet containing none of the supernatural resurgence or sincere folk belief that defines the genre. This essay argues that the film’s canonical status has less to do with its content than with its usefulness — first to AIP, who needed a Poe adaptation they could sell, and later to the first wave of Folk Horror critics, who needed an origin point for a genre they were constructing after the fact. What the film’s persistent misclassification reveals is not a misunderstood masterpiece but a text too thin to resist expedient labelling: a canon for hire.
Canon Fodder is an ongoing series in which I return to authors and bodies of work over time, reading them closely and piece by piece. This essay forms part of the Lovecraft strand; a chronological index of my Lovecraft writing can be found here. Other Canon Fodder posts can also be browsed via the series category.
Lovecraft’s ghostwritten stories don’t just vary in quality, they’re products of two different creative minds pulling in what are sometimes very different directions. “Winged Death” looks like a failure on the surface, but that failure actually exposes the mechanics of collaboration: Lovecraft polishes prose and injects his own obsessions, while the original author’s genre instincts remain underneath. The result isn’t just a bad ending, it’s a story that can’t fully decide what it is, and that tension is the real point.
Field Report is an infrequent series tracing physical zines that move in the same circles as this blog: Folk Horror, Forteana, Weird History, Occultism, and Roleplaying Games. It takes the place of my earlier Zine Corner series. The rest of the series can be found here.
VIBE:
A formally inventive and deliberately disorienting zine that uses the language of roleplaying games to question what games are and where their meaning resides. By presenting mechanics divorced from context and systems that undermine themselves, Anti-Sisyphus becomes less a game than an argument enacted in form. The result is a work that baffles, provokes, and lingers.
Strange Ground is an occasional series about particular places and the ways they resist easy explanation. Some pieces approach landscapes through history and reputation; others are closer to field reports, written from within the site itself. Rather than smoothing these perspectives into a single account, the series lets their contradictions stand. You can find the rest of the pieces collected here.
I arrived in search of a bronze-age barrow and found a barely perceptible uniformity in an expanse of otherwise uneven land. The monument is so hard to spot that a corner of it was carved off when the council built the road. The only unambiguous sign of human improvement is a roadside marker in the shape of a Star of David.
I pass through a gate and set off across open moorland. There are posts indicating the existence of bridleways but the closest thing to laid paths are conspicuous gaps in expanses of wild grass; reeds on the way back, something finer and golden on the way there. This land was once part of the 10,000 acre Knight estate, bought from the King for a song and the first step on Exmoor’s journey from Royal Forest to whatever it is to become tomorrow. Knight took over Exmoor on the understanding that it would be brought to heel by advances in modern farming but few of these innovations remain and those that do are easily confused with either abandoned modern buildings or ancient ruins. To my left, shin-high earthworks that once marked the edges of a field. To my right, a trench dug for training exercises in the run-up to the Second World War. Improvements may come and improvements may go but the moor remains.
Canon Fodder is an occasional series in which I write about classic works of horror fiction. This particular part of the series is devoted to the complete published works of Thomas Ligotti which I will slowly be working my way through.
Thomas Ligotti’s My Work Is Not Yet Done is the novella that made his reputation, and it is easy to see why: it opens with some of the funniest and most accessible prose of his career, follows a recognisable three-act structure, and tells what appears to be a satisfying story of supernatural revenge against corporate oppressors. All of this is a trap. Beneath the unusually legible surface, Ligotti is running a far more unsettling game — one in which every apparent escape route reveals itself to be just another expression of the same grinding, all-encompassing system from which his protagonist is desperately trying to flee. What follows is a close reading of how the novella works, why it ends the way it does, and why those final lines — so apparently clear and resolved — may be the most disturbing thing Ligotti ever wrote.
Long time readers of this blog will be aware that I have been working my way through the stories of Thomas Ligotti as part of a series I refer to as Canon Fodder.
The original model for Canon Fodder was inspired by the podcast Just King Things, which has spent a number of years working its way through the novels of Stephen King in publication order. While I am not that interested in Stephen King’s work, I admire the way that approaching his works in chronological order has allowed the podcasters to get a sense of how King’s sensibility has evolved over the course of his career.
Canon Fodder began as an excuse for me to work my way through the complete works of H. P. Lovecraft and I was able to do this work because generations of Lovecraft nerds had combed through Lovecraft’s correspondence and determined the dates when particular stories were written and what those stories might have looked like before the editors at Arkham House began revising the canon in order to fit with August Derleth’s interpretation of Lovecraft’s work.
The problem with the Ligotti strand of the Canon Fodder project is that the Ligotti canon is radically unstable in that Ligotti continues to re-work not only individual stories but also the contents of entire collections. Ligotti scholars have tried their best to discover when stories were written and to note changes in both stories and book contents but each re-issue seems to bring fresh changes meaning that there has never been a fixed and settled canonical progression of stories for people like me to work their way through.
This poses a methodological problem for the series going forward.
First published in 2025, We Are Always Tender With Our Dead is Eric LaRocca’s fourth novel and the first part of a series of novels set in the town of Burnt Sparrow.
Despite being extraordinarily prolific and regularly winding up with Bram Stoker and Splatterpunk award-nominations, LaRocca is arguably still best known for his 2021 novella Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke. Picked up by a subscription service with a good deal of visibility on both Tiktok and Instagram, Things briefly set the internet alight by telling the story of a toxic queer relationship rooted in obsession, dysfunction, and the need for validation even when it comes at the expense of moral collapse and self-annihilation. Doubtless expecting some decent queer representation draped in a handful of easily-digested chills, subscribers were completely unprepared for a work of unrelenting psychological cruelty that seemed to take aim directly at the consoling fantasy that marginality is indistinguishable from moral insight. Thankfully, reading continued when the anger faded and LaRocca was recognised as an author with a rather singular style and viewpoint.
Reviews of LaRocca’s work often compare him to Books of Blood-era Clive Barker in that his works are both viscerally unpleasant and explicitly queer but We Are Always Tender With Our Dead seems to owe a good deal more to the oppressively claustrophobic relationships of later Ramsay Campbell and the moral thought-experiments of Ursula LeGuin. In fact, one way of understanding this novel is to view it as a direct response to LeGuin’s 1973 short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”.
As LaRocca explains in the book’s very forthright and well-balanced introductory warning, We Are Always Tender With Our Dead is not a book for everyone. In fact, if I were to provide a comprehensive list of content warnings for this book then you might very well conclude that it is not a book for anyone. However, I cannot help but respond with a sense of awed admiration as this is a horror novel where the imagery is always in service of big ideas and where the big ideas are somehow always more disturbing than the imagery.
I have been running RPG sessions for the best part of thirty-five years and I still make mistakes.
Not little mistakes either. I mean huge, campaign-derailing, momentum-killing, structurally catastrophic mistakes that later turn out to have been blindingly obvious. Not long after returning to the hobby, I introduced a house-rule that allowed players to log income from investments as XP. While I thought that this would encourage long-term engagement with the campaign world, it actually wound up transforming the party into a cabal of rent-seeking slumlords who outsourced much of the adventuring to less wealthy NPCs while they sat around smoking cigars, collecting passive income, and getting their labia majora stimulated by highly-trained courtesans.
People do not talk enough about these kinds of failures. RPG culture tends to reward performances of confidence and expertise. People happily post elaborate campaign settings, home-brewed mechanics, and tales of triumphant sessions, but they often become markedly quieter when it comes to the moments when things fall apart.
This is unfortunate because I suspect we learn far more from our failures than our successes. Running RPGs is not simply a matter of correctly applying procedures in pursuit of specific outcomes, it is an activity that is social, improvisational, and personally expressive. When running games, experimentation is unavoidable and mistakes are inevitable. The challenge is not to avoid getting things wrong, but to learn from our mistakes. People who write about their own gaming should spend at least as much time discussing their failures as they do celebrating their successes.
A few months ago, I ran a short Call of Cthulhu campaign and made a couple of fairly serious mistakes. This is a post about what went wrong, why it went wrong, and what I think I learned from those mistakes.
Canon Fodder is an ongoing series in which I return to authors and bodies of work over time, reading them closely and piece by piece. This essay forms part of the Lovecraft strand; a chronological index of my Lovecraft writing can be found here. Other Canon Fodder posts can also be browsed via the series category.
Randolph Carter is H.P. Lovecraft’s most personal creation – a literary self-insert who managed to pass every test Lovecraft himself failed. So what happens when someone else takes hold of Carter and turns him into a Buddhist adventurer who achieves cosmic enlightenment rather than cosmic dread? This essay follows “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” from its origins in Lovecraft’s failed novel The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath through its strange collaborative production history, arguing that the story is best understood not as a Mythos tale but as an accidental document of two very different ways of being a person in the world.
While online fiction is often discussed in terms of platforms like Archive of Our Own, it is worth remembering that other, less curated spaces have produced their own literary ecosystems. Among these, the collaborative writing project known as SCP Foundation stands out as a rare example of a genuinely generative form: a shared universe built through pseudo-bureaucratic reports on anomalous entities, gradually accruing both internal logic and a distinctive tone. Over time, this structure gave rise not only to increasingly sophisticated entries, but also to longer-form “Foundation Tales” that translated the project’s archival conceit into something closer to conventional narrative.
There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm emerges directly from this context. Originally published as a series of interconnected stories within the SCP framework, it retains the episodic structure and conceptual focus of its origins even as it gestures toward the coherence of a novel. This hybrid form proves particularly well-suited to its subject: a class of entities that erase themselves from human memory, forcing those who study them into cycles of perpetual forgetting and rediscovery.
What makes the novel’s opening so striking is not merely its premise, but the rigour with which it develops it. In its early sections, There Is No Antimemetics Division operates within a mode of cosmic horror that is less concerned with monstrous spectacle than with the systematic erosion of knowledge, identity, and meaning. This is a tradition associated with writers such as H. P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti, but one whose underlying sensibility—marked by epistemic limits and human insignificance—is far less common than its surface imagery. Indeed, while the aesthetics of cosmic horror have been widely absorbed into adjacent genres, its deeper commitments are often displaced by more narratively accommodating forms.
It is precisely this tension that gives the novel its initial force—and, ultimately, defines its failure. For while There Is No Antimemetics Division begins by committing itself to a vision of horror grounded in absence, fragmentation, and the impossibility of comprehension, it gradually abandons that framework in favour of narrative resolutions that reintroduce meaning, coherence, and even transcendence. The result is not simply a shift in tone, but a rupture in the novel’s underlying logic: a movement from cosmic indifference to something far more familiar, and far less unsettling.
Field Report is an infrequent series tracing physical zines that move in the same circles as this blog: Folk Horror, Forteana, Weird History, Occultism, and Roleplaying Games. It takes the place of my earlier Zine Corner series. The rest of the series can be found here.
VIBE:
A compact but intellectually charged collection of essays that left me both challenged and energised. Snow’s writing resists the urge to explain or resolve, instead working from within tension to produce a form of criticism grounded in voice, affect, and lived experience. It is the kind of zine that doesn’t just present ideas but prompts you to reconsider your own approach to writing and play.
Canon Fodder is an occasional series in which I write about classic works of horror fiction. This particular part of the series is devoted to the complete published works of Thomas Ligotti which I will slowly be working my way through.
Thomas Ligotti is often positioned as a writer who outgrew Lovecraft. This piece argues that he never did. From Grimscribe through to The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein, Ligotti repeatedly revisits Lovecraft’s core ideas—not to echo them, but to strip away their consolations. What emerges is a body of work that turns cosmic horror inside out, replacing moments of revelation with a closed system in which awareness, alienation, and suffering are universal and inescapable.
Things Resurface is an occasional series in which I write films and TV series from in and around the ‘Folk Horror’ genre. While the spine of this series comes from the Severin films’ ‘All The Haunts Be Ours’ box-sets, it will also venture further afield. The other posts in this series can be found here.
Kadaicha is a poor film that stumbles into something difficult. Beneath its weak performances and threadbare construction lies a strained attempt at processing a history that resists being turned into myth. The result is a work of uneasy contradictions that reveals the limits of what Folk Horror has traditionally been willing to confront.
For Real is an occasional series about scary, horrific, and unsettling stuff that presents itself as non-fiction. This might include the paranormal as well as true crime and odd occurrences. The rest of the series can be found here.
At approximately 3:15 AM on November 13, 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr. murdered all six members of his family with a .35-calibre Marlin lever-action rifle. Each body was found lying face-down in bed. There were no signs of a struggle.
Just over a year later, the house at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville was purchased by George and Kathy Lutz, who fled after twenty-eight days, claiming sustained paranormal harassment. Their story broke in February 1975, moving quickly from local coverage to national attention, amplified by the involvement of Ed and Lorraine Warren.
What followed was less an investigation than a construction. The Lutzes hired Jay Anson, a writer of behind-the-scenes Hollywood documentaries, to shape more than seventy-five hours of taped testimony into The Amityville Horror. Published in 1977 and adapted for film two years later, it has since generated dozens of films and an enduring mythology. However, both the book and the events it describes point to a more interesting question: how did a messy, short-lived experience become one of the most enduring hauntings of the modern era?
Canon Fodder is an ongoing series in which I return to authors and bodies of work over time, reading them closely and piece by piece. This essay forms part of the Lovecraft strand; a chronological index of my Lovecraft writing can be found here. Other Canon Fodder posts can also be browsed via the series category.
Lovecraft’s “The Horror in the Museum” is often dismissed as a piece of lurid excess, but its power lies precisely in that excess. What begins as a gallery of grotesque waxworks gradually slips free of the category of representation altogether, as material evidence, sensory disturbance, and narrative misdirection erode any stable distinction between sculpture, corpse, and creature. At the centre of this process is George Rogers, whose ranting monologues seem easy to dismiss until the physical world begins to echo them in ways that cannot be ignored. The result is not the cold clarity of cosmic indifference but something far more unsettling: a world that grows less coherent the more it is explained, leaving both narrator and reader trapped in a state of mounting, irresolvable confusion.
Taskerland