The Abyss Also Stares

I HAVE AN ARTICLE IN RASCAL!!!! I talk about the haunted house as a genre, and how games like This Discord Has Ghosts in It and Our Haunt use old tropes to create new, weird stories.

Also I get to use the phrase "beefed it" in the opening sentence, which I thought was very funny

— Justin D. Edwards, "Mapping Tropical Gothic in the Americas" in Tropical Gothic in Literature and Culture.

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the word "zombie" is never used in Night of the Living Dead. the word used is "ghoul," which originated in Arabic folklore. reports of ghouls' origin and nature varied widely by culture but agreed that they were hostile and they ate human flesh, which to my mind makes the name more appropriate for the American movie creatures. after all, besides being animated corpses, our "zombies" really are nothing like the Haitian sort, who inspire in me nothing but the deepest pity -- enslaved people subjected to the final indignity, denied rest and freedom even in death.

in honour of halloween behold the four horsemen of the apocalypse

been reading a lot of haunted/sentient house books in the past couple years, and i've encountered 3 main types of narrative: 1) the house loves you and that's a good thing 2) the house loves you and that's a bad thing and 3) the house hates you and that's a bad thing. this leaves a gap for a potential fourth type of story-- the house hates you and that's a good thing. excited to see if hauntologists delve into this quadrant and what it looks like if they do

Finally finished this :D !!!!

Geological horror. You find a geode and crack it open and the crystal lining its walls is human blood that can't be genetically matched to anyone. You find a human skeleton but every one of the bones is made from rock, a rock that you know can't be whittled into those shapes. You find layers of clay and loam that sport ancient fossils at the top and the still-rotting corpses of modern animals at the bottom.

This reminds me of the blood river in Antarctica. For like a century scientists had no clue why this river looked like, acted like, and felt exactly like blood. Turns out it’s just really high in iron.

"Blood River in Antartica" yeah right there's no way a river looks like bl-

...nevermind

Blood Falls isn't just high in iron, it's the byproducts of extremophile bacteria that have been isolated under a glacier in a iron- and sulfur-rich anoxic brine for the past 5 million years.

I had a dream I was touring a house, and in the basement there was a little staircase that led to a door sealed with red wax. I told the lady showing the house “I don’t like that.” and she said “Then this house just isn’t for you. :)”

The lake town

"Meeting With the Gods"

Acrylic on Canvas

SIze 30x20 cm.

How my creative process works sometimes.

Search your soul. You know it to be true.

Text: There’s a second house, hiding in this one. I see the unfamiliar rooms through the cracks by the hinges, and keyholes. I don’t trust its dark red walls, its emptiness, suggesting parasitic hunger.

I’ve said this before but I think all sci-fi and fantasy adventure needs a little bit of horror as seasoning. It doesn’t need to be full sci-fi horror or fantasy horror but a little bit of scary adds flavor. Build a world and then explore the fucked up implications of that world a little bit