Media, Society, Monsters, and Magic
A modest proposal 💖 and a joke, of course!! Just a joke.
This was my submission to the 2025 edition of the anthology published by Philly Zine Fest, an event that gets cooler and livelier with each passing year. You can download a digital copy of the anthology from their website (here).
Dreaming Mary (available via the RPG Maker forums here) is a 2D narrative adventure game developed in RPG Maker by Dreaming Games. The opening of the game is super cute, but its pastel pink exterior hides a terrible secret.
You play as the eponymous Mary, who begins the game in the bedroom of her dream world. She emerges into a lovely hallway with three rooms: a garden modeled on a Greek temple, an aristocratic library with floor-to-ceiling shelves, and a swank but cozy jazz bar. Each room is home to an anthropomorphic animal, each of whom wants to play a simple game. The friendly bunny needs advice on how to arrange her statues, while the flirty fox wants to play a round of hide-and-seek. The gentle owl asks a few questions about the books on his shelves.
At the end of the corridor is a beautiful tree guarded by a burly boar. If Mary wishes to progress further into the dream, this is her gateway, but she’ll need to collect the blessing of each animal first.
If you play through the game normally, you’ll arrive at a sweet but somewhat ambiguous ending after around 15-20 minutes. If you follow a walkthrough – I recommend this one – to discover the game’s secrets and see the full story, you’ll find your way to a far darker but more satisfying ending in around 30-35 minutes.
According to the developer’s notes, Dreaming Mary was inspired by the 2011 magical girl anime Madoka Magica, which similarly begins as a cute slice-of-life story before evolving into something much more complicated. Mary’s dream is as lushly pink and pastel as Madoka’s fantasies of becoming a magical girl, which makes the hidden nightmare segments all the more shocking.
Should Mary actually figure out how to wake up… That’s when the story becomes truly grim.
To give a fair warning, many of the puzzle solutions don’t make much sense, and I’m not sure how possible it would be to get the game’s true ending without a walkthrough. Still, it’s worth the extra effort, because the contrast between the sunny opening of the game and its sinister conclusion is something special.
Dreaming Mary was released in 2014. It seems the devs have gone quiet since then, which is a shame. While Dreaming Mary isn’t perfect, it’s promising, and I would have loved to see this prototype expanded into a more polished game. Still, Dreaming Mary stands well enough on its own as a short but intriguing indie horror story in the surreal lineage of Yume Nikki.
“Dreamcore Limited” was my submission to the Halloween flash fiction contest hosted by Bloodletter Magazine. This piece was selected as one of the three winners, and it was awarded a cover illustration by the horror artist Rialin Jose! You can read the stories and bask in the spookiness of their illustrations on Bloodletter’s account on Instagram (here).
The theme of this contest was “liminality,” and what better setting than a dead mall? Nostalgia is creepy, and the horror of dead malls is the uncanniness of feeling your history collapse into a marketing demographic that no longer fits.
I was inspired by Maria-Gemma Brown’s academic article “Ghost in the Mall: The Affective and Hauntological Potential of Dead Mall Ruins,” which is a fantastic piece of scholarship that’s interesting and accessible to a broad general audience. The article is open-access, and you can read it or download a PDF copy on the website of Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry (here).
Vartio
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3639120/Vartio/
Vartio, a short and atmospheric horror game about walking through the woods at night, was developed by Pepperbox Studios and released on Steam in August 2025.
You play as a medieval soldier sent to an isolated fortress in the middle of a dense forest. As soon as you arrive, the guard captain explains your duty: you must patrol the woods by moonlight. Your job, as the player, is to follow a first-person circular path through the trees. You’ll complete three loops that result in a playtime of around 20 minutes.
Though Vartio has a bit of a twist ending, there’s nothing explicitly scary in the game. Aside from an owl flying in your direction toward the beginning of the second loop, there’s nothing resembling a jump scare. The graphics are well-designed but primitive and repetitive, and nothing much happens, truth be told. There’s no pathfinding or puzzle-solving; you just follow the road. You can leave the trail to explore a bit if you like, but there’s not much you can see in the darkness.
Precisely because the walk through the woods is so boring, it’s likely that your imagination will begin to work overtime as you navigate the sounds of the forest. The first loop is fairly normal. During the second loop, however, you become more sensitive to any break from the regular noises. And the third loop… Well, it’s a surprise.
Vartio is creepy, but it’s also oddly relaxing, like ambient lo-fi beats for forest goths. If you’re a fan of atmospheric horror that gives you space to make up a story as you go along, Vartio is an intriguing combination of retro graphics and precision sound design that allows you to immerse yourself in the spookiness of a starlit sea of trees.
My annual roundup of free-to-play retro horror games on Itch.io is now on Sidequest. There’s a gritty mix of fresh blood and decayed favorites in this year’s creepypixel harvest, from the recent haunted forest simulator Bloodbark to the Tumblr-favorite Flesh, Blood, & Concrete to the first game created by Deltarune artist Temmie Chang, Escaped Chasm.
You can check out the post here:
https://sidequest.zone/2025/10/15/retro-horror-games-on-itchio/
And there’s also my lists from October 2024 and October 2023, which are somehow even more liminal and retro.
I’m overjoyed to have commissioned a banner illustration from the shining Teller-of-Tragedies, who shares gorgeous and immersive dreamcore pixel art on Tumblr (here) and on Instagram (here).
I’m honored to have published an essay on Shelfdust about the gentle anti-capitalist use of cultural nostalgia in the French graphic novel Onibi: Diary of a Yokai Ghost Hunter, which is an autobiographical account of a summer the artists spent in rural northern Japan. When I used this book as a course text in my “Japanese Ghost Stories” class last fall, I was surprised by the warmth of the students’ response, which I suspect is tied to the trend of “analog nostalgia” that seems to be big on social media at the moment. I’d always thought of nostalgia as a reactionary cultural movement, but I have to admit that Onibi presents a welcome challenge to this assumption.
Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of my essay:
Onibi demonstrates a fascination with retro objects and aesthetics, which are presented as a refuge from hustle and productivity. As concerns regarding pressing issues such as unemployment and climate change grow ever more pressing, so too do anxieties concerning the speed and waste demanded by capitalism. I believe that the recent fascination with retro and analog technologies is partially a response to these anxieties. Given that comics have emerged as an increasingly visible and viable space for public discourse, I’d like to take a look at how Brun and Pichard use analog nostalgia to translate local culture into an argument for a break with contemporary capitalism’s insistence on constant growth.
You can read the full piece here:
https://shelfdust.com/2025/10/15/analog-nostalgia-and-gentle-degrowth-in-onibi-diary-of-a-yokai-ghost-hunter/
My most recent review for Comics Beat is about Witchcraft, a graphic novel by Sole Otero, an internationally famous Argentinian comic artist whose style has developed in a cool and unique way during the past decade. Witchcraft is a massive book, but it’s an incredible page turner. The writing is brilliant, and the art is both extremely stylized and exactly what it needs to be to tell the story, a gothic cautionary tale that jumps between the present day and various periods in the history of Buenos Aires. And the story is indeed about witches and magic and power. This book is so goddamn good, and I feel very honored to have been able to write about it. Here’s an excerpt:
Witchcraft is primarily set in Buenos Aires, and the narrative jumps between historical periods when the witches were active and the present day, when the gender politics of their activities are far more complicated. It would be easy to see the witches as feminist saviors as they run women’s clinics and shelter members of the local indigenous population, but their benevolence is called into question by the nature of their magic, which requires the victimization of men and the silent complicity of their fellow women. Instead of a feminist message, what Witchcraft offers is a fast-paced and high-stakes story about cycles of abuse and the human cost of the sacrifices necessary for the marginalized to survive.
You can read the full review on Comics Beat here:
https://www.comicsbeat.com/graphic-novel-review-witchcraft/
My zine Strange Tales and Modern Legends collects three illustrated short stories based on demonic Japanese folklore.
When I was an undergrad, I had the honor of taking a class called “Demonic Women in Japanese Fiction” with a professor I truly admire. This course was a foundational experience, and I ended up writing a lengthy senior thesis with the same title. The project served as an introduction to literary theory and feminist thought; but, more than anything, I really enjoyed stories about women behaving badly.
I taught my own “Demonic Women” class at the University of Pennsylvania for the first time in Spring 2024, and it was a resounding success. Everyone in this class was just as fascinated by the stories as I was, which was a minor miracle. In all fairness – demonic women are a lot of fun.
Though I teach and publish (and blog) about Japanese literature, and though I’ve spent a significant amount of time living in and around Tokyo, I generally don’t write original fiction set in Japan. Still, I love demonic folklore so much that I couldn’t help but be inspired by the literature in my “Demonic Women” class. I therefore put together a short zine that collects two previously published stories and one original piece of flash fiction, and I commissioned a coven of talented artists to create illustrations.
In the zine’s opening story, “The Smile of a Mountain Demon,” a 21st century yamauba entraps a YouTube influencer with Buddhist pretensions by using Airbnb and the language of New Age spirituality. The young man is looking for a scenic “spiritual retreat” to use as a source of content, and the yamauba is looking for a tasty snack. I was inspired by the medieval Adachigahara folktales in which a cunning yamauba entraps a less-than-devout Buddhist priest, as well as Minako Ohba’s beautiful and heartbreaking short story “The Smile of a Mountain Witch.”
The zine’s main story, “The Kumo Diary,” is set in the Meiji period, the era of Japan’s industrial revolution. As Japan established itself as a nation that could compete with Western powers, its intelligentsia were motivated to create a unified sense of “Japanese culture.” Scholars were therefore tasked with making The Tale of Genji a respectable classic to be held in esteem by a modern nation. While I was studying the history of The Tale of Genji, I couldn’t help but wonder about all the apocryphal chapters that never made it into the canonical version, and I created a few fragments of a medieval text to be discovered by a reader who dwells in the shadows cast by the light of modernity.
The final story, “Hanahaki,” is about a neglected cat who vows revenge on the small child that has monopolized his beloved human’s attention. The title comes from a trope in underground manga and fancomics of the late 2000s and early 2010s. In these stories, someone suffering from unrequited love painfully coughs up (haki) delicate flower petals (hana) in lieu of the words they can’t say. The cat in this story is unable to communicate in human language, but he still finds a way to make his displeasure clear. If nothing else, the child must go.
Strange Tales and Modern Legends explores themes that have fascinated me for years, specifically the intersections of folklore, feminism, and the unruly joy of problematic characters. I hope readers find these stories as delightfully unsettling as I did when I wrote them.
If you’re interested, you can order a paper copy of the zine from Etsy or download a free digital version from Itch.io.
👹 https://digitalterrarium.itch.io/strange-tales
👹 https://www.etsy.com/listing/4299187840/strange-tales-horror-fiction-zine
The art at the top of this post, which is one of the illustrations featured in the zine, was created by Le Soldat Mort, a dark fantasy artist who shares their work on Bluesky (here) and on Instagram (here).
I’m super grateful to Comics Beat for giving me the opportunity to review the newest horror comics collection from Adam Ellis, Let Me in Your Window. These gorgeously drawn stories offer disturbing insights into the murky shadows of internet culture, as well as brilliant speculation on potential digital futures.
Something I always appreciate about Ellis is how he documents the many absurdities of both corporate platform policies and social media subcultures alike. It’s easy to read the stories in Let Me in Your Window as spooky urban legends with no allegory… but also, I feel extremely Seen by Ellis’s characteristic take on digital horror. Here’s an excerpt from my review:
Adam Ellis’s second horror comic collection, Let Me in Your Window, is digital horror at its finest. As the successor to Ellis’s 2024 collection Bad Dreams in the Night, Let Me in Your Window ventures even deeper into the wires as it speaks to anxieties surrounding the omnipresent ghosts that speak to us through our screens. Even if most of us are content to allow these phantoms to pass unnoticed, it can be unnerving to realize that we’re ghosts as well – ghosts being watched, ghosts being catalogued, and ghosts that constantly leave behind traces of our former selves. The ten stories collected in Let Me in Your Window invite the reader to reflect on what it means to inhabit the constantly unfolding urban legends of online culture.
You can read the full review on Comics Beat here:
https://www.comicsbeat.com/graphic-novel-review-let-me-in-your-window/
I’m excited to announce that I published a new zine! Green Dreams: Tales of Botanical Fantasy collects six illustrated stories about our relationships with plants and nature.
“Each turn of the seasons brings an end to lives both large and small, but new seeds sprout joyously from the ruins” is the zine’s tagline, and disaster is a major theme of the collection. One of the opening stories is about the gradual effects of climate change; and, in the closing story, environmental catastrophes have become so severe that humans have disappeared completely. The zine also features stories about a medical tragedy narrowly averted, the aftermath of a devastating war, and a porous biological quarantine.
I considered subtitling the zine “Tales of Botanical Dark Fantasy,” but the truth is that none of the stories are actually that “dark.” In fact, I’d say the main theme of the collection is a persistent hope for the future. At this particular moment in history, the state of the world seems very bleak, so it’s good to remember that the environment that surrounds us is much larger – but also much more personal – than whatever horrors are currently unfolding.
Precisely because are so many fires burning in the world, I think it’s important to spend time in thriving green spaces that suggest futures of shifting and changing growth. I believe that a mindful contemplation of our natural environment can also be useful in the uncomfortable but necessary process of decentering normative humanity while challenging the artificial divisions we impose on ourselves and each other.
The incredible cover art by Frankiesbugs captures the mood of these stories perfectly.
Frankie creates bold and imaginative botanical fantasy art, and I asked them to illustrate the pagan archetypes of the flower maiden and the horned god, who together represent the endless natural cycle of death and rebirth. In this zine, I wanted to play with symbols that convey the beauty and mystery of the natural world, and Frankie embraced this theme, tinging the painting with potent Christian motifs and a powerful sense of fertility.
It’s an extremely impressive piece of art, and you to check out more of the artist’s work on Instagram (here), on Bluesky (here), and on Redbubble (here).
In this collection, I did my best to share a sense of fertile “green dreams” for the future. Mostly, though, I just really wanted to write some fun ecofiction about plants and mushrooms.
If you’re interested, you can read a free digital version of the zine on Itch.io or order a print copy from Etsy.
🌿 https://digitalterrarium.itch.io/green-dreams
🌿 https://www.etsy.com/listing/4351990958/green-dreams-fantasy-fiction-zine
Digital Fantasy Diary 