I had the honor of contributing a short story called “The Slithery-Dee Came Out of the Sea” to the first issue of Creaking Floorboards, an art and fiction zine that showcases tales of the supernatural.
“The Slithery-Dee Came Out of the Sea” is a small-town horror story about a woman in the coastal town of Freeport, Maine who assumes that people are slowly disappearing from her life because of the post-pandemic economic recession and rural depopulation. But nope! They’re being eaten by a sea monster.
This story is loosely based on a poem of the same name (this one here) from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, a collection of American folklore from 1981 that’s infamous for giving emotional scars to children. What’s interesting about this weird little poem is how the narrator watches everyone else get eaten but never runs away. I was interested in exploring the state of mind of someone in this situation. Surely a part of you must know something strange is going on, but it’s difficult to see the supernatural for what it is when everything in your life seems to be going wrong.
I’m honored to have received an illustration from ChassDraws, who shares her bold and colorful art on Instagram (here) and on Bluesky (here). Of the many things I love about Chassie’s illustration, what I especially appreciate is how it preserves the uncertainty of the situation while still providing an undeniable hint regarding what’s actually going on.
I’ve also archived a PDF of my story (here) with a page-by-page layout and higher contrast, which should hopefully make the text easier to read for people who are visually sensitive.
I’ve been a fan of Punko’s work since her debut manga-style graphic novel Bizenghast, which takes place in an isolated small town perched above a giant crypt. Stagtown is a return to a similar setting, but it’s a much more nuanced and mature piece of storytelling graced with remarkably confident and atmospheric art.
Just as I’m comparing Stagtown to Bizenghast here, I make a number of connections in my review of the graphic novel, including comparisons to The X Files, The Magnus Archives, and Stephen King – who coined the phrase “peculiar little town” that I use in the review title. I’ve pointed out these connections not because Stagtown is derivative. In fact, Punko’s art and writing are quite distinctive, as is her particular take on small town horror. Rather, I make these comparisons to emphasize how deeply Stagtown is connected to some of the primary roots of contemporary American Gothic. As I write toward the end of my review:
Underneath its elements of supernatural horror, Stagtown is a story about young adults who are stuck in place. The characters feel fresh and contemporary, but the setting is haunted by the analog horror sense of being cut off from the broader culture and society. Frankie and Felix are doing their best to overcome a less-than-ideal situation, but their efforts have depressingly few tangible results. Stagtown is small-town gothic horror that would make Stephen King proud, but it’s also a cautionary tale about economic recession, suburban stagnation, and a younger generation trying to survive in a world that has no place for their dreams or energy.
Hollow: Ten Tales of Fallen Knights collects a series of original short stories about knights who have found themselves in unfortunate circumstances. In the shadows cast by crumbling kingdoms, what inspires these knights to keep fighting?
Though the primary genre of the stories in this zine is dark fantasy, their tone is elegiac bordering on hopeful. Just as in my Ruins zine, the underlying theme is “regrowth after disaster,” though a few of these knights’ means of achieving that regrowth is a bit violent. Some dragons really need to die, if you catch my meaning.
All of the knights who appear in this collection happen to be female; but, as in the Dark Souls games that loosely inspired these stories, their gender is the least important thing about them. I just think lady knights are cool.
A free digital version of the zine is available on Itch.io, and paper copies are on Etsy.
Evelyn: A Gothic Tale is an atmospheric 2D puzzle platformer currently being created as a solo project by the Italian artist and game developer Frankiesbugs. The demo for Evelyn, which is free to download from Itch.io, features full Xbox controller support and takes about ten to fifteen minutes to finish, though you’ll likely want to spend more time exploring.
You play as the eponymous Evelyn, a small skeleton in a jaunty blue dress who’s become bored in her underworld crypt and wants to return to the world of the living. Getting there will be no easy task, however, as the way is obstructed by numerous gates and barriers. In addition, Evelyn will need to collect enough flames to light her way forward through the final stretch of darkness between worlds. If she manages to get her bony fingers on enough flames, she might even be able to secure an additional passage for her charmingly pathetic friend Rupert.
There’s no combat in Evelyn, but environmental hazards will hinder the player’s progress. In the demo, these hazards primarily consist of pits and spikes that Evelyn must jump over in classic 2D platformer style. The twist that Evelyn brings to this formula are its light-based puzzles, which involve obstructing or redirecting beams of light in order to trigger changes in the world and thereby grant Evelyn the keys she needs to pass through a series of grand stone gates.
The game mechanics involving light also carry over to the platforming. While most of the map is rendered in a vibrantly colorful style that still manages to convey the atmosphere of an underground crypt, a few of the side paths are shrouded in actual darkness broken only by strategically placed lamps. In order to navigate these dark sections, the player must rely on the instincts developed in previous sections while paying close attention to the lamp placement. The interplay between light and dark sections is perfectly balanced. I was always excited to venture into the darkness of a shadowy side path, but I always felt relieved to return to the well-lit areas.
Evelyn features full controller support, and I played with an Xbox controller with no problem at all. Evelyn’s movement speed is perfect in relation to the size of the map, as is her jump height. Though I suspect this game might be classified as “casual” in terms of difficulty, its gameplay is enhanced by a nice balance between freedom of movement and the small areas of friction impeding progress. Evelyn’s health bar contributes an additional element of challenge, as you can only fall into so many pits or spike traps before you have to start over. I will admit that I died a few times while exploring, but experience and familiarity with the map compressed the time I needed to navigate back to the point I died, resulting in a pleasantly smooth learning curve.
When I think about what makes a good Metroidvania, it’s not just the level design and gameplay, but also the sense of exploration and discovery that (more than anything, I think) distinguishes the genre from an action platformer like the Super Mario games. The hand-drawn characters and environment of Evelyn inspire a sense of moving through an actual world, especially in the details of the background art that caused me to wonder how a particular creature might have come to be tucked away in a particular dark corner.
The icing on the cake of any standout Metroidvania is the writing. Balance is important in this aspect of game design, as the text needs to walk a fine line between being too sparse and too voluble while simultaneously offering intriguing information without indulging in exposition. The writing in Evelyn is fantastic, from the dialogue to the text on the collectible daguerreotypes, and each character has a distinct voice (and there’s one character in particular that really surprised me, bless his heart). Evelyn herself is a silent protagonist, but her in-game animations express a great deal of character, as does the narrative animation that opens the game in the style of a silent film from the 1920s.
I’m amazed by how well-polished this demo is, and I’m curious to uncover more about the story behind this crypt and its restless inhabitants, which seems just as disturbing as the character art is cute. Everything about this spooky little game works in concert to lure the player deeper into its underground world, and I’m looking forward to spending more time in the company of these strange skeleton children. For the time being, I’m cheering Evelyn on as she makes her way out into the world.
Kuro is a free-to-play homebrew PS1 gothic horror game that takes about twenty minutes to finish. There aren’t any jumpscares, but the story is as dark as the chunky retro polygons are cute.
You play as Kuro, a mysterious visitor to an abandoned Shinto shrine. The moonlit shrine is beautiful and peaceful on the outside, but its interior conceals an underground labyrinth haunted by the ghost of a brutally murdered young woman named Miu. As Kuro, your job is to find and reunite the parts of Miu’s corpse so that her spirit can move on.
Along with Miu’s head and body, Kuro must acquire the means to open three locked doors. Though the game’s map isn’t overly large, Kuro moves slowly (with tank controls) across spaces presented to the player from dramatic angles. It’s unlikely that you’ll become lost, but the game does an excellent job of conveying the disorientation of wandering through a dark basement.
For me, the standout scene is when Kuro enters a locked room that’s completely empty except for an old television whose screen is filled with static. When Kuro interacts with the television, she’s transported to an otherworldly landscape where she meets the man who killed Miu. He explains what happened, but this isn’t the end of the story. Once Kuro returns to the shrine and begins to dig deeper, the player learns that murder is probably the most wholesome thing that happened here.
I genuinely appreciate the developer’s commitment to including every gothic trope they could think of. One might argue that the writing is somewhat clumsy, and that the game’s twenty-minute playtime isn’t sufficient to allow ample space for its horrors, but I’m of the opinion that the writing is just as integral to the retro aesthetic as the graphics. I feel like there’s a tendency to remember games like Final Fantasy VII and Resident Evil 2 as “well-written,” but PS1-era games had a tendency to hit you with a cascade of revelations in the most basic and matter-of-fact prose. Kuro matches the tone of this style of video game writing perfectly.
I also love to see this kind of gothic story in a setting that isn’t European, and I’m fascinated by the idea that a Shinto shrine would have a basement. Perhaps a shrine constructed overseas (in British Columbia, for instance) might have an underground level, but this would be unthinkable in Japan, where shrine buildings are always elevated above the ground in the traditional Polynesian architectural style.
The reason for this is 100% practical in a wet and humid climate, where various types of unpleasant things (primarily mold, fungus, and insects) would quickly infest the ground level of a building. Also, the water table is generally so close to the surface that it would be difficult to prevent underground rooms from flooding. There’s also a spiritual component to the architecture, as Shinto belief systems tend to associate anything inside the earth with an otherworld of rot and impurity. This otherworld is a necessary space for the cycle of life, but it’s not a good place for humans to be under any circumstances. In terms of its spiritual utility, one of the purposes of a shrine is to demarcate the boundaries between worlds.
So a Shinto shrine would not have a basement. But if it did. The horrors of Kuro would definitely happen there.
I admire how Kuro explores the idea of transgressing an extremely powerful taboo. Between the lost-media stylization of the game’s retro graphics and the grotesque quality of its writing, the player definitely gets a sense of wandering through a place they’re not supposed to be. Kuro is a short and simple game, but it’s very well-observed and surprisingly effective.
Misao is a short 16-bit indie survival horror game originally released in 2011 and then published on Steam (here) as a remastered edition in 2024. The game is set in a high school that’s been transported to a demonic realm by the vengeful spirit of the eponymous Misao, a beautiful but quiet girl who mysteriously disappeared three months prior to the opening of the story.
You play as a girl (or optionally as a boy, in the HD version) named Aki who suddenly hears Misao’s voice in the middle of class, asking someone to “find me.” The classroom is cloaked in darkness, an earthquake hits, and the school begins to fall apart in the aftershocks. As Aki explores the mostly abandoned building, she learns that four of her classmates were bullying Misao with the compliance of their homeroom teacher. Despite the intensity of the bullying, Misao didn’t kill herself – but someone else did.
The gameplay consists of navigating the school while collecting six objects necessary to piece together Misao’s story. There’s no set order to acquiring these items, meaning that the game starts off as somewhat confounding but gradually comes to make more sense. Once you get your bearings, what you need to do becomes fairly self-evident, but a walkthrough is recommended for players (such as myself) who might find themselves overwhelmed at first. There are several excellent guides posted to Steam, but I recommend (this one) on account of its helpful division into sections.
Like Mad Father (reviewed here), which was also published by Miscreant’s Room, Misao is essentially a haunted house simulator in which your player-character can die in dozens of delightfully gruesome ways. Thanks to a handy quicksave function, there’s no penalty for dying, and the player is encouraged to get into all sorts of trouble for the sole purpose of seeing what will happen. Aside from two short chase sequences, very little skill is needed to survive, just a bit of trial and error.
What I love about Misao is how much fun this game has with the tropes and imagery of a haunted high school. The laboratory is staffed by a mad scientist who has a chainsaw and will take advantage of any excuse to use it. The hamburgers in the cafeteria are made of unspeakable meat, and the seating area in front of the open kitchen is filthy with blood and entrails. The toilets haven’t been cleaned for a very long time, nor has the secret zombie cave under the school. The Shinto shrine in the courtyard is beautiful, but the rituals performed there are anything but.
Misao’s story mixes high school bullying and friendship drama with a mystery surrounding a twisted serial killer, and everyone gets exactly what they deserve. Still, for players who think high school kids shouldn’t be condemned to eternal damnation, Aki can rescue her classmates from their personal hells in a short epilogue. A few of the characters Aki encounters are native to the demon realm, and they’re all having the time of their lives. My favorite is the student librarian, who’s fully aware of the bloodshed surrounding her but just wants to make friends. She is a treasure.
If you’re not a completionist, Misao takes about two hours to finish, allowing the story to make an impact without testing the player’s patience through needless puzzles or gameplay challenges. The haunted high school setting is creatively rendered and a lot of fun to explore, even if the open-world structure is a bit overwhelming at the beginning.
The deaths are all creative and disturbing, but the retro graphics allow the game to feel campy instead of creepy, so much so that Misao sometimes feels more like a comedy than a horror story. I grew to feel a begrudging sort of affection for the characters, but I can’t deny that I had a huge smile on my face as I watched them get picked off – and really, good for Misao. I support her.
“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).
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.
My zineStrange 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.
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).
There is a legend in Hyrule that a sleeping princess lies behind the door of a locked room deep under the ruins of the North Castle. When the princess rises, so too will the ancient powers sealed within her dreams. Impa knows the legend is true, and she fears the fate that will befall the kingdom should the first Zelda wake. Yet when a shadow rises on the borders of Hyrule after the birth of a new princess, Impa must make a terrible choice.
I had the honor of contributing a story called “The Sleeping Princess” to Blood Moon Rising: A Zelda Horror Zine. I was interested in exploring the background of Princess Zelda in the original 1986 game, and I thought it might be fun to see her story through the eyes of Impa, who knew about the undead princess who was the first of Zelda’s line. In other words, I’m connecting some of the more disturbing threads between The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.
“The Sleeping Princess” is a story about maternal love, political sacrifice, and the dark secrets hidden within the labyrinthine dungeons of Hyrule. I was strongly inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s novel At the Mountains of Madness, which dwells in the geometric terror of monumental architecture built by strange hands, and I did my best to create a sense of ruined grandeur similar to that of Dark Souls and Ico: Castle in the Mist.
For the story’s illustrations, I had the incredible pleasure of working with the devilishly talented Pumpkinsouppe, whose dark arts brought this ruined world to life.
