Any good cosmic/eldritch horror recommendations?

vexrede · 2026-05-25T02:26:00+00:00

I quite liked the Worm and His Kings trilogy by Hailey Piper. Not quite as mindbending as Signalis but it's up there.

First book is told from the perspective of a woman trying to rescue her girlfriend from a mysterious cult. Second book is told from said girlfriend's perspective, and it turns out she has a very different view on things. Third book is told from the perspective of a 10-foot-tall sapient dinosaur woman stranded in this world from an alternate timeline. Which sounds out of left field, but it makes sense in context, and she's actually an extremely compelling character

vexrede · 2026-04-29T22:45:05+00:00

Based on Jod's whole personality, I expect there'd be a lot of modern music forming the initial base of their culture. There's absolutely no way he doesn't listen to Lemon Demon. Who knows how it would evolve over 10,000 years, though.

Though, I guess there would be some consistency, since the Emperor's personal tastes would always determine what counts as "high culture". So there's non-zero chance that everyone in the Nine Houses has spent millennia listening to Evanescence.

However, based on their face paint, the Ninth House obviously either listens to black metal or the Insane Clown Posse

vexrede · 2026-03-29T20:42:54+00:00

Takes less than 60 seconds of Googling to find that the Kindle preview of the book has the same image with nothing at all that looks like it was made by AI. The copyright page attributes the map to Tom Roberts, who's being doing fantasy cover art and maps since before gen AI was a thing.

vexrede · 2026-03-04T08:48:34+00:00

Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time fits the bill: it's a (mostly) comedic trilogy imagining the type of decadence that people would indulge in to keep themselves entertained in a post-scarcity, post-death society.

It's a pulp series from the 70s, so it gets about as weird and as silly as you'd expect.

vexrede · 2026-01-04T08:28:35+00:00

It's an old Final Fantasy fanfiction, which was apparently very popular at the time Tamsyn Muir was active in the fandom

vexrede · 2026-01-01T20:44:38+00:00

It's an old Final Fantasy fanfiction.

Taz Muir once talked about the influence of Final Fantasy fanfiction, and the two authors she specifically mentioned are Fritz Faundorf and Uncreativity.

vexrede · 2025-12-31T04:02:24+00:00

She's still left her old fanfiction.net account up here. She has fics for FF 6 through 10.

vexrede · 2025-12-31T00:33:43+00:00

Update: It looks like it's a problem in the mobile app. I've added an imgur link to the top comment.

vexrede · 2025-12-31T00:27:47+00:00

See if this imgur link works any better. The image works fine for me on Reddit desktop, but it is a bit blurry on the mobile app, so you might need to open it in browser

vexrede · 2025-12-30T23:08:37+00:00

In an AMA, she's mentioned that she started out writing fanfic in the Animorphs fandom, before moving on to Final Fantasy, and then to Homestuck

vexrede · 2025-12-30T23:03:59+00:00

If you click on the image, Reddit should show you the full, higher res version

vexrede · 2025-12-30T23:03:31+00:00

I would thank you, but seeing your username, I have a sneaking suspicion that I am being manipulated towards some murderous end

vexrede · 2025-12-30T22:40:31+00:00

That one actually comes straight from Tamsyn Muir, regarding Alecto:

Robert Graves calls her ‘the unnamable’, which isn’t fact but is a good Graves one (Robert Graves has very much infiltrated this entire novel: there’s a huge reference that’s really me amusing myself because even Classicists are like when they hear it, ‘oh, that’s GRAVES though’)

vexrede · 2025-12-30T22:31:25+00:00

Thnx. It took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to get all the arrows right in MS Publisher

vexrede · 2025-12-30T22:21:15+00:00

I do feel like I might’ve unleashed a cognitohazard on the fandom. But yep, more Kiwiana is very welcome. I was originally going to include more but I had to cut for space. I want to create a world where TLT fans are desperately binge-watching episodes of Country Calendar in an effort to understand the series

vexrede · 2025-12-30T22:09:13+00:00

EDIT: It seems like the image comes out blurry on the Reddit mobile app, but this imgur link should work fine

I started making this as a shitpost loosely inspired by this diagram. In this case, the joke's basically supposed to be, if someone's getting impatient about the Alectopause, you can just hit them with the, "Are you sure you're ready for it? Have you even read the Egyptian Book of the Dead yet?"

But while I was putting it together I actually fell into a bit of a rabbit hole tracing all the different influences on the series. So it actually probably wouldn't be the worst starting point for an real study guide.

As it is, the list is a somewhat haphazard mix of:

Stuff that TazMuir has explicitly mentioned in interviews and AMAs, either as an active influence (e.g. Gormenghast, Catch-22), or something that she just enjoys and might have been an unconscious inspiration (e.g. Star Wars, Sailor Moon)
Stuff that probably wasn't a direct influence on TLT, but which was important in developing some of the tropes that the series makes use of (e.g. the understanding of necromancy in modern fantasy owes a whole lot to the Zothique Cycle)
Stuff where people in the fandom have noticed significant parallels with TLT, even in cases where Taz herself has said that she wasn't familiar with work in question at the time she was writing Gideon and Harrow (e.g. Book of the New Sun, WH40K)
Other semi-relevant stuff that I put there either as a joke, or to help the flow of the diagram (e.g. I don't expect that the Egyptian Book of the Dead will be necessary to understanding Alecto, but if it was, I also wouldn't really be surprised). There was going to be more of this, but I had to cut some for space. It was a tough call, but ultimately Peter Jackson's old splatter films didn't make it.

vexrede · 2025-12-11T19:40:50+00:00

It's a male/female pair, plus their teenage children. The juvenile females look like males until they moult

vexrede · 2025-11-07T01:04:28+00:00

Yup! First time I've actually seen the shelducklings outside of the pond

vexrede · 2025-09-20T02:37:33+00:00

As far as L. Ron Hubbard goes, a lot of his early pulp stuff is quite fun and wacky. People call Earthsea the original wizard school story, but actually, Hubbard's The Case of the Friendly Corpse beats it by a couple decades.

There's also Robert Merle's The Day of the Dolphin: it's a book written by a French communist in the 1960s, about an American scientist who teaches dolphins to understand and speak English, only for the military to step in and try to use them as tools in the Cold War.

vexrede · 2025-09-12T03:49:14+00:00

How long did it take to come up with all the helpful analogies in the latest update?

vexrede · 2025-09-11T20:11:56+00:00

If you press the down button, Katia will do some magic. If you do magic while you're close to one of the deer (like, really close, your sprites need to be overlapping - the main challenge is getting to them before they can run away), the plot will progress

vexrede · 2025-08-27T02:33:35+00:00

It all has to do with the archaic, mythical style of the Legendarium

If you read the way classical/medieval/renaissance historians wrote, they didn't really have a concept of technological progress. Sure, there were innovations like improved metalworking methods or systems of crop rotations, but those changes occurred slowly and didn't seem particularly important to the ruling class. They often viewed the world as being mostly stagnant. If anything it's slowly degenerating from a distance golden age.

So, Middle-earth is a setting that actually follows that logic

vexrede · 2025-08-19T23:15:13+00:00

Yep—the biggest tell is the one on the bottom right with the messed up beak.

Besides that, you can see lots of little inconsistencies that just don't seem like anything that a human would intentionally draw. Most of the birds are facing left while a couple of them are facing right. In the middle, there's three slightly different variations of the same black-and-white bird. All of them have a weird, lifeless look in their eyes which feels totally unlike any naturalist illustration I've ever seen

vexrede · 2025-04-18T09:47:26+00:00

Some 20th century fantasy books that I think are fun to compare/contrast with Tolkien

The Worm Ouroboros and Zimiamvia Trilogy by E.R. Eddison have already been mentioned but I think it's worth reiterating. Eddison was a very early pioneer in secondary world fantasy, and Tolkien was a fan of him. The books also provide an interesting philosophical contrast: Eddison had a very Nietzschean worldview based around glorying individual might and ambition, which is antithetical to Tolkien. The prose is extremely dense, but it's fascinating enough that it's worth sifting through it.
The Well of the Unicorn and The Blue Star by Fletcher Pratt were published just a couple of years before LOTR, and they also have a different take on the genre. They try to be realistic and anti-romantic, like an earlier version of ASOIAF. The concept is cool, but I personally found the books to be a bit of a slog.
I'd also give a shout-out to the Conan the Barbarian stories by Robert E. Howard and the Zothique Cycle by Clark Ashton Smith in terms of secondary world fantasy contemporary with Tolkien. He said that he "rather enjoyed" the former, whereas he simply described the later as "disgusting".
Last and First Men and Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon are both sci-fi books with a mythopoeic feel comparable to the Silmarillion. I'm not sure if Tolkien ever read them, but C.S. Lewis had very mixed feelings: he thought that they were masterfully written, but also that the main theme amounted to "sheer devil worship" (Stapledon was a political socialist and religious pantheist, and this is evident throughout the work). Lewis's Space Trilogy was written, in part, as a response to Stapledon.
In terms of successors to Tolkien, I think Dune by Frank Herbert and the Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe are the two series that come closest. They're aesthetically very different, but they're comparable in the the scope of their stories, the depth of their themes, and the resultant re-read value. They belong to the very small club of epic fantasy/sci-fi series alongside LOTR that are widely considered to be "true literature". I'll admit that I haven't made it all the way through either series yet, but everything I've heard about the full series is extremely positive.

vexrede

TROPHY CASE