Welcome, welcome, welcome,

To another week at The Ink-stained Desk. This deep dive has been sitting in my drafts for a while, just waiting for the right bit of media consumption to come along and spur me on to finish it. Well, this past weekend I watched the newly released documentary My Grandfather is Charles Manson (—directed by Alexandra Orton and Sophia Maddox), and it seems that was the push I needed.

Of all the tropes in horror fiction, I think I find that of the cult the most interesting. Whether this is in the form of a circle of robed figures chanting around a bonfire, an isolated commune in the Scandinavian wilderness, or a sleek, hyper-modern urban clique operating under sinister pretences, the cult strikes a deep nerve for me. I think this is because it forces me to confront the question: How easily could my individuality, my morals, and my mind be stripped away just for the desperate need to belong?

Cults Through Literary History.

The concept of the cult did not begin with 20th-century true-crime documentaries or the grim headlines of the 1970s. Its roots stretch back centuries through folklore, religious anxiety, and the evolution of speculative storytelling.

Mythology.

The fear of the clandestine group is the basis of most ancient mythology and folklore.

The Maenads: In Greek mythology, the Maenads were the followers of Dionysus, and they represented a certain archetype, that is, civilised citizens who abandon reason, descend into an ecstatic frenzy, and operate entirely outside the laws of society.

The Roman suppression of the Bacchanalia in 186 BCE stands as one of history’s earliest state-level panics over a secret, oath-bound religious counter-society operating in the shadows. Similarly, the mystery cults of antiquity, such as the Eleusinian or Mithraic mysteries (—I had never heard of either of these until I began researching this article, so interesting!), demanded strict initiation rites, absolute secrecy, and severed ties with the uninitiated outer world.

The 18th Century. (The Gothic)

18th-century Gothic fiction weaponised the fear of absolute institutional control. Writers like Ann Radcliffe in The Italian (1797) and Matthew Lewis in The Monk (1796) focused heavily on corrupt religious orders, secretive tribunals, and cloistered brotherhoods. These works depicted closed environments where individual agency is completely crushed by an overarching dogma or clandestine judiciary, paving the way for later writers to imagine entirely autonomous, shadowy sub-societies operating beneath the surface of civilisation.

The 19th Century. (Secret Societies and Brotherhoods)

As the Victorian era progressed, the trope shifted toward secret societies, hidden brotherhoods, and fanatical devotion. Writers began exploring underground networks operating just out of sight of polite society. For instance, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868) introduced Western audiences to the chilling, coordinated dedication of a secret guardian cult of Hindu priests pursuing stolen sacred objects across borders with unwavering, oath-bound loyalty.

And while James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) was not explicitly about a cult, I think that its themes of religious fanaticism, antinomian sects, and the charismatic, manipulative figure driving a follower to total moral collapse are worth considering when discussing cults.

The 20th Century. (Cosmic Dread and Fanaticism)

By the early 20th century, H.P. Lovecraft had revolutionised the cult trope for the modern age by centring stories around organised, secretive religious fringe groups. In works like The Call of Cthulhu (1928) and The Shadow over Innsmouth (1936), Lovecraft introduced sinister cults worshipping ancient, indifferent cosmic entities.

Mid-century fiction continued this trajectory into domestic, psychological, and communal spaces. We can see this inmany of Shirley Jackson’s explorations of community cruelty, mob psychology, and ritualistic scapegoating. Think of her short story ‘The Lottery’ and her novels We Have Always Lived in the Castle. The Sundial (1958), stand out for me as a domestic apocalyptic cult, where an isolated family creates its own insulated, delusional reality. Alongside Jackson, Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967) cemented a terrifying neighbourhood-level satanic conspiracy operating in plain sight. For me, the 20th century really transformed this trope into an exploration of how normal people can be subverted by organised, fanatical collectives.

The 21st Century. (Digital Echos and Wellness)

In the 21st century, the cult horror trope has adapted to reflect hyper-modern anxieties. Rather than relying solely on rural communes or underground dungeons, contemporary horror explores how isolation, media exploitation, and mass-market commodification act as modern recruitment tools. Authors now examine how manufactured movements can mimic traditional cult mechanics, weaponising the human desire for meaning in an increasingly fragmented world. Texts like Jennifer Haigh’s Mr. Splitfoot, Catriona Ward’s Sundial, and Chuck Palahniuk’s Survivor interrogate modern fanaticism, shared delusion, and media-driven self-destruction.

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The Psychology of Hive-Mind Horror.

So, what about the psychology of cults? Why are we, humans, drawn to them, both in texts and real life?

Conformity vs. The Individual.

At our core, humans are social creatures who crave community and acceptance. This is an evolutionary survival mechanism designed to keep us safe within the tribe. Cult horror subverts this by showcasing the chilling power of synchronised conformity (—this is my new catch phrase for everything from Instagram to sport).

Basically, when placed in an insular group dynamic, the human brain undergoes a weird shift: personal moral accountability dissolves into the collective will of the hive-mind. Cult horror exploits the fear that our independent critical thinking is fragile, easily overridden by peer pressure, isolation, and systemic gaslighting. The scariest part of a fictional cult is watching a rational individual slowly surrender their autonomy to a smiling collective. (—think Emma Cline’s The Girls or Mona Awad’s Bunny.)

The Geography of Control.

Cult horror also relies on physical or psychological isolation. Whether it’s a commune deep in the woods, a closed urban ecosystem, or a digitally walled-off community, the architecture of the cult is meticulously engineered to prevent the rest of the world from testing the cult’s beliefs.

This forces the protagonist to rely entirely on the cult leader’s curated reality. Most cult horror texts pivot when the protagonist realises that help isn’t coming, and that the isolated physical and social environment is complicit in enforcing the group’s dogma.

The Charismatic Monster.

Unlike a traditional slasher villain or a mindless monster, cult leaders are seductive, articulate, and deeply perceptive of human loneliness. We can see this in both fictional and real-world historical figures like Jim Jones, Charles Manson, and Marshall Applewhite. These leaders have narcissistic personality traits, grandiose framing, and calculated charm. They prey on grief and disillusionment, and create their own reality. There is a dynamic psychologists call coercive persuasion and the pathological charismatic archetype. By projecting absolute certainty onto an uncertain world, they convince characters (—and real people) that total submission and destruction are actually acts of supreme salvation.

Recommended Reading.

If you want to dive deeper into this trope, check out these essential horror reads spanning classic folk dread, cosmic terror, and modern psychological thrillers:

Last Days by Adam Nevill: A suffocating look at a documentary crew investigating a defunct, brutal religious movement.

Black Sheep by Rachel Harrison: A brilliant modern blend of family trauma, dark comedy, and insidious modern cult mechanics.

The Children of Red Peak by Craig DiLouie: Explores the psychological aftermath and lingering, lifelong trauma of surviving a doomsday cult.

Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin: I mean, of course this has to be on the list! The ultimate blueprint for domestic paranoia, gaslighting, and neighbourhood-level conspiracy.

The Girls by Emma Cline: A fictionalised, hypnotic exploration inspired by the Manson family, focusing on female adolescence and vulnerability. (—Less horror, more thriller, but still worth reading for the vibes)

Last Days by Brian Evenson: A surreal, Kafkaesque nightmare about a cult that views amputation as the ultimate sacrament.

The Ritual by Adam Nevill: While famous for its woodland monster, the book heavily features a terrifying pagan cult embedded in the Scandinavian wilderness.

Recommended Non-Fiction.

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell: This is a really deep look at how cults use specific language to draw people in and keep them.

Lure of the Arcane: The Literature of Cult and Conspiracy by Theodore Ziolkowski. A deep dive into the cultural fascination with esoteric groups, mapping out how historical anxieties and conspiratorial narratives manifest in mass media and popular culture.

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If you’re still here with me, thanks so much for reading The Ink-Stained Desk.

Question everything you see and don’t go following any strange groups into the woods.

Have a great weekend

C M Reid at The Ink-Stained Desk.

Welcome, welcome, welcome,

Last weekend I reread ’s new release Jellyfish Bloom, and it really affected me. I think everyone has that one horror trope that really gets under their skin, and for me, it is anything set in or around the ocean or large bodies of water. (—anyone who has read this book, let me just say the part with the barnacles! I had to put the book down for a moment and gather myself.)

I live in a country obsessed with the ocean. Here in Australia, we flock to the water every chance we get. Weekends, Christmas, family holidays, school holidays, no matter the season, the beach is the place to be. It is winter here right now, and still my teenage sons trek to the beach with their friends.

In Australia, the beach is basically a civic religion. From the time we’re old enough to walk, we are fed a steady diet of golden tans, rhythmic crashing surf, crying seagulls and reassuring red-and-yellow flags. To be Australian is supposedly to love the ocean without a second thought.

Except, I don’t.

Ask me to walk along the shoreline, feel the salt spray on my face, and listen to the roar of the Pacific, no problem. But ask me to swim out past where my feet touch the sand, and you will get a big nope. The few times I have swum in the ocean, as in unable to put my feet down swam, my heart raced, the horizon looked entirely too vast, and every stray piece of seaweed brushing against my legs was transformed into an apex predator.

For a long time, I told people that I just don’t like to swim. But the truth is, I’m afraid of the open ocean, and I think this is a completely rational, evolutionary respect for an alien environment where humans simply do not belong.

And thankfully, I’m not alone in feeling this way. Horror fiction has been leaning into the terrifying pull of the deep blue for a long time. If you, too, prefer to admire the ocean from the safety of dry sand, here are a few books that completely validate my dread.

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Welcome, welcome, welcome,

to another Genre Genealogy, where we trace the roots and influences of our favourite genres together. I planned to release the Fairytale Horror Genealogy this month, but my head was turned… In June I read Christie Anne Jones’ debut novel Theodora’s Teashop and have since been following conversations online regarding the genre shelf it has been ‘forced’ into (—it has been marketed as Cosy Fantasy, which has caused alot of contention; even Jones herself admits that she didn’t think she wrote a cosy fantasy). After reading The Faraway Inn, by Sarah Beth Durst, this month, a book that firmly lands in the Cosy Fantasy genre, I’ve been considering the genre, and it just made sense to follow my brain.

If you’re a regular scroller of contemporary book recommendations, you likely will have noticed a shift. For decades, the fantasy genre was defined by the weight of the world: dark lords, crumbling empires, flashing steel, and blood-soaked prophecies. But over the last few years, a counter-movement has taken over bookshelves, indie bestseller lists, and reading communities everywhere.

So, today, we are tracing the genealogy of cosy fantasy and following its quiet, comforting footsteps all the way from ancient hearthside myths to the modern coffee shops of today.

The Anatomy of the Cosy Fantasy.

To recognise the texts of the genre, we must first look at its anatomy. What makes the Cosy Fantasy different from other fantasy texts? Not every low-stakes book is cosy, and not every cosy book is strictly fantasy. To diagnose a work as Cosy Fantasy, look for these four vital organs:

• The Stakes: The antagonist is rarely a world-ending demon lord. Instead, conflict is internal or interpersonal. It is a struggling small business, a misunderstanding between neighbours, creative burnout, or learning to bake the perfect pastry.

• The Setting: Immersive, sensory-rich, and often contained spaces. Think of magical cafés, quiet pastoral villages, sun-dappled cottages, or cozy valleys protected from the harsh winds of the wider world.

• The Vibe: Food, warmth, craftsmanship, and domesticity. Magic is integrated into daily routines: warming a teapot, magically sweeping a floor, or enchanting a batch of cinnamon rolls.

• The Theme: Found family, community building, healing, and belonging over conquest and power. Victory is measured by whom you welcome to your table, rather than whom you defeat.

The Roots and Influences of Cosy Fantasy.

Note: Any and all of the following texts and stories will not satisfy every characteristic of the Cosy Fantasy genre outlined above. These are roots and influences that lead up to it in the present; in other words, they are not explicitly Cosy Fantasy texts in and of themselves.

Mythology and Folklore.

Long before novels existed, there was oral tradition. While epic poetry focused on grand heroes slaying monsters, folklore leaned into the quiet spaces, trickster spirits, household goblins, and local nature myths. Across world folklore, domestic spirits embodied the cozy bond between humans and the unseen world:

• The Celtic Brownie: In Celtic and British tradition, the brownie was a helpful household sprite that quietly tidied the kitchen, mended shoes, and cared for farmsteads overnight. In exchange for their diligent domestic magic, they asked for nothing more than a simple saucer of cream left by the hearth.

• The Japanese Zashiki-Warashi: In Japanese folklore, the zashiki-warashi is a benevolent spirit said to inhabit traditional guest rooms. Rather than causing terror, their presence brings quiet prosperity, good fortune, and a gentle, childlike warmth to household residents.

• The Slavic Domovoi: In Slavic folklore, the domovoi is a protective house spirit residing near or under the stove. Known for watching over the family, keeping livestock safe, and maintaining household order, they reward respectful homeowners with peace and warmth.

Together, these stories reflected a universal human desire to feel looked after by the everyday magic of the home.

The 18th Century.

While the 18th century is often remembered for the Age of Enlightenment or the birth of dark Gothic fiction, it was also a pivotal era for literary fairy tales that laid the groundwork for whimsical, interior spaces.

Madame d’Aulnoy and other French conteuses (—I went down a rabbit hole learning about the conteuses; here is the Wikipedia page, such an interesting group!) popularised the term contes de fées (—fairy tales), weaving intricate stories that combined courtly life with magical transformations, enchanted parlours, and cozy domestic enchantments.

Simultaneously, early European translations of folklore and moral tales began to value the more domestic moral space. In these stories, transformation happened through patience, kindness, hospitality, and tending to the hearth.

The 19th and Early 20th Centuries.

As the Industrial Revolution accelerated, writers began looking nostalgically backward toward pastoral village life and gentle animal societies, pioneering the aesthetics of the cosy escape.

I think Beatrix Potter’s anthropomorphic animal tales established the cosy domestic in a miniature setting. A few decades later, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows gifted us the ultimate blueprint for “riverbank life”—long summer picnics, cozy underground dwellings, and gentle camaraderie between Badger, Ratty, and Mole.

Mid-20th Century.

In the wake of global conflict, mid-century children’s literature and fantasy began to offer sanctuary for the weary mind.

Tove Jansson’s Moomin series, which began in 1945, remains an undisputed masterpiece when it comes to building the Cosy Fantasy genre. The Moominvalley is a safe haven where Jansson’s eccentric characters weather floods, winters, and existential dread together through art, curiosity, and boundless hospitality.

Grandfather Tolkien also tucked a deeply cosy heart into The Hobbit. (—Living the life of the hobbit has always been a fantasy of mine) The Shire and Hobbiton remind us that hobbit-holes, second breakfasts, and quiet gardens are worth fighting to protect precisely because they reject

“nasty, disturbing, uncomfortable things.”

J.R.R Tolkien, The Hobbit, Chapter 1.

Late 20th Century.

As fantasy grew more commercial a wave of authors began playfully subverting epic tropes, injecting domestic bickering, humour, and everyday magic into their worlds.

Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle combines sprawling magical curses with mundane domestic chores and family squabbles. Meanwhile, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld (—particularly the Witches and City Watch arcs) showed us how human decency, local community dynamics, and a cup of tea could anchor even the most satirical fantasy worlds.

The 21st Century.

Today, cosy fantasy has exploded from a quiet niche into an officially recognised, heavily demanded genre category, supercharged by indie publishing and community spaces like BookTok.

Travis Baldree’s Legends & Lattes acted as the watershed moment that gave the modern movement its name, telling the story of an orc mercenary who retires to open a magical coffee shop. It was joined by works like TJ Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea (—Anything by Klune is cosy!) and Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot series, cementing a cultural hunger for stories about healing, safe havens, and gentleness.

Why We Crave the Cosy.

It’s no accident that cosy fantasy is experiencing a massive boom right now. In a cultural climate defined by perpetual connectivity, economic anxiety, ecological dread, and rapid social change, our collective nervous system is perpetually stuck in fight or flight mode.

When the real world feels overwhelmingly loud and broken, traditional grimdark or high-stakes epic fantasy can sometimes feel exhausting. I know that I don’t always want to read about the fate of the universe hanging in the balance because, frankly, I am are already worried about the real one!

Cosy fantasy offers a psychological antidote, kind of like a literary sanctuary. It operates on the premise that safety, kindness, community, and personal healing are worth writing (—and reading) about.

Recommended Reading List.

Fiction:

In addition to books mentioned above, these are some wonderful Cosy Fantasy novels.

• The Spellshop, by Sarah Beth Durst.

• A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, by T. Kingfisher.

• The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches, by Sangu Mandanna

• Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries, by Heather Fawcett.

• Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter, by Heather Fawcett.

• Wildflower, by Becky Jenkinson

• A Widow’s Charm, by Caitlyn Paxson.

• The House Witch, by Delemhach

Non-Fiction Essays and Critical Texts

For those inclined.

• The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs: While not exclusively about fantasy, this text explores the psychological restoration found in returning to comforting, immersive literary spaces.

• The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales by Bruno Bettelheim: How fairy tales provide psychological safety and moral comfort.

• ‘“You’ve Built a Beautiful World”: Hope, Care, and the Utopian Ideals of the Cozy Fantastic’. By Jessica Haden Stanley. Dissertation.

Cosy Fantasy tells us that you don’t have to save the world to matter; sometimes, baking a loaf of bread, listening to a neighbour, or creating a warm space for strangers is the bravest, most revolutionary thing a person can do. In this light, I like to think of Cosy Fantasy as a rehearsal for the kind of gentle, connected world we wish we lived in.

I hope you’ve found a book to keep you cosy this week!

C M Reid at The Ink-Stained Desk.

Welcome, welcome, welcome,

If you’ve already scrolled through my media consumption round-up for July, then you will know that I’ve spent some time thinking about what I’m going to refer to as ‘through-lines’ of the books, movies and television I’ve consumed this month.

Looking back over this media, which really is a sprawling rag-tag stack ranging from Sarah Beth Durst’s whimsical fantasy and Elizabeth Gaskell’s timeless Cranford, to George Saunders’ sharp-edged Vigil. There seemed to be little any of these had in common.

However… (—because there is always a however at The Ink-Stained Desk) something jumped out at me that hooked neatly into the changes occurring in my life recently. We are looking for a new home. (—it is not the fun that it sounded like when we began; it is actually quite painful. Someone should write a horror novel about house hunting.)

When you strip away the genre tags, a common through-line emerges: Home as a Site of Survival, Memory, and Reinvention.

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Welcome, welcome, welcome,

to a slightly different kind of monthly round-up. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how easy it is to limit our recommendations and round-up strictly to fiction. But for me, every novel is just a gateway to some other media form: a book leads to an article, which leads to a film or TV series, which inevitably leads me right back to another book. They are all linked. So, I’ve decided to upgrade my reading round-up into a broader media consumption log.

In conjunction with this, over in this week’s paid subscriber post, you’ll find an article exploring a recurring theme I noticed in my consumption this month, which is the domestic space.

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Fiction.

The Faraway Inn, by Sarah Beth Durst

I picked up The Faraway Inn without realising it was YA. I have loved the adult cozy fantasies that Sarah Beth Durst has been publishing recently and was excited. I read the first two chapters, made the realisation, put it down, intending to leave it there. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the main character, so the next afternoon I picked it back up, put away my adult cynicism (— grown-up responsibilities) and read it in two sittings. It is low-stakes, teenage angst, overachieving female main character(s), set in a whimsical inn with secrets, gargoyles, a cat and a cast of magical characters (—literally magical) If you enjoyed The Spellshop and The Enchanted Greenhouse, this is for you.

Cranford, by Elizabeth Gaskell

Cranford is one of those books that sat on my shelf for over 20 years, a title I never quite seemed to reach for. But after making a promise to myself at the beginning of the year to finally tackle the books on the damn shelf, I finally picked it up.

Strictly speaking, Cranford is less a traditional novel and more a series of interwoven stories set in a small English country town, told through the perspective of Mary Smith, a frequent visitor to the area. The bulk of the tales revolve around Miss Deborah Jenkyns and her sister, Miss Matty, offering a glimpse into their pasts, extended families, and old beaux.

It is a sweet look at small-town life that is funny in places and genuinely sad in others. However, I think it is best enjoyed by taking in a story here and there, rather than doing what I did and reading it straight through. By the end, reading it all in one go made the episodic structure start to feel a bit repetitive and grating.

Vigil, by George Saunders

George Saunders’ newest offering comes in novella form. It follows Jill—who is either an angel or simply a helpful spirit, though what she actually is remains wonderfully ambiguous. Her task is to help a dying, immoral businessman named K.J. Boone come to terms with the wrongs of his past, pushing him to finally take accountability rather than making excuses for his actions.

Saunders doesn’t tread lightly with his themes in Vigil, and the book can occasionally come off as a bit heavy-handed or overly didactic. Boone’s business empire caused massive environmental destruction. Jill trying to have him take accountability for this leads to heavy environmental and climate crisis discussions that raise pressing questions about who is to blame and how they should be held accountable. Personally, I didn’t mind that element at all, as these are urgent and legitimate questions to explore.

The Little Friend, by Donna Tartt

I’m almost embarrassed to admit this is only my second Donna Tartt (—I haven’t read The Goldfinch yet, but intend to very soon). Given the length of her books, I’m secretly grateful she only publishes once every decade (—though that also means we are well overdue for a new Tartt novel!)

Reading The Little Friend was quite an experience. I felt like I was holding my breath the entire time, making it both an exhilarating and exhausting read.

We follow Harriet as she tries to solve the mystery of who murdered her brother 12 years prior. Because she was only a baby at the time and remembers nothing, we as readers discover things right along with her. Set deep in the South, the book very aptly earns its Southern Gothic label. With its snakes, old houses, nosy neighbours, and unsolved murder, I absolutely loved it!

On a side note: there is something I love about a dark novel told from a child’s perspective. King does this really well; think of It, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, certain chapters of Needful Things and Carrie. Also, there’s The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan and Boy Swallows Universe by Dalton. Would love to hear of any others you recommend!

We Sold Our Souls, by Grady Hendrix

We Sold Our Souls was the only Grady Hendrix book I hadn’t read yet, and it taught me a very important lesson: sometimes the narrator of an audiobook is the entire reason you aren’t enjoying a book. I don’t know what it was, but I just kept dreading hitting play on this one. Finally, I decided to borrow the physical book from my library, picked it up right where I had left off, and ended up loving the story.

In this novel, we follow Kris, a former heavy metal guitarist who was ousted from her band under mysterious circumstances she can no longer remember. The book is her journey to piece together the terrifying occurrences of that night, ultimately culminating in a crazy concert scene you really have to read to believe (—these epic final scenes are where Grady Hendrix truly shines!).

Non-Fiction.

Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home, by Susan Hill

This book was an accidental find. I was trying to find a second-hand copy of Howard’s End after watching the film (—as I discuss below) and this came up in the search results. I noted the author (—the author of The Woman in Black and Mrs de Winter) and clicked add to cart. This is a collection of essays about books and reading, each inspired by books Hill discovers forgotten around her home. Susan Hill has close to 30 books to her name and has been in and around the publishing industry for decades. My favourite thing about this book is the many little memories of other authors she has crossed paths with; for example, there is a wonderful scene where she is in the library and picks up a book an elderly gentleman has dropped, only to discover the elderly gentleman is E. M Foster! Can you imagine!

The Population Bomb, by Dr. Paul Ehrlich.

Reading The Population Bomb was research for a novel I’m currently working on. Published in the late 1960s, it’s an influential and intensely controversial environmental warning book built on a simple premise: the Earth’s human population is growing at an exponential rate that will soon outstrip our ability to produce food, leading to total global collapse and—basically—our doom.

It is pure fear-mongering. The author takes mid-century statistics and facts entirely out of context, over-confabulating to the point where you can practically hear his heavy, panicked breathing straight through the pages. Honestly? It’s absolute gold for what I’m using it for.

Movies & Television.

Howards End, directed by James Ivory

Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins, Helena Bonham Carter, and Vanessa Redgrave—the cast is what initially drew me to this one, along with the fact that it was streaming for free on my local library’s service (thank you, Hoopla!).

The film apparently stays very faithful to the novel, leaving almost nothing out. (I’ll be reading the book in August, so look out for that review!) The story follows two very different families who become entangled in various ways. While it has many subplots, the main thread revolves around Ruth Wilcox, the owner of Howards End, who on her deathbed gifts the estate to a friend. Because no one outside the family knows about this dying wish, they simply ignore it and carry on with their lives—even as the two families keep crossing paths.

Obsession.

Obsession stayed on my mind for days after I watched it, and to this day, a scene from the movie will still occasionally creep back into my thoughts. What I expected to be a straightforward horror movie turned out to be something much more compelling: a sharp discussion of consent, a main character who was actually the villain all along, and an ending that completely pulled the rug out from under me. (—seriously, how does some go on after that??) (—also, my teenage children want to know who gets all that money?)

Suffice it to say it was on my mind so much that I wrote an article about it last week. You can find it here:

Why horror Loves To Grant A Wish.

The Little House on the Prairie- (2026) Netflix.

I happened upon the trailer for this adaptation ages ago and have been waiting for its release on the edge of my seat. The original books and television series hold such a special place in my childhood, so I really loved the fresh creative choices made here. While it stayed much closer to the books in certain parts, it changed others entirely. (—leaving myself and many other fans asking, “Where is Carrie?”)

For me, the standout improvement was the inclusion of an Indigenous perspective on the town’s settlement. This was completely absent from both the original books and past television adaptations, and bringing it to light added a vital layer of depth and historical weight to the story.

Of course, it ended on a cliffhanger, so I am desperately hoping for a second season soon! Fans of Anne with an E and The Durrells in Corfu will feel right at home with this series.

And with that, my July reading and viewing journey comes to a close. Be sure to head over to the Ink-Stained Desk website for my companion article, where I dive deeper into these stories to explore a common thread: finding the extraordinary in the quiet corners of domestic spaces.

I hope you’ve found something here to add to your own TBR pile

Have a wonderful weekend!

C M Reid at The Ink-Stained Desk

Welcome, welcome, welcome,

If you’ve been reading The Ink-Stained Desk for a while, you’ll know I’m deep in the middle of my current work in progress, an eco-feminist thriller about a community who take sustainability a step too far. As I mentioned in a recent article about the changing ethics of literary villains, every time I have to write a line of dialogue for this one specific character, I get that weird, uncomfortable ick feeling in my stomach. He’s just creepy, and not in a good way. This guy really creeps me out, which is weird, because he’s my creation.

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Thank you for investing in my voice and making this space possible. Your support gives me the freedom to explore these ideas, wrestle with my writing, and share it all with you every week. This space is an oasis for me, and I’m honoured to have you here as part of the process. Thank you for helping me keep the lights on—I’ll see you in the comments!

Welcome, welcome, welcome

So, I finally watched Obsession—and it was an experience. A friend of mine pointed out that the film reminded her of The Craft, and I initially drew a blank (—because it reminded me of The Exorcist) until she reminded me of how the coven cast a spell on Chris Hooker to force him to fall in love. (—It has really been years since I last saw The Craft, and I’m due for a rewatch) Anyway, that conversation got me thinking about the short story The Monkey’s Paw—which I went on a deep dive about here:

The Monkey's Paw by W. W. Jacobs

and the larger, pervasive idea of making wishes in horror.

These are my thoughts.

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Welcome, welcome, welcome,

to this month’s Genre Genealogy, where we trace the roots and influences of our favourite genres together. If you missed the survey earlier this month, I put out a few of the half-finished, over-contemplated Genre Genealogies that are sitting in my drafts folder. The consensus was Southern Gothic, although if you voted for something else, I promise it is coming!

And so, today, we explore the Southern Gothic. (— I have recently finished watching the second season of The Mayfair Witches and am currently reading Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend for the first time, so I was very pleased to see this was the most popular genre.)

If you make it to the bottom of this article, prepare yourself for fiction and non-fiction reading lists and I may have compiled a playlist as well…

The Southern Gothic is not just a regional subgenre. It is a literary tradition that mines the tensions, the history, and the haunted landscapes of the American South. To enter a Southern Gothic text is to walk into a house where the doors are locked, the floorboards are groaning, and the people inside are wrestling with secrets they cannot quite name.

The Anatomy of the Southern Gothic.

To recognise the texts of the genre, we must first look at its anatomy. What makes the Southern Gothic different from other Gothic texts?

• The Grotesque: In this genre, the physical is almost always a roadmap for the moral. The Misfit (—a character with a physical deformity, a social eccentricity, or a psychological crack) becomes a symbol for the decay of the society surrounding them. (—this person is sometimes refered to as the ’freak’, as coined by Flannery O’Connor)

• The Setting: The landscape is a character rather than just a setting. Whether it is a crumbling antebellum mansion or a desolate, sun-bleached field, the setting feels alive, oppressive, and heavy with the weight of time.

• The Burden of History: Faulkner famously said:

  ”The past is never dead. It is not even past”

  This quote is like the North Star of Southern Gothic. The shadows of the Civil War, the institutional stain of slavery, and the rigidity of class structures are the ghosts that refuse to leave the room.

• The Outsider: Most narratives center on the alienated figure—the person who sees the rot in the foundation but is powerless to repair it. They are often trapped by their environment, unable to escape the gravity of their own lineage.

• Religion and Piety: There is an almost rhythmic juxtaposition between the sacred and the profane in Southern Gothic. The stories often look at how religious zealotry sits uncomfortably alongside dark, violent human impulses.

The Roots and Influences of Southern Gothic.

Note: Any and all of the following texts and stories will not satisfy every characteristic of the Gothic Horror genre outlined above. These are roots and influences that lead up to it in the present; in other words, they are not explicitly Gothic Horror texts in and of themselves.

Mythological Roots.

The Southern Gothic’s lineage stretches back to the ancient Greek tragedies, where the inevitability of fate and the idea that you cannot outrun your bloodline anchored the narrative.

• The House of Atreus: The quintessential myth of the intergenerational curse. Just as the sins of the fathers plague the descendants of Atreus, Southern Gothic characters are often shackled to the moral failures of their ancestors, particularly regarding the history of plantation society.

• The Furies (Erinyes): These ancient deities represented the inescapable nature of guilt. In Southern Gothic, the past operates as a secular Furies—relentless, driving the characters toward a reckoning they cannot outrun.

• Oedipus/Thebes: Follows the theme of hidden identity, and the devastating realisation of one’s own complicity in the decay of the land is a recurring motif.

The 19th-Century Foundations.

While the Southern Gothic as a term solidified in the 20th century, I think we can still see its ideas in the 1800s. The transition from American Romanticism to a darker, more sceptical view of the human condition found its champion in Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe was the architect of this psychological erosion. In works like The Fall of the House of Usher, he established the doomed estate. This mansion literally and figuratively collapses under the weight of its own lineage and secrets. Similarly, stories like The Black Cat and Ligeia moved the Gothic inward. These stories had phantoms that did not roam the halls but instead consumed the mind. This era acted as the essential bridge, stripping away the chivalric veneer of Southern plantation life to reveal the rot underneath, proving that the American landscape was already ripe for horror.

The Golden Age (1920s–1950s).

This was the era when the Southern Gothic truly solidified its place in the American canon. Disillusioned by two World Wars and the shifting economic realities of the South, writers did what they do best and turned their lenses to the wreckage.

• William Faulkner gave us the architecture of decay, using non-linear time and shifting perspectives to show how history suffocates the present. In The Sound and the Fury, the fragmented narrative reflects the internal disintegration of the Compson family, while Absalom, Absalom! explores how the obsession with lineage and racial status acts as a slow-acting poison on the land.

• Flannery O’Connor weaponized the grotesque, using the freak (—misfit) to deliver flashes of divine grace or, more often, a stark, uncomfortable revelation. Her novel Wise Blood uses the bizarre, fanatical protagonist Hazel Motes to challenge the shallow religiosity of the South, and her short story ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ remains the genre’s gold standard for the sudden, violent intersection of grace and malice. (—this is one of my favourite of O’Connor’s short stories, there’s something about unnamed characters that I really enjoy.)

• Carson McCullers explored the isolation of the heart, painting the South as a place where loneliness is a physical geography. In The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, the deaf-mute John Singer serves as a hollow vessel for the town’s secrets, while The Member of the Wedding captures the painful, claustrophobic transition of adolescence in a world that feels permanently stuck.

The Expansion (1960s–1990s)

As the 20th century progressed, the traditional Gothic began to widen its scope. The genre moved past the old houses and into the borderlands and the margins. We can see this shift in the Southern Gothic as well.

• Cormac McCarthy pulled the genre into the harsh, violent light of the border, proving that the Gothic sensibility could survive in the desert in works like Child of God.

• Alice Walker and other writers began to reclaim the genre, using it to confront the specific, intersectional traumas of race and gender, turning the haunted house into a metaphor for systemic oppression in powerful works such as The Color Purple.

The Anne Rice Influence.

Anne Rice transformed the haunted landscape by centring her work on the decadence of New Orleans. By blending Gothic tradition with a lush, erotic, and deeply historical sensibility, Rice, particularly in The Vampire Chronicles (—Interview with the Vampire) and The Mayfair Witches (specifically The Witching Hour) reimagined the haunted house as a living, breathing history of bloodlines, curses, holding the eternal weight of memory. Her work showed that the Southern Gothic could be glamorous, transgressive, and inextricably linked to the literal architecture of the city.

The Contemporary Era (2000s–Present).

Today, we are seeing the New Southern Gothic. It’s a genre that isn’t afraid to borrow from noir, magical realism, and modern horror.

• Jesmyn Ward, who captures the modern rural struggle of poverty, addiction, and environmental degradation in Sing, Unburied, Sing. The novel uses the literal ghosts of the past to substantiate the generational trauma that keeps the living haunted.

• Daniel Woodrell, whose country noir Winter’s Bone uses the harsh, clannish structure of the Ozarks to reveal that the decaying mansion has simply been replaced by the decaying economic and social structures of modern America.

Recommended Reading.

If you want to dive deeper into the darker corners of the genre, here are a few essential titles that explore the haunted South from unique angles:

• The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix: A brilliant contemporary take on the genre that blends domestic satire with visceral horror, showing how the polished facade of the 1990s South can hide absolute monsters.

• The Little Friend by Donna Tartt: A masterful examination of childhood, revenge, and the humid rot of Mississippi, perfectly capturing the slow-burn dread of the Southern Gothic. (—my current read, which I’m having trouble putting down.)

• The Elementals by Michael McDowell: Often cited as one of the best haunted house novels ever written, this follows two families at a coastal Alabama summer home where the sand itself seems alive and hungry.

• Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison: A harrowing look at the cycle of poverty and abuse in the South. While not supernatural Gothic, it captures the psychological grotesque and systemic trauma that defines the genre.

• Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn: A modern noir that masterfully dissects the suffocating, small-town secrets and twisted family legacies of the deep South.

• The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams: If you want the dramatic, theatrical heart of the genre, this play remains the gold standard for exploring the entrapment of memory and the fading glory of the Southern past.

Recommended Non-Fiction.

For those inclined, here are some of the texts I perused for this genealogy:

Books:

• “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose” by Flannery O’Connor: This is the definitive text on the genre. O’Connor’s essays on the grotesque and the craft of writing are essential for anyone who wants to understand why the Southern Gothic feels the way it does.

• The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic, Edited by Susan Castillo Street: This book covers not only iconic figures of Southern literature but also other less well-known writers, and examines gothic imagery in film and in contemporary television programmes (—True Blood !)

• Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts, Edited by Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson: The ghosts of race, gender, and identity in the South.

Scholarly & Cultural Articles.

Get your free JSTOR account! (No, this is not sponsored. I’m just so grateful to be able to read 100 academic articles a month for free and so can you!)

• Spiegel, Alan. ‘A Theory of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction’. The Georgia Review, vol. 26, no. 4, 1972, pp. 426–37. JSTOR.

• Palmer, Louis H. ‘Southern Gothic and Appalachian Gothic: A Comparative Look at Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy’. Journal of the Appalachian Studies Association, vol. 3, 1991, pp. 166–76. JSTOR.

• Hennelly, Mark M. ‘Framing the Gothic: From Pillar to Post-Structuralism’. College Literature, vol. 28, no. 3, 2001, pp. 68–87. JSTOR.

A Southern Gothic Playlist.

The Southern Gothic is a genre that refuses to let us look away from the things we would rather bury beneath the floorboards. It reminds us that our stories are tethered to the dirt we stand on, and that the past, in all its messy, tragic, beautiful complexity, is always waiting for us just around the corner. We remain drawn to the shadows of the South because, in the end, we’re all looking for a way to make peace with the ghosts of our own making.

I’m going to go lie down now, I’m exhausted! Have a great week!

C M Reid at The Ink-Stained Desk.

Welcome, welcome, welcome,

To another free Friday thematic essay from The Ink-Stained Desk.

This week, after finally finishing the second season of The Mayfair Witches, watching the trailer for Practical Magic 2 too many times (—is anyone else who has read the books confused by it?), and reading Christie Anne Jones’ debut, Theodora’s Tea Shop, I’ve been thinking about witches and the way their portrayal has evolved from early literature and fairy tales, to the present.

We often think of the witch as a very specific figure. She is a woman with a pointed hat and a bubbling cauldron. She lives in an isolated cottage and cackles in the woods. But if we look at the literary history of the witch, we will find that it is something much more fluid. Throughout history, the way the witch has been portrayed is a direct reflection of society’s deepest anxieties, control mechanisms, and, eventually, its dreams of liberation.

The Classical Roots.

In the ancient world, the witch was synonymous with chaos. Think of Homer’s Circe, who turned men into swine, or Ovid’s Medea, who navigated the intersections of love and betrayal. These women were practitioners of magic, but perhaps more importantly, they wielded power entirely independent of male authority.

In the eyes of ancient writers, this was fundamentally dangerous. For the Greeks, these women weren’t necessarily evil as we think of evil today. It was more that she was a manifestation of the terrifying reality that not everything in the world could be governed by the laws of men (—how terrifying!). She was a reminder of a wilder, older world that required propitiation rather than control.

The Fairy Tale Foundation.

If the Classical witch was a goddess-like threat, the fairy tale witch became a domestic one. In the folklore traditions—most famously codified by the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault—the witch was transposed from the halls of power to the literal margins of society (— read ‘the dark, foreboding woods’)

In stories like Hansel and Gretel, the witch becomes a creature who lives on the periphery and views children not as humans, but as sustenance. This solidified the archetype of the Crone: the older woman living in isolation. By moving the witch to the woods, these stories gave a physical location to societal fears about aging women and those living outside the traditional family structure. The witch in the fairy tale is the antithesis of the good mother. She is the danger lurking just outside the village, waiting to dismantle the family unit.

The Early Modern.

As we move into the Early Modern era, the literary witch takes a darker, more localized turn. Here, the archetype shifts from a powerful sorceress or a fairy-tale villain to a symbol of betrayal and religious corruption.

Shakespeare’s Macbeth gives us the quintessential version: the weird sisters, creatures of the margins who exist in the fog and the filth. By this time, the literary portrayal had begun to mirror real-world anxieties. We were deep in the era of the witch trials, where societal pressures against aging women, healers, and those living on the fringes of village life were reaching a fever pitch.

Literature became the primary way we processed the trauma and the terror of these trials (—literature always is!) Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, while written in the 20th century, stands as the defining literary examination of the 1692 Salem witch trials. Miller’s work demonstrates how the witch was used as a vessel for justifying the persecution of the marginalised. She was a scapegoat for societal instability, used to explain away crop failures, illness, or personal misfortune. In these narratives, the accusation of witchcraft served as a tool for enforcing conformity and purging anyone who threatened the existing power structure.

The Victorian & Gothic Turn.

By the 19th century, the witch undergoes a shift toward the Gothic, where she becomes a figure of inherited trauma and psychological decay. This era saw a fascination with occultism and the “otherness” of women who possessed intellectual or spiritual power.

In F. Marion Crawford’s The Witch of Prague (1891) or H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887), for instance, we see the emergence of the witch as a figure of atmospheric mystery and dark capability. Unlike the crude, forest-dwelling hag of fairy tales, the Victorian witch was a woman who refused to conform to the rigid standard of the Angel in the House. (—Virginia Woolf often critcised the ‘Angel in the House’ and I like to think that perhaps she was a witch)

And so the witch became a code for the woman who lived on the fringes of domestic respectability, representing the fear of a history that refuses to stay buried. By centering stories around the figure of the witch, Victorian and Gothic writers explored the moral rot of their own communities, using the witch as a metaphor for the female ancestor whose voice was silenced, only to return as an atmospheric, haunting presence.

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The 20th Century.

In the 20th century, we began to see the cracks in the armor of the ‘villainous’ witch. This was an era of deconstruction. Writers started to ask: Why is she evil? What did the world do to her to make her this way?

This was the century of empathy. The most significant shift was the movement toward the humanized villain. We saw authors begin to peel back the layers of characters like the Wicked Witch of the West from L. Frank Baum’s original The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, turning her from a flat caricature into a tragic, complex individual who was failed by the systems of power around her. This era was less about celebrating the witch’s magic and more about critiquing the society that labeled her a monster in the first place. It was the century where we started to wonder if the real villain was the establishment, not the woman with the broomstick.

The 21st Century.

In our current century, we have fully embraced the Witch as Heroine. The 21st-century witch is an icon of agency, sisterhood, and reclamation.

Modern literature has transformed the witch into the ultimate avatar for the outsider. Whether in YA fantasy or contemporary literary fiction, the witch now represents the intersectional, the rebel, and the self-actualized woman. This version of the witch serves as a symbol of radical autonomy. She is the woman who claims her power, defines her own morality, and creates her own community.

Contemporary works like Rachel Harrison’s Cackle perfectly illustrate this evolution. It explores the allure of the witch’s path as a rejection of societal expectations and a choice for self-actualization. Similarly, books like Madeline Miller’s Circe or Alexis Henderson’s The Year of the Witching show us that we are no longer afraid of her. Rather, we are looking to her for a roadmap of how to survive and thrive in a world built for someone else.

A Witchy Reading List.

If you’re looking to explore these themes further, here are some reads that expand on the evolution of the witch, I could list 100 more, but I’d be here for hours:

• The Lives of the Mayfair Witches by Anne Rice: One of my all time favourite series. A sprawling, Gothic epic that dives deep into the legacy of power, family secrets, and the visceral, messy side of being a witch.

• The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike: A sharp, often biting 20th-century look at the power dynamics of female friendship and societal expectations in a small town.

• The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow: An incredible piece of historical fantasy that links the witch to the fight for women’s suffrage; a perfect example of 21st-century reclamation.

• Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman: A classic in its own right. A beautiful exploration of domestic magic, the curse of reputation, and the enduring bond of sisterhood.

• Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett: Part of the Disc World series, although I think this stands up on its own. A brilliant, satirical subversion of the wizarding trope that highlights the absurdity of gender-restricted power structures.

• The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna: A modern, cozy, and uplifting look at found family and the importance of claiming one’s own space in the world.

• The Lighthouse Witches by C.J. Cooke: A chilling and atmospheric look at folklore, motherhood, and the way the “witch” myth can be twisted by time and trauma.

The witch has evolved from a terrifying monster used to police behaviour into a symbol of empowerment used to critique it. She remains a resonant figure because we still have plenty to fear. We fear what we do not understand, but we celebrate what we want to become. By turning the witch from a scapegoat into a sovereign figure, literature has allowed us to take back the power that was once used against us.

Thanks for reading to the end, I hope you have a great weekend,

C M Reid at The Ink-Stained Desk.

In my deep dive article this week, I traced the evolution of the witch. We saw her transform from a manifestation of patriarchal fear (—basically a supernatural scapegoat) into a symbol of agency and sovereignty. This got me thinking, if the witch is the supernatural vessel for our societal anxieties, what happens when we strip away the magic, and the other is just an ordinary woman?

The reality is that literature has long used the Witch label as a shortcut, but witches were not the only persecuted women. Throughout literary history, whenever a woman has threatened the status quo, whether through her sexuality, her intellect, or by refusing to conform, society has devised a label to contain her.

Whether that label is adulteress, madwoman, or fallen woman, the mechanism of control remains identical to that of the witch hunt: isolation, public shaming, and the policing of her body and mind. So today in Marginalia & Miscellany, we’re emerging from the forest, putting down the potions and stepping into the parlour to look at the other ways literature has tried to silence women. (—tried being the operative word)

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Welcome, welcome, welcome,

We’ve reached mid-winter here in Australia, and it is mild to say the least. There are constant reports of ‘the worst ski season in decades’, and my children are still walking around without jumpers (although they are teenage boys, so I’m not sure they’ve worn anything but short sleeves for several years). I find this both pleasant and a little worrying.

I am, very happily, currently on mid-year break from uni and trying very hard to complete my current work in progress before next semester. I am making good progress and having a good time creating some very unlikable characters (—one in particular gives me the ick every time I write any of his dialogue).

Anyway, it’s time for the monthly recap. This month was a month of fantasy, offbeat apocalypses, and a book on writing craft that I want to recommend to everyone!

The Sundial, by Shirley Jackson.

I’ve been needing to finish my read of The Sundial for longer than I want to admit here, but for some reason, it kept getting relegated to the bottom of the pile on my bedside table. I finally finished it, and I must say that the end was interesting, but in a good way. If you’ve never come across this lesser-known Shirley Jackson (—author of The Haunting of Hill House and The Lottery), it follows the Halloran family. When Aunt Fanny believes the spirit of her long-dead father has come to warn her of a coming apocalypse, the family prepare to bunker down in the house. I think, if you love plot, this one is not for you, not a lot actually happens. But if you read for character, Shirley Jackson has created some of the wittiest, snarkiest, horrible people you’re ever going to come across in The Sundial!

The Residency, by C. J Major. (Publication: 4th August 2026)

Ginny is a single mum and an artist, although the art has taken a backseat in life lately. So, it is a surprise when she receives an offer for an artist’s residency on a small, remote Scottish island, a residency she didn't even apply for. At first, all seems perfect. The house is beautiful, her daughter is eagerly welcomed at the island's school, and the other residents are kind, if a little odd. Soon, Ginny begins noticing things aren't quite right. She signed an agreement before coming to the island and may not have looked closely enough, or taken seriously enough, the rules of her residency.
This story deals with themes of failure as an artist. It brought to mind an episode of Charmed (—yes, I'm going there) in season two, where a person gets magically locked in a painting. There are definitely Picture of Dorian Gray vibes, but crossed with the revenge of a failed artist.

Femlandia, by Christina Dalcher.

Femlandia was recommended to me by a friend when I was trying to explain the concept of my novel. Of course, I went out and found it, because there is nothing scarier than thinking someone has already written the thing you are writing. Needless to say, this is not nearly the same (—and I clearly need to work on my elevator pitch). I did enjoy Femlandia, though. It is set in a newly post-apocalyptic world, inside a women-only community. The newly arrived protagonist begins to question how babies are still being born, hint, it’s not immaculate conception. This novel brought to mind Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, but the voice is closer to a contemporary chick lit vibe.

The School For Good Mothers, by Jessamine Chan.

After thoroughly enjoying The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami in January, I’ve been searching for something similar that also explores themes of modern surveillance set in a near future, with ‘this might happen if things keep going the way we’re heading’ vibes. This hit the mark exactly! The School for Good Mothers follows Frida Lui, who has a ‘very bad day’ and loses custody of her small daughter. In order to have her rights returned, she must spend a year in a ‘school’, learning how to be a good parent. This book goes deep into the ridiculousness of modern parenting expectations, surveillance culture, and the government’s child protection laws.

Caroline: Little House Revisited, by Sarah Miller.

I wrote a little about this book in last week’s article; you can find that below.

Female Led Retellings

Suffice it to say that I loved this. Little House on the Prairie is pure nostalgia for me, and reading the story from the mother’s point of view gave me a whole new respect for the resiliance of women. I highly, highly recommend it.

Theodora’s Tea Shop, by Christie Anne Jones (Publication: July 28th, 2026)

Theodora’s Tea Shop is the upcoming release for YouTuber Christine Anne Jones. If you haven’t seen her channel and you are a writer, enjoy bookish type content or just cozy vlog type videos, I recommend you have a look.

I was excited for this one, which has been marketed as a cozy fantasy with dark elements, and it is that. I just wanted more. I think the problem is that my expectations were so high, having followed the creation, querying and submission process for this book. Then waiting for a longer than usual time for the ARC (—which I understand drums up interest and desire)… The story felt a little disjointed, as if it were two stories connected in the middle, or as if it might have done better as a duology. The characters, although likeable, were not as fleshed out as I wanted. Yes, they had wants and needs and fears and whatever, but they felt lacking in substance.

I still recommend this book, if only for the beautiful descriptions and world-building.

Several Short Sentences About Writing, by Verlyn Klinkenborg.

I promised myself I would read more books on writing craft this year. It’s already July, and although this is only the second one I’ve picked up, I’m very happy with the choice. I’d seen this book—with its minimalist cover and slim profile, floating around everywhere, so I finally decided to buy it. It is packed with so many nuggets of wisdom and (—as one would expect) beautifully constructed sentences that I actually began writing them down.

Some of my favourites:

• “There is no correlation between longer sentences and better sentences.”

• “You can only become a better writer by becoming a better reader. You have far more experience as a reader than a writer.”

• “A true metaphor is a swift and violent twisting of language. A renaming of the already named… Like any other rhetorical device, the less you use it, the more effective it is.”

• “A cliche isn’t just a familiar, overused saying. It’s the debris of someone else’s thinking.”

I think this book would benefit everyone, those writing fiction, non-fiction, or even just a simple email.

Well, that’s all from me for this week. I hope you’ve found something that has piqued your interest.

Have a great weekend,

C M Reid at The Ink-Stained Desk.

There was a time when the monster stayed in the dungeon. Dracula didn’t want to be understood. Sauron didn’t need a tragic childhood to justify the destruction of Middle-earth. Judge Holden didn’t need a complex motive to embody the utter, chaotic cruelty of the frontier. The villain didn’t need a reason to be villainous—he just was.

But if we look at our contemporary fiction today, the so called Black Hat villain is an endangered species. In their place, we have ‘the misunderstood anti-hero’, the ‘villain with a point’, and the ‘tragic antagonist’. Why do we suddenly want to empathysis with the bag guy?

In this deep dive, I want to look at why this shift occurred, and ask the question: Have we traded genuine narrative depth for a hollow moral relativism? Are we losing the ability to tell good from evil in our stories?

Keep reading for the philosophy, tropes of villainy, and what is perhaps a too-long reading list (—I apologise in advance).

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Welcome, welcome, welcome,

After writing last week’s Genre Genealogy, I’ve been ruminating about the Porous Self, the classic Sad Girl Horror protagonist whose internal wreckage is so loud it physically warps the world around her. In literature, we call that a state of being. It’s an honest, messy collapse of the walls between a character’s mind and reality. If I look around myself and the internet at large, I think we’re currently doing the influencer version. We’ve effectively taken the actual, painful work of unravelling and turned it into an aesthetic. We’ve branded disintegration. They’re performing Sad Girl Horror.

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Welcome, welcome, welcome,

This week, I wanted to think a little about retellings, specifically those retold from the marginalised perspective. I recently finished the audiobook for Caroline: Little House Revisited by Sarah Miller, and it hit me in a way I didn’t expect. For as long as I can remember, the Little House on the Prairie series was the backbone of my childhood nostalgia. I’ve read all the books, watched the TV show multiple times in numerous binge-watch sessions and was irrationally excited to see there is a remake coming out on Netflix soon. I knew the story of the Ingalls family by heart —or so I thought. Hearing that same story through the mother’s point of view felt like the story shifted in weight. The journey from Pepin, Wisconsin, to the Osage Diminished Reserve in Kansas always felt like a great adventure. And I suppose it was for the young Laura Ingalls. But this same journey, told from her mother’s perspective, is one of labour, fear, and the quiet, often invisible, endurance of a woman holding a family together on the frontier.

Miller’s portrayal of Caroline got me thinking about the wave of retellings that have dominated the last decade of publishing. By taking stories we’ve known forever and sliding the lens over to the women, who were often the enslaved or the voiceless, all previously relegated to the background, we are engaging in a radical feminist act.

For centuries, history and myth have been written from a single, more often than not male-centred perspective. And when we only hear one version of a story, it seems to become truth. When we only see female characters as objects, helpers, or victims in someone else’s journey, we internalise a version of the world where women don’t have their own internal lives.

Retellings break that monolith. They remind us that the monsters, the damsels, and the matriarchs have always been there, dealing with their own complicated, messy, and heroic business. When we change the perspective, we also change who gets to be the hero.

What I find most exciting is the directness of this trend and how authors are reclaiming the space of the classic. Choosing a canonical text and forcing it to make room for a silenced voice, and at the same time allowing readers to conduct an interrogation of the old one.

The Odyssey is perhaps the most fertile ground for this reclamation. Take, for instance, Madeline Miller’s Circe. Miller took a character formerly cast as a mere obstacle in Odysseus’s journey—a witch who turns men into pigs—and gave her a soul. This allows us to watch her grow from a scorned nymph to a woman of immense, self-determined power. Then there’s Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, which similarly deconstructs Homer’s epic, shifting the focus away from the hero’s journey entirely to land squarely on Penelope’s internal world, exposing the cold, calculated endurance required to survive her husband’s decades-long absence.

Then there is the work of authors like Alice Randall in The Wind Done Gone. By reimagining Gone with the Wind through the eyes of a formerly enslaved woman, she dismantles the romanticised mythology of the Antebellum South. She forced the reader to look at the same landscape and see the horror, the labour, and the humanity that the original text deliberately obscured (—Gone with the Wind is one of my favourites, but there’s no denying the willful ignorance it took to write an entire book about the Antebellum South without mentioning the point of view of the enslaved. And yes, I know it’s focused on Scarlett, who would have likely been oblivious, but come on !!)

We must also acknowledge the foundations laid by Jean Rhys. In Wide Sargasso Sea, she took ‘the madwoman in the attic’ from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and gave her a name and a heartbreaking history, transforming a caricature into a complex, tragic figure defined by colonial erasure. (—Seriously, go read Wide Sargasso Sea.)

Finally, consider Jodi Lynn Anderson’s Tiger Lily. By shifting the perspective of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan to the indigenous princess, Anderson moves the narrative away from the whimsy of childhood and into the visceral, grounded reality of a woman navigating love and war in a world that often treats her as a secondary prop.

This is the power of the pivot: it’s an act of truth-telling.

My Dream Retellings: A Wishlist.

While writing this article, I’ve been considering some dream retellings.
(—Writers, take heed!) I would love to see more creators tackle the classics with a sharp, modern edge:

• The Brides of Dracula: Instead of just being plot devices for Stoker’s Count, I want a slow-burn horror novel from the perspective of the Brides, exploring their own twisted, immortal sisterhood. (—I feel like this exists already. If anyone knows, please send me over the title!)

• Sybil Vane: We’ve all read The Picture of Dorian Gray, but what if Sybil Vane had her own agency? I’d love a version where she isn’t a tragic sacrifice, but has her own agency.

• The Phantom’s Music Teacher: Forget the romance; let’s see a version of The Phantom of the Opera that leans into the musical obsession and the psychological thrill of the underground, told entirely from Christine’s perspective as she unearths the secrets of the Opera House.

• Wendy’s Neverland: Let’s take Peter Pan and put it through the lens of Wendy. I want to see a story that explores the stifling Victorian reality she was desperate to escape, and the complicated, often eerie, burden of being the Mother to a group of boys who refuse to grow up. I’ve seen countless Wendy books that explore what happens after Neverland, but never a book of the Peter Pan story through Wendy’s eyes.

• Sarah Dolittle: The Dr Dolittle of the books was never married (—this is a Hollywood evolution.) However, he did have a sister, whom I would love to hear from. Can you imagine living with all those animals??

Other Re-tellings I Think You’d Enjoy.

• The Scent of Oranges, by Kathy George: Oliver Twist, from the point of view of Nancy.

• Estella, by Kathy George: Great Expectations from the point of view of Estella. (—this one is brilliant!)

• Marmee, by Sarah Miller: Little Women, from the point of view of Marmee.

• Ophelia, by Lisa Klein: The point of view of Ophelia from Hamlet. (—Also a really, really good movie.)

And I think it’s worth mentioning Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life, by Anna Funder, here as well. This is an investigative biography that uncovers the life of Eileen O'Shaughnessy, the essential, often-erased wife of George Orwell, who (—I think it is safe to say) enabled his literary genius. Funder exposes the quiet, unacknowledged domestic labour often overshadowed by the great man myth.

I really hope this isn’t just a passing phase. There are countless women in the margins of history, classic literature, and folklore whose stories deserve to be brought into the light. We need more stories that challenge the official record.

Every time we read a book that pivots the perspective, we are participating in a conversation that has been happening for centuries. We are finally, thankfully, listening to the other side.

Is there a classic story where you always felt the female character deserved a better, or at least a louder, arc? Or perhaps a villainess you’ve always wanted to hear from? Who would you want to see a story from next? Let me know in the comments!

That’s all for now,

Have a great weekend!

C M Reid at The Ink-Stained Desk.

Welcome, welcome, welcome,

to this month’s Genre Genealogy, where we trace the roots and influences of our favourite genres together. This month, I’ve wrestled with a recurring question: Is Sad Girl Horror a trope, or is it a genre? Where does the Sad Girl fit into our literary considerations?

While Sad Girl Lit has become the catch-all term for female-centric novels about melancholy and alienation, I think it misses the core of what is going on in these stories. Today, I am reclassifying them as Sad Girl Horror—a genre where the horror manifests from the protagonist’s internal rot.

Currently, much of the market treats the Sad Girl as an aesthetic. She’s a moody, curated vibe, characterised by lace, pills, unmade beds, and a specific brand of ethereal suffering. In this sense, she is a trope: a collection of shorthand signals used to show that a protagonist is troubled without necessarily exploring the why or the consequences of that trouble. When it’s just a trope, the sadness is a prop, not a narrative force.

But the Sad Girl moves into genre territory when that sadness ceases to be an aesthetic choice and becomes the engine of the plot. In Sad Girl Horror, surviving isn’t the point (—she isn’t running from a monster or a psycho with a chainsaw), instead the point is the messy, painful reality of what’s happening inside her.

The Anatomy of Sad Girl Horror.

As is our usual way, to properly explore the lineage of Sad Girl Horror, we must first clarify its defining characteristics. We must ask ourselves, what makes this genre different from other horror texts?

• The Porous Self (Internalised Stakes): In these stories, the protagonist’s brain dictates the rules of the physical world. Her internal emotional state (—could be grief, numbness, or obsession) literally warps her surroundings. If she feels hollowed out or decaying on the inside, the house, the apartment, or the landscape around her will physically start to rot and break down too.

• The Architecture of Stasis: These stories almost always trap the protagonist in claustrophobic, domestic spaces (—which I think reverts back to the whole ‘angel in the home’ Victorian cultural ideology of the ideal of femininity, but that would be a whole other essay). The setting, whether it be unmade apartments, sterile hospital wings, or isolated rooms, becomes a physical manifestation of depression. It’s a space where time feels frozen, and the walls ensure she cannot move forward or escape her own thoughts.

• The Abject Body: A traditional horror movie monster attacks from the outside, but the Sad Girl’s monster is her own skin. Physical symptoms such as relentless nausea, bone-deep fatigue, hair loss, or self-neglect are treated with the weight of supernatural occurrences. Her body becomes a traitor, refusing to obey social norms or her own will.

• The Involuntary Pact (The Subverted Final Girl): In a classic slasher, the Final Girl survives by being hyper-alert and fighting tooth and nail. The Sad Girl subverts this entirely. Desperate to escape the agony of feeling, she makes a silent trade for numbness, oblivion, or emotional anesthesia. She surrenders her autonomy to the dark, meaning her survival isn’t a victory—it’s a paradox.

  

The Roots and Influences of Sad Girl Horror.

Note: Any and all of the following texts and stories will not satisfy every characteristic of the Sad Girl Horror genre outlined above. These are roots and influences that lead up to it in the present; in other words, they are not explicitly Sad Girl Horror texts in and of themselves.

Mythology.

These myths serve as the foundation for the genre, demonstrating that the monstrous female experience is often just a reaction to an impossible world.

• Medusa: The ultimate avatar of the monstrous feminine. She was not born a monster, but she is transformed by trauma and isolation. Her gaze petrifies those who look at her, and she seems to be the earliest iteration of the ‘Porous Self’. She warps the world around her, turning living beings into stone, simply because she cannot bear to be seen.

• Persephone: The archetype of the ‘Involuntary Pact’. Abducted into the underworld, she represents the horror of being trapped in a life one did not choose. Her life becomes one of forced stasis, where she must bloom in the dark and wither in the light (—a perfect metaphor for the cycles of depression).

• Echo: The horror of total erasure. Condemned to only repeat the words of others, Echo represents the death of the self. This is the ‘Sad Girl’ fear of losing one’s voice, of becoming a hollow vessel for the desires and expectations of those around you, until there is nothing left but a whisper.

  

Domestic Tragedy (17th Century).

In plays such as Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (1607), playwrights shifted focus from kings to the ordinary household, exposing it not as a refuge, but as a cage of surveillance. This era also pathologised our Sad Girl’s melancholy as a medical failure (—which I think is still often the case). After her husband discovers her infidelity, Anne Frankford enters a period of self-imposed isolation and penitence. Her eventual decision to stop eating leads to her wasting away in the house where she was once the mistress. This serves as a proto-version of Sad Girl Horror. She turns her own body into the site of her final rebellion, opting for a slow, physical disintegration over the claustrophobic survival of the domestic life she no longer wants to inhabit.

The Heroine of Sensibility (18th Century)

The 18th century gave us the Female Gothic (—I wish I could type that in a very cool, scripty font, but alas, we are still stuck with a single font on Substack). The horror here was inextricably linked to the heroine of sensibility. These heroines were defined by their extreme emotional perceptions. They felt more, feared more, and mourned more than their male counterparts.

Authors like Ann Radcliffe codified the idea that a heroine’s internal state of dread could transmute the landscape. If the heroine was feeling isolated or despairing, the castle walls would loom, the shadows would deepen, and the wind would howl with malice.

Consider Emily St. Aubert in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). She is arguably the first true Sad Girl, defined by her isolation and the tedium of her captivity. Trapped by the social and physical machinery of her world, Emily embodies Sad Girl Horror’s foundation. She projects her internal terror onto every corner of her prison.

The Ancestry of Melancholy (19th Century)

In the 19th century, we see the Victorian fascination with the hysterical woman. Here, domestic imprisonment is the primary antagonist.

In The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (—sorry, yep, referring to this one again), the protagonist’s forced isolation and the rest cure prescribed by her husband turn the wallpaper of her room into a shifting, predatory entity. It captures the exact moment where the mind, denied agency, turns its oppression outward and sees monsters in the pattern.

And what if we look at Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847)? Catherine Earnshaw is the ultimate example of the Porous Self. She refuses to be the perfectly quiet, submissive woman she’s expected to be, and because she can’t fit into that role, her internal turmoil becomes so overwhelming that it seems to spill out and infect the very house and land around her. She stops being just a person and starts being a part of the landscape. It shows that when a Sad Girl is denied freedom in her home, she will simply haunt it until it’s in ruins.

The Era of Repression (Mid-20th Century)

As we moved into the mid-20th century, the horror shifted from Victorian confinement to the stifled potential of the suburban or post-war woman.

While The Bell Jar (1963) by Sylvia Plath is taught as literary fiction, it is easy to see Esther as our Sad Girl. The literary device of the bell jar itself is a great example of the Architecture of Stasis. It is a glass dome that separates the protagonist from the world, making her feel distorted and trapped. This book is also about the feeling that your identity is dissolving while the world continues to move on without you.

In The Haunting of Hill House (1959) by Shirley Jackson, Eleanor Vance is a woman who has spent her life being invisible and controlled. When she reenters her childhood home, her extreme loneliness and deep need to belong make her vulnerable to the house itself. Eleanor’s deep, sad need for a place of her own makes her, and the house, inseparable.

Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys is a perfect example of the Architecture of Stasis (—this is a prequel of Jane Eyre, telling the story of Mr Rochester’s first wife. If you haven’t read it, please go read it!). Antoinette Cosway is locked in an attic, slowly losing her identity as she is redefined by those around her. Her internal pain makes the house itself feel like a cage that is burning down around her. It shows how being stripped of your name and your freedom can make you a ghost in your own life (—If you didn’t get to the end of Jane Eyre and despise Mr Rochester, Wide Sargasso Sea will remedy that).

The Visceral Turn (Late 20th Century)

By the late 20th century, the genre turned its attention to the physical decomposition of the Sad Girl. (—If you feel like you are falling apart, your body begins to reflect it). This era explored the grotesque nature of female pain, moving away from psychological toward visceral, bodily transformation. The monstrous became a way to reclaim agency in a world that insisted the protagonist remain polite, thin, and silent.

Carrie (1974) by Stephen King is the ultimate Sad Girl horror story, in which the protagonist’s isolation and bullying culminate in a literal, visceral eruption of power. Carrie’s internal pain is so deep and so repressed that when it finally breaks, it destroys her school (—And all the bullies). It’s the perfect representation of how societal cruelty can turn a girl into a force of nature.

The Stepford Wives (1972) by Ira Levin captures the horror of domestic assimilation. In the town of Stepford, women are stripped of their complex, sad, and messy humanity and replaced by perfect (—read ‘perfect’) robotic versions of themselves. It is the definitive take on the Architecture of Stasis, a world where your identity is actually erased and replaced by a curated, silent, and obedient shell.

In the final year of the 20th century, Sarah Waters handed us Affinity (1999). Set in a decaying Victorian prison, it focuses on a protagonist trapped by her own grief and the rigid expectations of her class. She becomes obsessed with a mysterious medium, leading to a pact that is both physically draining and spiritually consuming.

The New Weird and Digital Isolation (Present)

Today, Sad Girl Horror has adapted to the digital age. The internet in all its glory has handed us extreme loneliness and the pressure of ‘having it all together’, which create a fertile ground for the uncanny.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) by Ottessa Moshfegh is the book that everyone tends to think of when our Sad Girl enters the conversation, again this is typically marketed as lit fiction, but I would argue that the side efects of the pharmacutical cocktail the protagonist consumes, and its side effects sustantiate body horror. In this book, the monster (—if horror must have a monster) is the protagonist’s own detachment. By drugging herself into a year-long coma, she tries to reset reality. It is a horror of total disconnection

Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea (2022) turns grief into cosmic horror. Leah’s return from the deep is the Abject Body part of the text. The ocean literally begins to leak from her, blurring the boundaries between human and non-human. The apartment becomes an Architecture of Stasis, a domestic setting where Miri is trapped in an Involuntary Pact of devotion, helplessly watching her wife slowly dissolve into the mystery of the deep.

The Contemporary Resonance.

If Sad Girl Horror feels vital in our current cultural moment, it is because we are living in the age of burnout culture. We are conditioned to be performative, productive, and constantly on.

Reading this genre allows us to validate the real female experience. It creates a space where characters can be unravelling, unlikable, or completely broken without the reader demanding they get better. It is a form of resistance against the constant pressure to present a curated self. By letting the monster (—the sadness) run wild on the page, we find a way to make it manageable in our own lives.

Non-Fiction Reading For Those Inclined:

If you want to dig deeper into the intersection of gender, madness, and horror, these are the things I read (—in their entirety or parts of) to put this article together.

• Fuller,Emily and Miller, Alyson. ‘I am trying, you know’: Reading Power, Politics, and the Body in Sad Girl Literature, Contemporary Women’s Writing, Volume 19, 2025.

• Gilbert, Susan M and Gubar, Susan. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. (1979) I don’t know how many times I’ve flicked through these chapters, but excellent resource.

• Jamison, Leslie. ‘Cult of the Literary Sad Woman.’ The New York Times, 7 November 2019.

• Janisse, Kier-la. House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012): A seminal, personal autopsy of the madwoman in film. Essential for anyone wanting to understand why we are drawn to images of female unravelling.

• Yilmaz, D., (2026) ‘The Literary Sad Girl: Female Disaffect and Passive Dissent in 21st-Century Anglophone Fiction’, C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings 12(3): 2.

Sad Girl Horror endures because it holds up a mirror to our most fragile moments. We read these stories not because we want to see ourselves defeated, but because seeing the monster—the sadness, the numbness, the rot—given a name and a shape allows us to survive it. It is a genre of catharsis. It tells us that while the internalised nightmare is real, it is also survivable. We look into the void of the Sad Girl’s experience, and for the first time, we feel seen.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this installment of The Genre Genealogy Series,

See you next week

C M Reid at The Ink-Stained Desk.

Welcome, welcome, welcome,

To another week at The Ink-Stained Desk. This essay began as a double-feature of sorts on my bedside table. I had just finished revisiting Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, his essential masterclass on the anatomy of fear, and immediately followed it with my first read of Grady Hendrix’s Paperbacks from Hell, a joyous love letter to the garish pulp horror of the 1970s and 80s. Seeing the intellectual foundation of the genre laid out by King alongside the history documented by Hendrix sparked a tiny flame that grew into what you’re about to read.

So first, you have to imagine it’s 1984 (—a very good year) and you’re standing in front of a rotating wire rack in the corner of the supermarket, or newsagent. You’re scanning rows of mass-market paperbacks with golden embossed titles and garish, hand-painted covers: a skeletal hand reaching from a grave, a doll with bleeding eyes, a suburban house silhouetted against a sickly purple moon. You buy it for three dollars, and by the time you reach the final chapter, under your bedsheets, with your torch, your world has fundamentally changed.

Now, look at the New Releases section of your local bookstore or your digital feed today. Between the global resurgence of classic pulp reprints (—possibly single-handedly funded by me) and the wave of new authors reclaiming the small-town-secret tropes that defined the 80s, I think horror literature is circling back to the spirit of the mass-market boom. I’ve seen so many posts of people lamenting the end of physical mass-market paperbacks, and I think they’re wrong.

The 1980s were more than just a decade of print; they established a global blueprint for how we narrate fear. We aren’t just remembering these stories; we are still operating within their narrative geometry. But why does the 80s horror novel still hold such a tight grip on our collective psyche?

The Rise of the Mass-Market Machine.

Before we look at the stories themselves, we should consider the shelf. In the 1980s, the mass-market paperback was a revolution. Unlike the prestige hardcovers of today, these books were designed to be disposable, portable, and most importantly, omnipresent.

A perfect storm of retail and economics drove the popularity of the 80s paperback. This was the era when selling books stopped being relegated to only bookstores. Suddenly, they were sold in supermarkets, gas stations, airports, and newsagents. You didn’t have to go looking for horror; it looked for you while you were buying milk or waiting for a prescription.

Also, because they were cheap to produce, publishers could afford to take massive risks. This created a wild west of publishing, so to speak, where editors were hungry for content to fill those wire rotating racks. If you had a halfway decent hook about a killer car or an ancient curse, you could get a deal. This saturation meant that for an entire generation, horror became the background noise of everyday life.

The Paperback from Hell Aesthetic.

The second reason for the 80s literary stranglehold is the sheer physicality of the era. Before the rise of digital reading, the horror novel was a tactile object. I fondly remember the embossed foil covers, the lurid step-back art, and the specific, musty smell of cheap pulp paper (—There’s honestly nothing better).

I feel like there was also a blue-collar grit to the writing of these stories. They weren’t trying to be literary fiction; they were trying to make your skin crawl by page fifty.

Modern horror often feels polished and psychologically distant. In contrast, 80s horror fiction occupied a visceral space. When a monster appeared in an 80s paperback, the descriptions were anatomical, messy, and unapologetically bold (—and sometimes they didn’t exactly make sense, but nobody cared). I miss that lack of restraint.

Writing Your Own 80s-Style Horror.

If you want to bottle this lightning and apply it to your own writing, you don’t need to force a period setting. You just need to strip away the “safety rails” of modern convenience. Here is how to write for that 80s frequency:

• Kill the Technology: The 80s horror engine relied on isolation. If your characters have cell phones, GPS, or immediate access to Google, your monsters have no room to breathe. Find a narrative reason to break their connection to the world.

• Prioritise Impact Over Growth: Modern stories are obsessed with internal arcs and therapy-speak. 80s pulp was obsessed with impact. Don’t worry about whether your character is finding themselves—worry about whether they will survive the next five pages. Let the plot drive the characters, not the other way around.

• Keep the Stakes Local: The Small Town Secret worked because the world felt small and inescapable. Focus on the geography of a single neighbourhood or a single building. When the threat is contained, it feels more intimate (—and significantly more dangerous).

• Be Unapologetically Visceral: Don’t apologise for the monster. If you have a creature, show the anatomy. If you have a curse, make the consequences physical. Use all five senses to describe the supernatural; keep it messy, and don’t worry about being polite.

Sai King and His Disciples. (IYKYK)

If the 80s had a literary architect, it was Stephen King. During this decade, King released IT, Pet Sematary, The Tommyknockers, and Misery (—All the big ones). He also basically codified the rules of the modern horror novel.

There’s the ‘Small Town with a Dark Secret’ trope. Which suggested that evil wasn’t found in gothic castles, but in the local library, the sewer system, or the neighbour’s backyard. Authors like Robert McCammon and Dan Simmons followed suit, creating epic, multi-POV narratives that treated horror as a community-wide event.

There is also the ‘latchkey kid’ factor. 80s horror novels often featured children and teenagers operating in a world without parents hovering. This independence made the stakes feel absolute. If the kids didn’t solve the mystery, no one was coming to save them. That isolation is a narrative engine that modern technology has made nearly impossible to replicate.

The 1980s horror novel maintains its stranglehold because it captured a fleeting, perfect alignment: stories visceral enough to shock, tropes sturdy enough to build a world around, and settings that mirrored our own mundane backyards. We can’t actually go back to that rotating wire rack of 1984. We can’t un-invent the internet or return to a world where a paperback was one of the few windows into the macabre (—80s horror movies are a whole other essay!) —but we don’t have to.

These books remain my comfort food, not because they were better, but because they were definitive. Today, we have infinite, curated content, so it makes sense that there is relief in picking up a paperback where you know exactly how the story ends and who the monster is.

I’d love to hear which 80s horror paperback still sits on your bookshelf. I’m always looking for some weird, obscure pulp novel with a garish cover. Tell me your favourite “paperback from hell” in the comments below.

Have a great week, and if you’re a paid subscriber, please watch out for the corresponding Marginalia & Miscellany email for this article, which should be in your inbox shortly, or check out the paid subscriber section of the Ink-Stained Desk website.

Have a great week,

C M Reid at The Ink-Stained Desk

Welcome to the Marginalia & Miscellany section of The Ink-Stained Desk!

Over on the free article, we’ve thought about the aesthetic of 80s horror—the garish covers, the pulp paper, the visceral monsters. But now, I want to investigate the atmospheric conditions that made these stories hit so hard, and to give you many, many reading recommendations.

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Welcome, welcome, welcome to Marginalia & Miscellany, the paid subscriber section of the Ink-Stained Desk, where you can expect side quests, rabbit holes and general tidbits, usually linked to the free articles of the same week.

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Welcome, welcome, welcome,

To a month in review at The Ink-Stained Desk. May was the last month in Autumn for all of us in Australia, and my goodness, hasn’t the weather gotten suddenly chilly? Honestly, I’m so glad it’s finally Winter, it’s my favourite month. There’s just something about being safely inside while the weather gets wild outside. You’ll find me in front of the fireplace for the next three months, hibernating with my laptop and an embarrassingly tall stack of books.

Anyway, let’s get on with what you’re all here for, the book reviews and recommendations. It was a good month for speculative fiction, let me tell you!

The Natural Way of Things, by Charlotte Wood. (2015)

Yep, I’m late to this one; it’s been on my to-read list forever, and for some reason I kept puttin git off. Then I walked into my library, and there it was staring at me from the shelf end. A truth about me is that if I ever see a book on my to-read list on the shelf end of the library, I have this weird fear that something bad might happen if I don’t borrow it. It’s like the universe is speaking to me. Anyway, I finally read this book (—which has seven awards under its belt) and had to sit for a moment when I finished it because it’s quite a ride. Part body horror, part feminist missive, part kidnapping narrative, this packs a punch. Don’t read it straight after breakfast, but if you’re looking for something honest and raw, this one is for you.

Eight women are kept in an abandoned… facility (-???)in the middle of outback Australia. All they know is that they have all had experiences with wealthy men that didn’t end well. With three guards, who seem just as stuck there as the women do, they endure days of hard labour out in the boiling sun. Then the food runs out, and they lose electricity, and things go a bit wild.

Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke. (2026)

I have read so much hate about this book in the last few weeks that I just wanted to see for myself, and I’m here to say I really enjoyed this book. Will it win any literary awards? Probably not. But made me feel something, and that’s what matters when it comes to stories.

The basic storyline is that Natalie is an influencer, stay-at-home mum and wife to a real-life cowboy. And she doesn’t use the term trad wife. Natalie makes this all seem simple for the camera. What she doesn’t show is the nannies, camera people and farm hands that actually do most of the work. Cut forward, Natalie wakes one morning to find that the electricity is not working, and the children don’t look right. And it’s 1855.

Look, I’m not going to spoil the ending of this; you’ll have to read it for yourself. I will say that the was Caro Claire Burke twisted this story is so smart and spoke so much more about our internet social media culture than the ending that everyone wanted would have.

Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter, by Heather Fawcett. (2026)

Heather Fawcett is an automatic read for me at this point. I was enamoured with each of the Emily Wilde books and have now found a new cat-loving heroine to love in Agnes. This is a very low-stakes, cozy fantasy, but honestly, when I pick up Fawcett’s book, I’m here for the prose, not the action.

The basic premise here is that we are in an alternative 1920s Montreal where wizarding and magic are looked down upon, but not illegal. So when Agnes accidentally rents a shop from the biggest, baddest wizard, she has to decide if she will put aside her prejudices and stay, or make many, many cats homeless.

The cats all have beautifully fleshed-out personalities of their own, and the Havelock (—the ‘big bad’ magician) is delightfully quirky.

The Dorians, by Nick Cutter. (2026)

The Dorians is Nick Cutter’s (—he of The Troop and The Queen) most recent release. I was very lucky to receive an advanced copy, which I wrote an extended review of earlier this month. Find it here:

Reclaiming Youth, Relinquishing Soul.

Just know, it’s excellent!

Such Pretty Things, by Lisa Heathfield. (2021)

If you enjoyed Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, you will enjoy the atmosphere in Such Pretty Things. It’s very slow burn, and the horror is subtle, but there is this overall ‘something is not right in this house with these people feel’ which is something I enjoy. The prose is suffocating, but poetic. Think haunted houses, weird dolls and abandoned children.

The Endling, by Keely Jobe. (2026)

This debut absolutely knocks you for a six—it’s impossible to believe it’s her first book. It is the eco-feminist horror I’ve always been waiting for.

Set in Australia, the story follows a commune of women who have turned their backs on men and the rest of humanity. When they all mysteriously fall pregnant, the narrative shifts to explore these radical pregnancies and the unsettling, otherworldly nature of the children they bear.

If you enjoyed Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, this is a must-read. Please reach out once you've finished—there is so much to unpack here, and I am desperate to discuss it.

—just a weird note on this one. When you look this title up on Goodreads, it says it’s not yet published. This is incorrect; it was published in Feb 2026.

The House Across the Lake, by Riley Sager. (2022)

My question to myself is, why do I keep trying with Riley Sager? The answer is I’m drawn to the blurbs on the back of the books. They always sound so intriguing, but when I read it and well…, and I’m such a sucker, I picked up another one since and put it down after a few chapters. Let’s say I’ve learned my lesson now.

The House Across The Lake follows an alcoholic, widowed ex-actress, who is also a snoop (—because one trope isn’t enough). When the woman who lives in the house across the lake vanishes, our protagonist goes on a Rear Window-type detective jaunt.

Wildflower, by Becky Jenkinson. (2026)

Oh, how I love a cozy fantasy! Let me count the ways. The short, clumsy protagonist, the bad boy love interest, the best friend who has no idea, the antagonist who is doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. Add to that flower magic, a cozy cottage, a sprinkle of spice, and you have yourself a winner.

Wildflower will be released next week by Del Rey, and I can’t speak about this book without mentioning the beautifully sketched and labelled botanical illustrations that feature with each chapter heading.

I hope you’ve found something here that piqued your interest,

Have a wonderful weekend, and I’ll see you all next Friday.

C M Reid at The Ink-Stained Desk.