fanna for books

Megan Bontrager’s debut novel is both a cosmic horror and a queer dark fantasy, inspired by local mythos and regional urban legens, and in the author’s own words, this includes “the idea that doors and stairways in the Appalachian woods lead to alternate universes.” Set in an insular town, a guilt-stricken park ranger on a mission to uncover the truth of her sister’s strange disappearance is intervened by the Federal Bureau of Reality. Included is a dog named Bear and an exploration of grief and abuse. And included are parallel realities.

Ally Wilkes, author of Where the Dead Wait, has said this arresting debut is “steeped in creepypasta” and that readers will fall in love with the “bitter, queer, hanging-on-by-her-fingernails Park Ranger”. If a chilling atmosphere, a mysterious disappearance, and a touching protagonist is what you’re looking for, Eye of the Ouroboros is the perfect pick. And if the lingering vibes make you crave more cosmic horror, we have Megan Bontrager [Eye of the Ouroboros, April 2024) recommending ten titles serving the eldritch. To view more such posts by debut authors, make sure to check out this collaboration, Debut Dialogues!

The Scary and the Strange

Megan Bontrager (Eye of the Ouroboros) lists her favourite forays into the eldritch and the weird.

It may seem backwards that I fell in love with cosmic horror — which is all about the sprawling unknown, the infinite possibility of worlds beyond our comprehension — while on lockdown in a fifth-floor apartment in rural Kentucky. The only thing sprawling and infinite (and arguably strange beyond human comprehension) was the stretch of woodlands bordering the complex. Which, to be fair, is fodder enough for the spooky and uncanny; you wouldn’t believe the sounds that came out of those woods in the middle of the night. On a regular basis, my partner and I would wake to the sound of what I can only assume was an eldritch horror frolicking through the underbrush. Good for the horrors — bad for my sleep schedule. 

As we all did, I spent a lot of my lockdown on the internet. And it’s during this time that I came across a Reddit thread wherein US Park Rangers swapped spooky stories and as-yet unsolved mysteries. Needless to say, it felt as topical as it was ominous. Superstitions spanned states, common threads of urban legends and cosmic mysteries bringing past and present Rangers together in the service of all things eerie. My favorite was the common idea that if you come across a set of stairs in the woods, you do not under any circumstances go up them.

The Rangers couldn’t seem to agree on the consequences of going up the stairs they so warned against —yanked into a different dimension, swallowed up by the monster on the top step, so on and so forth— but it didn’t matter. This was, by definition, the very picture of the cosmic, the eldritch, the wonderfully incomprehensible. I was inspired. And Eye of the Ouroboros was born. 

Ouroboros follows Theo: a member of the Parks Service Search & Rescue Team who has spent the better part of her life searching for her sister, Flora, after she went missing in the woods surrounding the insular town of Mill Creek, West Virginia. What Theo finds in her search is a marriage of all the things that kept me up at night during my time in rural Kentucky, from the bumps in the dark to the pressure of isolation in a place that feels endless and insurmountable. And all of it is tied in a neat little bow: a staircase in the woods. What she finds in her journey into the cosmic feels impossible to overcome. But it’s in human nature to try. And that’s what cosmic horror is all about. 

Listed here are some of my favorite forays into the eldritch and the weird. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did!

Dead Sea by Tim Curran: Take a journey into a place unknown to humanity. A space between spaces. When the Mara Corday, an aged freighter, enters the Graveyard of the Atlantic, nightmares become real. The crew finds themselves trapped in a realm where time doesn’t exist and unimaginable horrors dwell. Lost in a becalmed sea, in a netherworld where evil manifests itself in hideous forms, the survivors of the Mara Corday have an eternity to find a way out – if they aren’t killed first by the creatures stalking them.

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer: Area X has been cut off from the rest of the world for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the second expedition ended in mass suicide, the third in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition.

The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.

They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—but it’s the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything.

The Fisherman by John Langan: In upstate New York, in the woods around Woodstock, Dutchman’s Creek flows out of the Ashokan Reservoir. Steep-banked, fast-moving, it offers the promise of fine fishing, and of something more, a possibility too fantastic to be true. When Abe and Dan, two widowers who have found solace in each other’s company and a shared passion for fishing, hear rumors of the Creek, and what might be found there, the remedy to both their losses, they dismiss it as just another fish story. Soon, though, the men find themselves drawn into a tale as deep and old as the Reservoir. It’s a tale of dark pacts, of long-buried secrets, and of a mysterious figure known as Der Fisher: the Fisherman. It will bring Abe and Dan face to face with all that they have lost, and with the price they must pay to regain it. 

Tales from Brackish Harbor: An Anthology of Eldritch Horror from Quill & Crow Publishing House, edited by Cassandra Thompson and Damon Barret Roe: Welcome to Brackish Harbor. Settled in the 1920s on an island in the Atlantic Ocean, it was once a booming fishing town that attracted tourists who longed for quiet retreat. It soon became a beautiful escape, and for those who lived there, it was a community. A promise. A home. Until…

​​​​​​​Mysteriously, the fishing industry that sustained the small village dried up, and over time, tourists lost interest. Many loyal villagers relocated. But most were forced to remain, scraping by amidst the dilapidated buildings, docked fishing boats, and vestiges of better days. Whispers of curses, strange experiments, and otherworldly creatures floated about the harbor. So many rumors, so many untold stories. Here are the ones that managed to be told.

The Worm and His Kings by Hailey Piper: New York City, 1990: When you slip through the cracks, no one is there to catch you. Monique learns that the hard way after her girlfriend Donna vanishes without a trace. Only after the disappearances of several other impoverished women does Monique hear the rumors. A taloned monster stalks the city’s underground and snatches victims into the dark.

Donna isn’t missing. She was taken.

To save the woman she loves, Monique must descend deeper than the known underground, into a subterranean world of enigmatic cultists and shadowy creatures. But what she finds looms beyond her wildest fears—a darkness that stretches from the dawn of time and across the stars.

The Dead Take the A Train by Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey: Julie Crews is a coked-up, burnt-out thirty-something who packs a lot of magic into her small body. She’s been trying to establish herself in the NYC magic scene, and she’ll work the most gruesome gigs to claw her way to the top. Julie is desperate for a quick career boost to break the dead-end grind, but her pleas draw the attention of an eldritch god who is hungry for revenge. Her power grab sets off a deadly chain of events that puts her closest friends – and the entire world – directly in the path of annihilation.

The first explosive adventure in the Carrion City Duology, The Dead Take the A Train fuses Khaw’s cosmic horror and Kadrey’s gritty fantasy into a full-throttle thrill ride straight into New York’s magical underbelly.

Agents of Dreamland by Caitlín R. Kiernan: A government special agent known only as the Signalman gets off a train on a stunningly hot morning in Winslow, Arizona. Later that day he meets a woman in a diner to exchange information about an event that happened a week earlier for which neither has an explanation, but which haunts the Signalman.

In a ranch house near the shore of the Salton Sea a cult leader gathers up the weak and susceptible—the Children of the Next Level—and offers them something to believe in and a chance for transcendence. The future is coming and they will help to usher it in.

A day after the events at the ranch house which disturbed the Signalman so deeply that he and his government sought out help from ‘other’ sources, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory abruptly loses contact with NASA’s interplanetary probe New Horizons. Something out beyond the orbit of Pluto has made contact. And a woman floating outside of time looks to the future and the past for answers to what can save humanity.

A Season of Monstrous Conceptions by Lina Rather: In 17th-century London, unnatural babies are being born, with eyes made for the dark and webbed digits suited to the sea. Sarah Davis is intimately familiar with such strangeness―having hidden her uncanny nature all her life and fled to London under suspicious circumstances, Sarah starts over as a midwife’s apprentice to a member of the illegal Worshipful Company of Midwives, hoping to carve out for herself an independent life. But with each new unnatural birth, the fear in London grows of the Devil’s work. When the wealthy Lady Wren hires her to see her through her pregnancy, Sarah quickly becomes a favorite of her husband, the famous architect Lord Christopher Wren, whose interest in the uncanny borders on obsession. Sarah soon finds herself caught in a web of magic and intrigue created by those who want to use her power for themselves, and whose pursuits threaten to unmake the earth itself.

Hammers on Bone by Cassandra Khaw: John Persons is a private investigator with a distasteful job from an unlikely client. He’s been hired by a ten-year-old to kill the kid’s stepdad, McKinsey. The man in question is abusive, abrasive, and abominable.

He’s also a monster, which makes Persons the perfect thing to hunt him. Over the course of his ancient, arcane existence, he’s hunted gods and demons, and broken them in his teeth.

As Persons investigates the horrible McKinsey, he realizes that he carries something far darker. He’s infected with an alien presence, and he’s spreading that monstrosity far and wide. Luckily Persons is no stranger to the occult, being an ancient and magical intelligence himself. The question is whether the private dick can take down the abusive stepdad without releasing the holds on his own horrifying potential.

The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle: People move to New York looking for magic and nothing will convince them it isn’t there.

Charles Thomas Tester hustles to put food on the table, keep the roof over his father’s head, from Harlem to Flushing Meadows to Red Hook. He knows what magic a suit can cast, the invisibility a guitar case can provide, and the curse written on his skin that attracts the eye of wealthy white folks and their cops.But when he delivers an occult tome to a reclusive sorceress in the heart of Queens, Tom opens a door to a deeper realm of magic,and earns the attention of things best left sleeping.

A storm that might swallow the world is building in Brooklyn. Will Black Tom live to see it break?

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