ChatGPT Writes a Literary Analysis Good Enough to Fool AI Detectors, or FM(Teaching)L

 

As I’ve mentioned before in my blog and on social media, I don’t use AI for myself. But as a college writing instructor, I experiment with it before each semester so I can better advise students on the pros and cons of using it, as well as help me get a better feel for AI-generated text vs human-written text. My experiments mostly focus on asking questions about my work because I know it intimately and can spot mistakes easily. The last experiment I typically run before the semester starts is to have AI write a literary analysis essay of my work. This year, I asked DeepSeek and ChatGPT to write such an essay. DeepSeek’s contained numerous errors, fabricated information, and its analysis was surface-level. I decided to give ChatGPT a more detailed prompt. ChatGPT took a long time to think about the essay, then gave me an error message. I tried again, and this time it thought for three minutes and produced an essay fulfilling the prompt I’d given it. It cited its sources, too, but I didn’t tell it to use any specific citation system, and the hyperlinks looked different on the ChatGPT site than they do in this document. They were small ovals that said things like Tim Waggoner’s Site, so the links looked neater than what appears in the copied and pasted version below. I could’ve easily asked ChatGPT to use MLA or APA, or any other citation system, though.

What was weird was that I was able to view its process in real time because, as it worked, messages such as Gathering Sources, Constructing Outline, etc., appeared on the screen. I’d never seen that before.

There are a few minor errors in ChatGPT’s essay. For example, my novel A Hunter Called Night takes place in a small office building, not an apartment complex. ChatGPT used the word affect, perhaps intentionally, in a couple of places, but it seems like effect would’ve worked better. But what do I know? I’m a creative writing guy, not a lit crit guy. A couple of subtler details about my work feel a bit off, but only a bit. Some of the language is overly pedantic, too, which makes the "writer" seem as if it's trying too hard.

After the essay was finished, I asked ChatGPT how it would improve the essay just to see what it would say, but I didn’t ask it to create a new version.

Here’s the essay:

ChatGPT

August 17, 2025

You said:

Please write a 2000-word literary analysis of the work of author Tim Waggoner. Please use specific examples and explore his work in depth and provide sophisticated insight.

ChatGPT said:

Thought for 3m 21s

“Where the World Is Always Coming Apart”: A Literary Analysis of Tim Waggoner’s Horror

Tim Waggoner’s fiction sits at the weird, volatile seam where reality frays—where perception turns unreliable, identity becomes porous, and the familiar shakes loose into nightmare. Over a career spanning decades and more than fifty books, Waggoner has become one of contemporary horror’s most distinctive stylists and architects, equally at home in original novels, series fiction, and media tie‑ins. He’s also an influential teacher and critic of the genre: his craft book Writing in the Dark won the Bram Stoker Award for Nonfiction (2020), and his long fiction The Winter Box won the Bram Stoker Award in 2016. Most recently, his Terrifier 2 novelization earned the 2025 Scribe Award for Best Adapted Novel. These credentials matter because they illuminate the two poles of Waggoner’s work: a patient, craftsmanly control of technique and a restless commitment to pushing horror toward the irrational edge. Grimdark MagazineTim WaggonerWikipediaPenguinRandomhouse.com

Waggoner’s fiction theories and practice feed each other. A full‑time professor who teaches creative writing at Sinclair College in Dayton, Ohio, Waggoner has spent years articulating the mechanics of fear—tone, image systems, point of view, escalation—then stress‑testing them in books that interleave body horror, surreal dread, and noir momentum. That dual identity—teacher/practitioner—helps explain why even his most phantasmagorical novels feel engineered for maximum affect: they are dreamlike but never formless, wild but meticulously staged. Tim Waggoner

Below, I trace a set of recurring concerns and techniques across representative works from early and recent career phases: the urban‑weird of The Harmony Society and Like Death; the “otherworld leakage” novels like The Mouth of the Dark and Your Turn to Suffer; the haunted‑community books The Forever House and We Will Rise; the identity‑erosion horror of The Way of All Flesh; and the urban‑fantasy/noir experiment of the Nekropolis cycle. Along the way, I’ll consider how Waggoner transforms stock elements—ghosts, cults, monsters—into metaphysical machines for examining grief, guilt, and desire.

1) Early Urban Weird: Maps of a City That Doesn’t Want to Be Understood

Waggoner’s earliest notable novels are urban cartographies of rupture. The Harmony Society reads like a Baedeker to a city whose metaphysical plumbing has broken. Reviewers have noted its “strange and surreal urban fantasy” texture: neighborhoods and subcultures comprise not a social fabric but a set of overlapping reality‑systems, each with its own rules and predators. The book’s power lies in its refusal to allegorize neatly; instead, the city feels like a living ecosystem that feeds on attention and fear. Amazon Canada

Like Death intensifies this method. Where many horror novels translate urban blight into a moralized monster, Waggoner lets the city’s detritus—abandoned theaters, decayed streets—generate a polymorphous hauntology. Critics reading the book have emphasized its blend of psychosexual trauma and hallucinatory set‑pieces, a union that feels closer to the transgressive surrealism of Kathe Koja or the dream logic of Clive Barker than to conventional thriller beats. The result is a portrait of place as a predatory memory palace: the city remembers what its inhabitants would rather forget, and it manifests those repressions as entities that look back. Goodreads

Formally, these books demonstrate a signature Waggoner technique: establishing the ordinary world with clear, grounded prose and then letting the diction drift, image by image, toward the unaccountable. The prose grows more sensorially “noisy”—textures and smells crowd the sentence; comparisons get stranger; metaphors literalize—until the boundary between figurative and factual collapses. That slow bleed from realism into the unreal sets a template he continues to refine.

2) The “Leakage” Novel: When the Otherworld Won’t Stay Put

In later work, Waggoner often engineers scenarios where a parallel domain seeps into ours and starts rewriting us. The Mouth of the Dark is exemplary: a father searches for his missing daughter and slips into a shadow‑realm superimposed on our own—an interstitial ecology of predators and pleasures that targets human appetites with weaponized seductions. Reviewers have stressed the harsh, uncompromising surrealism of its set‑pieces and the way the book literalizes desire as an external force that colonizes the body. That’s Waggoner’s twist on body horror: bodies become contested sites where the world’s unspoken rules engrave themselves. Amazon

Your Turn to Suffer makes the “leakage” institutional. The Cabal—a secretive order—accuses Kara of a crime she can’t remember and subjects her to trials that bend reality. The premise looks procedural (prove innocence), but the novel’s affect is fever‑dream: cause and effect decouple; consequences arrive before actions; and the antagonist is not a person but a cosmology of contempt. What’s striking is Waggoner’s ethical argument embedded in the weirdness: shame is an instrument of control that acquires mystical force when shared; the cult only works because we are already good at punishing ourselves. Goodreads

Across these books, Waggoner’s plot architecture is modular: scenes read like discrete set‑pieces—each with its own monster, rule set, and moral—but they accrue meaning as variations on a theme. The result is musical rather than purely causal narrative momentum: the reader moves forward because the next “track” might reconfigure what every previous track meant.

3) Haunted Communities: Houses, Towns, and the Politics of Dread

Waggoner’s most emotionally resonant work often scales fear up from the individual to the communal. The Forever House begins as a familiar suburban fable—new neighbors, too perfect—and detonates into pocket‑dimension horror when the predatory Eldreds transform a home into a labyrinth where emotions are harvested. In interviews, Waggoner has emphasized his fascination with the house as a machine for producing identity and secrecy. That’s key: the Eldreds don’t simply torture; they curate. The book’s spatial puzzles—rooms that rearrange, thresholds that betray—externalize the lies families tell themselves to sustain a façade of normalcy. thebramstokerawards.comsfbook.com

We Will Rise pushes that communal logic to the nation‑scale. The premise is audaciously simple: ghosts rise everywhere, all at once. A catastrophe novel becomes a grief novel as hauntings function like mass reckonings with unacknowledged losses and old harms. Because the phenomenon is global and simultaneous, the book evacuates the specialness of any single ghost and focuses instead on how communities respond: some form mutual aid; others metastasize into violence. Horror becomes sociology without losing its teeth. Publisher copy and reviews highlight this “ghost apocalypse” conceit; its real innovation is to treat ghosts as a public utility of memory—inescapable, infrastructural, and unevenly distributed. Flame Tree Publishing

Notably, both books maintain a driving, cinematic readability while smuggling in complicated questions: What do we owe the dead? What is a home if not a consensus hallucination? How much of ourselves do we outsource to the places we live? Waggoner’s answer is uncomforting: places are not neutral; they are predators or parasites or at best symbionts.

4) Eroding the Self: The Way of All Flesh

Few horror novels tackle identity dissolution as intimately as The Way of All Flesh, which proceeds from the radical gambit of telling a ghoul story from the perspective of the ghoul. Inverting the zombie’s traditional role, Waggoner focalizes a consciousness struggling to remain human even as appetites and perceptions convert. The book’s critical descriptions underline that the narration makes the monstrous empathically legible without sentimentalizing it. Horror here is neither jump scare nor gore fest; it’s the minute‑by‑minute attrition of a self. Reading the novel feels like watching a language lose the words for “I.” SFFWorld

Technically, the novel showcases Waggoner’s mastery of close point of view. As the protagonist’s sensorium deforms, diction and syntax deform with it. This is a central Waggoner technique: the sentence itself is the monster’s footprint.

5) Noir as Pressure Cooker: Nekropolis and the Comedy of the Grotesque

Waggoner’s zombie PI cycle—Nekropolis, Dead Streets, Dark War—seems at first a tonal departure: urban fantasy built on witty premise (Matt Richter, private eye, is dead) and genre cross-pollination. But the series reveals a consistent Waggoner concern: bureaucratized monstrosity. Nekropolis is a fully functioning city, complete with vampire districts, demon cartels, and municipal grime. Reviews and publisher materials emphasize the setting’s density and “morbid wit,” but the comedy is acid: institutions designed to manage the monstrous inevitably become monstrous themselves. When Matt literally loses his head in Dead Streets and his body commits crimes without him, the gag hides a bleak joke about autonomy under systems too big to fight. Angry RobotHidden in Pages

What makes Nekropolis artistically relevant to Waggoner’s larger body of work is its worldbuilding method. The city’s logic is not arbitrary whimsy; it is rule-bound, like a nightmare that insists you respect its local physics. That insistence is at the heart of Waggoner’s horror: the irrational is rational on its own terms, and we’re punished not for disbelief but for misunderstanding the rules.

6) Predators with Philosophies: A Hunter Called Night and the Ethics of Survival

One of Waggoner’s recent novels, A Hunter Called Night, compresses his strategies into a single building. A monstrous presence infiltrates an apartment complex; strangers are forced into uneasy alliances; survival requires ethical compromise. Synopses and jacket copy emphasize the “vicious demonic monster” and a locked‑space siege structure, but what lingers is how Waggoner uses constricted geography to stage moral experiments. Who are we in a closed system that rewards predation? How quickly does community devolve into calculative self‑interest? The book’s taut plotting gives these questions teeth. Amazon

7) Craft Consciousness: Writing in the Dark and the Engineering of Dread

Because Waggoner articulates his methods in Writing in the Dark, readers can triangulate his fiction against his theory. The book—published by Raw Dog Screaming Press and recognized with the Bram Stoker Award—lays out pragmatic strategies for generating and sustaining fear: escalating uncertainty, sensory specificity, character vulnerability, and the disciplined use of imagery to create thematic resonance. You can see these practices in action throughout his novels: the “image grid” of The Mouth of the Dark (flowers, skin, darkness, appetite) or the motif recursion in The Forever House (rooms, thresholds, keys). Waggoner’s horror is designed, not improvised; its irrational effects are products of rational craft. Flame Tree PublishingGrimdark Magazine

That craft orientation also explains the consistency of his sentence‑level moves: verbs do heavy lifting; metaphors arrive as sudden ontological claims rather than decorative comparisons; and there’s an economical clarity even in the most baroque scenes. He has a journalist’s sense of pacing and a poet’s patience for exact nouns. The result is that readers rarely feel lost even when the book wants them to feel lost: disorientation is achieved cleanly.

8) Tie‑Ins as Laboratory: Alien: Prototype, Halloween Kills, Terrifier 2

Waggoner is a prolific writer of media tie‑ins, a practice sometimes dismissed as purely commercial. In his case, tie‑ins function like a laboratory to test how much of the Waggoner method can be smuggled into a shared IP while respecting franchise constraints. Alien: Prototype shows him working within the Alien universe’s industrial‑horror idiom—bioweapons, corporate malfeasance—and punching up the visceral immediacy of the xenomorph threat without losing character‑centric stakes. Halloween Kills threads the needle of honoring a slasher’s mythic simplicity while giving interior shape to fear and grief. Terrifier 2 demonstrates how a novelization can both mirror a film’s gleeful extremity and expand its implications; its Scribe Award recognition suggests peers saw more than transcription. In all three, he treats set‑piece logic as a chassis for point‑of‑view intensity and sensory design. titanbooks.com+1PenguinRandomhouse.com

This side of his oeuvre also showcases a complementary virtue: discipline. Tie‑ins demand problem‑solving within strict scaffolds—canon, timeline, brand voice. Waggoner’s ability to make those constraints generative speaks to the precision that underwrites even his loosest, dreamiest work.

9) Thematic Spine: Appetite, Memory, and the Slow Violence of Shame

Across modes and periods, three motifs repeat:

Appetite as Ontology. Waggoner’s monsters often hunger not just for flesh but for meaning: the Eldreds siphon emotion; entities in Mouth of the Dark harvest desire; the ghoul’s hunger in Way of All Flesh is as much epistemological as nutritional. Appetite explains the world: to want is to be vulnerable to the world’s counter‑wanting, and supernatural predators take advantage of that asymmetry. Amazonthebramstokerawards.comSFFWorld

Memory as Infrastructure. In We Will Rise, hauntings scale from personal to systemic, making memory a public hazard and a civic duty. Even earlier work like Like Death positions the city as a mnemonic machine that refuses to let trauma stay buried. The past is not past; it’s load‑bearing architecture. Flame Tree PublishingGoodreads

Shame as Technology. Your Turn to Suffer literalizes shame as a supernatural punishment system, but many Waggoner antagonists leverage shame to collapse resistance. What Waggoner grasps is that shame pre‑polices the self; horror’s job is to dramatize that pre‑policing as an external pressure that can be fought. Goodreads

10) Character and Compassion

For all his baroque monsters, Waggoner’s fiction works because he’s attentive to ordinary people under intolerable pressure: grieving parents, burnt‑out cops, compromised neighbors, lonely outcasts. There’s a consistent refusal to mock vulnerability. Even when characters behave badly, the books seek out the causal chain—what grief, need, or fear made this outcome plausible—without collapsing into determinism. That’s most apparent in The Way of All Flesh, where empathy for a transforming consciousness becomes the terror’s engine; in The Forever House, where families’ small deceptions have enormous metaphysical cost; and in Nekropolis, where wisecracks never negate the pathos of a dead man trying to do good in an unlivable city. SFFWorldthebramstokerawards.comAngry Robot

Technically, this emphasis shows up as sustained close point of view and an ear for interiority under stress. Waggoner rarely writes “stoic competence porn.” Instead, he lets fear act on perception: breath shortens, time dilates, details over‑resolve into the grotesque. That phenomenology of terror—what it’s like to be inside the moment—distinguishes his set‑pieces from mere action choreography.

11) Image Systems and the Felt Shape of a Book

One way to understand Waggoner’s design intelligence is to track image systems across his books. He builds clusters of recurring motifs that carry thematic load:

• Thresholds/Keys/Rooms (The Forever House): the domestic as a series of controlled entries and exclusions; hospitality inverted into predation. thebramstokerawards.com
• Flowers/Skin/Darkness (The Mouth of the Dark): sensual beauty turned carnivorous; the erotic coded as a trap. Amazon
• Hands/Teeth/Names (Your Turn to Suffer): agency, consumption, and identity shredded by a tribunal that denies the protagonist’s say in who she is. Goodreads
• Windows/Water/Weight (We Will Rise): the dead as a pressure system that seeps, floods, and settles over communities. Flame Tree Publishing

These aren’t just aesthetic choices; they’re mnemonic devices that teach the reader how to read the book. Horror often risks incoherence when the irrational takes over; Waggoner’s image grids give even his wildest episodes a sense of inevitability.

12) Pacing, Clarity, and the Ethics of Extremity

Waggoner writes violence and grotesquerie with unapologetic candor. Yet an ethical through‑line tempers the extremity: scenes exist to crystallize a character’s conflict or to reveal a rule about the world, not simply to shock. That clarity is partly a product of his prose economy—clean syntax, active verbs—and partly of his teacher’s commitment to reader trust: he will not trick you with nonsense. In A Hunter Called Night, for instance, the siege structure creates continuous jeopardy, but Waggoner refuses to collapse characters into meat puppets; the choices that doom or save them feel legible. Amazon

This also explains why his tie‑ins often feel more “novelistic” than expected. In Alien: Prototype and Halloween Kills, the carnage is anchored by comprehensible stakes and tactile spaces; you know where people are, what they want, and how the scene’s physics work. Even Terrifier 2, which celebrates splatter as spectacle, uses interior perspective to make sensation matter. titanbooks.com+1PenguinRandomhouse.com

13) Where to Start: A Reader’s Trajectory (and Why)

If you’re new to Waggoner and want the fullest sense of his range:

• Start with The Forever House to experience his haunted‑community mode at peak control—tight structure, strong ensemble, and a devastating metaphor for domestic secrecy. thebramstokerawards.com
• Move to The Mouth of the Dark for the fullest blast of his surreal, transgressive imagination. Amazon
• Read We Will Rise to see him scale personal horror to civilizational stakes. Flame Tree Publishing
• Then sample Nekropolis to watch him warp noir into monster‑city worldbuilding without losing thematic bite. Angry Robot
• Finish with The Way of All Flesh for a stripped‑down, intimate study of identity under erasure. SFFWorld

Parallel to that, Writing in the Dark will deepen your appreciation of how deliberately he builds fear on the page. Flame Tree Publishing

14) Conclusion: Horror as a Theory of Reality

Tim Waggoner’s work advances a coherent thesis about horror: the world is not stable; meaning is negotiated under pressure; and the self is a contested frontier, susceptible to colonization by appetite, memory, and shame. The task of the horror writer is to give that instability form—to build narratives and image systems sturdy enough to contain the uncontainable for as long as a book lasts. Waggoner does this with unusual reliability. His novels aren’t merely tours through inventive hellscapes; they are arguments, staged as nightmares, about what it costs to keep being a person when the rules change without warning.

That’s why he matters in the contemporary field. He brings the genre’s visceral intensities into contact with ethical and metaphysical questions without becoming didactic; he treats readers not as thrill‑seekers to be manipulated but as witnesses to be entrusted with difficult recognitions. And he writes like someone who has diagrammed fear and still respects it. If you want horror that remembers people even as it dismembers them, Waggoner is one of the surest bets we have.

 

How would you improve this essay if I gave you a chance to rewrite it?

ChatGPT said:

Here’s what I’d suggest if you gave me a chance to rewrite the essay for improvement:

1. Sharper Thesis and Through-Line

Right now the essay frames Waggoner as a craftsman of surreal horror, but the central thesis could be distilled more strongly into a single sentence and repeated as a guiding thread—something like: “Waggoner’s horror dramatizes how appetite, memory, and shame destabilize identity and community, using surrealism as a rigorous narrative tool.” That through-line would make the sections feel even more connected.

2. More Close Reading of Scenes

I summarize many books and mention their themes, but I don’t unpack specific passages or moments at the sentence level. Adding close readings—for example, a paragraph analyzing how Waggoner’s prose in The Mouth of the Dark literalizes metaphor, or how point of view in The Way of All Flesh conveys sensory distortion—would deepen the “literary analysis” aspect.

3. Stronger Comparative Frame

I briefly mention Koja and Barker, but more sustained comparison to other horror stylists (Ramsey Campbell’s psychological unease, Brian Keene’s apocalyptic community horror, even Shirley Jackson’s haunted domesticity) would situate Waggoner more firmly in a lineage, which is often expected in academic-style criticism.

4. Tighter Section Transitions

The essay moves book by book, which is useful, but the transitions could highlight how each phase evolves organically from the previous one (e.g., how the cityscapes of Like Death anticipate the community horror of The Forever House). This would help the essay feel like a single arc instead of a series of dossiers.

5. More on Style

I discuss “verbs do heavy lifting” and “image grids,” but a more nuanced analysis of his sentence rhythm, imagery density, or tonal shifts would showcase what makes his language distinctive, not just his structures.

6. Balance of Summary vs. Argument

Some parts lean toward plot summary (especially the sections on tie-ins). A rewrite could trim these down and emphasize interpretive claims: what the tie-in shows us about Waggoner’s core concerns, rather than what happens in the book.

7. Punchier Conclusion

The conclusion works, but it could tie more directly back to contemporary horror culture—why Waggoner matters right now in a landscape crowded with cosmic horror, folk horror, and extreme horror. That would leave a stronger final impression.

 

When ChatGPT finished with all this, I copied the text of the essay (but not the program’s insights into possible revision) and pasted it into three online AI-detection sites. Two of the three came back with a result that the text was human-written.

 

In the last few years that I’ve been running these before-semester experiments to get a sense of what AI-written essays look like, this is the best (or worst) result I’ve gotten. Best if you’re a student wishing to cheat. Worst if you’re a teacher wishing students would create original work. ChatGPT produced what I asked for – a sophisticated essay using examples and providing insight.

 

Bottom line? I suspect AI-assisted writing is going to become a new, separate field from traditional composition instruction. I dread teaching research writing this academic year, and as I’ve said before, I’m glad I'll retire soon.