Two Wrongs Don't Make a Good Story

I’ve just gotten back from watching Weapons in the theater as I write this. I really enjoyed the movie, especially the actors’ performances, the direction, and the cinematography. The script, however, had some problems for me. I only want to focus on two of those problems for this blog entry, though, because they’re among the most common ones I see as a writing teacher, often in student-written stories, but sometimes in professionally published (or filmed) ones, too. (Don’t worry; I’m not going to give any spoilers for Weapons.)

Problem Number 1: Forgetting That Media is Everywhere

I first became aware of this problem when I read a horror novel in the early 1990s (and no, I’m not going to say which one to avoid spoilers). It was a great book, an award-winner, and I enjoyed the hell out of it. But the events that occurred within it were realistic, the public was aware of them, and they were so bizarre that both print and TV reporters would’ve been all over the story throughout the novel. But there was no media presence in the book whatsoever.

A more recent example (which I will name) is Bentley Little’s The Bank (2020). I love Bentley’s fiction, and I enjoyed the book quite a lot. But in the novel, nearly twenty people, all who work at the same bank, are found dead in a field outside town. (This happens early in the novel, so my telling you isn’t much of a spoiler.) One of the dead people has an obvious cause of death, but the others don’t. Weird, right? But no news media – not even a single local reporter – shows up to cover the story.

I see this failure to address the presence of media happen a lot in horror – including in Weapons. Given the mysterious circumstances – seventeen children all disappear at 2:17 a.m. on the same night – and the fact the events of the story go on for weeks, local, state, national and international media would quickly show up to cover the story, and they’d stay on it. The media would be omnipresent in town, and they’d bug the elementary school teacher, the one child who didn’t disappear, the kids’ parents, law enforcement (both local and federal), and regular citizens alike to get interviews and sound bites – and they would not stop.

Add to this all the people who’d be texting each other, posting on social media, making YouTube and TikTok videos about the case, discussing it on podcasts – especially in this age of true-crime entertainment – and people would flock to the town: influencers, true-crime writers, paranormal investigators, conspiracy theorists, dark tourists… The entire world would become obsessed with the disappearances. And the parents of the missing children would use this to their advantage, granting interviews to the media to put more pressure on law enforcement to find their kids. But there’s nothing but crickets in the film as far as the media is concerned.

Now, in a more intimate, character-focused story like Weapons, the writers might decide not to make the media a major aspect of the story, and the media might fade out of the story for the most part as the plot moves on, but they’d still be in the background somewhere. But not having any media at all present is extremely unrealistic – and it always strains my suspension of disbelief.

Here’s how I handle the issue of the media in my fiction:

• Many of my novels take place over the course of a few hours, and there often isn’t time for news media to become alerted to the weird stuff going on.
• My characters are usually so caught up in dealing with weird stuff that they don’t have time to text anyone or post about it on social media.
• The weird stuff is usually supernatural, and characters may perceive it, but the rest of the world doesn’t, so no media becomes involved.
• The situation might only impact a few characters, so the incidents aren’t known – and maybe never will be known – outside their circle.
• I might have law enforcement try to conceal the more bizarre/extreme aspects of an incident to keep news media from becoming involved (as long as they can, anyway).
• I have news media show up for a scene or two to establish their presence, but they don’t play a big role in the story.
• I’ll show someone post a message on social media or read one, send a text or receive a text, talk to someone on the phone, etc. about what’s happening. I’ll do this once or twice to show that people are upset about what’s going on and talking about it, but I don’t make it a major part of the story.
• Sometimes I’ll make the news media and social media a significant aspect of the story. I may do this by having one reporter be a supporting character or even a main character. This reporter stands in for all the other media that’s present in the background. I might have characters stay in regular phone/text/social media contact with friends or family during a story (although I’ll make sure not to overdo this).

Problem 2: Not Checking Your Plot Forward AND Backward

Writers seem so focused on moving their plot forward that they sometimes don’t fully consider the ramifications of the events they’re writing about. They write a cool scene revealing the central mystery of the story, but they don’t go back to the beginning of the draft and check to make sure everything else in the story fits the explanation. This happens in Weapons, but I can’t talk about where and how without spoiling aspects of the film. But I’ll give you an example from Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot (1979) All the vampires in the miniseries are repelled by the cross – except master vampire Barlow. When Father Callahan shoves a metal cross toward Barlow, he reaches out, crumples it in his hand, and tosses it away. No explanation. The audience can guess that Barlow is so powerful that the cross doesn’t affect him, but in the novel, King makes it clear that the bearer of the cross must have faith for it to work, and Father Callahan’s faith is more than a little shaky at that point in his life. I’m sure Hooper loved the imagery of Barlow crushing the cross without any explanation, but King’s version is infinitely better – and it’s logical within the confines of the story. It often doesn’t take much to fix a problem like this. Fright Night (1985) dealt with this same issue in one line. When Peter Vincent thrusts a cross toward master vampire Jerry Dandridge, Dandridge laughs, then says, “You have to have faith for that to work on me.” If you’re going to establish rules in a story – whether explicitly through dialogue or showing them through action – they need to be consistent, and when there’s an exception to the rules, the audience needs to know why.

The original 1978 Halloween has a different problem. When Michael Myers escapes from the mental hospital where he’s been confined since he was a child, he steals a hospital vehicle and drives away. When did he learn to drive? It’s established that he’s been catatonic the entire time he was in the hospital, so even if someone wanted to teach him, he wouldn’t have responded to them. In the novelization of Halloween, one of the hospital staff gives Michael driving lessons, which isn’t believable given what the script says about his mental condition, but at least it’s some kind of explanation.

Probably the horror movie most guilty of plot inconsistency (at least for me) is M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs. At the end of the movie, humans discover that water is like acid to the alien invaders. They use it as a weapon against the aliens, and the surviving invaders, evidently realizing the egregious error they’ve made, get the hell off the planet. My guess is that Shyamalan loved the symbolism of pure water defeating the evil aliens so much, that he didn’t bother to ask why would aliens with super-advanced tech come to a planet and not know its water was acid to them? Don’t they have sensors? Probes? Water-testing kits? Couldn’t they have seen a buddy step into a puddle and lose a foot and realize something was wrong? Or couldn’t they have done what we humans do when we go into a hostile environment and wear fucking protective gear? I mean, those dudes walked around Acid World naked! (And what if it rained on the aliens or they went to a place with a shit-ton of humidity, or…) It also irritates the hell out of me that Shyamalan seems to imply the entire alien invasion – and all the human casualties that resulted – was created by God to restore one man’s faith.

Assuming Shyamalan had the ending of his story in mind first, he should’ve figured out why the aliens wanted to come to Earth and take it over, and why they were unaware that water is acid to them. He wouldn’t have to address either issue in the film, but his knowing those things would’ve allowed him to avoid what turned out to be an extremely bad ending. So imagine him rereading his script and realizing it’s dumb as hell for aliens to come naked to a world that’s mostly acid to them. He then asks himself why they wouldn’t know ahead of time what water could do to them. Answer: Because it’s not just water that harms them. It’s water combined with another liquid, a combination the aliens could not foresee. So Joaquin Phoenix swings his bat, smashes the water pitcher and a cup of coffee. The mixture hits the alien, and it melts like the Wicked Witch of the West. Joaquin says, “Holy shit! Water and caffeine together! Who knew?” Again, it doesn’t take a huge adjustment to fix problems like this. (I’d probably have Joaquin or someone else hurl a different liquid at the alien first, then he could add the water by smashing the pitcher, just to make the combining of liquids seem more realistic.)

Now, I don’t need to have everything spelled out for me in stories. To me, Michael Myers is a liminal being that exists somewhere between the real and the unreal. His driving is just another part of the mystery that is this unknowable creature. And I fucking love David Lynch’s films and TV shows, and they don’t make a lick of sense, nor are they supposed to. My favorite stories are ones where bizarre shit happens for reasons we will never understand or for no reason at all. Most of the horror fiction I’ve written in my career is in this vein, especially my short stories. But if you are going to write more realistic horror fiction (or really, any kind of realistic fiction), you need to mentally sweep through your story forward and backward – as well as consider the story before the story – to make sure everything fits, or at least fits as well as it needs to.

I don’t mean to trash Weapons here. If you haven’t seen it already, you should check it out. Like I said earlier, it’s a really good film, and afterward, I heard members of the audience talking about how scary it was, and that’s always a good endorsement for a horror movie!

DEPARTMENT OF SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION

THE WORLD TURNS RED

 

My new horror novella, The World Turns Red, came out in June, and reactions from reviewers and readers alike have been overwhelmingly positive! Here’s a sample:

 

“A dark, disturbing masterpiece worth binge-reading in one sitting.” – S.E. Howard

 

“This is a very dark, intense read with a surreal quality that pulled me in from page one and held me spellbound to the bitter end.” – Well Worth a Read

 

The World Turns Red is another in a long line of brilliant horror work by Tim Waggoner. There was never anyone who could blend the real with the surreal so seamlessly that, as wild as the story gets, it makes perfect sense somehow. Now THAT takes one hell of a writer. The book is a flawless masterpiece…6 out of 5 stars.  – Carson Buckingham

 

Synopsis:

 

Welcome to the meat room.

 

At first, it’s a whisper on the edge of your consciousness.

 

As it gets louder, you begin to make out words—dark, sharp, dangerous words… You clap your hands over your ears to shut them out, but you can’t escape what comes from inside you.

 

The voice tells you to do things to yourself. Bad things. Awful things…

 

The longer you listen, the more they seem reasonable. Desirable.

 

Inevitable.

 

And as you reach for the nearest knife, gun, or rope, the voice speaks the last four words you’ll ever hear:

 

All hail the Unhigh.

 

Cemetery Dance: https://www.cemeterydance.com/TheWorldTurnsRed

 

Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/5cabrjn2

 

Barnes and Noble: https://tinyurl.com/kzphuep7

 

CONAN: SPAWN OF THE SERPENT GOD

 

The time is drawing nigh! My Conan the Barbarian novel, Spawn of the Serpent God, will be released October 28th! The novel ties into the comic book event Scourge of the Serpent Men (Conan being said scourge, of course, although it looks like King Kull may be involved, too). You won’t have to read the comics to understand my book, and vice versa, but if you’re a Conan fan, you might enjoy reading both. Here’s a link to the first issue of Scourge of the Serpent Men: https://titan-comics.com/c/2316-conan-the-barbarian-scourge-of-the-serpent/

 

You can find various preorder links for the novel at the Titan Books site: https://titanbooks.com/72365-conan-spawn-of-the-serpent-god/

 

And while I’ve had no official word (because nobody ever tells writers anything), it looks like Spawn of the Serpent God will be getting an audio edition! I’m super excited because the narrator is Bradford Hastings, who’s not only an excellent reader and performer, but his Conan is my absolute favorite portrayal of the character. The audiobook is due out in late December, and you can preorder it at B&N and Amazon. I’m sure it’ll be available directly from Blackstone Audio (who’s the publisher of the audio version) as well.

 

Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/bn6hh2m

 

B&N: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/conan-tim-waggoner/1148011208?ean=9798228671591

 

Synopsis:

 

In Zamora, the city of thieves, Conan meets Valja, a thrill-seeking thief. She entices him to join

her on a heist, where they steal a golden statuette of Ishtar, said to contain the goddess herself.

After killing a dozen guards and failing to escape, the pair are saved by priestesses of Mitra. But

Conan knows that nothing is free.

 

The priestesses have need of their skills. They have waged war against Set, god of chaos and

serpents, who demands constant sacrifice from his subjects and massacred thousands of his

followers. Yet they are no match for Uzzeran, a powerful sorcerer, who has been performing

unspeakable experiments on humans in the name of Set. To defeat Uzzeran, they will need a

legendary warrior on their side. They need Conan the Barbarian.

 

I SCREAM, YOU SCREAM

 

Weird House Press is going to bring out my middle-grade horror novel I Scream, You Scream. Joe Morey, publisher at Weird House, says “We are going to do a deluxe signed and lettered hardcover with slipcase, and double lettered deluxe hardcover (no slipcase), a signed hardcover edition, and a signed and numbered trade paperback edition sometime next year. Also an Amazon trade paperback edition and ebook.”

Check out that cover! The art from Derek Rook is perfect for the novel! It reminds me of the artwork that appeared on the covers of the DC horror comics I read as a kid – The House of Mystery and The House of Secrets. Young Timmy would be freaking out even more than old(er) Tim is!

If you’re a fan of my adult horror fiction, this story is just as weird and bizarre as anything else I’ve written, but geared toward younger readers. I think older readers will enjoy it, too, if for no other reason than to see how I translate my dark and surreal style for a middle-grade audience.

Synopsis:

Eighth-grader Joel Taylor just moved to Shadow Springs with his mom. He likes his new home well enough – until a sinister being called Mr. Freezee begins driving his creepy ice-cream truck up and down the streets at night, playing “Pop Goes the Weasel.”

Joel heard the music.

He looked out the window.

He saw Mr. Freezee, and what’s worse…

Mr. Freezee saw him.

Now Mr. Freezee wants to take Joel to a very special place where the world is made of every flavor of ice cream you can imagine – all of them deadly. Mr. Freezee brings all his new friends here, and they love it so much that they never leave.

Mr. Freezee makes sure of it.

Welcome to Sweet Land, Joel.

Welcome to a nightmare that never ends.

Here’s a link to the book’s page on the Weird House. Preorder info is scheduled to appear on August 26th: https://weirdhousepress.com/products/i-scream-you-scream-by-tim-waggoner

 

SCHEDULED APPEARANCES

 

2025

 

Moon Lit Tales and Haunted Trails. Oct. 11-12. St. Albans, West Virginia.

 

2026

 

Superstars Writing Seminar. Feb. 4-5. Colorado Springs, Colorado.

 

Akron Book Fest. March 7. Akron, Ohio.

 

StokerCon. June 4-7. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

 

Into the Springs Writers Workshop. August 7-9. Yellow Springs, Ohio.

 

WHERE TO FIND ME ONLINE

 

Want to follow me on social media? Here’s where you can find me:

 

Website: www.timwaggoner.com

Newsletter Sign-Up: https://timwaggoner.com/contact.htm

Amazon Page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Tim-Waggoner/author/B001JP0XFM?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true

Blog: http://writinginthedarktw.blogspot.com/

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/timwaggonerswritinginthedark

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/133838.Tim_Waggoner

Instagram: tim.waggoner.scribe

Threads: @tim.waggoner.scribe@threads.net

Bluesky: @timwaggoner.bsky.social

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tim.waggoner.9

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.