Episode Details

Another week, another episode in our series of Octobrish delights... this time, we are returning to our bookshelves to pull some inspirational fiction for the more uncanny, eerie, and unsettling side of Changeling: the Dreaming. We're going through 10(-ish) books and story collections that keep us up at night, and seeing how we can translate that into the themes and moods of the game. (This was also kind of an unexpected topic, so we had very little time to prepare, and it shows—apologies!)

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the list (this time)

• Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber — One of the earlier collections that adapt and modernize fairy tales, Carter's work takes a decidedly feminist approach. Her work was influential on many of the fantasy authors who followed her, and being a literary theorist, she knew what she was about when it came to crafting a darkly fantastic story.
• Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves — It's a piecemeal text drawing on numerous traditions and formats and histories. It's a retelling of the myth of the Labyrinth and the Minotaur. It's an experiment in surrealist writing. It's a horror story about a house and the family whose children disappear within it. Danielewski's work is always challenging, but the elegant precision of this novel is matched only by the madness lurking under the surface. There is a whole community of die-hard fans who discuss every little connection, hint, and reference (and there are thousands), if you feel like vanishing into an abyss of your own.
• Neil Gaiman, Coraline — We could have easily gone with The Ocean at the End of the Lane or Mr. Punch or any number of other Gaiman yarns, but this one seemed the Right One to talk about at the intersection of Changeling and creepy-style horror. It's a bit more Lost than Dreaming, maybe, but a pitch-perfect dark faerie tale for modern times. Check out the publisher's page for more information (or go watch the trailer for the film) (or find more about the musical, or the opera, or...)
• E.T.A. Hoffmann, "The Sandman" and other stories — Hoffmann is a landmark figure in the history of the German Romantic movement, known for his creepy and unsettling literary fairy tales. Freud discussed this tale at length in his essay on the "uncanny," which opens our episode; the text of that essay is freely available here from MIT.
• Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf — The most recent entry on this list is also the most epic, perhaps. It's set against the backdrop of African folklore, features a party of misfits in search of a missing boy, and has some of the most nightmarish tableaux ever set to paper in a fantasy novel. It's delightfully queer, shamelessly vulgar, and occasion