The Reading List

I’ve been working on the annotated bibliography of a variety of journal articles for the “theory” component of my thesis and proposal, but what of stylistic influences? Today I’d like to share a list of media that is influential to me and that I will be exploring in depth to make my own horror writing for the visual novel all the stronger. I am just going to do a cursory overview with this post, but I will also do in depth posts about the following items as well. I plan on adding this post to the menu of the site, so I will also include links to the blog entries where I talk about the specific works on this list. As such, this post will be revised significantly over the coming months.

I am always on the lookout for more material to read or view, so if you have a suggestions please comment on this post. I feel all of these works I have included have the air of cosmicism that I am interested in pursuing regarding my visual novel. While my primary themes will deal with cosmicism, I am intensely interested in hauntings, so there are ghost stories present as well.

1. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem (2002)
2. The Shining (1980)
3. Suspiria (1977)
4. The Witch (2015)
5. The Thing (1982)
6. The Conjuring (2013)
7. American Horror Story
   1. Murder House, Asylum, Hotel, Roanoke
8. David Lynch
   1. Twin Peaks, Fire Walk with Me, and Twin Peaks: The Return
   2. Eraserhead (1977)
   3. Mulholland Dr. (2001)
9. Silent Hill series (1999-2012)
10. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
11. Peter Straub’s Ghost Story (1979)
12. Henry James
    1. The Turn of the Screw
    2. The Jolly Corner
13. Edgar Allan Poe
    1. The Raven
    2. The City in the Sea
    3. The Fall of the House of Usher
    4. William Wilson
    5. The Masque of the Red Death
    6. The Pit and the Pendulum
14. H.P. Lovecraft
    1. At the Mountains of Madness
    2. The Shadow over Innsmouth
    3. Dagon
    4. Nyarlathotep
    5. The Rats in the Walls
    6. The Shunned House
    7. The Call of Cthulhu
    8. The Dunwich Horror
15. The Book of Cthulhu, Ed. by Ross E. Lockheart