User:The Koromo/Inspirations and References

The Legend of the Hightown Crow series

 * The Legend of the Hightown Crow took its name from a song by an obscure doom metal act (beautifully named Naked Shit), and both share themes of the crow as a dark symbol. As a whole, this thing was Lovecraftian to the point of fault, and incorporated the dull, ersatz "mythos" rather than merely showing inspiration from Lovecraft and/or creating an original cosmic pantheon of sorts. This as a whole prompted its removal from the website, but will return in revised form in due time.

Abigail Madeline Boulstridge series

 * The Untimely Shadow's protagonist, the (sub)titular Abigail, as well as the primary setting, were very much an allegorical (of sorts) reflection of my mental state during the bulk of my time writing this story, and for this reason Abigail and the hospital she is confined in continue to remain important creations of mine. The Connecticut setting is taken from my frequent visits and drives through the state, which I've found dull on more occasion than not. The unnamed psyche ward in Bridgeport that most of the story is set in is not only based off of what I experienced further west over here in New York, but the general sense of physical impossibility and completely atypical geography of the hospital were based on Kubrick's clever adaption of King's The Shining in 1980. Y'thra has traits similar to Lord Loss from the Demonata series in that the both of them are calm, collected, and remarkably intelligent yet harbor nothing but melancholy and apathy for the human race.


 * Ghosts I-IV takes its name from the Nine Inch Nails album of the same name, which I found as the perfect soundscape for a story like this. Of course it lives up to its namesake, as it is divided into four parts cycling Abigail's journey in the "afterlife" after the despairingly bleak ending of the previous story. The whole story is somewhat akin to Lovecraft's own The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, in that it features a cosmic entity as its antagonist (an omnipresent mother goddess who is similar in some ways to Shub-Niggurath) against a seemingly normal human being now trapped in an unfamiliar landscape. The story incorporates more Tolkienisms (yes, that's a word in my book!) and fantastical scenarios to truly label it a "horror" story.

Nineteenth Century series

 * The Maine setting of The Witch, the Cross and the Stream is an obvious shout out to  'Salem's Lot and King as a whole, though the 1800s setting brings to mind some more literary writers, albeit this story has far, far more enthusiasm and humor than both King and the others combined. The stereotypical three man band setup - the enthusiastic and pretty much impossibly optimistic hero, the pensive and rational woman who acts as a motherly figure to the group, and the formal sidekick whose advice is often ignored - is a (not so) obvious satire toward the detective group cliche.


 * Prayer has an abundant "get lost in the woods/some remote area and fight for survival" premise that is a little too common in horror, though I attempted to curb this by landing our protagonist in a big city slum setting, and we all know the dangers of people are more terrifying than the dangers of the wild. This story has a large amount of Christian references and symbolism and all that jazz, of course a reference to the faith that I have, so if you don't like stuff like that then I will put it in Mark Z. Danielewski's words: "This is not for you."


 * Black Rose Immortal is an obvious "novel"ization of Opeth's song of the same name, or at least my interpretation of it. Y'thra reappears here, though never explicitly stated, in the form of a very tall man, and the themes of selling the soul to a higher power to selfishly bring back your desire makes Y'thra's manifestation in this story an obvious allegory to the insidious deceit of Satan.

Hopewell
Hopewell is the name of two towns in the state of New York, but a fictionalized version of the one located in Dutchess County crops up in many of these stories.


 * Pushing Up Daisies is loosely based on the song "Please Just Stay Dead" by Nicole Dollanganger, in which the meaning is obscure either way. The themes of animal neglect by owner and corpse reanimation are also (apparently) abundant in the song, and our confused protagonist brings to mind the childlike discomfort in Dollanganger's voice. King's Pet Sematary is certainly similar, though themes of neglect in this story separate it from the themes of protection in the other.


 * The Blackhill Run Horror contains no notable references or inspirations, unless if we count the haunted house subgenre as a reference. If anything, in relation to the protagonist group's ignorance, the story is partially a satire toward teenage peer pressure such as abundant drinking, sex, and illicit acts as a whole, which for some unexplained reason Hollywood really likes to force feed us.

Haddonfield
A small city I completely made up (except for the county, Schenectady, which it takes place in), with no relation to Haddonfield, New Jersey.


 * The Sacrilege of Fatal Arms, based on the Devil Doll song of the same name in a roundabout way, is a more obvious cosmic horror story (you'll be seeing a lot of those). The idea of using a Ouija board to gaze into the vast trench of space rather than a spiritual world is sort of poking fun at modern horror fiction using a Ouija board as the chief excuse for any hackneyed supernatural event to occur, though the jab is not obvious and was really only mocking a personal pet peeve on my part (an irritation which is shared by dozens of other readers and writers of the genre, nevertheless).


 * Satyr IX has the same title of Electric Wizard's song of the same name, but the catch is that the story itself is based solely on my personal interpretation of the song, which is in and of itself the beauty of music. In a situation similar to  'Salem's Lot, though now with the smellier form of the undead (that being zombies), evil battling against a small town doomed from the very start is the theme here, and though this has a "happy" ending by my standards, it's still an exercise in bleakness as a whole. References to Junji Ito's Gyo occasionally crop up, at least in the forms of the undead themselves. Also worth noting is that one of the main female leads here is a shout out to the character Sae from the Saki anime and manga, though the shout out is more or less just an inside reference for me.

I have various other projects coming up to be set in Haddonfield, the most interesting idea to me being a story in which a person is locked out of their home, slowly freezing to death, because there is a dangerous criminal inside who will shoot if the individual attempts to enter. It doesn't help that this person's phone happens to be dead at the time.

Sunset Lake
Sunset Lake is based on the real village of Lake George in Upstate New York, though Sunset Lake is like what Lake George would be if it were a breeding ground for the supernatural.


 * The Lodge is pretty much a ghost story through-and-through, in an extremely isolated and remote woody section surrounded by swamp on the outer ridges of the forest - similar to The Shining in idea, but completely the opposite in execution and setting. Rather than a gorgeous, sprawling hotel in the Rockies you get a dismal, rotting lodge-motel in the remote heart of the Adirondacks that breeds filth and decay. There is also real life back story behind this tale in an explanation for the dark hauntings - in the American Revolution, the area which would become known as Lake George was fought in the battle of its namesake, in which over three-hundred native Canadians and Indians were brutally massacred by terrorizing Colonists, the carnage so strong that the corpses of the lives taken were thrown like trash despicably into the pond - it's a real shame that Americans take such pride in carnage and arrogance that the name "Bloody Pond Road" was given with apparent enthusiasm and pride to an atrocity. I've been through the area some times myself, and it's difficult to deny the dread emanating from that barren stretch of road. A paranormal dread, or just a suggestive one? Who knows, but anything is possible.