This blog entry is a crossover event! I’m also posting it at my other website, Uncanny Agency Gamebooks, for reasons that will make sense when you read it.
Most people who see me online will likely know my as a comedian, which I’ve been for the last 7 years. This year I’ve released The Thirteenth Vessel, the first entry in a trilogy of cosmic horror gamebooks, and I’m working hard on the second one, Geometry of the Abyss (although maybe not that hard… when you see more than one blog entry in a week, you can safely assume I’ve hit a hard part of the book and want to feel productive without having to actually write the book).
I’ve also announced an indefinite hiatus from comedy, with my Fresno gig on November 1st being my last for a while. Part of it’s burnout and part of it is because I want to focus on being a horror gamebook writer. It’s my current passion. I’ve already got book #3 mapped out in my head and have plans for another trilogy set in the same “Threshold” universe, so I guess this is what I am doing now!
If you do know me primarily as a comedian, and even if you don’t (statistically, you don’t), you might consider stand-up comedy to horror gamebooks a bizarre and inexplicable pivot, even stranger than moving from musician to comic was. You might accept my move to writing – especially if you, like many others, consider me a good comedy writer. But horror? Weird.
Let me explain, because it doesn’t look like a radical pivot from here. Yes, on the writer-performer spectrum of stand-up I’m definitely a better writer than speaker. And yes, the pop culture I sometimes reference in my comedy is largely science fiction and horror movies. But I’d like to explain that, from a writing perspective, they’re not as antithetical as your gut says they are.
If you know me, you’ll know that I like a lot of horror movies. But mostly, the ones I loved growing up all seemed like horror movies to me, even the science fiction ones. The dystopian science fiction from the 1970s – movies like Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, Rollerball, Clockwork Orange, Westworld, Logan’s Run, Mad Max, etc – are all horror films if you experience them right.
To my 10 year old self (and a big thank you to my parents for being open minded and cool about it), the ideas behind them had the same terrifying existential quality in their driving ideas as The Omen (I loved that one too) and The Exorcist.
Moving into the eighties, I added Videodrome and Blade Runner to my list of favourite films. Again, if you don’t see the horror in their themes I’d invite you to consider them again. Concepts from both of those movies are strong thematic drivers in the book I’ve written and the one I’m writing.
This is to say, if you know me you’ll know that I’m a horror fan. Maybe not for the slasher films or the Stephen King stories, which leave me cold. But the visceral existential vibes I crave are best found in horror and horror-adjacent stories.
Stand up comedy and horror writing, though, aren’t as different as you might think. Certainly not in their respective mechanics. Hopefully, practising comedians (or ones as geeky about it as me) will recognise our employment of Benign Violation Theory as evidence for my claim.
Someone (Shakespeare, some claim, but I can’t back it up) once said that Drama tells us who we want to be, while comedy tells us who we actually are. I can’t help but think that Horror resonates more with Comedy than Drama in this respect.
Comedians use the same tools as horror writers do: Tension and Release, Violation and Catharsis. We both claim the right to make a temporary break from moral sensibilities for our bizarre thought experiments. Personally, what I’m loving right now is to be able to have and develop those ideas without asking “Yeah, but how to do I make a room full of drunk strangers laugh at it?”
Here’s something I learned while becoming a comedian: You don’t know what kind of comedian you are until you actually do it. I spent too many years wanting to be a comic before I summoned the confidence to do it, and in that time I thought about what kind of comic I’d be.
My favourites at the time were smart, extremely transgressive and often political, so I assumed this was the kind of comic I’d become. I think I’m smart, but I’m nowhere near as transgressive or overtly political as I imagined I’d be. Those assumptions I’d made about who I’d be as a comic became laughably irrelevant when I started.
You don’t know what kind of jokes you’ll make until you start writing them. And when you learn stand up you realise that your appreciation of what constitutes good craft is different from when you were a fan, and what you like changes. So you don’t really know what kind of comedian you will even want to be until you start doing it.
Same for writing.
If you know anything about me you’d know I’ve had writing aspirations for even longer than I had comedic ones. I had some thoughts about what kind of writer I’d want to be and it sure wasn’t going to be genre fiction. I laugh at that thought now.
If you’re afflicted with the kind of snobbery I was, let me offer the notion that it’s all genre fiction, but for literary fiction the genre is usually fucking mundane and the stakes are very low. Looking down on a story just because it’s in a genre might be the most stupidly indulgent thing I’ve ever done, but if you have noble and lofty reasons for your biases I’m sorry to offend you.
I assumed that if I wrote in a genre it would most likely be science fiction. Or dystopian. Or maybe fantasy (I’m not a huge fantasy guy, but I’ve always got time for Joe Abercrombie).
I wanted to explore big existential ideas, and these genres can do that very well. But with science fiction it traditionally explores them from a sociological angle, and fantasy tends to do it from a political one. And dystopian? OMG, I’m not sure I have the imagination to describe a political situation more depressing than the one we have, and any commentary I can make on it will definitely be too on-the-nose.
It feels to me that the cellular level existentialism, the visceral and raw approach that horror takes, is the best vehicle for how I want to communicate. If that’s a long way from snarky humour, so be it.
Also, I want to write gamebooks. That’s probably too niche to ever be picked up by a BookTok crowd, but that’s ok. I love gamebooks and what I feel they’re capable of. And no way am I even slightly interested in creating gamebooks in the fantasy genre.
That’s also not very smart of me, because all I’ve heard from gamebook communities is that they don’t enjoy the horror genre. They also traditionally rate the gamebooks in science fiction and other genres pretty low too.
There are exceptions. Victoria Hancox writes excellent horror gamebooks. Nightshift is a favourite of mine. House of Hell is a respected Fighting Fantasy book. House on Sentinel Hill is considered a good gamebook. But every time horror gamebooks come up in conversation, most members of gamebook communities say they dislike the genre.
That’s fine. I don’t like most fantasy ones either. And truthfully, I don’t enjoy a lot of the horror ones either. Many of them are just fantasy with a spooky trope filter slapped over them. In those, you’re rolling to his a skeleton instead of an orc, and tracking Sanity points as well as your Hit Points.
I don’t care at all about those. To me, they’ve missed all the potential of the genre. Gamebooks can be one of the most deeply immersive narrative platforms, and Horror loves immersion. This could be an amazing resonant and powerful experience for the player/reader but instead, everyone puts a stat block on the monster and calls on dice, expressing a statistical probability of beating the once-terrifying monster.
Does anything remove fear as quickly as a stat block? I don’t think so. Making combat conditions visible for entities who are supposed to inspire dread is what philosophers would call a category mistake, much like when horror writers try to put movie-like jump scares on the page and expect them to work. It’s a misunderstanding of the medium.
I’m going to go on a brief ranty side quest right now. Please indulge me.
The only thing less scary than putting a vampire in your story is providing a stat block to gamify them with. Who’s afraid of vampires in 2026? And fucking why? They’ve got to be the least scary monster, even before we made sure everyone already knew about them.
I hope if I ever have a supernatural predator that it’s a stupid vampire. Seriously. Has any monster ever been more constrained by rules?
Can’t handle sunlight. Can’t go out in the day. Can’t handle garlic. Can’t handle religious symbols. Can’t enter a building unless they’re invited. Can’t step on consecrated ground. Can’t go without feeding. Can’t handle holy water, salt water or even fucking flowing water, apparently.
Asian vampires, if you throw rice anywhere around them, have to stop chasing you and count all the grains of rice. If you believe the Twilight books, they have to go to a high school to find a girlfriend. Tell me there’s nothing fucked up about that. What’s a ten thousand year old vampire doing at high school anyway? How do you get to be that fucking old and still be stupid enough that high school can still teach you something? What the fuck?
So yeah… I’m not afraid of vampires. Especially when you tell me how many hit points they have. Fuck those parasites.
So yeah, if you give vampires or any other scary entity the gamebook treatment and present a stat block and dice based combat system, they’re going to have an uphill battle striking fear into your heart. Treating horror gamebooks like a dungeon crawl with spooky tropes is probably going to feel off for most gamebook enthusiasts.
In fact the dungeon crawl aspect is probably the key to who lots of gamebook guys don’t enjoy horror. It doesn’t give them what they want, which is usually character progression. If you’re addicted to the dopamine loop of collecting gold pieces, acquiring magic items, levelling up and getting more powerful with experience, and hearing “New Achievement!” frequently, you’re not going to find much to enjoy about being trapped in a horror story.
They’re less about capitalistic acquisition fantasies than loss aversion and basic survival. They’re about coming face to face with your vulnerability and asking questions about what survival even means.
I’ve also had to accommodate the medium. Gamebooks aren’t like horror novels, in which you can be subtle. I’d love to retain more mystery, allude instead of explicate. It feels immature to explain everything in basic detail when horror thrives on mystery and ambiguity. I know spelling out exactly what’s happening doesn’t feel like the most “writerly” way of articulating stuff in horror fiction.
But it’s a compromise I have to make, because it’s the medium. Actually, I think it comes from the perspective. Horror, like most literature, is commonly written in 3rd person omniscient perspective. It gives a lot of scope for subtlety and ambiguity and has fun things like unreliable narration in it’s toolkit.
Gamebooks are optimally written in 2nd person, present tense. This presents it’s own challenges, especially when I’m also trying not to assume the name, gender and other attributes of the protagonist I’m speaking to. One of those challenges is having to explicate clearly. I’ve tried writing floral and ambiguous passages that let the reader fill in the blanks and it absolutely sucks all the power out of the experience. Sadly, I have to state stuff bluntly or it just doesn’t work.
Challenges aside, I’m loving learning how to do this. Yeah, horror is a strange pivot. But it’s communities are, like comedian communities, exactly my kind of people – those who think differently, are interested in psychology, ask the existential questions and aim for the visceral experience.
If you’re interested in my new pursuit, you can see a YouTube review of my first gamebook, The Thirteenth Vessel, here:
