More Eldritch than Eldritch
Panel discussion with Garrett Cook (moderator), Cody Goodfellow, Evan J. Peterson, Anya Martin, Sarah Walker
As Lovecraftian entities become bobbleheads and Satan becomes a quaint bugbear for the religious right, how does the writer of cosmic horror and horror create predatory cosmologies without creating fan fiction or giving lip service to canon without creating new fears? What place do "elevated horror", Bizarro and literary surrealism have in the future of occult and cosmic horror stories? Panelists will discuss how to create cosmic horror that will continue to awe and frighten in a time where the eldritch has become the familiar.
Garrett Cook is a Wonderland Award winning author as well as an editor, mentor and Twitch streamer. His work has been translated into several languages and published in multiple countries. He streams games and documents his writing process on his channel DocFaustus82 on Twitch. His latest book is Kennel from Madnesss Heart Press.
Cody Goodfellow has written ten novels and five collections of short stories, and has won three Wonderland Book Awards. His comics work has been featured in Mystery Meat, Creepy, Slow Death Zero and Skin Crawl. As an actor, he has appeared in numerous short films, TV shows, music videos by Anthrax and Beck, and a Days Inn commercial. He wrote, co-produced and scored the Lovecraftian hygiene films "Baby Got Bass" and "Stay At Home Dad," which can be viewed on YouTube.
Evan J. Peterson is a game writer, novelist, and poet. His first novel is Better Living Through Alchemy (Broken Eye Books), and other works include METAFLESH: Poems In the Voices of the Monster (ARUS), Drag Star! (Choice of Games), the world’s first drag performer RPG, and The Road to Innsmouth: Arkham Horror (Asmodee). His writing has appeared in Weird Tales, PseudoPod, Queers Destroy Horror, and Nightmare Magazine. POSTHUMAN, his next RPG, is coming in late 2025 from Choice of Games. Evanjpeterson.com can tell you more.
Anya Martin has always rooted for the monster and regrets abandoning her earliest career aspiration--paleontology. She's also half-Finnish, still likes punk rock though now with a heavy side of blues and experimental jazz, has a bachelor's degree in anthropology, cooks dangerously hot curries, earns her living as a journalist and abides in Atlanta. Her fiction appears in such anthologies and magazines as the upcoming Eternal Frankenstein, Cthulhu Fhtagn!, Giallo Fantastique, Cassilda's Song, Xnoybis #2, Borderlands 6, Resonator: New Lovecraftian Tales From Beyond, and Womanthology: Heroic. She is also associate producer of The Outer Dark podcast, which interviews weird fiction creators and was awarded Best Podcast for 2015 by This Is Horror. She grew up with Weird as the daughter of William C. Martin, First Fandom member and one of the world's most prominent H.P. Lovecraft collectors.
Sarah Walker is an artist, anthropologist, and writer of horror living in the Pacific Northwest. Her work appears in publications such as Audient Void, Lovecraft Ezine Press, Vastarien, and many more. She co-edited the Folk Horror anthology, A Walk in A Darker Wood with Gordon White, Phil Breach, and Duane Pesice, and A Walk in a City of Shadows: Tales of Urban Legendry, with Nora B. Peevy, Jill Hand, Gordon White, and Phil Breach.