As I’ve mentioned before in my blog and on social media, I don’t use AIfor myself. But as a college writing instructor, I experiment with it beforeeach semester so I can better advise students on the pros and cons of using it,as well as help me get a better feel for AI-generated text vs human-written text. My experiments mostly focus on asking questions about mywork because I know it intimately and can spot mistakes easily. The lastexperiment I typically run before the semester starts is to have AI write aliterary analysis essay of my work. This year, I asked DeepSeek and ChatGPT towrite such an essay. DeepSeek’s contained numerous errors, fabricated information,and its analysis was surface-level. I decided to give ChatGPT a more detailedprompt. ChatGPT took a long time to think about the essay, then gave me anerror message. I tried again, and this time it thought for three minutes andproduced an essay fulfilling the prompt I’d given it. It cited its sources,too, but I didn’t tell it to use any specific citation system, and thehyperlinks looked different on the ChatGPT site than they do in this document.They were small ovals that said things like Tim Waggoner’s Site, so the links looked neater than what appears in thecopied and pasted version below. I could’ve easily asked ChatGPT to use MLA orAPA, or any other citation system, though.

What was weird was that I was able to view its process in real timebecause, as it worked, messages such as Gathering Sources, ConstructingOutline, etc., appeared on the screen. I’d never seen that before.

There are a few minor errors in ChatGPT’s essay. For example, my novel AHunter Called Night takes place in a small office building, not anapartment complex. ChatGPT used the word affect, perhaps intentionally, in a couple of places, but it seems like effect would’ve worked better. Butwhat do I know? I’m a creative writing guy, not a lit crit guy. A couple ofsubtler details about my work feel a bit off, but only a bit. Some of the language is overly pedantic, too, which makes the "writer" seem as if it's trying too hard.

After the essay was finished, I asked ChatGPT how it would improve theessay just to see what it would say, but I didn’t ask it to create a newversion.

Here’s the essay:

ChatGPT

August 17, 2025

You said:

Please write a 2000-word literaryanalysis of the work of author Tim Waggoner. Please use specific examples andexplore his work in depth and provide sophisticated insight.

ChatGPT said:

Thought for 3m 21s

“Where the World Is Always ComingApart”: A Literary Analysis of Tim Waggoner’s Horror

Tim Waggoner’s fiction sits at the weird, volatile seam where realityfrays—where perception turns unreliable, identity becomes porous, and thefamiliar shakes loose into nightmare. Over a career spanning decades and morethan fifty books, Waggoner has become one of contemporary horror’s mostdistinctive stylists and architects, equally at home in original novels, seriesfiction, and media tie‑ins. He’s also an influential teacher and critic of thegenre: his craft book Writing in the Dark won the Bram Stoker Award forNonfiction (2020), and his long fiction The Winter Box won the BramStoker Award in 2016. Most recently, his Terrifier 2 novelization earnedthe 2025 Scribe Award for Best Adapted Novel. These credentials matter becausethey illuminate the two poles of Waggoner’s work: a patient, craftsmanlycontrol of technique and a restless commitment to pushing horror toward theirrational edge. GrimdarkMagazineTim WaggonerWikipediaPenguinRandomhouse.com

Waggoner’s fiction theories and practice feed each other. A full‑timeprofessor who teaches creative writing at Sinclair College in Dayton, Ohio,Waggoner has spent years articulating the mechanics of fear—tone, imagesystems, point of view, escalation—then stress‑testing them in books thatinterleave body horror, surreal dread, and noir momentum. That dualidentity—teacher/practitioner—helps explain why even his most phantasmagoricalnovels feel engineered for maximum affect: they are dreamlike but neverformless, wild but meticulously staged. Tim Waggoner

Below, I trace a set of recurring concerns and techniques acrossrepresentative works from early and recent career phases: the urban‑weird of TheHarmony Society and Like Death; the “otherworld leakage” novels likeThe Mouth of the Dark and Your Turn to Suffer; the haunted‑communitybooks The Forever House and We Will Rise; the identity‑erosionhorror of The Way of All Flesh; and the urban‑fantasy/noir experiment ofthe Nekropolis cycle. Along the way, I’ll consider how Waggonertransforms stock elements—ghosts, cults, monsters—into metaphysical machinesfor examining grief, guilt, and desire.

1) Early Urban Weird: Maps of a CityThat Doesn’t Want to Be Understood

Waggoner’s earliest notable novels are urban cartographies of rupture. TheHarmony Society reads like a Baedeker to a city whose metaphysical plumbinghas broken. Reviewers have noted its “strange and surreal urban fantasy”texture: neighborhoods and subcultures comprise not a social fabric but a setof overlapping reality‑systems, each with its own rules and predators. Thebook’s power lies in its refusal to allegorize neatly; instead, the city feelslike a living ecosystem that feeds on attention and fear. AmazonCanada

Like Death intensifies this method. Where many horror novels translate urban blightinto a moralized monster, Waggoner lets the city’s detritus—abandoned theaters,decayed streets—generate a polymorphous hauntology. Critics reading the bookhave emphasized its blend of psychosexual trauma and hallucinatory set‑pieces,a union that feels closer to the transgressive surrealism of Kathe Koja or thedream logic of Clive Barker than to conventional thriller beats. The result isa portrait of place as a predatory memory palace: the city remembers what itsinhabitants would rather forget, and it manifests those repressions as entitiesthat look back. Goodreads

Formally, these books demonstrate a signature Waggoner technique:establishing the ordinary world with clear, grounded prose and then letting thediction drift, image by image, toward the unaccountable. The prose grows moresensorially “noisy”—textures and smells crowd the sentence; comparisons getstranger; metaphors literalize—until the boundary between figurative andfactual collapses. That slow bleed from realism into the unreal sets a templatehe continues to refine.

2) The “Leakage” Novel: When theOtherworld Won’t Stay Put

In later work, Waggoner often engineers scenarios where a parallel domainseeps into ours and starts rewriting us. The Mouth of the Dark isexemplary: a father searches for his missing daughter and slips into a shadow‑realmsuperimposed on our own—an interstitial ecology of predators and pleasures thattargets human appetites with weaponized seductions. Reviewers have stressed theharsh, uncompromising surrealism of its set‑pieces and the way the bookliteralizes desire as an external force that colonizes the body. That’sWaggoner’s twist on body horror: bodies become contested sites where theworld’s unspoken rules engrave themselves. Amazon

Your Turn to Suffer makes the “leakage” institutional. The Cabal—a secretive order—accusesKara of a crime she can’t remember and subjects her to trials that bendreality. The premise looks procedural (prove innocence), but the novel’s affectis fever‑dream: cause and effect decouple; consequences arrive before actions;and the antagonist is not a person but a cosmology of contempt. What’s strikingis Waggoner’s ethical argument embedded in the weirdness: shame is aninstrument of control that acquires mystical force when shared; the cult onlyworks because we are already good at punishing ourselves. Goodreads

Across these books, Waggoner’s plot architecture is modular: scenes readlike discrete set‑pieces—each with its own monster, rule set, and moral—butthey accrue meaning as variations on a theme. The result is musical rather thanpurely causal narrative momentum: the reader moves forward because the next“track” might reconfigure what every previous track meant.

3) Haunted Communities: Houses, Towns,and the Politics of Dread

Waggoner’s most emotionally resonant work often scales fear up from theindividual to the communal. The Forever House begins as a familiarsuburban fable—new neighbors, too perfect—and detonates into pocket‑dimensionhorror when the predatory Eldreds transform a home into a labyrinth whereemotions are harvested. In interviews, Waggoner has emphasized his fascinationwith the house as a machine for producing identity and secrecy. That’s key: theEldreds don’t simply torture; they curate. The book’s spatial puzzles—roomsthat rearrange, thresholds that betray—externalize the lies families tellthemselves to sustain a façade of normalcy. thebramstokerawards.comsfbook.com

We Will Rise pushes that communal logic to the nation‑scale. The premise isaudaciously simple: ghosts rise everywhere, all at once. A catastrophe novelbecomes a grief novel as hauntings function like mass reckonings withunacknowledged losses and old harms. Because the phenomenon is global andsimultaneous, the book evacuates the specialness of any single ghost andfocuses instead on how communities respond: some form mutual aid; othersmetastasize into violence. Horror becomes sociology without losing its teeth.Publisher copy and reviews highlight this “ghost apocalypse” conceit; its realinnovation is to treat ghosts as a public utility of memory—inescapable,infrastructural, and unevenly distributed. FlameTree Publishing

Notably, both books maintain a driving, cinematic readability whilesmuggling in complicated questions: What do we owe the dead? What is a home ifnot a consensus hallucination? How much of ourselves do we outsource to theplaces we live? Waggoner’s answer is uncomforting: places are not neutral; theyare predators or parasites or at best symbionts.

4) Eroding the Self: The Way of AllFlesh

Few horror novels tackle identity dissolution as intimately as The Wayof All Flesh, which proceeds from the radical gambit of telling a ghoulstory from the perspective of the ghoul. Inverting the zombie’s traditionalrole, Waggoner focalizes a consciousness struggling to remain human even asappetites and perceptions convert. The book’s critical descriptions underlinethat the narration makes the monstrous empathically legible withoutsentimentalizing it. Horror here is neither jump scare nor gore fest; it’s theminute‑by‑minute attrition of a self. Reading the novel feels like watching alanguage lose the words for “I.” SFFWorld

Technically, the novel showcases Waggoner’s mastery of close point ofview. As the protagonist’s sensorium deforms, diction and syntax deform withit. This is a central Waggoner technique: the sentence itself is the monster’sfootprint.

5) Noir as Pressure Cooker: Nekropolisand the Comedy of the Grotesque

Waggoner’s zombie PI cycle—Nekropolis, Dead Streets, DarkWar—seems at first a tonal departure: urban fantasy built on witty premise(Matt Richter, private eye, is dead) and genre cross-pollination. But theseries reveals a consistent Waggoner concern: bureaucratized monstrosity.Nekropolis is a fully functioning city, complete with vampire districts, demoncartels, and municipal grime. Reviews and publisher materials emphasize thesetting’s density and “morbid wit,” but the comedy is acid: institutions designedto manage the monstrous inevitably become monstrous themselves. When Mattliterally loses his head in Dead Streets and his body commits crimeswithout him, the gag hides a bleak joke about autonomy under systems too big tofight. AngryRobotHidden inPages

What makes Nekropolis artistically relevant to Waggoner’s largerbody of work is its worldbuilding method. The city’s logic is not arbitrarywhimsy; it is rule-bound, like a nightmare that insists you respect its localphysics. That insistence is at the heart of Waggoner’s horror: the irrationalis rational on its own terms, and we’re punished not for disbelief but formisunderstanding the rules.

6) Predators with Philosophies: AHunter Called Night and the Ethics of Survival

One of Waggoner’s recent novels, A Hunter Called Night, compresseshis strategies into a single building. A monstrous presence infiltrates anapartment complex; strangers are forced into uneasy alliances; survivalrequires ethical compromise. Synopses and jacket copy emphasize the “viciousdemonic monster” and a locked‑space siege structure, but what lingers is howWaggoner uses constricted geography to stage moral experiments. Who are we in aclosed system that rewards predation? How quickly does community devolve intocalculative self‑interest? The book’s taut plotting gives these questionsteeth. Amazon

7) Craft Consciousness: Writing inthe Dark and the Engineering of Dread

Because Waggoner articulates his methods in Writing in the Dark,readers can triangulate his fiction against his theory. The book—published byRaw Dog Screaming Press and recognized with the Bram Stoker Award—lays outpragmatic strategies for generating and sustaining fear: escalatinguncertainty, sensory specificity, character vulnerability, and the disciplineduse of imagery to create thematic resonance. You can see these practices inaction throughout his novels: the “image grid” of The Mouth of the Dark(flowers, skin, darkness, appetite) or the motif recursion in The ForeverHouse (rooms, thresholds, keys). Waggoner’s horror is designed, notimprovised; its irrational effects are products of rational craft. FlameTree PublishingGrimdarkMagazine

That craft orientation also explains the consistency of his sentence‑levelmoves: verbs do heavy lifting; metaphors arrive as sudden ontological claimsrather than decorative comparisons; and there’s an economical clarity even inthe most baroque scenes. He has a journalist’s sense of pacing and a poet’spatience for exact nouns. The result is that readers rarely feel lost even whenthe book wants them to feel lost: disorientation is achieved cleanly.

8) Tie‑Ins as Laboratory: Alien:Prototype, Halloween Kills, Terrifier 2

Waggoner is a prolific writer of media tie‑ins, a practice sometimesdismissed as purely commercial. In his case, tie‑ins function like a laboratoryto test how much of the Waggoner method can be smuggled into a shared IP whilerespecting franchise constraints. Alien: Prototype shows him workingwithin the Alien universe’s industrial‑horror idiom—bioweapons,corporate malfeasance—and punching up the visceral immediacy of the xenomorphthreat without losing character‑centric stakes. Halloween Kills threadsthe needle of honoring a slasher’s mythic simplicity while giving interiorshape to fear and grief. Terrifier 2 demonstrates how a novelization canboth mirror a film’s gleeful extremity and expand its implications; its ScribeAward recognition suggests peers saw more than transcription. In all three, hetreats set‑piece logic as a chassis for point‑of‑view intensity and sensorydesign. titanbooks.com+1PenguinRandomhouse.com

This side of his oeuvre also showcases a complementary virtue:discipline. Tie‑ins demand problem‑solving within strict scaffolds—canon,timeline, brand voice. Waggoner’s ability to make those constraints generativespeaks to the precision that underwrites even his loosest, dreamiest work.

9) Thematic Spine: Appetite, Memory,and the Slow Violence of Shame

Across modes and periods, three motifs repeat:

Appetite as Ontology. Waggoner’s monsters often hunger not just for flesh but for meaning: theEldreds siphon emotion; entities in Mouth of the Dark harvest desire;the ghoul’s hunger in Way of All Flesh is as much epistemological asnutritional. Appetite explains the world: to want is to be vulnerable to theworld’s counter‑wanting, and supernatural predators take advantage of thatasymmetry. Amazonthebramstokerawards.comSFFWorld

Memory as Infrastructure. In We Will Rise, hauntings scale from personal to systemic,making memory a public hazard and a civic duty. Even earlier work like LikeDeath positions the city as a mnemonic machine that refuses to let traumastay buried. The past is not past; it’s load‑bearing architecture. FlameTree PublishingGoodreads

Shame as Technology. Your Turn to Suffer literalizes shame as a supernaturalpunishment system, but many Waggoner antagonists leverage shame to collapseresistance. What Waggoner grasps is that shame pre‑polices the self; horror’sjob is to dramatize that pre‑policing as an external pressure that can befought. Goodreads

10) Character and Compassion

For all his baroque monsters, Waggoner’s fiction works because he’sattentive to ordinary people under intolerable pressure: grieving parents,burnt‑out cops, compromised neighbors, lonely outcasts. There’s a consistentrefusal to mock vulnerability. Even when characters behave badly, the booksseek out the causal chain—what grief, need, or fear made this outcomeplausible—without collapsing into determinism. That’s most apparent in TheWay of All Flesh, where empathy for a transforming consciousness becomesthe terror’s engine; in The Forever House, where families’ smalldeceptions have enormous metaphysical cost; and in Nekropolis, wherewisecracks never negate the pathos of a dead man trying to do good in anunlivable city. SFFWorldthebramstokerawards.comAngryRobot

Technically, this emphasis shows up as sustained close point of view andan ear for interiority under stress. Waggoner rarely writes “stoic competenceporn.” Instead, he lets fear act on perception: breath shortens, time dilates,details over‑resolve into the grotesque. That phenomenology of terror—what it’slike to be inside the moment—distinguishes his set‑pieces from mere actionchoreography.

11) Image Systems and the Felt Shapeof a Book

One way to understand Waggoner’s design intelligence is to track imagesystems across his books. He builds clusters of recurring motifs that carrythematic load:

Thresholds/Keys/Rooms (The Forever House): the domestic as a series of controlled entries and exclusions; hospitality inverted into predation. thebramstokerawards.com

Flowers/Skin/Darkness (The Mouth of the Dark): sensual beauty turned carnivorous; the erotic coded as a trap. Amazon

Hands/Teeth/Names (Your Turn to Suffer): agency, consumption, and identity shredded by a tribunal that denies the protagonist’s say in who she is. Goodreads

Windows/Water/Weight (We Will Rise): the dead as a pressure system that seeps, floods, and settles over communities. Flame Tree Publishing

These aren’t just aesthetic choices; they’re mnemonic devices that teachthe reader how to read the book. Horror often risks incoherence when theirrational takes over; Waggoner’s image grids give even his wildest episodes asense of inevitability.

12) Pacing, Clarity, and the Ethics ofExtremity

Waggoner writes violence and grotesquerie with unapologetic candor. Yetan ethical through‑line tempers the extremity: scenes exist to crystallize acharacter’s conflict or to reveal a rule about the world, not simply to shock.That clarity is partly a product of his prose economy—clean syntax, activeverbs—and partly of his teacher’s commitment to reader trust: he will not trickyou with nonsense. In A Hunter Called Night, for instance, the siegestructure creates continuous jeopardy, but Waggoner refuses to collapsecharacters into meat puppets; the choices that doom or save them feel legible. Amazon

This also explains why his tie‑ins often feel more “novelistic” thanexpected. In Alien: Prototype and Halloween Kills, the carnage isanchored by comprehensible stakes and tactile spaces; you know where peopleare, what they want, and how the scene’s physics work. Even Terrifier 2,which celebrates splatter as spectacle, uses interior perspective to makesensation matter. titanbooks.com+1PenguinRandomhouse.com

13) Where to Start: A Reader’sTrajectory (and Why)

If you’re new to Waggoner and want the fullest sense of his range:

Start with The Forever House to experience his haunted‑community mode at peak control—tight structure, strong ensemble, and a devastating metaphor for domestic secrecy. thebramstokerawards.com

Move to The Mouth of the Dark for the fullest blast of his surreal, transgressive imagination. Amazon

Read We Will Rise to see him scale personal horror to civilizational stakes. Flame Tree Publishing

Then sample Nekropolis to watch him warp noir into monster‑city worldbuilding without losing thematic bite. Angry Robot

Finish with The Way of All Flesh for a stripped‑down, intimate study of identity under erasure. SFFWorld

Parallel to that, Writing in the Dark will deepen yourappreciation of how deliberately he builds fear on the page. FlameTree Publishing

14) Conclusion: Horror as a Theory ofReality

Tim Waggoner’s work advances a coherent thesis about horror: the world isnot stable; meaning is negotiated under pressure; and the self is a contestedfrontier, susceptible to colonization by appetite, memory, and shame. The taskof the horror writer is to give that instability form—to build narratives andimage systems sturdy enough to contain the uncontainable for as long as a booklasts. Waggoner does this with unusual reliability. His novels aren’t merelytours through inventive hellscapes; they are arguments, staged as nightmares,about what it costs to keep being a person when the rules change withoutwarning.

That’s why he matters in the contemporary field. He brings the genre’svisceral intensities into contact with ethical and metaphysical questionswithout becoming didactic; he treats readers not as thrill‑seekers to bemanipulated but as witnesses to be entrusted with difficult recognitions. Andhe writes like someone who has diagrammed fear and still respects it. If youwant horror that remembers people even as it dismembers them, Waggoner is oneof the surest bets we have.

 

How would you improve this essay if Igave you a chance to rewrite it?

ChatGPT said:

Here’s what I’d suggest if you gave me a chance to rewrite the essay forimprovement:

1. Sharper Thesis and Through-Line

Right now the essay frames Waggoner as a craftsman of surreal horror, butthe central thesis could be distilled more strongly into a single sentence andrepeated as a guiding thread—something like: “Waggoner’s horror dramatizeshow appetite, memory, and shame destabilize identity and community, usingsurrealism as a rigorous narrative tool.” That through-line would make thesections feel even more connected.

2. More Close Reading of Scenes

I summarize many books and mention their themes, but I don’t unpackspecific passages or moments at the sentence level. Adding close readings—forexample, a paragraph analyzing how Waggoner’s prose in The Mouth of the Darkliteralizes metaphor, or how point of view in The Way of All Fleshconveys sensory distortion—would deepen the “literary analysis” aspect.

3. Stronger Comparative Frame

I briefly mention Koja and Barker, but more sustained comparison to otherhorror stylists (Ramsey Campbell’s psychological unease, Brian Keene’sapocalyptic community horror, even Shirley Jackson’s haunted domesticity) wouldsituate Waggoner more firmly in a lineage, which is often expected inacademic-style criticism.

4. Tighter Section Transitions

The essay moves book by book, which is useful, but the transitions couldhighlight how each phase evolves organically from the previous one (e.g., howthe cityscapes of Like Death anticipate the community horror of TheForever House). This would help the essay feel like a single arc instead ofa series of dossiers.

5. More on Style

I discuss “verbs do heavy lifting” and “image grids,” but a more nuancedanalysis of his sentence rhythm, imagery density, or tonal shifts wouldshowcase what makes his language distinctive, not just his structures.

6. Balance of Summary vs. Argument

Some parts lean toward plot summary (especially the sections on tie-ins).A rewrite could trim these down and emphasize interpretive claims: what thetie-in shows us about Waggoner’s core concerns, rather than what happens inthe book.

7. Punchier Conclusion

The conclusion works, but it could tie more directly back to contemporaryhorror culture—why Waggoner matters right now in a landscape crowdedwith cosmic horror, folk horror, and extreme horror. That would leave astronger final impression.

 

WhenChatGPT finished with all this, I copied the text of the essay (but not theprogram’s insights into possible revision) and pasted it into three onlineAI-detection sites. Two of the three came back with a result that the text washuman-written.

 

In thelast few years that I’ve been running these before-semester experiments to geta sense of what AI-written essays look like, this is the best (or worst) resultI’ve gotten. Best if you’re a student wishing to cheat. Worst if you’re ateacher wishing students would create original work. ChatGPT produced what Iasked for – a sophisticated essay using examples and providing insight.

 

Bottomline? I suspect AI-assisted writing is going to become a new, separate fieldfrom traditional composition instruction. I dread teaching research writingthis academic year, and as I’ve said before, I’m glad I'll retire soon.