Dark Horses: The Appeal of Horror and My Little Pony · 12:33pm Nov 1st, 2022
A couple of weeks ago, I read through Rambling Writer’s short novel, The Needle, a Daring Do adventure story about a mysterious place called Needle Vale. Its secondary tag, Horror, was evident, perhaps, in the first two sentences in the story’s description:
The problem with being an explorer in this day and age is that unexplored lands are few and far between. Almost everything's been charted, catalogued, analyzed, and what have you.
The language there calls to mind H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, which is about a doomed expedition to Antarctica, the last known unknown land on Earth by that point (if one ignores the jungles and island nations filled with isolated tribes, as Lovecraft, the raging racist and general phobist of everything not Anglo-Saxon, would have).
From Francis Baranger’s illustrated edition, on Amazon
The Needle is an excellent story of things going wrong in spectacular, sinister fashion. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, given its Horror tag. Moreover, nor should my allusion to Lovecraft, since the description outright says, “Loosely inspired by [the film] Annihilation,” which itself was inspired by several of Lovecraft’s works. I have not watched the film, but I have read enough Lovecraft to recognize in The Needle staples of his cosmic horror genre: mysterious and ancient sites that seem isolated from the world of man; inexplicable physiological phenomena; non-Euclidean geometry (which, humorously, gets its own, ponified variant in this story); and, above all, the heavy theme of the danger of pursuing forbidden knowledge.
Forbidden Dreams - eqlipse
Echoing the opening statement in The Call of Cthulhu and mirroring the same tragic journeys of many of Lovecraft’s intellectual protagonists (who all go insane), Daring Do pierces the vast, unexplored island of ignorance on a quest to unlock the mystery of the Vale—and emerges, if not missing her sanity, something more subtle, and therefore more sinister.
Something evil has woken up. ⅓ - BlueWolfArtista
It’s a great story, excellently placed and with a believable cast of characters, as is always the case with Rambling Writer’s work. But though it is steeped in the Lovecraftian influence, it is able to get out of his enormous shadow. Unlike his work, stilted by archaic speech and an overabundance of adjectives, and plagued by poor dialogue, poor characterization, and, sometimes, poor suspension of disbelief (there’s at least one short story I read where the narrator is prevented from being killed by a bolt of lightning striking a house down; if Lovecraft was in a modern workshop, he’d be torn to shreds), Rambling Writer’s is more pleasant, thanks to a largely conversational style of writing and a conversational cast of characters. Seriously: if you don’t come to love this story for its horror elements, you will love spending time with Daring Do’s group of (doomed) hires who each have their own quirks and personalities to remember them by—making the story’s events all the more harrowing.
I’d like to return to that first part of the conditional statement: loving the horror elements. This is something that, for me, further separates The Needle from Lovecraft’s influence. When I read Lovecraft, though I admire his ideas, his stories never quite succeed in making me spooked. Uneasy, perhaps: At the Mountains of Madness, The Mound, and The Rats in the Walls are among my favorites—but his itinerary of cosmic unspeakables, like Cthulhu, Dagon, and Shub-Niggurath, and his supposedly creepy monsters like the Shoggoths, the Deep Ones, and the Elder Thingss, never struck me as scary.
It’s perhaps why I was more impressed by the racial horror found in Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country yet less affected by HBO’s adaptation, which only furthered the belief that you cannot translate Lovecraft’s ideas to the screen, big or small, without sacrificing something that makes cosmic horror—well, horror of a cosmic kind. Lovecraft is hard enough to access on the page, so trying to take his ideas about the unknowable and unspeakable and often unviewable and present them on TV or film—thus making them inherently knowable, and speakable (“Hey, did you see that new movie, Annihilation?”), and viewable—seems contradictory on just an emotional level.
But Rambling Writer’s The Needle had me thoroughly spooked. I had planned on spacing out my reading so that I read a chapter every other day, but I finished the whole thing in two sessions after starting. I simply could not stop—I had to know the story’s end, just like Daring Do, though, unlike her, I had a sickening feeling of what I might find, or rather, what I wouldn’t. And now that I’ve finished, I’m left wondering why I, someone who, ironically, does not like horror movies, and who is generally unimpressed with some staples of modern horror today, would be more affected by this pony-horror fic than by older and more established realms of the macabre.
Ladybug Horror - EmeraldGalaxy
If long-time viewers of my page are confused by my admission, I completely understand. After all, if I essentially claim to not be a horror enthusiast, how is it that on my page, I have actually TWO published horror fics?
Interest is not the same as enthusiasm, I find. I am interested in horror—and in pony horror—but am hardly the most indulgent of it.
The most recent of my horror escapades, “Braeburn Discovers the Eye in the Mirror,” was a gift-fic for Firefoxino, who had listed horror as one of the things they’d like to see. Horror involving Braeburn, however, proved an interesting challenge. I’ve neither love nor hate for that stallion, so writing him into some exotic, macabre situation would only be limited by what situation I could think of, not any personal misgivings I might have for landing him there. In the end, I decided to play fast and loose with the story, using a tongue-in-cheek reference to a game called “World of Horror” as the not-quite-teeth-chattering backdrop to a riff on Hallmark romance stories. I trust that Fire quite enjoyed it.
But my most successful endeavor into pony horror is “Red Illusion,” a story I wrote way back in high school (ugh!). To this day, it still receives a fair share of likes, favorites, and views, and, to my eternal shock and flattery, is the only story of mine to have received a dramatic audio reading.
It is a fairly simple premise: something stalks the outskirts of Sweet Apple Acres, and when Applejack goes to investigate, something horrible happens. Standard set-up for horror right there—the discovery of a monster, which exists on the literal edge of the “known world,” leads to a horrific realization or transformation of the unfortunate discoverer. There isn’t really anything fancy or spectacular about it, however, and reading the story now, I do not think I actually achieved a true “effect of horror.” That the monster is, apparently, an allusion to the Devil, now strikes me as edgy and contrived, a lackluster allusion to serve as a thin “explanation.” It is not, by my current standards, a good story—yet it is one of my most viewed and highest rated.
Of course, authors are their own worst critics, so I may simply be harping on an old story for being old, for lacking the knowledge I have now. Even so, I am compelled to question why it is still read with some frequency, what draws people to it—perhaps even why I wrote it in the first place. What role does such a story play in a community such as this one? For that matter, what does horror as a genre do for pony fics, such that they are read and written and continually shared?
It’s so weird that the top rated horror images on Derpibooru aren’t all that scary
On FIMFiction, there are roughly 3000 stories with the Horror tag, making it one of the smallest genres on the site. Of those, a little over 2000 add the Dark tag to it, suggesting an implicit association—with horror must come darkness. But Dark as a tag on its own has over 34 thousand stories, meaning the association is not reversible. Though this may have to do with the fact that Dark as a tag was created before Horror was, I think it’s a safe assumption to say that a majority of dark fics have elements of horror in them.
More than that, the numbers demonstrate that site readers and writers are increasingly drawn towards darkness and the like. By searching for the Most Viewed, we see that the 3rd one is Pen Stroke’s Past Sins, which, with its depiction of a cult of worshippers, ancient spells, a hanging, and a less-than-favorable depiction of Celestia (how truly terrifying for an early fandom giant), could loosely be considered a kind of horror fic. The 6th most-viewed story, Cheerilee’s Garden by Unahim, may lack the Horror tag, but with its targeted language found in its short description (“… pay the price in the theater of life”), it calls seemingly back to stage horror and the dramatics of Gothic fiction. Finally, there is the 8th most-viewed story, AuroraDawn’s Rainbow Factory, an explicit “darkening” of an otherwise benign Equestrian staple, that of rainbows (and by extension, Rainbow Dash). I note that these stories are also among the oldest on the site, suggesting that “dark horses” has long been the subject of many fandom works.
I haven’t actually read the whole RF series, admittedly.
Yet as these examples show, “dark horses” can represent a myriad of “dark” things. There is no one way of including them. I believe, to answer my question, it’s important to now talk about several dark horse fics which have piqued my interest and, as Stephen King put it in Danse Macabre, which my “interior dowsing rod responded to.”
The Needle, of course, stands out as my most recently read, but another pony-horror series that I manically indulged without a break was Flashgen’s Fleeting Light tetralogy, consisting of four stories: A FLEet|ng LIght |n thE DArknEsS, A Glimmer of Hope in the Black, Pray, Hope and Wander, and They're Never Coming Back. Largely written as journal fragments and research notes, as well as other forms of documentation, the narrative mode reminds one of the epistolary novels of the 18th century, especially such notable Gothic manuscripts as Frankenstein and Dracula. But a modern internet user may better identify the form with the SCP Foundation, an online database of amateur horror whose stories are mostly formatted as heavily redacted documents about a variety of anomalies.
The tetralogy focuses on the disappearance of Ponyville and the fallout of what the research teams discover, but, through this narrative mode, most events are presented from a detached, almost clinical view. Things are reported on, yes, but these reports are either journal fragments that are reported to the reader through a narrator’s presentation(rather than being received directly from a primary source to the reader) or are, literally, reports themselves: neutral-sounding write-ups of the emergent study on Ponyville and its missing citizenry. As these reports are often in response to a journal scrap or finding, one feels doubly detached reading them. The layers between reader, researcher, journal scrap, and original author, combined with the additional layer afforded by the electronic medium of FIMFiction, creates a rather disconcerting “distance” between each text and each layer-specific reader of each text. One gets the sense of only ever being dimly aware of the true story, fighting to discover it not alongside the scientists who may have uncovered some greater horror than they could anticipate, but rather ahead of them, if only to save the reader from further anguish.
Artist: agm - View on Derpibooru (Original source unknown at time of posting)
For a majority of the tetralogy, Flashgen creates an atmosphere of, “It’s far too late.” No matter how much the researchers push themselves and no matter how quickly the reader reads, the tragedy behind each metaphorical page remains not only inevitable, but also inaccessible. We are forced to “catch up” without really being able to; we are pulled alluringly through mountains of paperwork by the fleeting hope in that darkness. And by the tetralogy’s end, it’s unclear if that was worth it.
Obviously, I cannot say more without spoiling the whole series. But what I can say is that Flashgen’s series joins The Needle in having an ambiguous conclusion. That lack of a conventional resolution makes the events stand out more poignantly than they would have if anything more definitive had been written. The enduring quality of the series is therefore a result of the lingering fear that comes with not really knowing if the story has ended—or if, quite simply and quite disconcertingly, it’s simply stopped for now. In this manner, the series leaves the reader feeling haunted by what they read—a ghost story in a very literal sense. In other words, the horror aspect comes in the dysfunctional narrative (to quote Charles Baxter) left in the wake (how fitting a term) of the functional story.
But while ghouls and cadavers, especially the ones that death seemingly cannot claim, are staples of the horror genre, stories of hauntings and terrors are by no means beholden to such tropes. Some horror is better digested as the thing that is ultimately conquered rather than the thing that conquers. Lovecraft may have a very pessimistic view of reality—a view perhaps informed by his own experiences with nihilistic decay; in his later years, he lost his wife, large portions of his inheritance, and then his health, until he declined slowly yet surely towards death—but that served his purposes for writing of a cosmically indifferent, non-humanistic universe. Other horror writers have instead used the genre to reorient the universe in favor of humankind—a reversal of Modernism, of sorts—and recapture the spirit of humanity. Horror in Gus Moreno’s This Thing Between Us is something that the main character must try to break through, because that horror is a deeply personal and profound sense of grief given horrific, inexplicable form—yet it is grief that is treated as the ultimate obstruction to self-actualization and, in some ways, character evolution. Similarly, horror in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is something that the nameless monster must overcome if he is to defeat his arrogant creator in a metaphysical, Biblical, Milton-esque clash to determine what, really, defines a man.
Horror as a narrative antagonist that the protagonist must overcome is something I see a lot of in pony-horror fics. BaeroRemedy’s And Hell Followed is one such example, where the horror is in the form of antagonistic, cannibalistic unicorns that Equestria must somehow defeat. And mushroompone’s The Haunting of Carousel Boutique reflects the personal horror in Moreno’s work, while still conceptualizing a physical manifestation of it in the story’s pseudo-antagonist. Horror as plot device, as quest marker, may very well be one of the most common interpretations of it, especially in pony fics, because, as opposed to the purposely vague “enemies” and abstractions in Lovecraftian horror, a writer can more conventionally engage a reader by presenting to them a totally explainable, even tangible monster, one with weaknesses that can be exploited—one that may even be defeated by a protagonist brave enough to try. So, as opposed to defeatist horror, this particular brand is quite optimistic in scope.
Yet this isn’t to say these brands are mutually exclusive. They are closer to moods, to shades of ideas and feelings, than set in stone tropes. It is almost certain that an author can blend the two to have both a horror that defies a human-centric view, and wins and a horror that reclaims a human-centric viewpoint and defies. And for my money, I’d say that Chessie’s epic, Starlight Over Detrot, takes that cake (and eats it, and even arranges a nefarious spell with its remains).
I must admit some bias—this is among one of my favorite fanfics.
In that story, horror stands out in two main ways. First, there is a pony-on-pony horror aspect, the kind that feels like the antithesis to civilized form. A cop named Hard Boiled—obviously a line to the hard-boiled detective noir fictions—must contend with such atrocities in his city of Detrot, all in the name of duty. He—and those around him—are effectively obligated to deal with the absolute worst that ponykind has to offer—the inner savagery locked in a mad pony’s gut-slicing hoof, rib-busting blade, and so on. Rape, murder, drugs, gang violence, serial killers, and bodies upon pile of bodies—these are just a smattering of things they must face, the dangers lurking in the alleyways, as much a part of city life as electrical billboards and overzealous socialites. In presenting such details, Chessie reminds readers of the horrors of modernity, of the monsters that look very much like you and I, of the fact that the ghouls and ghosts of our 21st century more often take the form of the externally ordinary; of how the unspeakable and senseless acts of violence are not abstract entities we conceptualize from afar, but rather, are the brain-sucking screens we watch, the cigarette-smelling smog we breathe, the greasy dirt we roll around in. That is to say: horror is not something some of us merely entertain. Some, like Hardy, get into the filth and taste it themselves.
This seems conventional philosophically speaking for a self-titled noir story, and indeed, the first act is all about this kind of horror. But the story evolves to the horror beyond what seems appropriate for “gritty realism.” As the story grows longer, it also grows larger, such that, while the city of Detrot remains the center setting, the story’s boundaries ascend almost deifically past the skyline, reaching cosmic prominence. Drug lords make way for crazed cultists who make way for impossibly ancient family lineages who make way for something completely alien altogether. Now Hardy and co. must contend with a living idea rather than a simple murderer—an idea that can drive ponies mad without even sparing them a single thought. This is a horror of quite literal cosmic proportions, but the fact that it rises out of the comparingly benign and down-to-earth horror of pony-on-pony crime seems dramatically striking. The dichotomy and juxtaposition of the two accentuate their opposite to distressing levels—that both forms appear in such detail in Starlight Over Detrot only further exacerbates the effect.
Of course, that blending of conventional, psychological horror with cosmic, nihilistic horror is nothing new, either. Any of the stories I’ve already mentioned could be said to do the same thing, to different extents. Even Lovecraft’s work could be considered as starting off with the ordinarily strange and leveraging that as a jumping-off point for the extraordinarily strange. Yet, for me, ponies perform this effect with greater sensitivity and effect either way. So I once again return to the heart of this essay and ask: why is that the case?
But in going back over the stories and looking at even my own, I realize the answer: it has to do with subverting the show.
Witching Hour - LolliponyArt
Let me return to Starlight Over Detrot. I pointed out how one kind of horror was the pony-on-pony one, characterized by exceedingly violent acts. While in our world that may sadly seem part of the status quo, it’s the fact that, in Starlight, it’s also treated as part of the status quo which makes its horror come to life. The Equestria that we know and love is not a place where murdered prostitutes and drugged-up kids call home, but in Chessie’s story, that’s exactly the case. The idyllic aesthetic of ponykind is almost squashed by the oppressive weight of a new, grim reality, one where violence is a sad but expected norm. Yet glimmers of that idyllic landscape still exist at the edges of such grimness—only faint ones, enough to remind us that however changed this Equestria is, it’s still Equestria.
The effect is one of meta-textual tension, or perhaps a looser form of dramatic irony. We know the Equestria that is and once was, but arguably, neither the story nor the characters do, or not to the same extent. Our normal view of things seems abnormal in the story’s context. But the same effect occurs vice versa: the story’s normal view of things—a normal, hideous, disturbing (but no less enthralling) view—seems abnormal to our own context: the context of the Equestria we call home.
It is fascinating, and alarming, too. That words could upset a sense of banality is, itself, a kind of soft horror. But that appears to be at the core of horror—the transfiguration of the supposedly complacent (Lovecraft would have called it a placid island of ignorance) when confronted with the first sign of trouble. A house isn’t disturbing until a ghost comes to haunt it.
Pony horror, then, functions by this confrontation. And because the effect is so startling, so inherently discomforting (enough that there are people who outright hate pony horror as a genre on this site), it is amplified tenfold. The familiar hills of Equestria fade away to suspicious, mist-covered monoliths, to foggy, New England forests uncountably old—to artifacts in the desert, relics from forgotten races—all of which whisper incessantly, See what lies beyond the veil…
And perhaps, by seeing what lies beyond, we end up seeing what lies within, as well.
Iron Lung - Phutashi
There may yet be another effect, one that harkens back to the resemblances pony horror has with our own world. It has to do with horror’s more intense cousin: terror.
In Danse Macabre, Stephen King defines terror as:
… when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It’s when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there’s nothing there…
What strikes me is how King’s definition observes a kind of violation of boundaries. The hypothetical home exists as an insular, private, almost sacramental space. You come home and expect it to be the same one you woke up in. Having everything replaced by a perfect replica violates this space in several ways. First, it means that whatever or whoever did the substitution, it actually entered the home to do so—a physical violation of the house’s boundaries. Second, by making perfect substitutions, it not only must have been familiar with the home—as familiar as the owner—but it must also understand how important familiarity is, for it to make perfect replicas in an attempt to trick the owner—a mental violation, a psychic one. And thirdly, as an effect of these violations, a third one emerges—an empirical violation; that is, a violation of what was once known or thought to be known through the senses. What you had previously established to exist in your home has been cast aside and replaced with ambiguity. What you thought was credibly “real,” no longer is. (These three violations also work with the second half of King’s definition.)
Fundamentally, these violations that terror creates are violations of the perception of safety. They upset our belief in the veracity of safety, in its vitality, its invincibility. They tell us that peace only ever resembles peace and that that resemblance can be destroyed with but a breath. Resemblance, then, seems to be actually scarier than “reality,” because of the fact that realizing it substitutes reality’s concreteness.
I think a similar effect is seen in pony horror. Our sense of comfort directed towards ponies stems commonly from the appearance that they are, in some ways, “better off” than us, more peaceful, more friendly. Yet they paradoxically resemble us, because it is only by having a concept of “more peaceful, more friendly,” could they exist. It’s a Plato-like argument for the existence of perfection. The resemblance is almost flawless, baked in a prototypical and intrinsically human longing for “something better,” and thus we forget the resemblance and interpret Equestria as this serenely separate place.
Pony horror harshly and effectively reminds us of that fragile resemblance by disrupting and violating what we thought we knew about the show. It disturbs yet also recontextualizes our anthro-centric view of “paradise” by stating no such thing actually exists. And it reminds us more acutely of our own fears—of ghosts and goblins and gods, of the haunting entrapments of age and love; even Heaven, it seems is not without its Hells; it must not be.
This, to me, seems to be how and why pony horror functions, why its nicheness has created richness.
I cannot know, however, why it endures—I can only speculate as to the psychological and sociological reasons for the endurance of horror at all. But, to close, I think it may have to do with how horror fiction is a kind of escape from both reality and fiction, while disrupting both. It seems to me that watching characters be subjugated by the things we fear gives us the strength and courage to rise against those every same things, even if the characters fail. Horror authors, even the ones that write only bad endings, grab hold of those phantoms and make them things we can briefly interact with, through reading about them—and that momentarily, I believe, shines light onto that dark matter, counterintuitively giving us hope that one day, all the horrors will end—and the sun will come up tomorrow.
An excellent analysis of the genre. Unfortunate timing that you probably finished working on this just before Mushroom dropped The Head on us.
5695684
I had the draft prepped for editing just as that story dropped, so I figured I'd better finish it up and post it. A day later than Halloween, but that's all right.
I have a strange relationship with horror. I hate watching gory horror but don't necessarily mind suspense horror. One of my favorite movies (also one of only 2 horror movies I genuinely liked and the only one I would gladly watch repeatedly) is the original 1963 version of The Haunting. But even for gory things I don't want to watch (or play, in the case of video games), I still often want to know how the story goes. I've spent many hours reading the plot summaries of horror movies and games, sometimes incredibly detailed summaries. I enjoyed a long, rambling article that was probably mostly headcanon on the lore behind Silent Hill, for instance.
So I'm there with you on outward evidence not accurately suggesting how I feel about horror.
5695778
That's me an internet horror media, like ARGs and stuff. I rely on people like Nexpo and Wendigoon to explain the spooky stuff so I don't have to watch it :)
A fantastic blog that really touches on what I really enjoy about cosmic horror and pony horror. I especially liked the segment about how ponies have to resemble us if only to provide a "better" world than ours. That world having and hiding just as many horrors as ours is a great thing to explore.
I also feel horror as a genre is a fantastic way to explore our own fears and why they terrify us, why we react the way we do, and what makes characters tick. I love to use them as a lens to examine ponies through, even if I've not used a lot of different characters for my stories.
For all that I don't watch or read much horror at all (I'd struggle to list horror movies I've watched outside of Jaws, Alien, Predator and x of their sequels), and that does extend to Ponyfic, I have noticed horror fics do pop up in my reading path every now and then, enough to read one from time to time. That does include Flashgen’s Fleeting Light tetralogy, and the effective technique and discipline meant that even as it was unsettling, my desire to keep reading overpowered the creeping dead. So I'm glad you mentioned it! In any case, it's when horror is doing something beyond just scare the audience, having a purpose to doing so, or revealing something about the characters, the reader or humanity in general that it tends to have a better chance of standing out.
Also, I did not realise that fic The Head floating around the featured box was by mushroompone, as I tend to filter out M-rated fics unless they grab me enough to take a closer look, heh.
Also, I've realised I could totally be pascoite and yourself, as far as using the summaries to get to the meaty stuff without going through schlocky screentime or pages, heh.
In any case, fantastic dive into the genre, buddy. Far too in-depth for me to be able to respond much, frankly. Rather overwhelming, point of fact. Still, I salute you!
5695919
What a surprise to see you here! You can imagine how honored that makes me feel - especially as I absolutely loved your tetrology.
Some might argue that, next to tragedy, horror is the ultimate form of catharsis. I think horror functions also as a reflection of our reality, however real or fragile that is at any given moment - but there's some comfort in that, a comfort akin to Camus' absurdism, in some respects. Sometimes reading a good horror story can actually make one feel better, even if the ending is poor.
5695954
I started noticing the pattern a couple months ago, actually, which was when I started putting together some of the ideas that turned out in this post. mushroompone's The Haunting of Carousel Boutique was the impetus to drafting it - Halloween, the impetus to publishing it. (Though power went out on Halloween, so I could not publish it day-of. Quite the spooky coincidence!)
Er... come again?
It seems you missed a verb or two.
5695968
Nope, didn't miss any verb, or any other type of word. Just missed some egregious spelling errors that jumbled it to kingdom come and back.
It should have read:
What an excellent essay!! I definitely have some fics to read - you've hyped up The Needle to an extent where I simply can't resist it! I'm excited to lose myself in some certified good content.
I absolutely agree with your conclusion about violation. I have, of course, read some awesome MLP horror that could exist without the MLP veneer that's applied to it (Force and Consequences stands out in my mind - I don't think it's tagged horror, but it is certainly horrific). But the horror that lasts, in the fandom at large and in my own mind, depends upon the rules of the world. Rainbow Factory is successful because it is a result of the world of fim - it doesn't easily translate to our world. It is an evil that is entirely unique to ponies. Blink is successful because it explores directly the consequences of a magic spell that we do not have any never will. Stories that explore the horrors of immortality, or Discord's Chaos magic, or the nature of cutie marks and destiny... That endures because it could only happen in this world. It is, exactly as you said, a violation.
I am also happy to receive a little shout-out :) I'm glad The Haunting stuck with you long enough to make it to this post - it remains one of my favorite pieces, and I have found myself returning to your review on bad days. I have also recently gotten into Cormac McCarthy's work on your recommendation, and his stuff is right up my alley!
Have a good one!
5696126
Hi, sorry to have taken a bit before responding! And yes, I highly recommend all of the fics I wrote about - they're great on their own, regardless of their horror genre.
True - but perhaps there's another aspect that must be mentioned. The extent to which Rainbow Factory and Blink work is quite different between the two of them, in my view. Blink relies largely on the tension and suspense of a known FIM "phenomenon" but does not necessarily ride the edgy and dark to its edgy and dark conclusion (despite being quite dark). It knows a little about how to pull back from fully stepping over the edge. Rainbow Factory, at least on my brief glimpses into it, struck me as toeing that line too closely - it and Pegasus Device, if I'm being honest. Perhaps that's because (and I am, of course, speaking largely in general, having obviously not read it in full) it requires a certain violation of a certain pegasus's character to get its point of horror across, in a way that feels like the premise (not necessarily the execution) is grimdark for the sake of grimdark. That's a difficult thing for a story to overcome, and perhaps an indicator for why I could not find much in it for me to enjoy past the first few words.
I guess you could say it haunted me
ha HAHe recently published a new book--the first in over a decade, I think. Glad you're enjoying him! He's definitely one of my favorite modern stylists.