Recs if you like Basilisk...

I can't be the only one who want to remember all the books without jumping around in a video, right?

what gab smolders read in 2025 as per her book talk video! horror + in tier order from most to least liked by her:

★ S TIER: from "night shoot" to "old country"

★ A TIER: from "what stalks the deep" to "listen to your sister"

★ B TIER: from "the long walk" to "the gathering"

★ C TIER: from "banquet for the damned" to "model home"

★ D TIER: from "3 streets" to "my darling dreadful thing"

★ F TIER: from "basilisk" to "survivor song"

"Allegory of the Cave", a story inside "The Republic", is about prisoners chained inside a dark cave with shadows of puppets on the wall. The prisoners mistake these shadows for reality. When one prisoner escapes into the outside world, the sunlight hurts his eyes, but he eventually sees real objects and the sun. When he returns to free the others, they reject and mock him. This story has inspired several books, which focus on ignorance of society, followed by discovery of truth.

"ergodic literature is a mode of textual organization in which nontrivial effort is required for the reader to traverse the text, beyond ordinary eye movement or turning pages." - espen j. aarseth

books with unique formatting, books you can play like a game, books you need to take apart and put back together again, stories-within-stories, books containing found documents and ephemera, etc.