It is finally on shelves.
First, I want to thank my editor, Ruoye, from Qidian's Group Nine, for giving this newcomer a lot of advice, including recommending many horror movies, though I still haven't dared to watch them.
I have read very few horror novels and watched slightly more thriller movies. In fact, while writing this book, I noticed a rather realistic problem: for Chinese people, genuinely frightening thriller works are actually all about ghosts, and once a story enters the rhythm of monsters, it is no longer that scary.
Just like me, when watching The Conjuring, I might be terrified; when watching Alien, I just think this monster is so cool; when watching A Chinese Ghost Story, I only think those clothes are way too big.
On one hand, this might be due to cultural immersion. A pair of worn embroidered shoes, a red bridal gown, a crooked tree, a mourning hall, a half-open coffin, the Room at the end of the corridor, the mirror in the bathroom at midnight, the Merry-go-round in the abandoned Amusement Park—just describing these things casually makes people's hearts creep.
However, things like dense clusters of eyeballs, slippery endless tentacles, huge shadows in the Deep Sea, deep ones, Ghouls, sludge with complex patterns, rats covering the mountains and plains, make many people only feel hungry when they see them.
On the other hand, the fear of tangible monsters mostly comes from insufficient firepower, while ethereal ghosts offer no way to cope.
So actually, trying to write a sense of thrill starting from nameless Cthulhu-style monsters is quite difficult.
I have always felt that as Cthulhu has developed to this day, what is more important is not some formal clichés, but the elaboration of the essence of fear in its core. Of course, I am