The Good Friends of Jackson Elias

318: Metafiction and Horror, with Eleanor Hingley (long cut)

Added 2025-07-28 23:01:01 +0000 UTC

This is the unedited version for backers only.

Metafiction turns up in every genre from literary fiction to superheroes, breaking fourth walls, embedding fictional narratives within fictional narratives, and generally dismantling storytelling conventions. Our focus here, however, is on the connection between metafiction and horror, whether this is self-aware slasher films or horror novelists who write horror novels about horror novelists. Done right, it can make things even creepier, making you doubt your own reality. Yes, you.

We look at various definitions of metafiction, how it's been used in media, and how all this applies to horror gaming. As ever, we wrap things up with a few ideas about how we might bring all this into our games. And then we look directly into the camera and wink.

Our Guest Host

We are delighted to welcome Eleanor Hingley back to the Good Friends, following our recent discussion of small town horror. Eleanor is a lifelong horror fan, obsessed with Gothic and horror art since childhood. She has written for a bunch of tabletop roleplaying games, including Doctor Who: The Roleplaying Game, Hollows, Aegean, Broken Weave, The Laundry, Heart, and many other game lines. She also writes interactive fiction for Choice of Games, and has had IF published in sub-Q magazine. Eleanor has released her own independent TTRPG zines, which you can find on her itch.io page: Ex Libris, Talking Thunder and Seed of an Idea. You can follow Eleanor on Bluesky.

Blasphemous Tomes Latest Updates:

Blasphemous Tome Fanzines Update for $1 backers (April 2025)

Blasphemous Tome Fanzines Update for $3+ backers (April 2025)

Blasphemous Tome update

Unfortunately, issue 14 of The Blasphemous Tome has been delayed by ill health. We're playing catch-up at the moment, however, and we hope to get it to backers before the end of August. Thank you for bearing with us!

The Two-Headed Serpent returns to How We Roll

Regular listeners to How We Roll will have noticed that our campaign of The Two-Headed Serpent has been on a short hiatus. Life has an unfortunate way of confounding plans. Happily, we have resumed recording and the first episode of the penultimate chapter should be hitting public podcast feeds within the next week or two. The world is safe once more!