I like to think that the stories in Notes from Underground contain more melancholy than terror, but this is still a horror collection, and these are still horror stories. You don’t have to take my word for it, either – one of them made it all the way into Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year.

We’ve already talked a bit about Clive Barker, who was one of the main horror inspirations of Notes from Underground, and another one is mentioned in the dedication. It’s been years since I read Brian McNaughton’s Throne of Bones, and its past time for me to revisit it, but when I did read it, it left a big impression.

Taking Lovecraft’s ghouls and transforming them into grotesque, tragic, pathetic, grandiose, and highly sexual creatures, Throne of Bones, like Notes from Underground, is made up of linked short stories that, taken together, form something more than the sum of their parts.

It was a transformative read for a younger me, who had never encountered anything else quite like it. How much of that is actually in Notes from Underground is difficult to say – I am not an especially horny writer, after all, and Throne of Bones is, if nothing else, a very horny book. But I think the tragedy of McNaughton’s ghouls is definitely something that is hanging around my own spidery variations.

It would also not do to fail to mention Mike Mignola’s take on the Hollow Earth, which certainly informed my own, even while the two are, in many ways, very different. Originally appearing in the pages of his B.P.R.D. series, Mignola’s Hollow Earth draws heavily from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1871 novel The Coming Race, which I have never read.

I think the main things that spread from Mignola’s Hollow Earth to my own were the idea of a formerly Utopian locale in decline, and the ways in which Mignola’s Hollow Earth extends its tendrils (mainly, in his case, in the form of Vril energy) throughout so much of the rest of his Hellboy-adjacent titles.

Frankenstein’s creation also makes his way into Mignola’s Hollow Earth, in a move that seems calculated as a nod to Howard Waldrop and Steven Utley’s 1977 story “Black as the Pit, from Pole to Pole,” in which the Frankenstein monster finds a polar opening into the Hollow Earth and subsequently travels through the entire globe, encountering a variety of monstrous creatures and weird scenarios before emerging in Antarctica.

The story is phenomenal and absolutely worth seeking out. To the best of my knowledge, it was most recently reprinted in Ellen Datlow’s Lovecraft’s Monsters.

The horrors that the Frankenstein creature finds underground certainly influenced my own Hollow Earth, just as Mignola’s similar adventures did. More than that, however, I think I took from Mignola’s Hollow Earth a feeling of the cyclical nature of the place, as, in his conception, the early Utopian civilization of the Hollow Earth falls to ruin, only to be reborn after the destruction of the surface, as the final humans take refuge once more within.

Is my Hollow Earth quite so hopeful? Read Notes from Underground next week and decide for yourself…