Down the Lazarus Spiral

T. Kulp’s Early Journeys into Darkness

A middle-aged housewife lights a cigarette and picks up a knife, ready to make her suburb tremble. A dying artist is haunted—perhaps literally—by guilt that tinges the world in “dead gold hues”. Four teenagers, expecting a fun night building a charity haunted house, find themselves stalked by an old legend come to life. These are just a few of the arresting scenes in T. Kulp’s early fiction, a body of work that ranges from slasher homage to dark fairy tale. Across Origins, Library of Lessons & Lies, Shadows, Stains & Secrets, Good Teens Die Bad, and other tales, Kulp invites readers into small towns with long shadows and ordinary people with extraordinary demons. His writing brims with genre-blending creativity and emotional intensity, presented in a voice that feels both colorfully poetic and crisply modern. In what follows, we delve into the key strengths that make Kulp’s early work shine, the rough edges that reveal a growing talent, and the literary lineage and motifs that situate his stories in the rich tradition of speculative horror.

Characterization and Voice: People in the Dark

One of Kulp’s foremost strengths is his characterization – he populates his tales with believable, sympathetic characters who are often wrestling with inner turmoil as frightening as the external threats they face. Whether it’s Beatrix, the bookish loner who must confront monsters from beyond in Library of Lessons & Lies, or Arnold, the wayward everyman haunted (quite literally) by the consequences of his affair in 16, these protagonists are crafted with clear wants, flaws, and voices. Kulp has a knack for grounding the supernatural in the personal. For example, Early Birds Pay Double opens with a jolt of personality: “Annabelle Morton didn’t scream when she snapped—she just lit a cigarette and started stabbing”. In one darkly comic line, we immediately grasp Annabelle’s repressed rage and sardonic demeanor. Across the board, characters like Annabelle or the quartet of teen friends in Good Teens Die Bad come alive through distinct voices and perspectives (the artist, the fighter, the glue of the group, etc.), making us care about their fates. Even side characters and villains carry a sense of humanity or memorable flair. The masked slasher known as the Tallyman, for instance, is introduced via a creepy nursery rhyme and a faux-newspaper report that wryly notes “Eldermarsh is stuck in an endless rerun of a bad 80s slasher flick, except this time, there’s no VHS tape to rewind”. This playful, self-aware voice – very much in conversation with horror tropes – is a signature of Kulp’s style.

Kulp’s narrative voice shifts deftly to serve each story, yet retains an underlying cohesion. He can be poetic and evocative, as in the atmospheric short stories of Shadows, Stains & Secrets, and also punchy and colloquial when a scene demands it. A Reedsy reviewer remarked on Kulp’s “poetic flair” paired with “crisp, no-nonsense language,” praising his “vivid, descriptive” prose that nonetheless remains engagingly direct. We see this balance in his work: lush imagery and metaphors appear in the text, but they never bog down the pace of the horror. For instance, in the story Reflections (from BLOTS), a blind artist’s world is described in muddy, golden tones – a lyrical touch – yet the storytelling stays taut and suspenseful. Kulp isn’t afraid to experiment with form and voice either. Remarkably, many of his stories are written partly in verse, using poetry as a narrative device. This stylistic gamble could easily fall flat, but in Kulp’s hands it often heightens the emotional impact and dreamlike mood. Not every reader will love the sudden shifts into free verse or the interludes of rhyming song, but there’s an admirable boldness in an early-career author mixing mediums like this. It’s as if each tale finds its own voice: one might read like a campfire legend, another like a folk ballad, another like a feverish confession. Through it all, Kulp’s voice remains engaging and surprisingly versatile, stitching together humor and horror, elegance and grit.

Genre-Bending Creativity and Emotional Intensity

Reading Kulp’s work is a tour through the horror spectrum. He delights in genre play, melding and flipping horror subgenres with gleeful abandon. In the collection Shadows, Stains & Secrets, he offers eight tales that span from cosmic dread to gothic terror. One story might feature faceless eldritch entities lurking at the edge of vision, while the next pits a little girl against a carnivorous playhouse. Good Teens Die Bad unabashedly channels slasher movie vibes – complete with a masked killer, a body count, and a hearty dose of 1980s nostalgia – yet it also has a modern self-awareness that updates the formula (the teen characters are creative and fight back, bending the “rules” of the genre). On the other end, Library of Lessons & Lies veers into dark fantasy, thrusting its bookworm heroine into a mystical library realm of sorcery and extra-dimensional beings. And then there are the Lazarus Spiral stories – a series of interconnected tales about cursed toys – which mix urban legend creepiness (a yard sale of haunted objects) with Twilight Zone morality and even streaks of black comedy. Kulp treats genre conventions like pieces on a chessboard, happily playing with Lovecraftian cosmic horror, fairy-tale folk horror, ghost stories, slashers, and “horrormance” in turn. This genre-bending is one of his key strengths: it keeps each new story feeling fresh and unpredictable. As one reviewer noted, BLOTS truly has “something for any fan of the macabre” – a testament to Kulp’s imaginative range.

Yet, no matter what fantastical or frightful elements swirl around, Kulp never loses sight of the emotional core of his stories. In fact, the heart of his horror often lies in human vulnerability and intensity of feeling. His characters are not just running from monsters; they’re running from grief, guilt, loneliness, trauma, or temptation. In BLOTS, many stories grapple with guilt, entrapment, and the weight of bad decisions, to the point that the supernatural elements can be read as manifestations of the characters’ inner struggles. The artist in “Reflections” is literally blinded by sorrow and regret, the ghosts that sabotage him possibly real or possibly his own psyche. This kind of psychological depth, where horror operates on both a literal and symbolic level, shows up time and again. In the Lazarus Spiral tales, each cursed toy brings out the darkest impulses or regrets of its owner – a baseball that feeds on a boy’s competitive drive and turns it into depraved obsession, or a ten-sided die that lets a woman relive her worst moment, forcing her to confront the trauma of that night. Kulp uses these speculative scenarios to explore raw emotions: regret, envy, desperation, the desire for redemption. Even Good Teens Die Bad, beneath its splatter and suspense, carries an emotional undercurrent of friendship and courage; we feel the teens’ bonds and fears as the night wears on. The result is horror that can be as emotionally affecting as it is scary. Moments of loss or sacrifice hit hard. Triumphs (when they occur) feel earned. Kulp isn’t content to simply spook readers; he wants to make them care and even hurt a little for his characters. This emotional intensity gives his horror a surprising amount of weight and resonance.

Recurring Motifs in the Macabre Tapestry

Threaded through Kulp’s kaleidoscopic tales are a number of recurring motifs and concerns that mark his emerging literary identity. These elements crop up repeatedly, creating a sense of cohesion across otherwise disparate stories:

Haunted Objects and Cursed Artifacts: From demonic toys to magical books, Kulp has a clear fascination with objects that carry dark power. The entire Lazarus Spiral series is built around possessed playthings – each item (a VHS tape, a doll, a bicycle, etc.) has its own sinister story and effect. In Library of Lessons & Lies, it’s an enchanted book that literally drags the heroine into danger. In Shadows, Stains & Secrets, even classic tropes like an ancient tome or a cursed painting make an appearance. These objects often serve as catalysts for the plot, but also as symbols: they externalize a character’s inner demon or temptation. A “haunted children’s book” that unleashes a monster in 16 reflects Arnold’s infidelity and lies coming back to devour him. By repeatedly using cursed objects, Kulp situates his work in the rich horror tradition of the evil talisman (one thinks of Stephen King’s Needful Things or the puzzle box of Clive Barker), while giving each a personal twist.
Personal Demons and Moral Failings: Nearly every Kulp protagonist must face themselves as much as some outside threat. Bad decisions haunt these characters as surely as any ghost. We see characters plagued by guilt (Ed in “Reflections”), by grief (perhaps Lucy in the Lazarus stories, dealing with loss through the Death Doll), or by their own anger and repression (Annabelle’s suburban madness in Early Birds Pay Double). There is often a moral dimension: those who harm or deceive tend to pay a price. Otis, the hapless romantic in Excess Baggage, discovers his dream date’s “baggage” comes with literal nightmares – a darkly comic punishment for his perhaps superficial desires. This motif harks back to the cautionary tales of folklore and shows Kulp’s interest in consequences and redemption. Horror, for him, is often a crucible for character growth or reckoning.
Small Towns and Community Secrets: Kulp’s settings frequently center on tight-knit communities with buried secrets. The fictional town of Eldermarsh, Maryland in Good Teens Die Bad has “its fair share of ghost stories” and a reputation it can’t shake. Small-town traditions turn eldritch in “The Wisp” (a folk horror tale of a community’s pact, as described by one reviewer). There’s an intimacy to these locales – quiet streets, local legends, neighbors who aren’t what they seem – that Kulp uses to amplify fear. In such familiar settings, when horror intrudes, it feels personal. The cozy town façade also allows Kulp to explore themes of collective memory (e.g., townsfolk remembering the Corsair Warehouse massacre and practically expecting its return) and denial (the polite fiction of “spooky but safe” communities). This is a page right out of the Stephen King playbook – think Derry or Castle Rock – and Kulp handles it with a mix of homage and fresh perspective.
Unseen or Ambiguous Threats: Interestingly, not every monster in Kulp’s tales is overt. While many stories do have a concrete creature or villain, a recurring technique he employs is to leave the reality of the horror ambiguous. Is the horror truly supernatural, or is it born of a character’s psyche? In several BLOTS stories, including the opener, the answer is left to the reader’s interpretation. This motif of blurred reality appears elsewhere too – for example, in Library of Lessons & Lies, the line between psychological demons and literal demons gets thin as Beatrix and Claudia confront the “horrors of their past” alongside very real monsters. Even Good Teens Die Bad toys with a ghost-story legend (the Tallyman’s spirit) that may or may not be behind the very human killer. By pulling back “the veil of reality” only partway, Kulp taps into the Shirley Jackson-esque tradition of uncertainty, where the true source of evil often lies in perception and belief. This ambiguity not only makes the stories creepier (our imagination fills the gaps) but also more thematically rich.

Influences and Literary Kinship

Kulp’s writing resonates with the echoes of horror and speculative fiction masters, yet it never feels like pastiche. Instead, he wears his influences openly while remixing them into something distinctly his own. Perhaps the most obvious influence is H.P. Lovecraft. There’s a “strong streak” of Lovecraftian inspiration in several stories – most directly in pieces that involve ancient tomes, cosmic entities, or the sanity-blasting unknown. Kulp nods to Lovecraft outright by titling one story “Pickman’s Model” and giving it a modern AI twist. But crucially, Kulp doesn’t merely imitate the elder god of cosmic horror; he injects his own twist and humanity into those tropes. Where Lovecraft often kept characters at arm’s length as mere witnesses to incomprehensible horror, Kulp brings the cosmic dread down to a personal scale – the unknowable might be lurking in a suburban yard sale or behind a familiar face, entangled with the character’s inner life.

We also feel the presence of Stephen King in Kulp’s work. King’s influence shows in the small-town settings and ensemble casts, and in the blend of horror with coming-of-age or midlife crises. Good Teens Die Bad in particular reads like a loving tribute to King-esque tales of youthful friends facing off against evil (with a dash of R.L. Stine pulp and Stranger Things flair for good measure). The way Kulp balances supernatural horror with the ordinary struggles of life – bullies, broken marriages, social isolation – recalls King’s approach of finding fear in the familiar. And like King, Kulp isn’t afraid to crank up the gore when needed, while still keeping characters front and center. In Library of Lessons & Lies, one can even catch a whiff of King’s dark fantasy side; the premise of a mystical library and a reluctant hero echoes works like King’s Fairy Tale (a comparison the book itself invites). Yet Kulp’s tone is his own: often lighter on its feet, a bit more nerdily playful, and attuned to the digital age in a way King’s 20th-century tales weren’t.

And in the psychological and domestic horror realm, one might draw lines to Shirley Jackson. Jackson’s influence is subtler but visible in Kulp’s penchant for ordinary settings unraveling and characters whose sanity is in question. The slow-burn breakdown of Annabelle in Early Birds Pay Double, as absurd and violent as that story becomes, has at its core the very Jackson-like idea of a woman pushed past the edge by mundane oppression (imagine if Eleanor from The Haunting of Hill House picked up a knife against her family instead of imploding inward). Kulp’s story “Covers” (about the futility of hiding under the bed) also feels like a modern riff on the childhood folk horror that Jackson might appreciate – the unseen terror just outside one’s safe space. By channeling such classic vibes and then cranking the dial (often adding a splash of humor or pop culture), Kulp creates a dialogue with horror’s literary tradition. As a critic aptly observed, “Kulp’s inspirations are worn plain to see, [but] he manages to craft stories that feel entirely his own”. In other words, if you’re well-read in horror, you’ll enjoy catching the references – but you’ll just as often be surprised by how Kulp subverts them.

Rough Edges and Room to Grow

No early career is without its weaknesses, and Kulp’s ambitious forays do come with a few rough edges. At times, the very genre-mixing that makes his work exciting can also be a double-edged sword. Some stories juggle so many elements – experimental formats, multiple themes, lore-building – that they strain under the weight. For instance, a reader not on Kulp’s wavelength might find a verse-form narrative followed by an action scene a bit jarring. The bold structural choices (like breaking a story into fake newspaper clippings, rhymes, and traditional prose in Good Teens Die Bad) are inventive but occasionally risk disrupting the narrative flow or pulling the reader out of immersion. A more seasoned writer might smooth these transitions; in Kulp’s early work, one sometimes sees the seams. Likewise, while Kulp’s prose is often praised for its vividness, there are moments where it can tilt into overwriting or clunky exposition. In the rush to set up an elaborate premise, a story might dump a chunk of background lore or explicitly spell out a theme where subtlety could suffice. These are common growing pains – the exuberance of a storyteller with so many ideas, learning exactly how much to reveal and how much to hold back.

Another area for refinement is pacing and structure in longer works. Kulp’s short stories are usually tight and impactful, but his longer narratives (like novel-length Library of Lessons & Lies or the novella-ish Good Teens Die Bad) sometimes wobble in momentum. Good Teens, for example, front-loads a lot of its mythos (the Tallyman legend, the town history) through the clever device of a news article, which is fun but also delays us from meeting the characters. Once the action kicks in, it’s gripping, but the early info-dump might test a reader’s patience expecting a quicker start in a slasher tale. In Library of Lessons & Lies, readers have lauded the fast-paced adventure, though the complexity of the magical world and its rules could at times use a bit more clarity or refinement in exposition. These structural nitpicks suggest that as Kulp hones his craft, he will likely learn to trim or better integrate exposition and keep the through-line of each story taut even amid detours.

Lastly, Kulp’s experiments with style – such as telling six out of nine stories in BLOTS via verse – while largely successful, could alienate some readers who come in expecting conventional prose. It’s a courageous choice that sets him apart, but one could argue that the verse technique works better in some stories than others. In spots, the line breaks and poetic devices enhance the mood; in others, they might feel like an affectation. As he develops, Kulp may fine-tune when to unleash the poet within and when to let a scene speak plainly. None of these weaknesses are fatal by any means; in fact, they are the kind of ambitious missteps that often signal a writer on the cusp of great things. The good news is that even when something doesn’t quite land, there’s usually another brilliant image, chilling twist, or heartfelt character beat just a page later to redeem it.

A New Voice in Speculative Horror

Taken as a whole, T. Kulp’s early work forms a vivid patchwork of horror and wonder. It’s the product of a writer who clearly loves the genre – its highs, its lows, its dusty old ghost stories and its bleeding-edge nightmares – and who isn’t shy about playing in all its corners. In an era where speculative and horror fiction are thriving with new voices, Kulp’s stories fit right in while also standing out for their particular blend of qualities. Contemporary horror has seen a resurgence of short story collections and cross-genre experiments, and Kulp is contributing to that wave. Readers who enjoy the way authors like Stephen Graham Jones remix slasher tropes, or how Carmen Maria Machado infuses horror with personal themes, will find something kindred in Kulp. At the same time, fans of classic horror will appreciate that his stories feel like old friends with new faces – the Gothic ghost, the Lovecraftian fiend, the fable – all revisited with fresh eyes.

Kulp’s work also reflects current anxieties and fascinations in speculative fiction. He tackles technology (an AI that tells you “how to think”, a dangerous computer program on SocialNet, a VHS that ends the world), grapples with social media and information addiction, and addresses mental health struggles, all through the prism of the supernatural. This makes his horror relevant. It’s not horror in a vacuum; it’s horror that speaks to the 21st-century reader, telling us that the monsters may be timeless but the context is ours. In this sense, he aligns with the modern horror tradition of using monsters to illuminate societal and psychological truths – much like Jordan Peele does in film or writers like Victor LaValle do in fiction.

Crucially, one gets the sense that Kulp is still finding and refining his voice, and that’s part of the excitement. There’s a raw passion in these early works, a willingness to try things and push boundaries. As he continues to write, we might speculate that the stylistic experimentation will coalesce into an even more confident voice. The seeds are already there: an ear for dialogue, an eye for unsettling detail, a heart that beats for his characters. If Life Changing Yard Sale was the spark and Origins is a first step deeper into the spiral, where might the next turn lead? Perhaps he will expand on the mythologies he’s created – the ending of BLOTS suggests some stories beg for continuation – or perhaps he’ll venture into completely new territory. The beauty of an author who dabbles in many genres is that we can’t predict what his next concoction will be.

What we can say is that Kulp’s early tales establish him as an inventive storyteller with a strong emotional compass. He understands that horror is not just about making us scream, but also about what lingers after the scream – the shadow on the wall when the monster is gone (or is it still there?). In his own words, “the Lazarus Spiral is waiting for you to take a few more steps down, deeper, deeper, deeper…”. It’s an invitation and a promise. T. Kulp’s early work shows that he’s unafraid to lead us down those dark, winding stairs. Wherever they end up, it’s a journey well worth taking, and one can only imagine that even greater terrors and triumphs lie ahead in the continuing development of his literary voice.

Sources:

T. Kulp, Life Changing Yard Sale – Lazarus Spiral Book I (Making Adventure, 2023).
T. Kulp, Passages – Lazarus Spiral Book II (Making Adventure, 2024).
T. Kulp, Origins – Lazarus Spiral Book III (Making Adventure, 2024) – Author’s Introduction.
T. Kulp, Good Teens Die Bad (Making Adventure, 2024).
T. Kulp, Shadows, Stains & Secrets (2025) – promotional summary.
T. Kulp, Library of Lessons & Lies (2023) – promotional summary.
T. Kulp, Early Birds Pay Double (2024) – promotional summary.
T. Kulp, Excess Baggage (2024) – promotional summary.
Night Terror Novels, Review of BLOTS by T. Kulp (Reedsy Discovery, 2023).