Joshua Hull is the co-screenwriter of the indie gem Glorious (2022), a film that manages to squeeze cosmic horror into the small space of a roadside bathroom. This sense of narrative limitation is why the film’s most over-the-top moments land so spectacularly. Yet while constraint is creatively productive for Hull in this project, it’s a quality that’s sorely missing from his debut novel, 8114 (2025). Here, he strives for a kind of horror maximalism, piling on every trope he can find with no clear aim. Instead of raising the stakes, the excess dilutes the book’s focus and dials down the dread. It also signals 8114’s kinship with the meta-horror novels of the 2010s. There’s no agreed-upon expiration date for the reflexive fiction trend, but I think it’s safe to say that, over the past five years, the best horror has shifted from irony to earnestness. And that’s what stands out most about 8114: it’s already nostalgic for a style of storytelling that’s barely behind us. 

When 8114 opens, unscrupulous podcaster Paul Early has destroyed the life of a former classmate by promoting a false story. Reeling from the internet backlash, he returns to his hometown after his best friend, Kyle, dies by suicide. The death is shocking but also deeply mysterious because he’s done it in the ruins of Paul’s childhood home. Having learned nothing from the past, he launches a new podcast to explore the dark history of the house and the strange circumstances of Kyle’s death. 

The novel is preoccupied with the exploitative nature of true crime media, suggesting that content like Paul’s causes real harm—not just to victims’ families, but to anyone who creates and consumes it. It’s a compelling theme that’s unfortunately buried under a heap of horror cliches. Paul doesn’t just go back to a haunted house. The house is on cursed land ruled by a demon once worshipped by a cult of pregnant women. And now Paul sees dead people, is pursued by a J-horror-style revenge ghost, and his podcast is part of a cursed media storyline. And on and on. 

Of the many elements jumbled together in 8114, the fungal horror stands out. Not because it’s thematically misplaced. As a metaphor, it makes perfect sense: Hull is linking Paul’s moral corruption and its technological spread to a contagious rot, a black mold that slowly consumes his body. The problem is that the literary marketplace is overcrowded with mushrooms. Since Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (2014) and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic (2020), it seems like every horror writer is drawing on the imagery of creeping mycelia. 

That increasingly hackneyed quality of fungal horror is probably why Hull went with it—he seems determined to use only the most conventional of horror conventions. The question is why. What’s the desired effect? At the risk of exposing myself as an unsophisticated reviewer, I’ll admit that I don’t know. It can’t be to frighten us. And if it’s supposed to be funny, I’d say that—coming almost 30 years after Scream—it’s a brand of comedy that’s gotten stale. 

Paul is stuck in the self-referential storytelling of the meta-horror boom and mired in postmodern unreliability. His endless film comps keep us at arm’s length from what’s actually happening. And this distance is compounded by his tenuous grasp on the real world. Again and again, he takes us through gruesome set-pieces only to reveal that they’re hallucinations. Fool me once, fine. But by the second or third vision, I’d learned my lesson and stopped caring. Hull’s technique of constantly undercutting reality is the equivalent of “it was all a dream.” Like that old chestnut, it lowers the stakes dramatically: when anything can happen, nothing matters.  

Readers who fantasize about a fourth novel in SGJ’s Indian Lake Trilogy might love 8114. But if meta-horror isn’t your thing, and you come to it—like I did—through the carefully constructed Glorious, then you may find its everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach disappointing.