The cat is out of the bag! I am so excited this news is finally being released. I’ve been sitting on this amazing thing, sworn to secrecy, for more than two years! My story “In Vaulted Halls Entombed” has been adapted into an amazing animation for the new season of the Netflix Original Series, LOVE, DEATH + ROBOTS. I couldn’t be more excited about it! I’ve only seen a few stills from the episode thus far, so I’ll see it for the first time along with everyone else when Season 3 drops on May 20th.
The story was originally published in the SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest anthology (ed. Geoff Brown & A J Spedding, Cohesion Press) in September 2015. The following year it won the Australian Shadows Paul Haines Award for Long Fiction. Then it was translated into German for the Best of SNAFU anthology, (Festa, 2018). It’s reprinted in my second short story collection, Served Cold. Then it was picked up by Blur Studios for the Netflix Original Series LOVE, DEATH + ROBOTS. I love that series so much, it’s an incredible thrill to have a story featured in it.
To say this story has worked its arse off for me is an understatement.
You can read the story in Survival of the Fittest or Served Cold, as mentioned above, or you can read all the stories from LD+R season 2 and 3 in a brand new anthology from Cohesion Press. (They also released the anthology of all the S1 stories.)
Here’s a still from my episode. How amazing does it look?
I’m not entirely sure how close to the original story they stayed with the adaptation. I know they changed the main character to a woman, which is more than fine with me. Beyond that, the handful of stills I’ve seen look pretty close to what I wrote. I can’t wait to finally see the episode.
Here’s a rundown of all the S3 stories at Animation World Network. And below you can see the trailer for season 3:
Bring on the 20th of May!
EDIT 24th May 2022: As quite a few people are seeing this post now since the episode aired, I’m editing it to add a couple of things.
Firstly, I’m SUPER happy with the episode. It looks amazing and their adaptation is incredible. A few people who have read the original story noted how different the spider swarm thing is in the episode from the glassy blob monsters in my story. No, I don’t know why they changed that – maybe as simple as a blob monster being incredibly hard to render well in such high level CGI, maybe entirely different reasons. I can’t tell you. But I don’t mind at all, the episode is fantastic.
There’s also been heaps of speculation around the end and the big question: “Is that Cthulhu?” Again, sorry, I can’t tell you! It sure looks like Cthulhu. I write a lot of cosmic horror, but not all cosmic horror is Lovecraftian. I’ve only ever written two short stories that directly feature Lovecraftian mythos, and this isn’t one of them. In my original story, only Coulthard sees the elder god – the reader doesn’t and it’s ambiguous about whether or not the “survivor” saw it. In the episode, they showed it very clearly. Of course, what I wrote is definitely an incredibly powerful cosmic elder god of some kind, and all cosmic horror can’t help but be compared to Lovecraft – I’m entirely happy with them representing it as Cthulhu. Like I said, I think the episode is awesome.
Finally, regarding the title. When I wrote the story, I didn’t have a title. When I finished it, I decided it was the kind of story that needed the most black metal name I could imagine, while still remaining relevant to the story. I came up with “In Vaulted Halls Entombed”. I was so pleased when it originally sold to Cohesion Press for the SNAFU anthology. Then it won a Shadows Award. My black metal-titled cosmic horror story won an award. Brilliant! Then it got picked up by Netflix, and now that name is everywhere. Seriously, I couldn’t be happier.