If Fisher’s distinctions between the weird’s intrusion and the eerie’s agency of absence lit you up—like his readings of Tarkovsky’s Stalker and the deserted spaces in The Shining—you’ll appreciate how Thacker pushes those ideas into philosophy proper. In the Dust of This Planet meditates on a world-without-us, echoing Fisher’s riffs on the “unexplained presence” in works like Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape and the impersonal forces in Lovecraft. It’s a thinking companion that channels the same chill of concepts acting on us, rather than the other way around.

Fisher’s fascination with invisible structures—those Overlook corridors that feel watched, or the prohibitions that make the Zone in Stalker so menacing—finds a perfect fictional mirror here. In The City & the City, Inspector Borlú polices two overlapping cities whose citizens must “unsee” each other, a civic eeriness that rhymes with Fisher’s analyses of rules you feel but can’t name. If you loved how Fisher made absence and social ritual feel like entities, this procedural of enforced blind spots will grip you.

Fisher’s chapter on Garner shows how myth can seize a place and its people—plates that become owls, patterns that won’t stop repeating. The Owl Service is that idea as narrative: Alison, Gwyn, and Roger are caught in the re-enactment of the Blodeuwedd legend, with the house and valley acting like Fisher’s “eerie agencies.” If Fisher’s take on Garner’s textures—the rustle of something old reasserting itself in the modern—stayed with you, this will too.

Fisher’s throughline from Lovecraft’s cosmic indifference to the chill of Nigel Kneale’s broadcasts primes you for Ligotti’s fiction, where office parks, storefronts, and polite conversations vibrate with nonhuman intent. Stories like “The Frolic” and “Vastarien” conjure that Fisher-esque eeriness—presences that don’t announce themselves, but structure your reality anyway. If the impassive spaces of The Shining and the humming emptiness of The Stone Tape fascinated you, Ligotti’s scalpel-cold tales will, too.

Fisher loves how an absence can be an active force—the missing explanation that makes a space feel alive. In Picnic at Hanging Rock, the sudden vanishing of schoolgirls at the rock creates exactly the kind of eerie Fisher dwells on: an event that reorganizes everyone’s behavior and beliefs, like the moral vacuum he traces in Don’t Look Now and the unsettling silences around M.R. James’ hauntings. If Fisher’s idea that the eerie is a question—“who or what is acting here?”—grabbed you, this novel is that question made haunting.