entering another surreal/weird-horror snob era and using cohost to subject people to it
the revelation in the finale of That Insidious Beast that the angels and unfolders both are human beings, just from different points in the far future, is something I still think about. No monsters, no demons, just different kinds of people carrying out atrocities on each other, forever. Man hands on misery to man.
There’s a bit of a similar reveal used in Instructions for a Help, which preceded Insidious Beast, where the red worm is revealed to be genetically identical to humans, but that work is less concrete and miserable in its framing (at least mostly) than Beast is, so it’s less of a gut punch and more of some spice on the mystery there. Both are excellent pieces of strange unsettling fiction, as is Parson’s later actual novel Liminal States, which is hard to explain while also doing it justice. Highly recommend Parson’s work in general.