Damian McCarthy's Oddity arrives on Shudder with a handmade golem at its center, a figure constructed to embody absent presence. The same week, The New Yorker published Weike Wang's story The Dreamdrive, a piece about recurring dreams and loneliness that Wang describes as exploring the texture of inhabiting a mind that refuses to let go. Two works of fiction, one in film and one in prose, circling the same phenomenological problem: what do we do with the persistent presence of things that should have ended?
The Golem as Cultural Diagnostic
The golem is one of the oldest anxiety objects in Western myth, a figure animated by language who cannot think for itself but cannot be stopped. In 2026, this is not subtle. The AI chatbot at the drive-thru is a golem. The companion robot sitting with your parent is a golem. McCarthy's horror works because it takes the metaphor literally and refuses to resolve it: the golem is horrifying not because it is evil but because it is wrong in a way that is hard to articulate. A 2019 paper in Screen by Briefel and Miller on horror and uncanny objects argued that contemporary horror has shifted from external monster to internal doppelganger, reflecting anxieties about authenticity and self-dissolution rather than invasion.
Dreaming as Resistance, Fiction as Infrastructure
Wang's fiction operates differently. Where McCarthy uses dread, Wang uses the dream state as a formal container for loneliness that has no clean social address. Hearing Wang read the story aloud amplifies this: her voice makes the recursion of the dream feel like a feature, not a flaw. Both artists are making work about the parts of human experience that digital infrastructure cannot process. The social media harm lawsuit settlements this week are the legal acknowledgment of the same problem: platforms optimized for engagement did not design for grief, loneliness, or the uncanny persistence of the dead in your feed. Horror and literary fiction are doing the diagnostic work that product teams refused to.