Literature / Auteur

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Auteur is a villainous, skeletal Reality Warper with a Multiple-Choice Past of his own making and delusions of grandeur. Styling himself as a visionary writer and artist, he has the power to literally rewrite reality and styles himself as the Author of All. For untold millennia, he was kept in check by being only one of many gods and lesser powers, but as the series opens, the Cosmic War has devastated their ranks, leaving reality vulnerable and Auteur a bigger fish than ever before. Eager to seize this chance, he immediately sets about eliminating his remaining competition, cementing his power, and generally running amok, travelling across Time and Space through the Labyrinth and interfering in the lives of various ordinary or not-so-ordinary people.

After multiple preview stories appeared in holiday anthologies put out by Arcbeatle Press between 2023 and 2025, a CGI video trailer with Jonathan Rowe voicing Auteur was posted on Halloween 2025, teasing the actual Volume 1 of the series, The Final Word, ultimately released on June 16th, 2026.

The series contains examples of:

• Above the Gods: Some Archons hold the Eternal Abstractions of the Abyss to be "the gods beyond the gods". A young version of Auteur is even seen claiming that the authority of Fate outstrips that of the Supreme Being, the leader of the Archons.
• Alliterative Name:
  • Neville Naylor in A Play for the End of the World.
  • Penny Primrose, as well as bit characters Celia Celandine and Cathy Cowslip, in Penny Primrose and the Grand Ball of Fairy-Town.
• Amnesiac God: Marginalia has no less than two: Marnal, who was trapped in a century-long time loop on Earth where he only remembered what he really was in his senior years, and even then with huge gaps; and Stephie, who believed herself to be a human who couldn't remember anything before her eighteenth birthday for mysterious reasons, but is really the Flesh-Shaper known as the Prince-Provost.
• Anachronic Order: The stories in Volume One are mostly in chronological order from Auteur's perspective, with two notable exceptions: Long Live the Author takes place before everything else (but is placed later in the book because a story all about how Auteur came back to life wouldn't land for readers lacking context on who Auteur even is), and the narrative foreword Avant-Propos is implied to take place after the rest of the book (and possibly after future volumes as well) despite being placed at the very beginning of Volume One.
• Anatomy of the Soul: Souls as discussed in the series do not precisely have "components", but people still have a "conceptual heart", described as the core or center of mass of their "astral footprint" or soul. This heart is "a mostly hypothetical construct" for mortals, but very much a tangible aspect of a deity's essence; their godheart or cœur de lumière is notably how Archons like Auteur draw power from the Morning Star.
• Ancient Astronauts: Discussed and subverted in Terry's inner monologue in Marginalia. Although recognizing Epsilon's vessel as a starship of some sort, Terry instinctively knows that Epsilon is a genuinely supernatural being who happens to travel through space, not an alien posing as a god, namechecking Von Daniken explicitly and mentally chiding him for his "self-satisfied pseudo-skepticism".
• Anthropomorphic Personification: The Abyss is home to such entities, whom some Archons consider "the gods beyond the gods", described as "the spirits of ideas, eternal principles of existence" and referred to as Conceptuals, Eternal Abstractions, or simply Spirits. The personification of Life plays a major role in The Face with a Thousand Heroes, while a lesser entity called the Five O'Clock Shadow, who defines himself as the personification of "grief deferred, hidden from healing", appears in House of Auteur. Other mentioned entities include Suffering, Fate, Discordance, Contradiction, Paradox, and Waste of Time.
• Angel Unaware:
  • Professor Arvorax generally pretends to be an eccentric scientist-explorer in the Jules Verne mold, but is actually the Collector, a millennia-old deity.
  • Michael Brookhaven, a Deity of Human Origin, continued to pose as a human corporate executive in Hollywood even after his ascension.
  • Auteur himself takes on several human personas over the course of Volume One, including the modern-day writer Walter Cliffside and the 19th-century occultist Théophile Bateleur.
• Antagonist Title: As a villainous character with a fairly static personality, Auteur is rarely the protagonist of the story; in the majority of stories within the first volume, he serves as an antagonist or secondary character in someone else's narrative, with the role of protagonist falling to the likes of Neville Naylor. Auteur is thus an antagonist title for the series as a whole.
• Our Archons Are Different: Auteur's kind, the Archons, are considered a particular group of gods, and are also referred to by a variety of other titles including the Lightbringers and the Keepers of Order. They Caused the Big Bang as a means of imposing orderly laws of physics on a chaotic universe. All possess some measure of Reality Warper abilities, although Auteur has honed his to an unusual degree, and uses them far more wantonly than Archons are supposed to do.
• Art Initiates Life: Though he is fonder of Rewriting Reality, Auteur can also draw or paint things into existence; in the story House of Auteur, a manifestation of him insists on "drawing [the protagonist's] face again", which he doesn't think much of at the time but turned out to be a way for the character to tweak his facial featues.
• Badass Long Robe: Auteur wears flowing purple robes.
• Bald Mystic: Stephie in Marginalia has a shaved head as part of her butch aesthetic. She has a mysterious, supernatural condition, performs tarot readings in her spare time, and is actually an Amnesiac God.
• Barefoot Poverty: Penny Primrose is illustrated as barefoot, though is not clear if her lack of shoes is related to her only owning "old and ragged clothes", or is simply a consequence of her being a fairy.
• Berserk Button: Auteur loves the sound of his own voice — and hates being interrupted.
• Big Brother Instinct: Terry in Marginalia is extremely loyal to and protective of his disabled sister Terry, to the point of sacrificing his own career, finances, and social life.
• Blatant Lies: When introducing himself to Stephanie, Auteur shamelessly claims to be the "Last of the Archons" as part of his Badass Boast — this, even though she has just watched him engage in fisticuffs with another surviving Archon, the Magician. Moreover, she is herself an Archon, although Stephanie doesn't know that yet.
• Book Burning: The House Fire that destroyed the original House of Cliffside took Auteur's library with it, and Auteur accuses Scribe and Voix of having deliberately set the fire with that specific aim, though it's implied that he's barking up the wrong tree.
• Break the Cutie: House of Auteur reveals that millennia ago, in another body, Auteur was Mavina, an incredibly wholesome and enthusiastic artist who only wanted other Archons to acknowledge her talent. Unfortunately, when she invited everyone she could get to the unveiling of a painting she believed to be her masterpiece, she was instead publicly humiliated by one of her former teachers, causing her to flee in tears. Though she had a ways to go before she became Auteur as we know them, it's suggested that this remained a foundational trauma in Auteur's life and the last time they truly tried to connect with others through their art, instead of descending into solipsism.
• Captured Super-Entity: The precipitating event of The Face with a Thousand Heroes is the capture of the Anthropomorphic Personification of Life by the occultist Oliver Haddo.
• Caused the Big Bang: The Archons predated the universe as we know it, and designed it. The Big Bang, from their perspective, was the moment they "activated" it, creating the whole arc of history in one relative moment.
• Character Name and the Noun Phrase: Penny Primrose and the Grand Ball of Fairy-Town.
• The Collector: The Collector, otherwise known as Professor Arvorax, is a benevolent example who travels across the Cosmos salvaging rare objects and creatures, preferentially the "last of their kind".
• Consummate Storyteller: Auteur sees himself as such, often insisting on sitting characters down so they can listen to one of his stories, though in-universe opinion varies on how good he actually is.
• Continuity Cavalcade:
  • Most of the Archons mentioned by Epsilon in a single exchange in Marginalia originated in various strands of the Doctor Who Expanded Universe, to which Auteur is connected through Faction Paradox among others. These include:
    • The Truth-Seeker, Tannis, Casmus, the Saints, and the Minister from Death Comes to Time.
    • Gable, alias Michael Brookhaven, from Faction Paradox.
    • The Horseman, the Summer King, the Sage of the Waves, and the bargeman of the River Hex from The Minister of Chance.
    • The Corvid from Cwej: The Series.
  • The climax of House of Auteur, the last story in Volume One, sees manifestation of the protagonists of each of the prior stories mobbing Auteur together.
• Cosmic Retcon: Rewriting reality and history themselves are the primary ability of the Archons, via a combination of sheer Reality Warping by force of will, and travelling through time to alter the past. The most striking target of it is perhaps Auteur's own backstory, with him having given himself a Multiple-Choice Past of his own making by successively creating new life stories for himself to suit his whim. This power is also used to avoid treading on any toes with regards to the specific history of the War in Faction Paradox, with Marginalia dealing with Auteur's efforts to retroactively alter the history of the War to better suit his ego and his aesthetic preferences.
• Creation Myth: Auteur gives an account of how and why the Archons Caused the Big Bang in Marginalia, explaining that they first created physical bodies for themselves as a "test run", then constructed an "outline" of the universe which they navigated using the Labyrinth, and finally quickened the prototype into the true Cosmos by means of the Big Bang, at which point the Labyrinth was made obsolete and became a haven for Archons who disapproved of the way things were going.
• Creature Creation Committee: The ancient Archons collectively designed the universe and everything within it before Time. Auteur claims that the only reason they turned themselves into humanoid Physical Gods was to check that it was possible for life to exist as "combinations of atoms", with the Flesh-Shapers deriving their name from having been the original designers of these "test" flesh bodies.
• Crossover Cosmology: Many pantheons of gods coexist, including the Archons, the House of Osiris, and the House of Olympus, as well as Satan, an individual strongly implied to be Odin, and countless fictional deities (including the title character).
• Death Is Cheap: Played With. Mechanically, reversing death for mortals is wholly within the abilities of an Archon, with Epsilon in Marginalia viewing it as just a particularly tricky disease to cure — or someone's death can just be undone by Rewriting Reality. However, Auteur himself is a deity, as are many prominent characters within the series, and although gods are, of course, very hard to kill (as they can create themselves a new body if one is destroyed by mundane means), resurrecting a properly-dead god is much trickier than resurrecting a mortal; the Shadow Spire had to go through a complicated process to resurrect Auteur himself in Long Live the Author that combined her powers with his own, and Auteur in turn spends much of House of Auteur trying and failing to bring back his cousin Gideon, whom he himself murdered in a fit of pique a long time ago.
• Decomposite Character: As described under Satan below, at least three unrelated supernatural beings take on traits of the traditional Abrahamic Devil.
• Deity of Human Origin: Some Archonic Houses were smeared as "cuckoo-Pantheons" for "their habit of recruiting mere mortals and giving them a chance of apotheosis". One example of this is Michael Brookhaven, who kept up a human persona even after becoming something much greater.
  He himself had once been mortal, and even by this stage of his career, he could make a passable impression of an ordinary human being (or at least, of an ordinary corporate executive).
• Dem Bones: Auteur's true physical form is little more than a skeleton, with eyeballs and a few organs in his rib cage.
• Divine Conflict: The Great Cosmic War started as a large-scale conflict between the Archons and some other pantheons. Auteur also ends up in more personal conflict with other deities on several occasions, such as his extended chase/fight/argument with the Collector in The Collector.
• Double-Meaning Title:
  • Marginalia is named after a technical term for anything scribbled into the margins of a book, such as handwritten annotations. This simultaneously references Auteur's biased editorialising of the manuscripts he steals, Stephie and Terry's metaphorical home on the "margins" of society, and the Labyrinth's status as the literal margins of reality. It's also a Epunymous Title incorporating both syllables of the name of Marnal, a pivotal character in the story.
  • When You're Good To Mama simultaneously references Harris's motivation for undertaking the road trip (visiting his dying mother with whom he's had a strained relationship) and the Eldritch Abomination into whose clutches he and Auteur find themselves, known only as Mama Joe.
• Draconic Abomination: Some of the more powerful manifestations of the Yssgaroth, an eldritch gestalt from another universe, are huge spaceborne "Yssgaroth Wyrms", all shadow and eyes, capable of devouring entire galaxies.
• Dragons Are Divine: Some Archons adopted the shapes of wyrms to fight in the Cosmic War. House of Auteur also implies that even before the War, some chose to turn into wyrms to spend eternity "slumbering below the earth in endless dreaming".
• Dressed to Heal: Epsilon, an Archon physician, wears an outfit that immediately scans to Terry as that of a surgeon, despite actually being fantastical armor — with a helmet that resembles a plague doctor's mask, and green robes reminiscent of a hospital gown or lab coat.
• Eldritch Location:
  • The Labyrinth of Imaginary Prisons, an organic, gothic maze outside Time and Space. Not only doesn't it have a concept of "up" or "down", but in a deeper sense, it feels more real than the conventional universe, with even its austere greyscale color scheme striking human observers as incredibly vivid and varied.
  • The Shadow Spire, the sentient tower where Auteur resides, which is noted to drive any other visitors than Auteur completely mad just from being there.
• Emotion Eater:
  • The Algea, a creature briefly mentioned in Penny Primrose and the Grand Ball of Fairy-Town, which feeds on grief.
  • The Five O'Clock Shadow in House of Auteur, which simultaneously acts as an Anthropomorphic Personification of the feeling of "grief deferred, hidden from healing", and feeds on it like a parasite when it's chosen a host, growing more powerful the more they give in to that unhealthy mindset.
• Empty Shell: In Penny Primrose and the Grand Ball of Fairy-Town, Penny becomes this after Auteur takes her soul and bottles it, with the extracted soul feeling her emotions in her place as a dispassionate, amoral Penny wanders around acting on every random whim, but finding no pleasure in anything.
• Epunymous Title: In a subtle example, the word Marginalia incorporates both syllables making up the title of the pivotal character Marnal.
• Encyclopedia Exposita: Entries from The Book of the Cosmic War are interspersed in-between chapters of Marginalia, providing background on the War and the Archons.
• Evil Tower of Ominousness: The Shadow Spire is Auteur's home and a stark black, sentient lighthouse standing on a rocky outcrop outside reality.
• The Exact Center of Everything: The Morning Star was located at "the center of the Cosmos".
• Exotic Extended Marriage: In The Patchwork Princess, it is traditional for the Queen of Cheema's unnamed alien species to choose "at least three husbands" before taking the throne, who will contribute to siring the new generation.
• Expy Coexistence: Oliver Haddo was created by W. Somerset Maugham as a No Celebrities Were Harmed stand-in for Aleister Crowley, but an off-handed reference in The Face with a Thousand Heroes establishes that Crowley already existed even before Haddo was erased from history, with Crowley's role in events merely expanding to make up for Haddo's disappearance.
• Extinct Animal Park: Parts of the Collector's ship Neptune serve as this, with large habitats for animals such as Maurice, the last Titanoboa.
• Eyes Do Not Belong There: One of the Flesh-Shapers, who appears as a "sack-like creature covered with mouths and elaborate tattoos", sports a "ring of sapphire eyes" around its body.
• Our Fairies Are Different: In Penny Primrose and the Grand Ball of Fairy-Town, the titular Penny Primrose, though a thousand years old, appears as a child-sized girl with large butterfly wings; it is not clear if the other fairies in the plot, such as the King and Queen of Fairy-Town, are any taller. Brownies, elves, and pixies are also mentioned among the King and Queen's subjects, but are listed separately from "fairies" proper.
• The Fettered: Professor Arvorax from The Collector strives not to use his powers as an Archon, believing that the universe has taken as much as it can survive of Gods using their powers on a whim, and that it is only ethical for him or any others of his kind to survive following the Cosmic War if they live like mortals. Auteur strenuously disagrees.
• Fictional Color: The Vibrancy, created by Auteur by refining the corrupting effect Mama Joe has on her victims, is a textbook fictional color, described as "something orange and purple and turquoise but none of those things, and not brown in the slightest", and asa "sad, angry color" that "insists on itself". It has a vague but immediate emotional effect on anyone who sees it.
• Fictional Disease: "Sagittarian photomyocardis" is Epsilon's name for a condition which affects the surviving Archons when they try to use their power, due to their cœur de lumière's connection to the now-destroyed Morning Star.
• First Friend: Auteur and the Collector were this for each other when they were both children on the Morning Star, bonding over compatible hobbies and both actually looking childlike whereas most Archons are created in adult-seeming forms from the off.
• Flashback B-Plot: House of Auteur alternates between a present-day plot and two sets of vignettes drawn from Auteur and Gideon's pasts.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: The foreword of Volume One purports to be an account of a vision the book's editor had of Auteur himself, and strongly implies that Auteur needed the book to exist in our reality as part of some yet-unrevealed scheme.
• Friendship Trinket: The Collector has a whole room onboad the Neptune filled with artwork gifted to him by Auteur, including the very first drawing Auteur gave him when they were both children.
• Genius Loci:
  • The Shadow Spire is a sentient, malevolent tower located in its own Pocket Dimension, and Auteur's personal home base. After Auteur was erased from existence, it actually takes action to recreate him, speaking directly in the ersatz-Auteur's mind to guide him until he matures into asserting his own reality.
  • Though she's imprisoned there instead of being synonymous with the building outright, the line between the eldritch presence of "Mama Joe" and Mama Joe’s Diner, Inn and Hospitality is thin at best.
• Genocide from the Inside: Subverted in Marginalia. Auteur takes credit for the destruction of the Archons, but it is revealed that this is his attempt at Rewriting Reality to make it so that he was responsible, because he actually doesn't know who did it and the thought that whatever got them might still be out there unnerves him.
• The Ghost:
  • Many of the other surviving Archons known to exist as of the first volume are only mentioned in Epsilon's monologue in Marginalia and never directly appear within the plot (although some of them have appeared in other media; see Continuity Cavalcade).
  • Mama Joe is central to the plot of When You're Good To Mama, but is never directly encountered by any characters on-page; her presence is merely felt through her Hope Crusher aura and the rot that affects those who spend too much time within said aura. It's explicitly stated that she "makes an effort to always be one room away".
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: Auteur's amber eyes glow with a fiery light, a constant reminder of his power as an Archon of Light.
• A God Am I: Auteur actually is a god by the terminology of the series, but only one of many, and an ultimately minor figure. To hear him tell it, on the other hand, you'd think he was the supreme ruler and creator of all reality.
• God of Order: The Archons collectively fulfilled this role, being described on various occasions as "the Lords of Order", "the Archons of Order", and "the Keepers of Order".
• God of the Arts: Auteur dubs himself a God of Writing, and is thought of as "a god of the arts" by the Collector.
• Götterdämmerung: The Cosmic War was a massive Divine Conflict which ended in all but a few of the Archons being wiped from existence. Auteur was destroyed in its early stages, and is resurrected shortly after its end. In Marginalia, Auteur, unable to stomach the uncertainty over exactly what happened to destroy his own kind, nor the knowledge that it wasn't his doing, eventually uses his powers to retroactively assert that he was the one who brought an end to the conflict by erasing the Archons.
• Good Samaritan: The hiker who encounters Penny Primrose in the forest attempts to be this, immediately going out of her way to try and comfort what appears to be a distraught child.
• Good Wings, Evil Wings: Penny Primrose, an innocent little fairy, has large butterfly wings.
• Gratuitous French: One of Auteur's trademark affectations is his constant peppering of French phrases and words into his speech. Sometimes their meaning is so plain to an English-speaker as to make it unclear why he bothered; other times, he's using French asides to insult people to their faces without their knowing, or otherwise for his own private enjoyment.
• Gratuitous Greek: Marginalia features an ancient Archon named "Epsilon". When Terry asks if they were named for the Greek letter, he gets a reply suggesting that the letter was named after the Archon.
• Great Offscreen War: The Great Cosmic War is frequently brought up, being the conflict which wiped out most of the gods. However, it is already over by the time Volume One begins, as (something close to) it was already explored by the parent series, Faction Paradox.
• Green and Mean: Epsilon is an antagonistic force, though they do not view themself as malicious, and they wear green robes over their silver armor.
• Healer God: Epsilon is an ancient Archon obsessed with preventing "change", and, as such, acts as a healer and surgeon.
• Hell Hotel: When You're Good To Mama has Mama Joe’s Diner, Inn and Hospitality, a mysterious, decaying building in the middle of nowhere that's actually a prison for the Eldritch Abomination from which it takes its names. If you check in, you can never check out, and slowly undergo The Corruption as Mama Joe feeds on your despair.
• Hero of Another Story: The mysterious barmaid Jezebel in When You're Good To Mama is implied to be a more significant person than she seemed to Harris; this is confirmed by her appearance as a main cast member in the Disparate Minds series, written by the same author as When You're Good To Mama, where she goes by the name of "Anthea".
• Home of the Gods: The Archons lived on the Morning Star, a planet at the center of the universe, until it was destroyed (and most of them with it)
• Hope Crusher: Mama Joe is an eldritch being whose aura has this effect, and who is stated in narration to revel in it.
  She makes you think about cutting your wrists, and then she makes you get too nervous to actually commit to it. She wallows in that.
• Horror Hunger: Vajda in tA Play for the End of the World, like all of the Yssgaroth, is an Eldritch Abomination affected with a hunger which, if unchecked, would force her to consume entire galaxies, to the point of once declaring "I am Hunger".
• House Fire: The House of Cliffside burned down for mysterious reasons centuries ago, killing many of Auteur's cousins and destroying Auteur's books. This spurred Auteur's departure from the Morning Star. He suspects the fire was deliberately set by Scribe and Voix to hurt or kill him, but it's implied that he's wrong, leaving the true causes of the fire a mystery.
• Humans Through Alien Eyes: When the fairy Penny Primrose first encounters the hiker, she is described from Penny's point-of-view as a fairy who's never met a modern-day human before, with Penny being confused at the "funny thing on her back, like a shell or something" (actually a backpack).
• I Am the Noun!: Vajda declares "I am Hunger".
• I Have Many Names:
  • Auteur himself went by other titles and nicknames over the aeons before settling on the name "Auteur", including the mocking childhood nickname of Little Cousin Cliffside, as well as Mavina, Dessinateur, and Ecrivain. He also claims a variety of grandiose titles, most notably variations on "the Author of All Reality", and uses several aliases to publish on Earth over the course of Volume One alone, including Walter Cliffside, A. F. Oakehurt, and Théophile Bateleur.
  • Auteur states in The Collector that this is also true of the eponymous character:
  "(…) your friend is the Keeper of the Lost; he is the Watchers’ Heretic; a Weaver of Worlds, Court Librarian of Time’s Cathedral. An Archon of the First Sphere, Surveyor of Creation, Patron of the Forsaken — so many names, and so many worlds where sheeple whisper them in wondering tones!"
• I Know Your True Name: Both Oliver Haddo and Auteur himself attempt to use Hex Kotlee's name to magically harm or control her — and Auteur winds up being defeated because Hex Kotlee sacrificed her own name the night before, so it has no effect.
• Immortality Inducer: Haddo grows a magical apple-tree from a drop of the embodiment of Life; its golden apples rejuvenate those who eat them, as Haddo promptly demonstrates before his minions. Auteur later creates cider from the apples, which is implied to have the same effect.
• Insect Queen: Though Cheema's unnamed alien species in The Patchwork Princess are not physically insectoid, they are reminiscent of eusocial hive insects; accordingly, Cheema's role as Queen involves both the governing duties of a monarch, and the biological duty of bearing a new generation of offspring, with her most important decision on the eve of "coronation" being to choose three husbands to sire her heirs.
• Insistent Terminology: Unlike some other Archons, Auteur is just "Auteur", not "''The'' Auteur", and God help you if you get that wrong in his presence.
• Knight of Cerebus: Auteur deliberately acts as one within Penny Primrose and the Grand Ball of Fairy-Town, disrupting the tone and structure of a sickly-sweet low-stakes Victorian fairy-story and introducing horror and death to the setting.
• Last of His Kind: Auteur claims to be the Last of the Archons when first introducing himself to Stephanie. This is however a case of Blatant Lies, as it is already clear by this point that there are a number of surviving Archons, even if they've been highly reduced in numbers by the Cosmic War.
• Last-Name Basis: Throughout Marginalia, Auteur insistently refers to Stephanie Prince-Provost as "Prince-Provost" rather than "Stephie" or "Stephanie". This turns out to be Foreshadowing that her true identity, known to Auteur but not to herself, is as a being called simply the Prince-Provost.
• Lazy Alias: In Marginalia, Auteur comes to be known as "Walter" simply because someone mishears him saying his actual name and he decides to roll with it. In A Place Like Home, he writes under the pen name A. F. Oakehurt, an anagram of "Fake Author".
• Lighthouse Point: The Shadow Spire in which Auteur resides is an ominous black lighthouse standing on a waves-battered island outside reality. It's also sentinet and extremely malevolent, possibly moreso than Auteur himself.
• Mad God: Auteur is referred to as one in so many words on many occasions. Though he isn't completely dysfunctional, his stubborn, willful delusion that he is the ultimate authority in the Cosmos, and his brittle emotional state, more than earn the title.
• Magical Barefooter:
  • Penny Primrose in Penny Primose and the Grand Ball of Fairy-Town is illustrated as barefoot, though it is not clear if her lack of shoes is related to her only owning "old and ragged clothes", or is simply a consequence of her being a fairy.
  • Petit Cœur, a mysterious little girl in House of Auteur, is barefoot outdoors when the protagonist first meets her, and the reason she was outdoors was to practice drawing stars into existence (she is eventually revealed to be a manifestation of Auteur's inner child, making her a goddess of sorts). This is however a Downplayed Trope, as narration later establishes the fact she doesn't wear shoes has more to do with lack of exposure to social convention due to living secluded in the House on the Cliff Side with only Mrs Teak for company than with her magical nature per se.
• Master of Illusion: Crixra from A Play for the End of the World uses her psychic abilities to disguise herself as a human and decades-old ruins as a fully-functional theater.
• The Maze: The Labyrinth is an eldritch, gothic, Escherian maze underpinning all Time and Space. Its many doors can be used to travel from one point in space-time to another, as Auteur does, but they are almost impossible for a human to navigate without getting lost, and that's not even mentioning the things that lurk in there.
• Metafictional Horror: Fittingly enough, as the series stars a Villain Protagonist with the power of Rewriting Reality. At least one story plays the realization that the narration of a scene has actually been Auteur writing events into existence with malicious intent as a chilling twist, and the foreword of Volume One additionally implies that the actual existence of the book series is part of an as-yet-unrevealed scheme on Auteur's part.
• The Modern Gods: Brookhaven, a Deity of Human Origin, is said to have styled himself "the God of Hollywood", heading a pantheon staffed with "eager local talent" and "embodied cinematic archetypes".
• My Species Doth Protest Too Much: Vajda and Crollox of the Yssgaroth are among the few individual Yssgaroth Wyrms to rebel against their species' Hive Mind and assert their own individuality. Though still affected by her kind's Horror Hunger, Vajda has no positive desire to kill sentient beings, and is happy to Take a Third Option when Neville devises one.
• No Full Name Given: We never find out the first name of Harris, the protagonist of When You're Good To Mama.
• Non-Indicative Name: Like Venus from which it borrows the nickname, the Morning Star was not a literal star, but a planet of "blinding radiance", both literally and symbolically.
• Nothing Is Scarier:
  • Mama Joe is an unseen presence throughout When You're Good To Mama, and we never find out exactly what her creation the Vibrancy does to people if they look at it for too long.
  You’ll never find her. She makes an effort to always be one room away, a voice overheard. She’s the perfect housemate.
• The Older Immortal: As an Archon, Auteur is thousands of years old, but he is comparatively young next to some of the other beings he encounters, such as Epsilon, who is millions of years old and was an active participant in the creation of reality as we know it.
• Only Friend: Auteur believes that he and the Collector have been this to one another throughout their lives, but the Collector disagrees, insisting that they've both had closer relationships with other people throughout their immortal lives, even if they were each other's First Friend aside from their respective siblings.
• Only One Name:
  • Auteur himself, and several other gods including Epsilon and Arvorax.
  • Most of the aliens seen in Marginalia, The Patchwork Princess, A Place Like Home, or A Play for the End of the World, such as Cheema, Tanaat, and Crixra.
• Out-of-Genre Experience: The story of Penny Primrose and the Grand Ball of Fairy-Town is one relative to the rest of the book, being told in the style of a cloying Victorian fairy stale for young children. Of course, that's only until Auteur starts invading the story, acting as an in-universe Knight of Cerebus.
• Painting the Medium: The narration corresponding to each of Hex Kotlee's different borrowed fictional personas in The Face with a Thousand Heroes is rendered in a different font. She also begins speaking in a different font from the narration when channeling Haddo in a scene told from a generic third-person-omniscient point of view.
• Physical God: Most gods seen in the series have actual physical bodies, though they're only one aspect of their true higher-dimensional selves. These bodies can be replaced if destroyed, but are genuinely part of them, not just an avatar. According to the Creation Myth related by Auteur in Marginalia, the Archons were the first beings to create physical bodies for themselves at the dawn of Time, as a "test run" for creating mortals.
  Auteur: "Before they could create the universe, the Lightbringers needed to create themselves. That is, they needed to craft bodies for themselves to inhabit. (…) Bones and blood and flesh and all! Well, after all, why not? Why not be composed of materials and combinations of atoms? They had to know that it was possible for life to exist within crude matter, within sacks of dirt that ran on mathematics. What better way than to test it on themselves?"
• Plague Doctor: Epsilon's armor evokes the appearance of a classic plague doctor, with a bird-like helm and long robes draped over the plate armor. Rather than a conventional plague, Epsilon is obsessed with halting and reversing change itself, in all its forms; their suit makes them immune to other deities' Reality Warping and Cosmic Retcons.
• Planetary Romance: A Discussed Trope in A Place Like Home, which incorporates extracts from in-universe critical texts discussing A. F. Oakehurt's (fictional) Yvari Duology's place in the history of the genre, comparing it to John Carter of Mars and The Space Trilogy.
• Pop-Culture Pun Episode Title: A number of story titles reference preexisting stories and even famous non-fiction works:
  • Long Live the Author, an allusion to Roland Barthes's trope-naming essay Death of the Author.
  • The Face with a Thousand Heroes, an inversion of The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
  • A Place Like Home, inverting the Arc Words of The Wizard of Oz (1939), "There's no place like home".
  • House of Auteur, referencing House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula.
• Portal Network: The Labyrinth of Imaginary Prisons in is an infinite extradimensional maze with doors connecting to countless places and eras — if you know how to navigate it.
• Posthumous Character:
  • Michael Brookhaven died during the Cosmic War, long before the events of Volume One, but his failed attempt to take over the Labyrinth through Loophole Abuse still forms a key part of the resolution of the plot of the story Marginalia.
  • Neville Naylor's mother is frequently discussed in A Play for the End of the World, with her advice to her son motivating him and her interest in the occult helping him to grasp the situation he's in, but she's already passed away by the time the stor begins.
  • The wizard Bumpity is killed by Auteur before the events of Penny Primrose and the Grand Ball of Fairy-Town, with Auteur operating out of his house through the rest of the story, with Bumpity's corpse still lying in place.
• Prolonged Prologue: Lampshaded by Auteur towards the end of the prologue of Marginalia, which spans multiple thousands of words, as long as a regular chapter of the story. Auteur himself grows bored and decides to cut to the chase by removing most of the supporting characters from existence.
  Auteur: "I’m talking about a retcon. About killing a few darlings… streamlining the plot. This cold open’s gone on far too long."
• Public Domain Character: Oliver Haddo, the Aleister Crowley-like magician seen in The Face with a Thousand Heroes, originated in the 1908 novel The Magician by W. Somerset Maugham. The story actually ends with Haddo permanently turned into fiction by Auteur, causing him to be Ret-Gone from reality with Maughan's novel existing in his place.
• Punctuation Shaker: The Splin'Trex species in A Play for the End of the World.
• Purple Is Powerful: Auteur himself, a powerful supernatural being with a very high opinion of himself and a domineering personality, wears purple robes.
• Reality Warping: Archons and other gods can alter reality by fiat, ordering things to be a certain way. Auteur mediates this through the act of writing and uses it much more liberally than most deities do, with other Archons being horrified at his excesses.
• Really 700 Years Old: The various gods and Archons are of course Time Abysses whose ages are counted in millennia or more, whether they appear as young adults like Hex Kotlee or as Dem Bones like Auteur. In more sedate lengths of time, however, there's also the fairy Penny Primrose, who is so short and youthful that she is easily mistaken for a child, but is actually around a thousand years old.
• Ret-Gone: Auteur can do this to people, whether by erasing them altogether or turning them into fiction.
• Rewriting Reality: Auteur is the very embodiment of this ability, able to create or alter people, objects or events through writing. While he is most powerful when using his Quill to write in his personal grimoire, any writing materials will do in a pinch.
• Satan: A Decomposite Character:
  • "The First of the Fallen", mentioned on several occasions, is the founder of the Fallen House, equivalent to Grandfather Paradox in Faction Paradox. It seems he wasn't actually a bad sort.
  • "The Son of Marnal" was the malevolent trickster who restored Hex Kotlee's memories against her will in a flashback in The Face with a Thousand Heroes, also referred to as the Devil, the Prince of Perdition, the Father of Lies, and the Magistrate. He is also a Composite Character with the Deathless as seen in Cwej: The Series, himself hinted to be a version of the Master.
  • Vajda claims that the Yssgaroth, the Eldritch Abomination which is the originator of vampires, is "that power which your theologians calle the Great Deceiver, the Prince of Darkness, the Form Manipulator".
• Soul Jar: Auteur places Penny Primrose's soul in a ginger beer bottle after buying it from her.
• Spell My Name with a "The": A frequent structure for the names of gods and Archons: the Prince-Provost, the Collector, and the Creator all appear in Volume One with varying degrees of prominence. Several others mentioned by Epsilon share this trait. Auteur, on the other hand, averts this trope, insisting that he's just "Auteur".
• Spirit World: The Abyss, mentioned to also be called the Spirit World or the Astral Plane, is a non-space "below" physical reality, inhabited by Conceptual Abstractions and other Spirits.
• Spin-Off: Of Faction Paradox, with Auteur having debuted in the anthologies The Book of the Enemy and The Book of the Peace. Auteur was Killed Off for Real at the end of the latter, but is recreated in Long Live the Author in Volume One.
• The Stoic: Epsilon in Marginalia acts and speaks with almost mechanical efficiency, with the only time they display any emotion being when Stephie stabs through their armor to force them to leave before they can "heal" her.
• Sue Donym: "Walter Cliffside", the human name Auteur uses in Marginalia, is drawn from a mishearing of "Auteur" and uses (what is presumably a translation of) his Archonic House's name as a human surname.
• Sugar Bowl: Fairy-Town and the surrounding woods are the setting of a Victorian Fairy Tale where nothing bad happens and everyone speaks politely to one another.
• Talking Animal: Cock Robin in Penny Primrose and the Grand Ball of Fairy-Town, a pastiche of a Victorian fairy tale, is (as per the classic nursery rhyme) a talking robin who is able to give sage advice to the protagonist about how to dress for a ball, while otherwise living in a tree and behaving like an ordinary bird.
• Take Away Their Name: Hex Kotlee sacrifices her original name to Athena. Though the name is still remembered by Haddo and Auteur, it's implied that others will forget it, and at any rate, the name no longer has any power over her (which is exactly what she wanted).
• Tempting Apple: In The Face with a Thousand Heroes, the sorcerer Haddo uses The Dark Arts to grow a magical apple-tree from a drop of the embodiment of Life's blood. The golden apples it produces are an Immortality Inducer and creating them was evidently his primary motivation for capturing Life in the first place.
• Terminology Title: "Marginalia", the title of the first full-length story in Volume One, is a technical term for handmade annotations in the margins of a book.
• Title Drop: The title of the first anthology, The Final Word, is given two separate justifications and title drops: the first at the end of the CGI trailer for the book, where Auteur claims it refers to his ability to be the one to decide what reality will be from now on after the fall of the Archons; and the second in a flashback scene towards the end of the last story in House of Auteur, where Ecrivain's curse that would lead to the fall of the Archons centuries later is referred to as "the Final Word".
• Tom the Dark Lord: The primary antagonist of When You're Good To Mama is a godlike Eldritch Abomination from the dawn of time, known only as… "Mama Joe".
• Top God: Before the end of the Cosmic War, the Archons were ruled by one of their own given ultimate authority and called "the Supreme Being". It is implied that this was a title that could be passed on rather than a specific being, with Auteur once attempting to usurp the position.
• Two-Faced: Francine is depicted as such in the illustration for When You're Good To Mama, with her left side intact but her right size overtaken by the fungus-like Vibrancy. The narration in the actual story describes it as less of a clean split, but still suggests that "the right side of her face is annihilated" while the left size retains more visible features, such as a "tearful, pleading" eye.
• Unusual Euphemism: In A Play for the End of the World, Neville Naylor's inner monologue once refers to vampires as "friends of Dracula's".
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: In Penny Primrose and the Grand Ball of Fairy-Town, Penny Primrose's reaction to Auteur dropping his disguise as the wizard Bumpity and revealing his true, demonic appearance to her is to simply carry on talking to him under the assumption that he's Bumpity, who's gotten a lot thinner than he was when last she saw him. Auteur is extremely bemused, to say the least.
• Our Vampires Are Different: As in Faction Paradox, humanoid vampires are lesser emanations of an eldritch gestalt from another universe known as the Yssgaroth. The Yssgaroth has powerful extrusions into our universe, described as "Star Vampires" or Wyrms. Most Wyrms are slaves to the Yssgaroth hive mind, but some, like Vajda, rebel against it to assert their own individuality.
• Villain-Based Franchise: Auteur is almost always the antagonist of a story rather than the primary point-of-view character, with each story in Volume One pitting him against a different protagonist.
• Villain: Exit, Stage Left: Auteur prone to to this, escaping through the Labyrinth at the end of Marginalia, The Face with a Thousand Heroes and When You're Good To Mama. Hex Kotlee and Anuã actually consider pursuing him in Face but are advised against it by Life.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: In Penny Primrose and the Grand Ball of Fairy-Town, a tearful Penny encounters a human hiker in the forest, the fist (and last- time that a modern-day, human character appears in the story. The hiker acts as a Good Samaritan to the crying girl — who promptly bites the woman repeatedly until she bleeds out, because she's an Empty Shell with no moral compass after trading her soul to Auteur.
• Wham Line: In the story House of Auteur, the Shadow's line " Because the real Gideon didn't want to live either", revealing himself as an impostor (or, to be precise, a different impostor than Auteur thought he was).
• Writing Around Trademarks: Whenever a Continuity Nod to Auteur's history with the titular organisation from Faction Paradox occurs, it is referred to as "the Fallen House" instead of its proper, copyrighted name.
• Your Soul Is Mine!: In Penny Primrose and the Grand Ball of Fairy-Town, Auteur buys the fairy Penny Primrose's soul from her. Once she's signed the contract, he literally takes it out of her and puts it in an empty bottle of ginger beer; it is suggested that he could use it to impersonate her at will. The soul remains connected to Penny, but she feels disconnected from her emotions without it, while the soul observably "weeps" within the bottle in her place.