Mar
20
A Brief History of Monsters
Weird Fiction Review has posted a short essay by Theodora Goss that provides an excellent overview of our changing understanding of and reaction to monsters.… [Read More]
Mar
16
Show me something I won’t see walking down the street, or through a forest, or swimming in the sea, but…leave me with the suspicion I could be very mistaken about what I might encounter. Instill in me that sense of a cosmos hopelessly beyond my ability to comprehend.~ Caitlín R. Kiernan
From a brief but interesting interview on Weird Fiction Review with author Caitlín R. Kiernan. She has other interesting things to say about the importance of mystery in weird fiction, about the real significance of Lovecraft, about the evolution of her own work, and about the works of others she … [Read More]
Mar
04
Lovecraft Relief
Sculptor Allan Harwood has created this H. P. Lovecraft relief, available to buy on Etsy.… [Read More]
Feb
08
Teaser Trailer for The Halloween Kid
“The Halloween Kid” is described as a “short, spooky Halloween fairy tale.” It premieres at the International Children and Young People’s Film Festival in Malmo, Sweden, in March. From what I’ve seen of the promotional shots, and now the teaser trailer, I love the look of this project … [Read More]
Feb
02
Scary Stories with Less Scary Art
I just found out that the 30th anniversary edition of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark will replace Stephen Gammell’s iconic and nightmare-inducing artwork. There’s a good write-up about this, along with some comparison images, at Adventures in Poor Taste.… [Read More]
Jan
24
There can be books where the zombies are zombies, and books where the zombies are metaphors, and books where the zombies are both, and that we as readers, and writers, and critics, ought to trust those books – rather than any of the labels that get put on them – to tell us how they ought to be read.~ Fantasy Matters
Every new book has an obligation to teach us how to read it, and a good book does that without making us realize it.
Genre can be a helpful shortcut as a tool to help publishers and bookseller market a work, to guide readers toward a general set of characteristics … [Read More]
Jan
23
The essential ingredient for success seems to be to give the imagination something to feed on beyond the story ... the sense of a wider world, of which the author was giving you only glimpses ... room for you to wonder.~ Tom Shippey
From a review in the Wall Street Journal of the book As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality by Michael Saler.
Saler identifies three major strains of popular imaginative fiction and cites the founders of each: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective, Sherlock Holmes; H. P. Lovecraft’s … [Read More]
Jan
20
A Horror Movie Montage
“The Horror Portfolio” is a well-made montage of sixty-four films in a five-minute video, arranged into three broad categories: haunted houses and ghost stories, angels and demons, killers and slashers.
Lots of other films could have been included, of course, but I was glad to see The Orphanage… [Read More]
Jan
20
Lovecraft is Missing
If you like comics and H. P. Lovecraft, then you should know about Lovecraft is Missing, a webcomic that creator Larry Latham has been publishing since 2008. It’s a mystery webcomic that asks: what if Lovecraft’s stories were real?
Besides regular updates to the comic, he also posts about weird-fiction … [Read More]
Jan
19
Noël Carroll and the Definition of Horror
In Noël Carroll’s work, The Philosophy of Horror, he defines horror as an emotion that is elicited by beings not acknowledged to exist by science that are both harmful and impure. I wonder if recent works offer a challenge to this definition.
I'm a writer interested in the genres of horror and dark fantasy, their ties to folklore, and their expression in various media. I like asking questions.
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