I love discovering new-to-me authors from centuries gone by, whose works could sit comfortably alongside those of Poe and Lovecraft but haven’t received quite the same attention. And no one provides better opportunities for such discoveries than Melissa Edmundson and the folks at Handheld Press. Over the last few years, this team brought us two volumes of Women’s Weird collections. Now, they are focusing in on one such weird fiction writer: Helen de Guerry Simpson. The Outcast and The Rite: Stories of Landscape and Fear, 1925-1938 contains thirteen tales of weird, supernatural horror published during the period between the two World Wars by this underappreciated Australian writer. The collection came out from Handheld Press earlier this month. Continue reading Review of The Outcast and The Rite—Interwar Supernatural Stories
Month: May 2022
Dracula Daily: An Internet-wide Book Club
You have no idea how warm and fuzzy it makes me feel to see vast swathes of the internet get passionate about Gothic literature! If you don’t know what I’m talking about, let me introduce you to the best thing that has happened online this year: Dracula Daily. Created by web designer Matt Kirkland, Dracula Daily is a brilliant new way to experience Bram Stoker’s vampire classic. The project takes advantage of Dracula’s epistolary format to turn the text of the novel into an email newsletter so that you can experience the story in real time. If you’re unfamiliar: Dracula is told entirely through a series of journal entries, letters, newspaper clippings, and ship’s logs dated from May 3 to November 7. Subscribers to Dracula Daily will get each entry delivered to their inboxes on the corresponding date. Though we’re already a few weeks into the story, it’s not too late to sign up! You can go back and read the entries you missed in the Dracula Daily archive. I started last week and just got caught up. Continue reading Dracula Daily: An Internet-wide Book Club
Review of Ring Shout—Making Monsters
White supremacy can make people into monsters. This is as true today as it was during the heyday of Jim Crow laws and burning crosses. P. Djèlí Clark literalizes this metaphor in his celebrated novella Ring Shout, which came out in 2020. Continue reading Review of Ring Shout—Making Monsters
Review of And Then I Woke Up—Existential Zombies
“…And then I woke up.” These are the words that nearly every reader dreads to hear at the end of a story, suggesting as they do that the characters and situations the reader has just gotten attached to have been nothing more than a dream. But how about at the start of the story? Malcolm Devlin’s latest horror novel, And Then I Woke Up, explores the struggles of characters who have just awakened from an imagined reality and must reckon with their new understanding of the world and the consequences of actions they committed while living under a lie. The book, which came out last month, is the most unique take on a zombie apocalypse I have ever read and has a particularly poignant message for our times. Continue reading Review of And Then I Woke Up—Existential Zombies
Review of Base Notes—An Immersive Thriller
Is your art worth killing for? Vic Fowler certainly thinks so in Lara Elena Donnelly’s decadent new thriller Base Notes. This tale of a murderous perfumer, which came out back in February, had me seeing New York City’s struggling artist scene in a whole new light—or rather, through a whole new sense. Continue reading Review of Base Notes—An Immersive Thriller