3,364 words
Just as the great pleasure of having a good bottle of wine is having another, so too one of the great pleasures of reading a book you enjoy is re-reading it. When you approach a book for a second time, you already know you like it, which takes the pressure off. If it’s Dostoevsky, for example, you don’t have to spend the first 20 pages memorizing 17 different characters who each have three different names. You already did all that. (more…)
1,441 words
C. P. Webster
The Horror Beneath
Independently published, 2023
“Whatever the history of the house, Wingood felt confident that von Hallerstein had not been carried off by vengeful spirits. No, von Hallerstein was too substantial a man for that.”
How this excellent novella reached my hands is a story that must be told! (more…)
2,752 words
I have been reading the work of H. P. Lovecraft, who passed away on March 15, 1937, longer than that of any other author. I still own my copy of a book which, appropriate to Lovecraft, is itself a mystery. My name is inscribed on the inside cover, and I would have been about 13 when I read this opening sentence: “North of Arkham the hills rise dark, wild, and wooded, and much overgrown, an area through which the Miskatonic flows seaward, almost at one boundary of the wooded tract.” (more…)
1,962 words
The New England schlockmeister Stephen King is a bad but interesting writer. Success is an interesting phenomenon, after all, and King is one of the most successful writers who have ever lived. Born in 1947 in Portland, Maine, he has sold millions of books in dozens of languages and won even wider exposure through film adaptations of novels like Carrie (1974) and The Shining (1977). (more…)
6,669 words
6,669 words
Edgar Mittelholzer
Eltonsbrody
London: Secker & Warburg, 1960;
Richmond: Valancourt, 2017 (First reprint, with an introduction by John Thieme)
Lecktor: “The reason you caught me, Will, is: We’re just alike. You want the scent? Smell yourself.”
— Manhunter (Michael Mann, 1986) (more…)
4,119 words
The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft: Beyond Arkham
Foreword and notes by Leslie S. Klinger
Introduction by Victor LaValle
New York: Liveright, 2019
It doesn’t take much to confuse me, I guess. Having enthusiastically reviewed Leslie Klinger’s previous The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft,[1] I now find he has put out another New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, distinguished only by the subtitle, Beyond Arkham (which sounds like a graphic novel). (more…)
2,010 words
And thus, as a closer and still closer intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasing radiation of gloom. — E. A. Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”