“The Beautiful Feast of the Valley” by Stephen Gallagher
The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories (2018) edited by Stephen Jones
Readers unfamiliar with The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories may prefer to read these notes only after reading the anthology.
A professor working on an AI project to recreate the personality of Plutarch encounters strange anomalies.
Setting: A modern university library and the ancient world of Egypt, blending the contemporary with the historical.
Characters: The narrator, a classicist working on an AI project; Henrik, a computer scientist; Magdalena, the deceased Plutarch specialist; Fahim, an Egyptian slave.
Halloween seen as: The dead walk among us, exploring themes of mortality, memory, and the potential consequences of resurrecting the past through technology.
Style: Literary horror, blending historical fiction with elements of the uncanny and philosophical exploration.
Point of view: First person, from the narrator's perspective.
Jay
