Sitemap - 2023 - Reading After Dusk

Haunters at the Hearth: Eerie Tales for Christmas Nights (2022) edited by by Tanya Kirk

A History of the Modern British Ghost Story (2011) by Simon Hay

Sunless Solstice: Strange Christmas Tales for the Longest Night (2021) edited by Lucy Evans and Tanya Kirk

Chill Tidings: Dark Tales of the Christmas Season (2020) edited by Tanya Kirk

Tales from the Dead of Night: Twelve Classic Ghost Stories (2013) edited by Cecily Gayford

The Dead of Winter (2023) edited by Cecily Gayford

The Heart of a Mystery (1900) by L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace

The Shrieking Skull & Other Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories (2022) by James Skipp Borlase (1839–1909)

How to Read Texts_ A Student Guide to Critical Approaches and Skills-[Bloomsbury Academic (2013)] by Neil McCaw

"The Crevasse" (2009) by Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud

“The Brute: An Indignant Tale” (1907) from A Set of Six

Omens and portents

November Night Tales (1928) by Henry Chapman Mercer

Captive Narratives and Puritan Beginnings of U. S. Horror

Christmas and Other Horrors: An Anthology of Solstice Horror (2023) edited by Ellen Datlow

#HBD Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863-1944) 🎂

"Absolute Evil" (1918) by Julian Hawthorne

My review available November 23rd

"Incident at Bear Creek Lodge" (2022) by Tananarive Due

A scared, lonely voice: An uncanny interlude in Max Brooks' World War Z (2006)

November Update

"The Bullet That Grows in the Gun" (1985) by Terry Dowling

"What?" And "How?" In E. A. Poe

Halloween (1979) by Curtis Richards. Based on the screenplay by John Carpenter and Debra Hill.

"He'll Come Knocking at Your Door" by Robert R. McCammon

"Halloween for Mr. Faulkner" (1959) by August Derleth

"Hallowe'en" by Conrad Aiken

"Halloween Hunt" (1987) by Richard Laymon

The Manse (1987) by Lisa W. Cantrell

"Halloween Girl" (1982) by Robert Grant

Halloween with Gore Vidal

"Old Halloweens on the Guna Slopes" (1975) by R. A. Lafferty

"The Black Pumpkin" (1986) by Dean R. Koontz

"Tricks & Treats: One Night on Halloween Street" (1999) by Steve Rasnic Tem

"Halloween" (1975) by Isaac Asimov

Six Stories from Halloween (2011) edited by Paula Guran

"Halloween Street" (1999) Steve Rasnic Tem

Eleven Stories from The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories (2018) edited by Stephen Jones

"Halloween Story" (1972) Gregory Fitz Gerald

"A Perfect Halloween Night" (1986) by Rose Rinaldi

"The Halloween Man" (1986) William F. Nolan

"Struwwelpeter" by Glen Hirshberg

"The Vow on Halloween" (1924) by Lyllian Huntley

"The Spirit of Things" by John Skipp

"Pumpkin" by Bill Pronzini

“Another Halloween” (1994) by Alison Lurie

"Trick" by Gerard Houarner

"The House on Cottage Lane" by Ronald Malfi

"Bad Things Happen on Halloween" (1995) Lucy Taylor

"Monster Night" by Brian James Freeman

"Spells for Halloween: An Acrostic" (2004) Dale Bailey

"The Toll" by Kealan Patrick Burke

"Eyes" (1986) by Charles L. Grant

"The Press" by Graham Masterton

"Trickster" by Steve Rasnic Tem

"A Little Halloween Talk" by Joe R. Lansdale

"Yesterday and the Day Before" by Ed Gorman

"Devil’s Night" by Richard Chizmar

"Quiet House" by Norman Prentiss

"The Man Who Killed Halloween" by Ray Garton

"The Ghosts of Pontefract Castle" by Simon Clark

"The Legend of Halloween Jack" by Lisa Morton

"Short of Breath" by Trent Zelazny

"The Banshee's Halloween" (1903) by Herminie Templeton Kavanagh

"Treats for Adeline" by Elizabeth Voss & Peter Tackaberry

"Invitation Only" by Ray Garton

"Devoured" by Paul Melniczek

October reading

"The Halloween Phantoms" by John R. Little

"Incredibly creative and perhaps surprisingly socially conscious horror"

"Monsters" by Stewart O’Nan

Body Horror

On Horripilation

Under Allt y Cnicht

Vampires from folklore to the cash nexus

Lycanthropy: a psychological as well as a moral and geopolitical category

“Are you familiar with the concept of a techno-myth?

"They tried to adapt their environment instead of adapting to it."

"The Acid Test" (2017) by Livia Llewellyn

"How to Talk to Girls at Parties" (2006) by Neil Gaiman

Gould and Bach

"The Room Where Love Lives" (1993) by Grant Morrison

"The life of mere sensation is uncovered as anarchic and self-destructive"

Glenn Gould’s distinction as a late-twentieth-century phenomenon

Valences of cosmic fear: "Hinterlands" (1980) by William Gibson

Unnerving edgelands

Weirding a green, pleasant nation-state

“But that looks like a dinosaur to me.”

"Gh-gh-gh-gh-gh-ghosts": naming the experience they can barely articulate

The more Henry S. Whitehead I read, the more Henry S. Whitehead I read

Glenn Gould's eminence

"Dinner at Countess Kotłubay's" by Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969)

Publishing schedule

"The Ghoul and the Corpse" (1923) by G. A. Wells

"The Painter’s Bargain" (1834) By William Makepeace Thackeray

“The right of a prior claim”

Frankenstein's Frankenstein

"Mid-August was a dull time in my garden."

"Ghost Stories" of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

"Deborah" (1929) by Josephine Tey (1896-1952)

“He is asleep now,” Piers said, “and the taint sleeps with him.”

"The Portable Phonograph" (1941) by Walter Van Tilburg Clark (1909-1971)

"The New Mother" (1882) by Lucy Clifford (1846-1929)

Two stories by Rose Macaulay (1881-1958)

Subversive graces

"The myth of the vindictive image"

"Gerassimos Flamotas: A Day in the Life" by Simon Clark

"Quo quisque stultior, eo magis insolescit."

"Stirred, and fed, and mocked the light..."

Recommended Reading: Short Horror stories

"The artist moves the world towards self-recognition, with at least a tinge of self-redemption"

The old Gods were dying, but not fast enough

Mercury and "Tiberian excess"

"Then, suddenly, without the faintest shadow of warning, from the centre of the lake...."

"I’ve seen him three times these last few nights, and each time he was dead.”

Ramsey Campbell's 1987 Top Ten Lists

"The aromatic manner of his expression"

Dependable patter, new imagination and new beauty

"Thus we had released Barabbas and crucified an innocent man"

Newsletter 1: Reading After Dark

"My thoughts were beginning to run away with me"

"Snow descending on fire"

"Are the waters of the lakes in that locality sufficiently clear for a lady to do her hair by?"

"There was sun outside, the kind sun of mid-September"

The context of horror fiction in the fin-de-siècle

Connoisseurship and a tendency towards the short form

Views From A Hill of Dreams

"After her own way she loves him"

"Events come to people—not people to events."

Uncanny John Dickson Carr

A face at the window

Historic Vermont Floods & cosmic horror

Too shallow to be damned?

"Still, you asked for it."

#unnameable

July 4, 1863

"I would not make my destination before darkness unless I could find a short cut across the fields."

Doctors Wear Scarlet (1960) by Simon Raven

A surfeit of just desserts

John Blackburn (1923-1993)

"What is known versus what is hidden"

Peak Shea

Decadence, Environmentalism and sex

"Twice my lamp flickered and went out"

"Let’s end it all in the river!"

Alternative hypothesis: Joyce Carol Oates

"If spoon you must"

"Clickety-Clickety-Click"

""I want to ask you if you ever saw a man with gills like a fish?"

"Satan was not idle"

"A simple cult of the devil"

A Fido in the Family?

"It was awful to hear the noises in that wood"

Favorite reading experience?

Credo of the Continental Op

The whole pattern of chance

Murder for revenge: The Uttermost Farthing (1914) by R. Austin Freeman

When will there be an east wind?

Robert W. Chambers: 90 Years since his death

Imagine a Man in a Box (1931) by H. Russell Wakefield

Gothic Chthonicism in John Blackburn's novel Children of the Night (1966)

Earthly Powers (1980) by Anthony Burgess

Edward Lucas White & "Alfândega 49A" (1927)

Michael Shea (1938-2009)

Personifications of malevolence: Seven stories from The Clock Strikes Twelve and Other Stories by H. R. Wakefield. (Ash-Tree Press, 1998)

"Mr. Oliver Carmichael" (1921) by Amyas Northcote

“This sure isn’t Jersey” – Wrong turns and Machenian perichoresis in Breakthrough: The Next Step (1995) by Whitley Strieber

Robert Aickman's Introduction to The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1964) [Reading notes]

Join me on Notes

By way of introduction: Reading after dusk

A midcentury modern style in U.S. horror fiction? Five stories from The Century's Best Horror Fiction 1951-2000 (2012) edited by John Pelan

"To See the Sun" (1980) by Kingsley Amis

Celebrating Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) on his birthday

Like the tremor of an impalpable bell: The Lycurgus Cup and Other Stories by Ron Weighell

"It’s a treat to be able to put one over on the police…."

"Like one that on a lonesome road doth walk in fear and dread...."

Gomorrah as Poe's "City in the Sea" per T. O. Mabbott [1945]

Three stories by Mary Webb (1881-1927)

Celebrating Dennis Etchison (1943-2019) on his birthday

The Year's Best Horror Stories XX (1992) Edited by Karl Edward Wagner

Gene Wolfe's horror stories

Short horror fiction: An initial personal list

Whistling past the graveyard: On the Beach (1957) by Nevil Shute

Jack Sullivan on Charles Ives

Jacques Barzun's introduction to The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural (1986), edited by Jack Sullivan

Don't part that veil

The Modern Library Writer's Workshop: A Guide to the Craft of Fiction by Stephen Koch (2003): Reading notes

A vampire novel canon from 1989