William Cook is a painter of impressions and moods, artfully rendering complex, authentic characters and weaving a twisted, darkly psychological narrative. In his exploration of the minds of a pair of prolific serial killers (those peculiar creatures of popular morbid interest), Cook introduces us to the Cunningham brothers – products of a long hereditary line… Continue reading Review: Blood Related by William Cook
In Snare – The Waiting Dark (Published 2015 by Permuted Press), author Carrie Nelkin delivers a truly unsettling tale of paranormal horror and intrigue that does not disappoint. Nelkin doesn’t cut any corners with cheap scares, building the terror slowly and subtly with a finely measured approach. Page by page, she gradually introduces us to… Continue reading Review: Snare by Carrie Nelkin
The introductory chapter to W.J. Renehan's The Art of Darkness: Meditations on the Effect of Horror Fiction - Why is it that we so often turn to works of horror fiction as a source of entertainment when they should, by all rights, turn us off completely? Why should we pay good money to be scared… Continue reading The Art of Darkness – Introduction
Edward M. Erdelac’s new novel Monstrumfuhrer is a tour de force, playing on the classic horror convention of science gone awry. The novel posits Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as truth, the main character (Jotham Podczaski) and his brother (Eli) discovering the correspondence of Captain Robert Walton in the attic of a Polish bookstore in which they are… Continue reading Review: Monstrumfuhrer by Edward Erdelac
The strength of H.P. Lovecraft’s masterpiece lies in its closing of aesthetic distance between the text and reader. Lovecraft achieves this effect by building the suspense/tension slowly and subtly, encouraging the reader to engage in/anticipate the progression of events, and in so doing drawing them to the edge of an actual psychological threat. Here we… Continue reading At the Mountains of Madness
I recently revisited an old favorite and thought I’d sit down and share some thoughts on it. One cannot meaningfully discuss the overall effect of Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot without considering the concept of horrific metonymy. The idea, as you may already know, is a simple one: that an antagonist can be rendered more frightening… Continue reading A Look at ‘Salem’s Lot
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