Ever since I was a little kid, I've loved scary stories. But more than the thrill of being afraid, I was drawn to the notion of befriending the ghosts, of making the frightening familiar, of finding meaning and comfort in the horrific. Maybe that's why I'm now a queer old goth, and maybe it's why my favourite themes to both read and write are those of identity, belonging as an outsider, and the 'monstrous' elevated to the beautiful.
How far would you go for your career? How far would you go for love? How far would you go for the truth? When Manda’s lab partner Daniel goes missing, presumed dead, it’s just another normal day at University Hospital. But the circumstances of his disappearance aren’t quite as straightforward as they seem and take Manda and her colleagues at the Department of Paranatural Medicine on a journey across planes and to the fringes of death to find the truth. Spirit Houses, a supernatural tale of action, adventure, and excellent Scotch, is Die Booth's first full-length novel.
This is one from my teenage years, and one of the first examples I read of 'monsters' having more humanity than a lot of humans.
On the surface, it's a good, pacey horror story about an institutionalised man who has been convinced that he's a murderer. But the themes of exclusion and belonging really speak to me, especially as a queer man who lives with anxiety and depression. The authority figures aren't to be trusted. The 'monstrous' is welcoming. The 'unnatural' is natural. Barker’s prose is flat-out gorgeous in places: "They were what the species he'd once belonged to could not bear to be. The un-people; the anti-tribe; humanity's sack unpicked and sewn together again with the moon inside." It still gives me shivers; oh, how I wanted to join them in Midian!
A fabulous journey through the mind of the master of dark imaginative fiction, Clive Barker.
The nightmare had begun....
Boone knew that there was no place on this earth for him now; no happiness here, not even with Lori. He would let Hell claim him, let Death take him there.
But Death itself seemed to shrink from Boone. No wonder, if he had indeed been the monster who had shattered, violated and shredded so many others' lives.
And Decker had shown him the proof - the hellish photographs where the last victims were forever stilled, splayed in the last obscene…
The first in a trilogy from vastly underrated author Susan Price. This is on the surface a charming kids’ book, but moved me more and has haunted me for longer than most 'adult' novels (and is also remarkably dark.) Set in a fairy-tale some-when, somewhere in a blizzard-scoured kingdom, the young witch Chingis seeks to rescue a czarevitchfrom the tower in which he's imprisoned. When I first read this book, I cried publicly on a train, it got to me so much. I'm envious of Price's skill at using simple language so exquisitely to conjure vivid, jewel-toned worlds and invoke both deep dread and soaring joy. It's a deceptively simple little tale of freedom, choice, destiny, privilege, responsibility, and love.
There's a reason that this is considered a classic.
My best friend sent me a copy of this many years ago and I was absolutely transported by the captivating, atmospheric prose and just how horribly relatable I found Eleanor to be. Nothing has skewered my heart quite as much as "Insist on your cup of stars; once they have trapped you into being like everyone else you will never see your cup of stars again." That really sums up the whole book for me: yes, it's a subtly done yet frankly terrifying plummet into the psychology of fear, but it's also very much about finding your own way and your own place in the world - no matter where that may be or what it might cost you.
Part of a new six-volume series of the best in classic horror, selected by Academy Award-winning director of The Shape of Water Guillermo del Toro
Filmmaker and longtime horror literature fan Guillermo del Toro serves as the curator for the Penguin Horror series, a new collection of classic tales and poems by masters of the genre. Included here are some of del Toro's favorites, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Ray Russell's short story "Sardonicus," considered by Stephen King to be "perhaps the finest example of the modern Gothic ever written," to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and stories…
"What you risk reveals what you value." This struck me so deeply when I first read it that I quote it to this day.
The Passion is a gorgeous, baroque, desperate symphony of a book. A love story spanning time and place, against the odds. The writing elevates the grotesque and disturbing to art. It leads you by the hand through the giddy, opulent confusion of Venice at Carnival and freezes you in the wintery depths of Napoleonic despair. It was one of the first books I read in my teens that was overtly queer and played with gender identity. It holds a very special place in my heart.
From the frozen Russia of Napoleon's campaign, to the canals of Venice, this novel journeys through curious waterways of war and chance, where destiny and the heart cannot be forgotten - nor passion which is to be found somewhere between fear and sex passion, somewhere between God and the Devil. Jeanette Winterson is author of "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit" which was winner of the 1985 Whitbread First Novel Award.
I read this tiny collection of stories after chatting to the author on social media, and it's what got me reading again after two years of barely reading a thing.
Nostalgic, atmospheric, and vivid, these stories are sometimes stomach-churningly brutal. Even though a lot of them deal with the supernatural, it's the most mundane of situations that are the most anxiety-inducing. They took me right back to my own Northern childhood, with all the mystery, boredom, wonder, and terror it entailed. A very emotional collection with as much heart as heartbreak, wrapped up in chiming prose.
Welcome to The Repository of Lost Souls. A place for tales – and the people who walk within them – to step inside and rest their weary heads. Meet the vengeful mermaid, the weary ghost. The sibling vampire and the curious child. The family damaged by war. Join the final journey of the Bone Queen.Follow the hare.The Repository of Lost Souls is the debut short story collection of Jane Roberts-Morpeth. Twelve short stories of birth, life, death and beyond, that draw on personal experience and the North East of England, where she lives. Some have a ghostly or paranormal element…
I am a fiction writer and currently live in Cairo, where I have lived for over twenty years. I noticed that the way I started telling stories was influenced by learning Arabic and by listening to the stories of the people in the city. My interest in Arabic also led me to read Arabic literature, like A Thousand and One Nights.
Shahrazad’s Gift is a collection of linked short stories set in contemporary Cairo — magical, absurd, and humorous.
The author focuses on the off-beat, little-known stories, far from CNN news: a Swedish belly dancer who taps into the Oriental fantasies of her clientele; a Japanese woman studying Arabic, driven mad by the noise and chaos of the city; a frustrated Egyptian housewife who becomes obsessed by the activities of her Western gay neighbor; an American journalist who covered the civil war in Beirut who finds friendship with her Egyptian dentist. We also meet the two protagonists of McCullough's Confessions of a Knight Errant, before their escapades in that story.
These stories are told in the tradition of A Thousand and One Nights.
Shahrazad's Gift is a collection of linked short stories set in contemporary Cairo-magical, absurd and humorous. The author focuses on the off-beat, little-known stories, far from CNN news: a Swedish belly dancer who taps into the Oriental fantasies of her clientele; a Japanese woman studying Arabic, driven mad by the noise and chaos of the city; a frustrated Egyptian housewife who becomes obsessed by the activities of her Western gay neighbor; an American journalist who covered the civil war in Beirut who finds friendship with her Egyptian dentist. We also meet the two protagonists of McCullough's Confessions of a Knight…
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