In this place marking our eternal return, we take respite to examine across various media the supernatural, myth, folklore, science-fiction, science-fantasy, dark fantasy, the weird tale, and much more.
I was working as a reporter for a small newspaper in the New England area—the Arkham Press it was called— when word came of the strange visitors. They were said to have walked right out of the water as if they had dwelled there and suddenly decided to go for a stroll. The island was… Continue reading The Visitors from Above
Chapter 1 A Quasquicentennial Celebration and a Promise of Adventure 1. I had been a fan of the writings of Victor Peter Hobbs from the first moment I had seen one of the author’s pocket paperback books unceremoniously displayed on a nickel rack down at Darlene’s Used Books in the Village square. The lurid cover… Continue reading The Ghost Writers (excerpt)
Darcy Coates was an author with whom I was not familiar, but she seemed to have quite the fan base on Amazon. Her bibliography (and biography) indicates that her passion is haunted house stories. Many of her novels have titles in variants of “The Haunting of (fill-in-the blank),” which might seem discouragingly generic or derivative,… Continue reading The House Next Door
I have been toying recently with a story idea told in the epistolary style—that is, told through correspondence between characters, as well as through a variety of news articles and journal entries. This genre of storytelling traces back as far as the 15th century. However, it is likely most familiar to contemporary readers by way… Continue reading Correspondence as a Method of Storytelling
Though I do have to admit that, in the past, I was entirely guilty of falling back on the very devices I now wish to denounce, it is only in the present that I have come to realize how tired a cliché and a blatant display of lazy storytelling the use of dream sequences within… Continue reading Notes on Dream Use in Storytelling
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