The Penguin Book of Exorcisms
Before reading this, I had the idea that most exorcisms across time were performed because of a lack of understanding concerning mental illness and — of course — rampant sexism, racism, and other prejudice.
Antiquarian and Classic Book Reviews
Horror novels.
Horror is a genre.
You can view all genres, or you can search by language/region, editor/translator, era/movement, book authors, or year of edition.
Before reading this, I had the idea that most exorcisms across time were performed because of a lack of understanding concerning mental illness and — of course — rampant sexism, racism, and other prejudice.
It’s surprising that her name seems mostly lost to time — like the grand majority female writers of the Victorian era. What makes it more of a tragedy in Oliphant’s case is that her work is quite good — even better than a lot of writers whose names I’ve seen on the more mainstream ghost story anthologies.
The Other is full of twists and turns and proceeds along at a fast pace — so fast that I could easily read it in the course of a long afternoon and evening.
To describe Abe’s The Face of Another as a horror novel would only be scratching the surface of what it truly delivers.
The amount of correspondence included here seems nearly silly when you think that this is before the age of internet and the two-line email and all of them — other than the telegrams and internal memos — required stationary, stamps, and envelopes.
I have a very old movie-tie in edition of The Amityville Horror and it was printed back when it was able to put the whole ‘based on a true story’ claim on the cover.
Bloch writes a twisting thriller that manages to surprise, even when you’ve watched the film first.
The real shining piece of this book is the ghost and the setting. The whole world of the opera house comes alive as the ghost wrecks havoc and extracts vengeance. This is a review of Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera (Le Fantôme de l’Opéra).
As much as I rarely buy newly published books, I make exceptions for curations of ghost stories and new printings of old, often forgotten work. This is a special Halloween review of Weird Women and Haunted Houses.
It might seem strange, and I’m sure it’s not a preference that many people share, but sometimes when I feel my worst — very anxious, very depressed, very not well — and can’t sleep, scary stories are what I turn to. There’s something about ghosts, goblins, vampires, and spooky houses in settings a hundred and fifty years old that draws me out of the racing thoughts my brain gets stuck in. This is a review of Horror Stories.