Ghostroots
More powerful than gore, I find an eerie atmosphere is what really makes a collection like Ghostroots tick.
Antiquarian and Classic Book Reviews
Chilling stories for the spooky season.
More powerful than gore, I find an eerie atmosphere is what really makes a collection like Ghostroots tick.
Summer Cold It’s been one of those messy, chaotic weeks. Lots of phone calls, lots of errands shoved into not a lot of time. Reading has gotten shoved into the backburner, and we haven’t had a lot of time to spend just quietly on the sofa together. That lack of time and reading time leads […]
Enríquez loves a twist ending, and ghosts and horrors found in unlikely places.
I read it for the first time when I was far too young for it, all of the way back in 1994. I loved it then, but I didn’t appreciate the nuances of what Berendt was trying to say.
The volumes are compact and beautiful, and look great on the shelf — plus the collections are both thorough and accessible for someone who doesn’t read as much poetry as literature.
The Cipher is an interesting story that uses extreme violence to help the narrative. It doesn’t become the narrative.
The thing I love most about Jackson’s short stories is the way that she twists seemingly ordinary events into strange and unsettling directions. You won’t find ghouls and goblins here, but you will find human monsters and ominous atmospheres that leave the reader wondering how things went so wrong and why.
Though the subjects are varied, what remains is Akutagawa’s beautiful starkness and his precise use of prose. There is the feeling that cutting one word would be impossible, but adding one would be a shame.
Patrick Hamilton’s Rope is a subtle kind of spooky. It’s not a murder-mystery. The murder has happened and it is no mystery who did it.
Termush centres around a seaside resort that after an unnamed disaster (but all signs seem to point to a nuclear war followed by a plague or a plague followed by nuclear war), which now houses those individuals that could pay for shelter and medical care.