The Cipher
The Cipher is an interesting story that uses extreme violence to help the narrative. It doesn’t become the narrative.
Halloween
Chilling stories for the spooky season.
Dark Tales
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.
Murder in the Age of Enlightenment
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.
Rope
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
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.
Picnic at Hanging Rock
Dark academia has become a much-talked-about off-shoot of the spookier genres, and I would say that label fits Picnic at Hanging Rock.
Haunted Tales
What really shines about this collection is the informative introductions to each and every one of the stories.
Blood on Satan’s Claw
This book may have been published just last year, but the writer, Robert Wynne-Simmons, is actually the screenwriter for the 1971 British horror film of the same name. So this book is a novelization of a movie that is over fifty years old.
The Daylight Gate
This novel is really an intersection of two goliaths of classic film and classic literature, and therefore I decided to both read it and to review it, despite it being a bit more recent.
Ghosts
Wharton explores eerie presences and does so with a flare that lingers in the air over your shoulder as you read. Her prose is elegant and languid, drawing the reader in with lush descriptions and then twisting each tale to a disturbing and artful ending.