by leerozelle | Apr 21, 2024 | horror short stories, vampire stories, weird fiction
E.F. Benson’s “Mrs. Amworth” is cozy horror at its finest. Set in a charming English village, this cheeky domestic vampire tale plots a pair of stuffy retirees against an undead widow. Interesting astral body bloodsucker concept, and the ending is bloody...
by leerozelle | Mar 17, 2024 | cosmic horror, the gothic, the weird, weird fiction
H.P. Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model” turns dark arts into shock art in this story that inverts ideas found in Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” and Wilde’s DORIAN GRAY. An outcast painter creates monsters in his gallery that are...
by leerozelle | Mar 3, 2024 | horror short stories, the gothic, weird fiction, werewolves
In Hugh Walpole’s queer chimera tale “Tarnhelm,” a young nerd visits his uncles in Faildyke Hall where a malicious monster dog creeps. With his boy-crush, the narrator must bear witness to a yellow-fanged caraway-scented beast. Charmed storytelling from...
by leerozelle | Feb 25, 2024 | horror short stories, weird fiction
Tamika Thompson’s “She By the Sea” magnificently blends nightmarish images of the Black Lagoon’s Gill-Man, a dead basketball star, and an unhinged, unhoused woman in a stabbing on the Pacific Coast Highway. As the police make a dragnet for Colleen, the ocean and...
by leerozelle | Feb 18, 2024 | horror short stories, the weird, weird fiction
In Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s “Hell Screen,” a sociopathic painter creates an all-too-real artwork for his psychopathic Lord. Takes Poe’s “The Oval Portrait,” Wilde’s DORIAN GRAY, and Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model” in diabolical new...
by leerozelle | Feb 11, 2024 | horror short stories, the weird, weird fiction
With deft and bitter genius, Shirley Jackson’s “The Summer People” teases layers of privilege from an unwitting wealthy couple. When the snobby Allisons stay at the lake house longer than expected, relations with the rural folk get...
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