Hell Yeah, Horror Lit.

devoted to fulfilling your horror literature needs

[writingcareer]

Horror Writers Association is Seeking Halloween Stories for Hallows' Eve Anthology - Pays 7 cents/word

Horror Writers Association is seeking submissions for Hallows’ Eve, a forthcoming anthology of stories devoted to the horror genre’s most treasured holiday–Halloween.

The editors of the anthology are requesting stories that explore Halloween from a wide range of perspectives. Share a story about a contemporary or an historical aspect of the holiday–haunted destinations, large-scale monster festivals, retailing. etc. The editors will also look at stories that address derivatives of Halloween: All Saints’ Day; All Souls’ Day; Devil’s Night; etc.

Keep reading

[sandovers]

MIDNIGHT STAYS: A SPOOKY SHORT STORY REC LIST

‘tis the season!  october’s almost halfway through, the evenings are stretching out across the days, the leaves are falling, and it’s cold enough to warrant whole days curled up inside with a book.  here are some of my favourite scary stories for that extra chill:

each thing i show you is a piece of my death, by Stephen J. Barringer and Gemma Files - originally published in the 2nd of the excellent Clockwork Phoenix anthologies; this is one of my favourite short stories, period.  It’s also one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever read.  Even Cat Valente, who was also included in that anthology, recommends it wholeheartedly.  The premise is very simple - what if spirits could haunt film? - but done originally and very, very well.

Shirley Jackson, the queen of American Gothic - I’ve expanded on my love for Jackson on countless occasions.  Her most famous story is likely The Lottery, but The Bus, The Possibility of Evil, and, unfortunately not available online but widely anthologized, The Lovely House, are all also excellent and creepy, as is her longer fiction.

A Rose For Emily, by William Faulkner - to stick with American Gothic for a moment; I first read this in English 12 and it haunted me for weeks afterwards.

The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman - in some ways one of the most terrifying short stories ever written, particularly the more one reads into it, this Lit class classic about a woman with postpartum depression and the woman she sees in the wallpaper grows and refracts upon itself with each new reading, making it endlessly creepy and rewarding both.

and, of course, the king and founder of American Gothic, Mr. Edgar Allen Poe - most or all of his known works are available on Project Gutenberg, but some of my favourites include The Masque of the Red Death, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Cask Of Amontillado, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, Morella, and, of course, The Tell-Tale Heart.

The Sandman by E.T.A. Hoffmann - the author of the story that would become the beloved Tchaikovsky ballet The Nutcracker also wrote a story so alarming that Freud wrote an entire theory on it.  In fact, The Sandman is probably just the most quintessential Hoffmann tale as, long before Freud ever wrote about him, he produced a great deal of tales focussed on the uncanny and an undermining of perception and the security of the self (which is all a highfalutin way of saying that Hoffmann anticipated the anxieties of his readers to come in fascinating and unsettling ways.) 

Don’t Look Now, by Daphne Du Maurier - unfortunately not online so far as I can tell, this is one of my favourite stories ever by one of my favourite authors, the masterful creator of Rebecca and Jamaica Inn, who also wrote the short story upon which Alfred Hitchcock based The Birds.  This story was also adapted into a film in the early seventies, starring Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, also a favourite of mine.

The Landlady, by Roald Dahl - another story dramatized by Alfred Hitchcock, about the horrors of taxidermy.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving - thanks to the Tim Burton film and the currently-running tv show, we all know this story.  Or at least, we think we do.  Irving wrote something a bit different than either of those adaptations lead us to believe of the story.

The Monkey’s Paw, by WW Jacobs - an exemplar of the “be careful what you wish for” genre.

the works of Algernon Blackwood - personal favourites include The Willows, The Kit-Bag, and The Strange Adventures of a Private Secretary in New York.  Blackwood is one of the originators of what would become the Weird tradition within horror writing, although he had much more of a sense of humour (and was much less racist than HP Lovecraft)

HP Lovecraft - speaking of, if you must read him (and he does loom large over almost all horror written after him), I suggest doing so critically, without ever trusting him, and with an eye towards doing better.  I also suggest the stories Cool Air, The Thing on the Doorstep, and The Whisperer In Darkness

William Hope Hodgson - creator of one of my favourite literary figures, not least for the possibilities he opens up, Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, who is essentially a supernatural Sherlock Holmes.  Hodgson also wrote one of the forerunners of cosmic horror, a novel called The House on the Borderland.

I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, by Harlan Ellison - a postapocalyptic sci-fi story featuring a vengeful computer that was groundbreaking at its time of publication and remains quite scary.

the late, great Ray Bradbury - one of the most formative influences on my own imagination, and one of the most important writers of the last century.  A lot of his work isn’t available online (although he’s beloved of almost every librarian I’ve ever met so finding his work shouldn’t be a problem), but here are a few: The Veldt, The Pedestrian, and The Pendulum

The Entrance, by Gerald Durrell - when I mentioned to a friend and prof that I was fascinated by mirrors in literature, she recommended this story by Durrell, who is better known for being a naturalist, an author of charming memoirs, and brother to Lawrence Durrell, but she failed to mention how terrifying it is.

Faces in Revolving Souls and Houses Under the Sea by Caitlin R Kiernan - two particularly disturbing stories by a writer who is perhaps less famous than she should be.

The Krakatoan, Who Is Your Executioner?, and The Cellar Dwellar, by Maria Dahvana Headley - three short stories by one of my favourite writers, author of Queen of Kings and Magonia, and keeper of a truly excellent tumblr

The Bone Key and other stories by Sarah Monette - The Bone Key: The Necromatic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth tells the story of Booth, an awkward and introverted archivist who finds himself in the midst of a host of supernatural mysteries, sometimes to do with his own shrouded family history.  They are easily some of the most engrossing and enjoyable short stories I’ve ever read.  Wait For Me, The Replacement, and White Charles are all available online, as is the newer story To Die For Moonlight.  Two other Monette stories, unrelated to Booth, that I recommend highly are Queen of Swords and Under the Beansidhe’s Pillow.

A Kiss With Teeth, by Max Gladstone - vampires and parent-teacher meetings, enough said.  My favourite story I’ve read recently.

Madeleine, by Amal El-Mohtar - my favourite story I’ve read all year, which is perhaps unsurprising as I adore El-Mohtar’s writing (not to mention her passion for speculative fiction and poetry and raising its visibility), about memories, and loss, and struggling with your own mind.

What is Midnight Stays? Tip me here.

[miskatonicaquarium]

H.P Lovecraft book covers by PixelatedSailor

[thelonelyscarecrow-deactivated2]

Oh shit look at that! Wow!

[vintageanchorbooks]

Great Moments in Gothic Fiction: A History in 13 Books

Last week we looked at our favorite scary Gothic houses from literature; there are so many, and they are all so interrelated, that it seemed like a good idea to go deeper and offer a timeline of gr...

[wilburwhateley]

An Episode in a Lodging House by mgkellermeyer (M. Grant Kellermeyer) You can read the story by Algernon Blackwood here; it was the focus of this week’s episode of the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast. 

[ophelions]

some highlights from the library while i was doing poe research

[theoreocat]

Happy Halloween! 😸🎃

[theperksofbeingaperk]

His name is Zouheir. He is a Muslim.

[badluckbadger]

Not that I disagree with the overall message y'all are trying to convey but this is reaching hard. Zouheir never stopped the bomber. He was briefed on what happened and gave his account. He’s not the reason that the bomber detonated outside instead. Also, how do you know that he’s Muslim? Where is this information coming from when all he wanted to be identified by was his first name? He deliberately asked to only be identified by his first name. Why do we have to lie about good people? Is it not possible to post the truth about good people?

[benepla-deactivated20180521]

[vvhack]

[lovingechoes]

Gotta do it

[nyu-tah]

You gotta do it

[sansasnark]

Her tarot readings were reputed to be so accurate that several of her friends nervously refused to let her tell them their fortunes. After the family moved to Vermont in 1945, she never had fewer than six cats at a time. A friend of her elder daughter recalled a dinner when a grey cat jumped on Shirley’s shoulder and seemed to whisper in her ear, at which point she announced that the cat had told her a poem - which she then repeated. Joanne reported another light side to her witchcraft. She kept all the small kitchen tools crammed in one drawer. When she wanted one, she would slam the drawer shut, call out the desired utensil’s name, and open the drawer. According to Joanne, it would always be on top.

aka I kind of want to be Shirley Jackson when I grow up (via sansasnark)

on Shirley Jackson, from Ladies Laughing: Wit as Control in Contemporary American Women Writers by Barbara Levy

(via laurenlizperez)

[unfollow-this-blog-already]

The linguistics of horror

There’s a very distinct pattern in what one might, if one were being… incautious, name “Internet horror-speak,” a particular patois that’s arisen in the latest years of this very era, a peculiar dialect lashed together from the flesh of Lovecraft and the sinew of internet culture and the bones of… something bony. Okay so I’m probably not going to be able to keep that gag up. It’s the language of Dread Singles

HOT SINGLES IN YOUR AREA, TRAVELING THE SUNKEN WAYS, DRINKING FROM THE LIPS OF THE LOW ONES, WISHING THEY’D WORN MORE SENSIBLE SHOES

and Welcome to Night Vale

Mayor Pamela Winchell The fences in the caves. A heart throbbing for what it cannot have. A heart not having what it needs to throb. The fences in the caves. Heat from below and above, but all is cold betwixt. The fences in the caves. The fences in the caves.

to which I refer.

What interests me though is that’s there’s a very distinct pattern and sort of grammar to how this Internet Horror-Speak (hereafter IHS) works, one I’ve been trying to work out for a while now. There are some very obvious patterns, as well as some subtle ones I’m not sure how to put into words. These are the rules I’ve sussed out, though:

One of the most important rules, and I think the one that might be the most surprising to a lot of people, is to use simple, mundane language. Empurpling the narrative with gratuitous polysyllabisms and grandiose prose is actually wholly deleterious to the desired effect. This actually makes a lot of sense. Purple prose has a serious abstracting effect, in that it draws the audience away from the action and makes it sound more like they’re listening to a story. So using purple prose to describe your indescribable horrors can make them feel less real, where using everyday language helps connect the audience and make them feel more like there’s some grotesque violation of normalcy going on

Use fewer ‘s-constructions. Say “the blood of the fallen,” not “the fallen’s blood;” “the intestines of dawn” not “dawn’s intestines.” This is a less solid rule, and it’s still possible to have a powerfully creepy effect with the ‘s-construction, particularly if the construction comes sentence-finally: “They beat them with sticks around which were wrapped dawn’s intestines,” but “They wrapped the intestines of dawn around thick oaken sticks.”

Use older words. “For” instead of “because,” “kin” for “family,” etc. If this makes them shorter than their modern counterparts, all the more effective.

Don’t use commas with conjunctions, just string conjunctions together. So “They laughed and writhed and screamed and died in the gaze of a smiling god,” but not *”They laughed, writhed, screamed, and died in the gaze of a smiling god.” This one’s variable, but I see the former more than the latter and to me it feels like it has more impact and is more visceral. The latter sounds more planned out, more official, more normal.

Use old-fashioned constructions. “The”+[adjective] constructions are a favorite, as are “the [adjective] one(s).” “The laughing ones steal away the dreams of the hopeful and feast on the teeth of the indolent,” “There are no innocent in this place, for to gaze on the Ancient Ones is to know that innocence is a lie, that blood and fear and corruption are the engines of all that breathes.”

Break word associations. If I start a sentence with “The toaster,” you’re probably going to expect something like, “the toasted fell off the counter,” or “the toasted exploded,” not “the toasted laughed” or “the toaster bled.” There are words we associate with animate things and words we associate with inanimate things, and mixing them up can lead to weird mental reactions. It’s why things like “SPANK HAIR — LICK EYES — WHISPER INTO ASS” are so funny. They make us build associations that we didn’t have previously. A toaster isn’t a thing that bleeds, and hair isn’t something you spank, so putting those words together tends to slightly mess with people and throw off our reading. Welcome to Night Vale does this SO MUCH.

Cecil Wednesday has been canceled due to a scheduling error

Cecil Here’s something odd: there is a cat hovering in the men’s bathroom at the radio station here

Cecil Alert! The sheriff’s secret police are searching for a fugitive named Hiram McDaniels, who escaped custody last night following a 9 PM arrest. McDaniels is described as a five-headed dragon

Last but not least, be vague. Let your words imply terrible and alien machinations at play, let them hint at vast supernatural tableaux of incomprehensible splendor and horror hanging just out of sight waiting to be glimpsed, but don’t ever explicitly tell anybody what’s going on. I put this one last because even though it’s the most important, it’s the most obvious, and I think everybody already knows this about horror. But it’s worth noting that IHS generally dials this up way higher, to the point where it’s hard or impossible to tell what parts are literal or metaphorical. Take this sub-par example:

Moving through the ashen ways of eons past, realms of fire and smoke and emptiness rising up and twisting around its path the beast walked on, burning all it perceived.

One on level, it’s possible that we’re talking about a minotaur arsonist who’s taking to the backroads during a forest fire to avoid the cops. On the other, we could be talking about some incomprehensible eldritch abomination warping its way through infernal dimensions outside space and time, ravaging worlds at its passing. Or anything between. I think this is probably the single most salient feature of IHS: its utter vagueness, and lack of proper context to distinguish the metaphorical from the literal.

But anyway. This is a fascinating memetic phenomenon and one I’d love to see some proper research done on this, beyond the idle musings of a lazy linguist with too much on her hands to spend time analyzing hard data.

[girl-like-substance]

Rhythm! The subtle things and the things that you ‘feel’ that you’re having trouble articulating? It’s rhythm. Rhythm is one reason why the last example is ‘sub-par’, and it’s absolutely key to (for instance) Welcome to Night Vale. There’s a pulse going through the prose that organises and structures how it’s read. English tends towards an alternation of strong and weak stresses; if you organise your words so that they start to reinforce that stress pattern, then congratulations, you’ve just invented the basics of English poetry. Part of what makes this particular brand of horror-speak so effective is a heightened control over the stress patterns of the language–not as much as in metrical verse, but still more than is usual for prose. Here’s the Mayor Winchell example from above, but with the stresses marked:

Mayor Pamela Winchell The fences in the caves. A heart throbbing for what it cannot have. A heart not having what it needs to throb. The fences in the caves. Heat from below and above, but all is cold betwixt. The fences in the caves. The fences in the caves.

It’s not perfect. Sometimes there are two or three syllables between stresses, sometimes only one–that’s normal, for English, because we speed up or slow down our reading depending on the rhythm we are unconsciously picking up from the words. Sometimes the stresses are unvoiced, in the form of pauses like rests in music. But you can see how underlying a lot of what Winchell is saying is a rhythmic pulsing that when read gives the effect of a kind of gnomic chanting that alters the atmosphere of the statement considerably. When you pronounce this aloud, it gives that characteristic Welcome to Night Vale effect; on the page, its power is lessened, but the rhythm is still strong enough that you can detect it, even if you don’t know that you’re doing so.

Most importantly, the presence of exaggerated rhythm is a conventional signal to your brain that it’s now reading poetry, and that puts you into a different mindset–a mindset where you are expecting the ambiguous, the non-literal and the metaphorical. It’s the mindset you get into when reading poetry, where your interpretative mind engages with a text that works on both a metaphorical and a literal level at the same time–exactly the ‘vagueness’ described by velartrill above.

What I’m saying, in essence, is that a (conscious or not) awareness of rhythm is key to being able to write sentences in this style. The choice between ’s constructions (“dawn’s intestines”) and old-fashioned x of y constructions (“intestines of dawn”) is down to which will best work with the rhythm of your sentence; the effect of the [adjective] ones construction can also be judged based on its rhythmic potential. Almost every effect of IHS, apart from its predisposition towards short, familiar words (which I think is more of a general horror thing; effective horror writers tend to use the vocabulary of their audience), has its roots in its essentially rhythmic nature: its constructions, its rhetorical figures, its ability to waver between metaphorical and literal without committing itself to either.

Tl;dr, IHS is basically prose poetry with a horror angle and a deliberately Anglo-Saxon focus to its words. More of an English literature approach than a purely linguistic one, I suppose, but that is my field, after all.

[allthingslinguistic]

Another great example of Internet Horror Speak is in the gothic meme, such as Linguistics Gothic and Language Gothic. 

I’ve also noticed that this style tends to over-use negation to convey a non-literal effect, which I’ve described here. 

[beatonna]

While on book tour, I visited Salem and got to see the House of Seven Gables! So I am pumped on Hawthorne. How many people have had to read this and suffer essays over the pink ribbons and etc? I used to think that for literature to be REAL it pretty well had to be chock-full of allegory and symbols. But for real, I do love it when my comics get used in a classroom setting, and I often hear from teachers who do that to warm the class up to a topic. That’s great! I should ask for a list of books to cover for this reason. Feel free to email, teachers!

Scroll down on the main site for PONY NEWS

[cicadamagazine]

Horror isn’t meant to comfort or reassure. If you come away from a horror story with your beliefs affirmed (eg ‘technology makes us worse people’) the creator failed you.

Julia Gfrörer  (via cicadamagazine)

[sarahmarian]

Gothic Fiction: A Timeline | Flavorwire

Great Moments in Gothic Fiction: A History in 13 Books

[brokehorrorfan]

August 20: H. P. Lovecraft was born 125 years ago today.

Some of the horror author’s most notable works include The Call of Cthulhu, At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Music of Erich Zann and Herbert West - Reanimator.

The long list of people he has influenced is as impressive as it is diverse, including Stephen King, Clive Barker, John Carpenter, Guillermo Del Toro, Mike Mignola, H. R. Giger and Metallica, to name a few.

Artwork by Sean Phillips.

[hellyeahhorrorlit]

Me: *Fist fights Haruki Murakami*

Haruki Murakami: I'm wearing my favorite pair of shoes while this man punches me in my face with closed fists. I should feel pain, but all I can keep thinking about is the time my mother showed me a picture of the clouds during the Japanese war with China. A brown cat with burned whiskers walks by us. Chopin is playing softly in the cafe across the street.

Me: SHUT UP PLEASE!!! OMG!!!