Supernatural Tales

This anthology of haunted house stories from Egaeus Pres s begins with a flanking attack on the sub-genre. Rebecca Kuder's tale is that of a haunted house in a small town. People tell stories about what happened there. There was a fire, and a girl. A father tells the story to his son, but not to us, at least not directly. Instead Kuder offers a new take on the familiar, fragmenting the narrative into a series of short, oblique references, giving us the story by not telling us exactly what happened. But we can guess. There are some wonderful scenes, here, which recall the careful ambiguities of the original Modernists, Woolf in particular.  Mrs. Raine, who always wore starched yellow blouses and used to tach math back when my mother was in school, said she knew the people who owned the house before the fire. Mrs. Raine said they were good people. But Mrs. Raine said it all so quietly and she was so faded and old that no one could hear her, or they just didn't listen. This is typ...

Sad news - I just learned of the death of Darroll Pardoe , lifelong partner and collaborator of Ghosts & Scholars editor Ro Pardoe. I only met Darroll a few times, and as we are both rather shy I don't think I ever had a very long conversation with him. But I remember him as a man with a great sense of humour who wore his considerable learning lightly.  Darroll was a scholar and a gentleman, and will be remembered with affection by all who had the good fortune to have met him. You can find out more about him at the link above and at Pigs Can Fly .

 Over at Egaeus Press , the anthology Crooked Houses is on a second printing. This seems like a good opportunity to review a pdf sent to me by one of the writers in a rather starry line up. A lot of the authors here have been published in ST, which is always promising! Here is the blurb from EP to give you some idea of what to expect. Alas! Is there a theme in supernatural fiction more prone to cliché and cozy familiarity than the haunted house story?      With this mammoth new anthology, Egaeus Press aims to reclaim that supremely primal tradition, not only from glossy movies, cartoons and television-era ghost hunters, but also from the Victorians, and the great, academic spook story authors of the 20th Century who, by their nature, sought to calibrate, anthropomorphise and provide justification for acts by forces which might hitherto have been considered beyond the scope of human comprehension.     Crooked Houses takes its cue from this earlier age. Tho...

  There's been much debate over whether our attention spans are getting shorter. Maybe they are, but if so they've been shrinking for a long time. Consider the difference between the relative brevity of a ghost story from - say - the 1930 and one written in the 1870s. The rise of mass education, print journalism, and later cinema and broadcast entertainment all changed our tastes and expectations. But it's fair to say that flash fiction - the publication of very short stories online - is something new. Without the internet we wouldn't have it. And, for my money, it's a good thing.  Christopher Stanley's debut collection of flash fiction shows how the genre straddles the nebulous territory between the traditional short story and free verse. If a story is extremely short, every word must count. And they do, by and large. As each story takes only a couple of minutes to read the effect is rather like a series of blackly comic sketches, with the usual proviso about ...

Bit of Southern Gothic here from Mean Mary. A neat little story in the lyrics.