Horror Fiction
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Like all genres, Horror runs the spectrum from great writing to less-than-great writing. The Woman in Black by Susan Hill falls squarely in the former category in every possible way. The novel is narrated by Arthur Kipps, who is recalling a terrifying experience from his past. Many years earlier, while working as a junior solicitor, Read more
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Growing up I regularly watched Saturday matinee movies on television with my brother and my cousins on winter and rainy days. If it was summer, or the weather good, we were expected to be outside in the afternoons, out of the way of my mom and my various aunts. But if the weather was bad, Read more
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Dracula is one of those books that everyone knows but few probably actually read much anymore. The details of Castle Dracula, Transylvania, Count Dracula, bats, wolves, sleeping in a coffin, casting no reflection in a mirror, fear of garlic and crucifixes, stakes through the heart, and all the others vampire cliches are well known. They Read more
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A classic of the genre, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson is the story of a haunted mansion where a group of people gather to investigate the supernatural. Led by Dr. John Montague, they include Eleanor Vance, a shy woman, Theodora, a bohemian artist, and Luke Sanderson, the young heir. Despite the house’s Read more
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Like London, Dublin is one of those cities that seems to be filled with literary history. Turn a corner and there you are at some building that some writer once lived in. I was not looking for Sheridan Le Fanu shrines in May of 2020 but by luck just stumbled across this one. It is Read more
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Twenty-five years before Bram Stoker wrote and published Dracula, the novella Camilla was published by another Irishman, Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu. Like Dracula, Le Fanu’s Carmilla features a vampire. But this one is quite different than Stoker’s famous Count. Carmilla is the story of Laura, a young girl living in a secluded castle. She recounts her Read more
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I must confess that I have become an indiscriminate reader as I have grown older. Early in my reading life, during my teens and 20s, I read exclusively what is commonly referred to as “Literary Fiction” (admittedly a snobbish and parochial term). At some point though that changed. Now, I read whatever fiction catches my Read more
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