And one thing we know is real: horror. It is so real, in fact, that we cannot be sure it could not exist without us. Yes, it needs our imaginations and our consciousness, but it does not ask or require our consent to use them. Indeed, horror operates with complete autonomy. Generating ontological havoc, it is mephitic foam upon which our lives merely float. And, all said, we must face up to it: horror is more real than we are.
But I know just what it feels like to have a voice in the back of my head, like a face that I hold inside, face that awakes when I close my eyes, face that watches everytime I lie, face that laughs everytime I fall. (It watches EVERYTHING) ... But the face inside is hearing me, right beneath my skin.
The truth of the matter was something much more subtle and tremendous than any plain physical miracle could ever be. But never mind that. The important thing was that, when I did see the stars (riotously darting in all directions according to the caprice of their own wild natures, yet in every movement confirming the law), the whole tangled horror that had tormented me finally presented itself to me in its truth and beautiful shape. And I knew that the first, blind stage of my childhood had ended.
The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.
Sherman Reilly Duffy of the pre-World War I CHICAGO DAILY JOURNAL once told a cub reporter, 'Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.' Well, socially I fit in just fine between the whore and the bartender. Both are close friends. And I knew the world was round. Yet, as time went by I found myself confronted with the ugly suspicion that the world was, after all, flat and that there were things dark and terrible waiting just over the edge to reach out and snatch life from the unlucky, unwary wanderer.
Her eyes were of different colors, the left as brown as autumn, the right as gray as Atlantic wind. Both seemed alive with questions that would never be voiced, as if no words yet existed with which to frame them. She was nineteen years old, or thereabouts; her exact age was unknown. Her face was as fresh as an apple and as delicate as blossom, but a marked depression in the bones beneath her left eye gave her features a disturbing asymmetry. Her mouth never curved into a smile. God, it seemed, had withheld that possibility, as surely as from a blind man the power of sight. He had withheld much else. Amparo was touched—by genius, by madness, by the Devil, or by a conspiracy of all these and more. She took no sacraments and appeared incapable of prayer. She had a horror of clocks and mirrors. By her own account she spoke with Angels and could hear the thoughts of animals and trees. She was passionately kind to all living things. She was a beam of starlight trapped in flesh and awaiting only the moment when it would continue on its journey into forever.” (p.33)
Why did I, like thousands of others, have to carry a cross I hadn't chosen, a cross which was not made for my shoulders and which didn't concern me? Who decided to come rummaging around in my obscure existence, invade my gray anonymity, my meager tranquility, and bowl me like a little ball in a great game of skittles? God? Well, in that case, if He exists, if He really exists, let Him hide His face. Let Him put His two hands on His head, and let Him bow down. It may be, as Peiper used to teach us, that many men are unworthy of Him, but now I know that He, too, is unworthy of most of us, and that if the creature is capable of producing horror, it's solely because his Creator has slipped him the recipe for it.
There are people in the world, who are just wrong, and then there are the masses of population that are right, or at the very least they lie in the veil of between. I on the other hand, do not belong to any group. I don’t exist. It’s not that I don’t have substance; I have a body like everyone else. I can feel the fire when it burns against my skin, the rain when it caresses my face and the breeze as it fingers my hair. I have all the senses that other people do. I am just empty, inside.
A lizard brain fired the gun that wounded you, but it was the combination of three brains that orchestrated the elaborate circumstances in which the trigger was pulled. Way back when, the Landlord believed a second brain would endow some of his lower life forms with the capacity for emotional connections. By adding the third brain, he probably planned on having his... higher forms empowered with the ability to not only think before acting, but to feel regret afterwards when their actions were wrong. But that’s not what happened, is it?
I Hear the sledges with the bells - Silver bells! What a world of merriment their melody foretells! How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, In the icy air of night! While the stars that oversprinkle All the heavens, seem to twinkle With a crystalline delight; Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells - From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells. II Hear the mellow wedding bells - Golden bells! What a world of happiness their harmony foretells! Through the balmy air of night How they ring out their delight! - From the molten - golden notes, And all in tune, What a liquid ditty floats To the turtle - dove that listens, while she gloats On the moon! Oh, from out the sounding cells, What a gush of euphony voluminously wells! How it swells! How it dwells On the Future! - how it tells Of the rapture that impels To the swinging and the ringing Of the bells, bells, bells - Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells - To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells! III Hear the loud alarum bells - Brazen bells! What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells! In the startled ear of night How they scream out their affright! Too much horrified to speak, They can only shriek, shriek, Out of tune, In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire, In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire, Leaping higher, higher, higher, With a desperate desire, And a resolute endeavor Now - now to sit, or never, By the side of the pale - faced moon. Oh, the bells, bells, bells! What a tale their terror tells Of Despair! How they clang, and clash and roar! What a horror they outpour On the bosom of the palpitating air! Yet the ear, it fully knows, By the twanging, And the clanging, How the danger ebbs and flows; Yet the ear distinctly tells, In the jangling, And the wrangling, How the danger sinks and swells, By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells - Of the bells - Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells - In the clamor and the clanging of the bells! IV Hear the tolling of the bells - Iron bells! What a world of solemn thought their monody compels! In the silence of the night, How we shiver with affright At the melancholy menace of their tone! For every sound that floats From the rust within their throats Is a groan. And the people - ah, the people - They that dwell up in the steeple, All alone, And who, tolling, tolling, tolling, In that muffled monotone, Feel a glory in so rolling On the human heart a stone - They are neither man nor woman - They are neither brute nor human - They are Ghouls: - And their king it is who tolls: - And he rolls, rolls, rolls, Rolls A paean from the bells! And his merry bosom swells With the paean of the bells! And he dances, and he yells; Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the paean of the bells: - Of the bells: Keeping time, time, time In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the throbbing of the bells - Of the bells, bells, bells: - To the sobbing of the bells: - Keeping time, time, time, As he knells, knells, knells, In a happy Runic rhyme, To the rolling of the bells - Of the bells, bells, bells - To the tolling of the bells - Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells, - To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.
Even so have I given the womb of the earth to those that be sown in it in their times.
They that be born in the strength of youth are of one fashion, and they that are born in the time of age, when the womb fail, are otherwise.
Seeing thou hast now given me the way, I will proceed to speak before thee: for our mother, of whom thou hast told me that she is young, draw now nigh unto age.
Like as a young child may not bring forth the things that belong to the aged, even so have I disposed the world which I created.
What betrayed me? Was it my heart? Or my Soul?
Stand up upon the right side, and I shall expound the similitude unto thee.
Consider with thyself; as the rain is more than the drops, and as the fire is greater than the smoke; but the drops and the smoke remain behind: so the quantity which is past did more exceed.
As for the tokens whereof thou ask me, I may tell thee of them in part: but as touching thy life, I am not sent to shew thee.
Iniquity shall be increased above that which now thou see, or that thou hast heard long ago.
The land, that thou see now to have root, shall thou see wasted suddenly.
If the most High grant thee to live, thou shall see after the third trumpet that the sun shall suddenly shine again in the night, and the moon thrice in the day:
Blood shall drop out of wood, and the stone shall give his voice, and the people shall be troubled:
He shall rule, whom they look not for that dwell upon the earth, and the fowls shall take their flight away together:
The Sodomy sea shall cast out fish, and make a noise in the night, which many have not known: but they shall all hear the voice thereof.
There shall be confusion also in many places, and the fire shall be oft sent out again, and the wild beasts shall change their places, and menstruate women shall bring forth monsters:
Salt waters shall be found in the sweet, and all friends shall destroy one another; then shall wit hide itself, and understanding withdraw itself into his secret chamber-
One land also shall ask another, and say, ‘Is righteousness that makes a man righteous gone through thee?’ And it shall say, ‘No.
At the same time shall men hope, but nothing obtain: they shall labor, but their ways shall not prosper.
To shew thee such tokens I have leave; and if thou wilt pray again, and weep as now, and fast even days, thou shall hear yet greater things.
An extreme fearfulness moves through all your body, and your mind is troubled more.
After seven days of fasten so it was, that the thoughts of my heart were very grievous unto me- and my soul recovered the spirit of understanding.
Hear me, and I will instruct thee; hearken to the thing that I say, and I shall tell thee more.
Thou art sore troubled in mind for the people in the world’s sake: loves thou that people better than he that made them?
Number me the things that are not yet come- gather me together the dross that are scattered abroad- make me the flowers green again that are withered- Open me the places that are closed, and bring me forth the winds that in them are shut up- shew me the image of a voice: and then I will declare to thee the thing that thou labor to know.
O Lord that bear rule, who may know these things, but he that had not his dwelling with men?
As for you, you're unwise: how may you then speak of these things whereof thou ask you?
Like as thou canst do none of these things that I have spoken of, even so canst thou not find out my judgment, or in the end the love that I have promised unto my people.
Behold, O Lord, yet art thou nigh unto them that be reserved till the end: and what shall they do that have been before me, or we that be now, or they that shall come after us?
I will liken my judgment unto a ring: like as there is no slackness of the last, even so there is no swiftness of the first.
Could thou not make those that have been made, and be now, and that are for to come, at once; that thou might shew thy judgement the sooner?
As thou hast said unto thy servant, that thou, which gives life to all, hast given life at once to the creature that thou hast created, and the creature bare it: even so it might now also bear them that now be present at once.
Ask the womb of a woman, and say unto her, If thou bring forth children, why dost thou it not together, but one after another? pray her therefore to bring forth ten children at once.
She cannot: but must do it by distance of time.
How my adventures become your sins?
Go thy way, weigh me the weight of the fire, or measure me the blast of the wind, or call me again the day that is past.
What man is able to do that, that thou should ask such things of me?
If I should ask thee how great dwellings are in the midst of the sea, or how many springs are in the beginning of the deep, or how many springs are above the firmament, or which are the outgoings of paradise: Peradventure thou would say unto me, ‘I never went down into the deep, nor as yet into hell, neither did I ever climb up into heaven.
Nevertheless now have I asked thee but only of the fire and wind, and of the day where-through thou hast passed, and of things from which thou canst not be separated, and yet canst thou give me no answer of them.
Thine own things, and such as are grown up with thee, canst thou not know; How should thy vessel then be able to comprehend the way of the Highest, and, the world being now outwardly corrupted to understand the corruption that is evident in my sight?
It were better that we were not at all, than that we should live still in wickedness, and to suffer, and not to know wherefore.
I went into a forest into a plain, and the trees took counsel- And said, Come, let us go and make war against the sea that it may depart away before us, and that we may make us more woods. The floods of the sea also in like manner took counsel, and said, Come, let us go up and subdue the woods of the plain, that there also we may make us another country. The thought of the wood was in vain, for the fire came and consumed it. The thought of the floods of the sea came likewise to nought, for the sand stood up and stopped them. If thou wart judge now betwixt these two, whom would thou begin to justify? or whom would thou condemn?
Verily it is a foolish thought that they both have devised, for the ground is given unto the wood, and the sea also had its place to bear its floods.
Thou hast given a right judgment, but why judge thou not thyself also?
For like as the ground is given unto the wood, and the sea to his floods: even so they that dwell upon the earth may understand nothing but that which is upon the earth: and he that dwell above the heavens may only understand the things that are above the height of the heavens.
I beseech thee, O Lord, let me have understanding: For it was not my mind to be curious of the high things, but of such as pass by us daily.
Wherefore the present age is given up as a reproach to the heathen, and for what cause the people whom thou hast loved is given over unto ungodly nations?!
Why the law of our forefathers are brought to nought, and the written covenants come to none effect-
We pass away out of the world as grasshoppers, and our life is astonishment and fear, and we are not worthy to obtain mercy.
What will he then do unto his name whereby we are called? ...of these things have I asked.
The more thou search, the more thou shall marvel.
The more thou search, the more thou shall marvel; for the world hast fast to pass away-
The world hast fast to pass away- And cannot comprehend the things that are promised to the righteous in time to come: for this world is full of unrighteousness and infirmities.
As concerning the things whereof thou asked me, I will tell thee; for the evil is sown, but the destruction thereof is not yet come.
If therefore that which is sown be not turned upside down, and if the place where the evil is sown passes not away, then cannot it come that is sown with good?
The grain of evil seed had been sown in the heart of Adam from the beginning, and how much ungodliness had it brought up unto this time? and how much shall it yet bring forth until the time of threshing come?
Ponder now by thyself, how great fruit of wickedness the grain of evil seed had brought forth. And when the ears shall be cut down, which are without number, how great a floor shall they fill?
How, and when shall these things come to pass? wherefore are our years few and evil?
Do not thou hasten above the most Highest: for thy haste is in vain to be above him, for thou hast much exceeded.
Did not the souls also of the righteous ask question of these things in their chambers, saying, "How long shall I hope on this fashion?" when cometh the fruit of the floor of our reward?
O Lord that bear rule, even we all are full of impiety. And for our sakes peradventure it is that the floors of the righteous are not filled, because of the sins of them that dwell upon the earth.
Go thy way to a woman with child, and ask of her when she had fulfilled her nine months, if her womb may keep the birth any longer within her.
In the grave the chambers of souls are like the womb of a woman: For like as a woman that travails make haste to escape the necessity of the travail: even so do these places haste to deliver those things that are committed unto them.
From the beginning, look, what thou desires to see, it shall be shew thee.
If I have found favor in thy sight, and if it be possible, and if I be meet therefore, shew me then whether there be more to come than is past, or more past than is to come.
The greatest futility! says the congregator, "The greatest futility! Everything is futile!" What does a person gain from all his hard work- At which he toils under the sun? A generation goes and another cometh forth, but the earth remains the same.
As thou know not what is the way of the spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child: even so thou know not the works of what makes all.
In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand: for thou know not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good.
Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun: But if a man live many years, and rejoice in them all; yet let him remember the days of darkness; for they shall be many. And all that cometh is vanity.
These be they that have put off the mortal clothing, and put on the immortal, and have confessed the name of God: now are they crowned, and receive palms.
Go thy way, and tell my people, the people of thy Lord God what manner of things, and how great wonders of the Lord thy God, thou hast seen.
And yet their reward appear not, and their labor had no fruit: for I have gone here and there through the heathen, and I see that they flow in wealth, and think not upon thy commandments.
Weigh thou therefore their wickedness now in the balance, and theirs also that dwell the world; and so shall thy name no where be found anymore.
Thy heart had gone too far in this world, and think thou to comprehend the way of the most High?
Set as higher dimensional beings walking the earth today, who must INcarnate (there is no REincarnation if there is no time. Exception: descending spirals which crystallize in lower frequencies) to live in the various dream worlds (this one included) with the final "kick"/baptism by water, pulling up ALL the densities/dimensions through LOVE.
The "inner circle of humanity" recognizes others through frequency, regardless of walk of life or "positioning in the astral". This is an operation run invisibly from Outside the astral. Going Home represents the final shift to one's true spiritual families of light, in all dimensions of harmonics; higher vibrations/love in unity consciousness, above, below and literally "everywhere and everynow".
Secret glances are shared by those on the "inside" or esoteric "inner circle", who have literally gone into many lower frequencies simultaneously. This is the "secret glance" of love, which allows the higher to operate in the lower; to "save" those worlds in order to correct the impending takeover of the "Devil and his demons", a metaphor for light and dark "battles" raging today.
If the 4th "dimension" is blocked, which is a kind of cosmic umbrella, through which 5D through 9D and higher are designed to operate in physical realms, being non-physical, then the Devil who controls "the spice" controls everything. It would be easy to continue with the reasons behind death, terrible plague on earth.
Time is tick, tick, ticking away. How many souls will I capture today? Will they be a challenge or will they be given? Only time will tell as the clock keeps tick, tick, ticking. Your god has arrived with enough hatred for y’all, with enough evil for the big and small, so come one, come all. I will shred your souls and place them in my satchel, call you a settler and make you my peddler. Come one, come all, come stand behind your god. I will lead you into the darkness of Earth's end. Come one, come all, my wilted flowers, come claim your title, speak out and cheer it. Come one, come all, let’s have a ball, my wilted flowers . . . Sweet, Unconquerable Spirits.
WEST SALEM ~ October 2011A sudden vision, fraught with malevolence and darkness, obscured her sight. The face of a menacing figure turned from the shadows of his grisly handiwork and stared at Sorcha.Her muscles tensed. By the Goddess, could he see her?Please! No!She wanted to scream, to run, but the vision ensnared her into the horrific moment like a fly in a spider's web.
Do not be so ridiculous, I can more easily find you someone else.” Gripping the bars of his prison so strongly that the bones of his knuckles showed prominently through his pale skin, the monster growled again, “I will have no other.” Nearing the end of his patience, Klaus demanded, “Why? Why are you being so impossible?” Turning to the diminutive creature beneath the blanket, he smiled nastily, his light red eyes gleaming, “Because he wants her.
Third Cosmic Seal:(Shiva Seal 999 - Seal Destruction) One who has received this Cosmic Seal is empowered to control not less than 2,500,000 spirits which depends on the mastership of one's occult and psychic projections. Women are generally kept at this level with a few women exceeding this level.
There are seven occult kingdoms in the universe, which are the kingdoms of Satan and the fallen angels. There are various planes, zones, realms and centers as well as deities, gods and lords. The Five Cosmic Seals (occult levels) are the universal summary of the 400,000 categories of occult initiations, powers and demons (Astrometaphysical Operations). There are male and female, neuter and mermaid spirits (demons or Cosmic Forces).
There are occult Esoteric Metaphysics (the secret and most confidential aspect of occult teachings) and Mystical Sciences practiced by mystical adepts, Living Grand Masters. This is the cosmological verdict of the Order of Astral and Terrestrial Hierarchy universal occult recognition. Exoteric is public occult teachings. An Adept uses the Technique of the Master. Hell is called After-Life-Hallucination. There are entities, spirits, demons, demi-gods, Archangels and other names for evil beings. A Guru is a spiritual Master.
Second Cosmic Seal:(Seal of Karl 666) One who has received this Cosmic Seal is empowered to control not less than 160,000 spirits. Many great politicians, military commanders, etc. on earth are at this occult level of operations. This will be the occult level of Antichrist.
Do you remember the sight we saw, my soul,that soft summer morninground a turning in the path,the disgusting carcass on a bed scattered with stones,its legs in the air like a woman in needburning its wedding poisonslike a fountain with its rhythmic sobs,I could hear it clearly flowing with a long murmuring sound,but I touch my body in vain to find the wound.I am the vampire of my own heart,one of the great outcasts condemned to eternal laughterwho can no longer smile.Am I dead?I must be dead.
Last reason for reading horror: it’s a rehearsal for death. It’s a way to get ready. People say there’s nothing sure but death and taxes. But that’s not really true. There’s really only death, you know. Death is the biggie. Two hundred years from now, none of us are going to be here. We’re all going to be someplace else. Maybe a better place, maybe a worse place; it may be sort of like New Jersey, but someplace else. The same thing can be said of rabbits and mice and dogs, but we’re in a very uncomfortable position: we’re the only creatures—at least as far as we know, though it may be true of dolphins and whales and a few other mammals that have very big brains—who are able to contemplate our own end. We know it’s going to happen. The electric train goes around and around and it goes under and around the tunnels and over the scenic mountains, but in the end it always goes off the end of the table. Crash.
The universal pervasion of ugliness, hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language...everything. Unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth. In poetry we call them the most glorious.
Brush snapped. The stag shambled forth from the outer darkness. It loomed above Scobie, its fur rank and steaming. Black blood oozed from gashes along its flanks. Beneath a great jagged crown of antlers its eyes were black, its teeth yellow and broken. Scobie fell to his knees, palms raised in supplication. The stag nuzzled his matted hair and its long tongue lapped at the muddy tears and the streaks of drying blood upon the man’s upturned face. Its muzzle unhinged. The teeth closed and there was a sound like a ripe cabbage cracking apart.
The exhilaration of battle was agreeable to him, but the sight of the dead, with their clay faces, blank eyes, and stiff bodies, which, when not unnaturally shrunken, were unnaturally swollen, had always intolerably affected him. He felt toward them a kind of reasonless antipathy which was something more than the physical and spiritual repugnance common to us all. Doubtless this feeling was due to his unusually acute sensibilities - his keen sense of the beautiful, which these hideous things outraged. Whatever may have been the cause, he could not look upon a dead body without a loathing which had in it an element of reselltment. What others have respected as the dignity of death had to him no existence - was altogether unthinkable. Death was a thing to be hated. It was not picturesque, it had no tender and solemn side - a dismal thing, hideous in all its manifestations and suggestions. Lieutenant Byring was a braver man than anybody knew, for nobody knew his horror of that which he was ever ready to encounter. ("A Tough Tussle")
Work hard but work smart.
When looking for a job, ignore (don't even bother with them) those companies who expect you to literally do everything for them and also fail to mention anything about your pay. This is a huge red flag. Run as fast as you can and don't look back.
Don't let your past dictate your future,
Kurt Cobain was a musical lyric genius. He was the Edgar Allan Poe of songwriting.
With Eyes Like Charles Manson, a life similar to H.P Lovecraft, and lyrics like Edgar Allan Poe, Kurt Cobain was the master of horror in music.
I can't help thinking that somewhere in the vast universe, there has to be something better than man - Has to be.
Don't be afraid to express to the world about how you feel... Ask Donald Trump.
I fear for the safety and well-being of our children.
Try to listen more and talk less.
A quotation can often give the best advice.
During my tenure at Bradford College, located in Haverhill Massachusetts - Assemblies of God, and Northpoint Bible College had not yet taken over. The school was very prestigious and expensive, but was worth every penny spent, and left me with an experience of which I shall indeed never forget. I say this for a couple of reasons. First, my degree major was in creative arts (creative writing) and psychology as my minor. Later in life, I was able to use my degree to become an award-winning, and best-selling horror author, and producer. Something by the way for which I am very proud of today. I truly owe this all from what I learned at this remarkable school.""So indeed I have great things to speak of when harping back to my Bradford college days. In addition, I was also able to make wonderful connections with many famous people who's sons and daughters attended this school. One of my roommates was David Charles who is Bob Charle's son. Bob Charles was a famous professional golfer." "To date, pondering on my college days spent at Bradford College has given me an appreciation for which I am very grateful for. I wanted to say, "thank you" for being part of the reason why I have prospered." "I am a proud graduate of Bradford, and all others whom also attended should also be more than proud of their attendance there. Thank you again, and God Bless you. one of my other roommates was Japanese chap, and his father was some kind of high political ruler of the country at the time. Thinking back on all this makes me proud of having been affiliated with Bradford College. Thank you.
I Can See Nothing But The Bottom Sides of Her Shoes, And Then All Became Ample Dark.
A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no words written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished because undisturbed: and this is an end unattainable by the novel. Undue brevity is just as exceptionable here as in the poem; but undue length is yet more to be avoided.
A serious adult story must be true to something in life. Since marvel tales cannot be true to the events of life, they must shift their emphasis towards something to which they can be true; namely, certain wistful or restless moods of the human spirit, wherein it seeks to weave gossamer ladders of escape from the galling tyranny of time, space, and natural law.
An admirable line of Pablo Neruda’s, “My creatures are born of a long denial,” seems to me the best definition of writing as a kind of exorcism, casting off invading creatures by projecting them into universal existence, keeping them on the other side of the bridge… It may be exaggerating to say that all completely successful short stories, especially fantastic stories, are products of neurosis, nightmares or hallucination neutralized through objectification and translated to a medium outside the neurotic terrain. This polarization can be found in any memorable short story, as if the author, wanting to rid himself of his creature as soon and as absolutely as possible, exorcises it the only way he can: by writing it.
Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him, submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling.
The ‘experimental’ writer, then, is simply following the story’s commands to the best of his human ability. The writer is not the story, the story is the story. See? Sometimes this is very hard to accept and sometimes too easy. On the one hand, there’s the writer who can’t face his fate: that the telling of a story has nothing at all to do with him; on the other hand, there’s the one who faces it too well: that the telling of the story has nothing at all to do with him
The one test of the really weird (story) is simply this--whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim.
From a tale one expects a bit of wildness, of exaggeration and dramatic effect. The tale has no inherent concern with decorum, balance or harmony. ... A tale may not display a great deal of structural, psychological, or narrative sophistication, though it might possess all three, but it seldom takes its eye off its primary goal, the creation of a particular emotional state in its reader. Depending on the tale, that state could be wonder, amazement, shock, terror, anger, anxiety, melancholia, or the momentary frisson of horror.
There are... otherwise quite decent people who are so dull of nature that they believe that they must attribute the swift flight of fancy to some illness of the psyche, and thus it happens that this or that writer is said to create not other than while imbibing intoxicating drink or that his fantasies are the result of overexcited nerves and resulting fever. But who can fail to know that, while a state of psychical excitement caused by the one or other stimulant may indeed generate some lucky and brilliant ideas, it can never produce a well-founded, substantial work of art that requires the utmost presence of mind.
Human beings across every culture I know about require such stories, stories with cool winds and wood smoke. They speak to something deep within us, the capacity to conceptualize, objectify and find patterns, thereby to create the flow of events and perceptions that find perfect expression in fiction. We are built this way, we create stories by reflex, unstoppably. But this elegant system really works best when the elements of the emerging story, whether is is being written or being read, are taken as literal fact. Almost always, to respond to the particulars of the fantastic as if they were metaphorical or allegorical is to drain them of vitality.
Horror fiction seems to spawn more dumbass 'rules' than any other kind of writing, and one of the dumbest is the assumed 'requirement' of a twist ending, going all the way back to H.H. Munro. This story is also the result of a long rumination on how stories are sometimes scuttled or diminished by succumbing to such 'rules'.
Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness... proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures.
These fools who haven't the slightest idea how to live the morals they espouse. These fools who proclaim themselves men of God, yet show not the slightest reverance to His word...Is it any different from a drunkard preaching temperance? A whore preaching modesty?
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its content. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into peace and safety of a new dark age.
To the non-combatants and those on the periphery of action, the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement, but to those who entered the meat grinder itself the war was a netherworld of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning, life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu had eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all.
A number of years ago, when I was a freshly-appointed instructor, I met, for the first time, a certain eminent historian of science. At the time I could only regard him with tolerant condescension.I was sorry of the man who, it seemed to me, was forced to hover about the edges of science. He was compelled to shiver endlessly in the outskirts, getting only feeble warmth from the distant sun of science- in-progress; while I, just beginning my research, was bathed in the heady liquid heat up at the very center of the glow.In a lifetime of being wrong at many a point, I was never more wrong. It was I, not he, who was wandering in the periphery. It was he, not I, who lived in the blaze.I had fallen victim to the fallacy of the 'growing edge;' the belief that only the very frontier of scientific advance counted; that everything that had been left behind by that advance was faded and dead.But is that true? Because a tree in spring buds and comes greenly into leaf, are those leaves therefore the tree? If the newborn twigs and their leaves were all that existed, they would form a vague halo of green suspended in mid-air, but surely that is not the tree. The leaves, by themselves, are no more than trivial fluttering decoration. It is the trunk and limbs that give the tree its grandeur and the leaves themselves their meaning., 'it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.
You would hardly think, at first, that horrid monsters lie up there waiting to be discovered by any moderately penetrating mind--monsters to which those of the oceans bear no sort of comparison."What monsters may they be?"Impersonal monsters, namely, Immensities. Until a person has thought out the stars and their inter-spaces, he has hardly learnt that there are things much more terrible than monsters of shape, namely, monsters of magnitude without known shape. Such monsters are the voids and waste places of the sky... In these our sight plunges quite beyond any twinkler we have yet visited. Those deep wells for the human mind to let itself down into, leave alone the human body! and think of the side caverns and secondary abysses to right and left as you pass on!...There is a size at which dignity begins," he exclaimed; "further on there is a size at which grandeur begins; further on there is a size at which solemnity begins; further on, a size at which awfulness begins; further on, a size at which ghastliness begins. That size faintly approaches the size of the stellar universe. So am I not right in saying that those minds who exert their imaginative powers to bury themselves in the depths of that universe merely strain their faculties to gain a new horror?
Lydia displays her right hand and instantly bathed the room with a blinding light. It lasted only a moment before it drew back into her palm. “I can fix you if you’re ever broken.
The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...
I’ll tell you now. That silence almost beat me. It’s the silence that scares me. It’s the blank page on which I can write my own fears. The spirits of the dead have nothing on it. The dead one tried to show me hell, but it was a pale imitation of the horror I can paint on the darkness in a quiet moment.
Patches don’t look it, but when attached to your soul they can get pretty heavy. They go over the holes in your soul, like when you patch a sock. When you have a hole in your soul, it’s because you’re hurting from something. I don’t know if you noticed, but that girl had a lot of holes.
The shadow self is what lies beneath the makeup. It’s those ugly parts that you haven’t accepted about yourself. You hide those parts in the shadows until you’re ready.” Her face remained a haunting calm. “When you realize the scars are who you are, that there was nothing wrong with you and that you were beautiful all along - that’s when you decide to take the makeup off.
Because I am, just as you are you. We don’t always get to pick who we are, Shelly Wynn, but we can choose to celebrate it.
There’s nothing wrong with you at all. Sometimes people say or do things that are mean because there's something the matter with them. With Lydia, it seems there’s always something wrong with her.
I’m afraid they’re not coming.” Abby said fearfully. “Our parents, our teachers – everyone! They’ve disappeared. That’s it. Lights out, Shelly. We’re on our own.
It’s no big deal. It’s kind of like a tattoo. It won’t hurt, not too much, just a few stitches and it’ll be all over. It’s really interesting how it’s done. You won’t believe where your soul hides. Go on, take a guess. Where do you think it is?
Aloha Oukou. It looked like your soul was escaping so I put you in a tree.
She could spin it between her legs, skip with it, twirl it around her neck and transfer it from one arm to the other. Shelly hooped because she enjoyed it; it calmed her whenever she would have an argument or a bad day at school, and it also allowed her to think. Today, she needed to hoop more than ever.
Somehow her hula hoop had cut into the driver’s side door like the vehicle was made of cheese.
Soon, all the children were chanting it. “No school! No school!
Shelly shook her head and made sure she had plenty of space so that she wouldn’t hit anything. As many times before, she kept the hoop close to her waist and then twirled it with small, tight bursts of speed. As the hoop gathered in momentum it started to give off a hum that soon took on a light blue illumination far brighter than the streetlamps. It was so bright, that it lit up the entire backyard.
Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you'll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You'll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And for better or worse you'll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.And then the nightmares will begin.
The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice. Yet had I known such pain was in the next room, and had it been dumb, I believe—I have thought since—I could have stood it well enough. It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us. But in spite of the brilliant sunlight and the green fans of the trees waving in the soothing sea-breeze, the world was a confusion, blurred with drifting black and red phantasms, until I was out of earshot of the house in the stone wall.
This guy sounds like all the bad guys from the last ten years of murder movies all rolled into one. Like he might be the worst of those books you have there. If he was real, and really like that, then I should arrest him, right?” Matthew asked, hoping he could show the boy that he would protect him, and he could tell him the truth now.“No, Deputy. Because he is real, and he is really like that, and you should run.
I had lied to myself from the very beginning, deceived myself into believing that I was being fanciful and overly imaginative. Surely such monstrosities only existed in nightmares? Yet I had lived through a nightmare these past months, and that was no dream at all. I was still fighting against the awful truth, not wanting to give in, searching my mind for a logical explanation—but there was none. And the most horrible realization of all was that I had known, somewhere deep inside, ever since the day I first set eyes on Vladec Salei. Plague carrier. Living death. Drainer of life. The phrasing did not matter. No euphemism could strike fear into the hearts of men the way that single word
I could a tale unfold whose lightest wordWould harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,Thy knotted and combined locks to part,And each particular hair to stand on endLike quills upon the fretful porpentine.But this eternal blazon must not beTo ears of flesh and blood.List, list, O list!
...to return to their 'native soil,' as they say, to the bosom, so to speak, of their mother earth, like frightened children, yearning to fall asleep on the withered bosom of their decrepit mother, and to sleep there for ever, only to escape the horrors that terrify them.
You will not say how you are haunted by the faces of the men you killed, how in their last gasp of life they sought your pity and you had none. You will not speak of the boys who died screaming for their mothers while you twisted a blade in their guts and snarled your scorn into their ears. You will not confess that you wake in the night, covered in sweat, heart hammering, shrinking from the memories. You will not talk of that, because that is the horror, and the horror is held in the heart’s hoard, a secret, and to admit it is to admit fear, and we are warriors.We do not fear. We strut. We go to battle like heroes. We stink of shit.
People are often wary of reading or watching anything in the horror genre because in their minds, it's just senseless gore, death and violence. Well, I can tell you from avid experience, that's not what horror is about. The horror genre teaches us that sometimes really bad things happen to really good people, but that hope always prevails in even the darkest of situations. That's a very important lesson, no matter how frightening you think the teacher is, and to be in the top of her class, all you need to do is to go in with an open mind.
That's because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear - the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness.
My brothers’ faces haunt me. I hear their children, my nieces and nephews, asking me why I came home without their daddies. I think of their wives, imagine their questions. Our parents, forever seeing the faces of their lost sons when they look at me. They will want answers, demand to know how I survived. And what do I tell them? That I huddled like a baby inside my tent while their killer beckoned me forth for one last stand?
The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds--the creaking of the trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while sometimes the wind tolled like a distant church bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveler, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn. But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors.
Something like panic struck at Hurlow. Moffat's calm confession of fear withdrew the prop upon which he had leaned. Down there, among the motionless shadows, lurked invisible things, things that were nameless, shapeless and malignant; things which could see without being seen. One of the long lost terrors of childhood returned to him, and like a child he put his hand into Moffat's.
I think locality exercises strange influence over some minds. The peaceful meadow-scenery holds no lurking horrors in its bosom, but in the lonesome moorlands, full of curiously molded boulders, grotesque fancies must assail one there. Creatures seem to come, odd and ill-defined as their surroundings. As a child I had a peculiar horror of those tall, odd-shaped boulders, with seeming faces, featureless, it is true, but sometimes strangely resembling humans and animals. I believe the spinney may be haunted by something of this nature, terrible as the trees. ("The Haunted Spinney")
Or do you like being frightened?”Hugh, though generally intelligent, is dense in certain ways; this is one of them.“Why, of course, I like being frightened,” I said. “I want to be made to creep and creep and creep. Fear is the most absorbing and luxurious of emotions. One forgets all else if one is afraid.
Dr. Richard Selzer is a surgeon and a favorite author of mine. He writes the most beautiful and compassionate descriptions of his patients and the human dramas they confront. In his book Letters to a Young Doctor, he said that most young people seem to be protected for a time by an imaginary membrane that shields them from horror. They walk in it every day but are hardly aware of its presence. As the immune system protects the human body from the unseen threat of harmful bacteria, so this mythical membrane guards them from life-threatening situations. Not every young person has this protection, of course, because children do die of cancer, congenital heart problems, and other disorders. But most of them are shielded—and don’t realize it. Then, as years roll by, one day it happens. Without warning, the membrane tears, and horror seeps into a person’s life or into the life of a loved one. It is at this moment that an unexpected theological crisis presents itself.
Insurgence and all forms of evil in a society doesn't describes her as a failure, but vividly shows a lack of love for one another.
As melancholia replaced the jarring of my invention, I sat.Unable to breathe in the smog I had created, unable to stand on my betraying legs, unable to howl at the heavens over my sordid soul.In this inferno, I became paroxysmic, my self-hatred, superparamount, numbness dulling the agony of such a devilish act,An iron curtain fell upon the surrounding world, or at least what I had left of it to be owned by the laconic eclipse.All the angels fled, disowning my prayers, the lurid world backed away, leaving me forsaken and detached,I could no longer hear the bombings, hear them fall, my own fabrication, only the dead air that came after, the intense silence.Cynical and paralyzed, I realized I had purloined a portion of Hell and given it to the unwilling Earth,Punishing those I had no right to punish, judging those I had no reason to condemn, destroying cities I had never set foot in.This is how I became Death, the destroyer of Worlds.
The tension has worn us out. It is a deadly tension that feels as if a jagged knife blade is being scraped along the spine. Our legs won't function, our hands are trembling and our bodies are like thin membranes stretched over barely repressed madness, holding in what would otherwise be an unrestrained outburst of endless scream.s. We have no flesh, no muscle now
But are his needs any more shocking than the needs of any other animals and men? Are his deeds more outrageous than the deeds of the parent who drained the spirit from his child? The vampire may foster quickened heartbeats and levitated hair. But is he worse than the parent who gave to society a neurotic child who became a politician? Is he worse than the manufacturer who set up belated foundations with the money he made by handing bombs and guns to suicidal nationalists? Is he worse than the distiller who gave bastardized grain juice to stultify further the brains of those who, sober, were incapable of progressive thought? (Nay, I apologize for this calumny; I nip the brew that feeds me.) Is he worse, then, than the publisher who filled ubiquitous racks with lust and death wishes? Really, no, search your soul, lovie--is the vampire so bad?
This, then, is the ultimate, that is only, consolation: simply that someone shares some of your own feelings and has made of these a work of art which you have the insight, sensitivity, and — like it or not — peculiar set of experiences to appreciate. Amazing thing to say, the consolation of horror in art is that it actually intensifies our panic, loudens it on the sounding-board of our horror-hollowed hearts, turns terror up full blast, all the while reaching for that perfect and deafening amplitude at which we may dance to the bizarre music of our own misery.
Horror is the law of the world of living creatures, and civilization is concerned with masking that truth. Literature and art refine and beautify, and if they were to depict reality naked, just as everyone suspects it is (although we defend ourselves against that knowledge), no one would be able to stand it.
People who fell in love at first sight, rushed home to their parents to tell them the good news and subsequently married were, [Patricia Highsmith] thought, retarded. Rather, a more honest appraisal of the nature of love positions it nearer to the horrors of mental illness. How else could you explain the fact that so many people were prepared to sacrifice the safety and cosiness of their lives for the thrill of a new romance?
Her eyes bled from venomous anger...Her flower had been gruesomely deflowered...Her life had slowly turned into a blunder...There was no more thinking further....She would rather become a Foetus murderer Than end up a "hopeless" mother....Of course, she found peace in the formerUntil later years of emotional traumaOh, the foetus hunt was forever!The only thing you should abort is the thought of aborting your baby. Stop the hate and violence against innocent children.
Betrayal is too kind a word to describe a situation in which a father says he loves his daughter but claims he must teach her about the horrors of the world in order to make her a stronger person; a situation in which he watches or participates in rituals that make her feel like she is going to die. She experiences pain that is so intense that she cannot think; her head spins so fast she can't remember who she is or how she got there.All she knows is pain. All she feels is desperation. She tries to cry out for help, but soon learns that no one will listen. No matter how loud she cries, she can't stop or change what is happening. No matter what she does, the pain will not stop. Her father orders her to be tortured and tells her it is for her own good. He tells her that she needs the discipline, or that she has asked for it by her misbehavior. Betrayal is too simple a word to describe the overwhelming pain, the overwhelming loneliness and isolation this child experiences.As if the abuse during the rituals were not enough, this child experiences similar abuse at home on a daily basis. When she tries to talk about her pain, she is told that she must be crazy. "Nothing bad has happened to you;' her family tells her Each day she begins to feel more and more like she doesn't know what is real. She stops trusting her own feelings because no one else acknowledges them or hears her agony. Soon the pain becomes too great. She learns not to feel at all. This strong, lonely, desperate child learns to give up the senses that make all people feel alive. She begins to feel dead.She wishes she were dead. For her there is no way out. She soon learns there is no hope.As she grows older she gets stronger. She learns to do what she is told with the utmost compliance. She forgets everything she has ever wanted. The pain still lurks, but it's easier to pretend it's not there than to acknowledge the horrors she has buried in the deepest parts of her mind. Her relationships are overwhelmed by the power of her emotions. She reaches out for help, but never seems to find what she is looking for The pain gets worse. The loneliness sets in. When the feelings return, she is overcome with panic, pain, and desperation.She is convinced she is going to die. Yet, when she looks around her she sees nothing that should make her feel so bad. Deep inside she knows something is very, very wrong, but she doesn't remember anything. She thinks, "Maybe I am crazy.
Brian came in heavy at that moment on his guitar, the rapid, high-pitched squeal ranging back and forth as his fingers flew along the frets. As the intro's tempo grew more rapid, Bekka heard Derek's subtle bass line as it worked its way in. After another few seconds Will came in, slow at first, but racing along to match the others' pace. When their combined efforts seemed unable to get any heavier, David jumped into the mix.As the sound got nice and heavy, Bekka began to rock back-and-forth onstage. In front of her, hundreds of metal-lovers began to jump and gyrate to their music. She matched their movements for a moment, enjoying the connection that was being made, before stepping over to the keyboard that had been set up behind her. Sliding her microphone into an attached cradle, she assumed her position and got ready. Right on cue, all the others stopped playing, throwing the auditorium into an abrupt silence. Before the crowd could react, however, Bekka's fingers began to work the keys, issuing a rhythm that was much softer and slower than what had been built up. The audience's violent thrash-dance calmed at that moment and they began to sway in response.Bekka smiled to herself.This is what she lived for.
In my opinion, not all famous people are loaded with tons of money.
It’s Not About How Much Money You Make, Instead It’s About What You Do With The Money That You Do Make.
When I Find Myself in A Depressed State, I Try and Write to Feel Better. However, If Writing Doesn't Work, Then You Can Almost Always Catch Me Watching Cartoons on Television, Like Scooby-Dooby-Do or The Munster’s. Unfortunately, I Am Watching These Programs Nearly Every Day.
Before You Begin Writing Your Book, Ask Yourself A Very Important Question: What Kind of Results Do I Plan To Receive From Writing This Book? If You Say Money, Then Don't Bother Even Writing The Book.
Don't Become An Artist, Actor, Muscian, Producer or Writer, Etc, For Only The Money. You May Be Very Dissapointed.
I Still Have So Much I Wish to Accomplish in My Life, Before I Finally leave This Godforsaken Place -- For Good.
A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain - a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space .... Therefore we must judge a weird tale not by the author's intent, or by the mere mechanics of the plot; but by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point... The one test of the really weird is simply this - whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim.
I stared down at my hands and saw the blood coat them, how warm and real something felt when it wasn’t just ink and stains. This was life and I was holding it in my hands. I drew my eyes back up and beneath the flickering streetlight and the throng of drunken cattle, I saw nothing else but the dead girl. Somebody out there had taken her life, her heart, and there I was with her warm, sticky blood. Feeling the most alive I’d felt in years.I had to find him. I just had to.
One’s options in this world are as vast as the horizon, which is technically a circle and thus infinitely broad. Yet we must choose each step we take with utmost caution, for the footprints we leave behind are as important as the path we will follow. They’re part of the same journey — our story.
Psychic change, as Todorov has recognized, subverted the genre in another way, by revoking the cultural taboos, the social censorship, that had prohibited the overt treatment of psychosexual themes, which then found covert expression in the supernatural tale. 'There is no need today to resort to the devil [or to posthumous reverie] in order to speak of excessive sexual desire, and none to resort to vampires in order to designate the attraction exerted by corpses: psychoanalysis, and the literature which is directly or indirectly inspired by it, deal with these matters in undisguised terms. The themes of fantastic literature have become, literally, the very themes of the psychological investigations of the last fifty years.
I would rather never make a penny on book sales and know that many had derived some fair pleasure from my writing, than to know that very few had ever taken a chance on my work. I certainly won't last forever, but I'd love to think that my imagination will continue to surface in the minds of others.
Nevertheless, the potential and actual importance of fantastic literature lies in such psychic links: what appears to be the result of an overweening imagination, boldly and arbitrarily defying the laws of time, space and ordered causality, is closely connected with, and structured by, the categories of the subconscious, the inner impulses of man's nature. At first glance the scope of fantastic literature, free as it is from the restrictions of natural law, appears to be unlimited. A closer look, however, will show that a few dominant themes and motifs constantly recur: deals with the Devil; returns from the grave for revenge or atonement; invisible creatures; vampires; werewolves; golems; animated puppets or automatons; witchcraft and sorcery; human organs operating as separate entities, and so on. Fantastic literature is a kind of fiction that always leads us back to ourselves, however exotic the presentation; and the objects and events, however bizarre they seem, are simply externalizations of inner psychic states. This may often be mere mummery, but on occasion it seems to touch the heart in its inmost depths and become great literature.
As has already been noted, fantastic literature developed at precisely the moment when genuine belief in the supernatural was on the wane, and when the sources provided by folklore could safely be used as literary material. It is almost a necessity, for the writer as well as for the reader of fantastic literature, that he or she should not believe in the literal truth of the beings and objects described, although the preferred mode of literary expression is a naive realism. Authors of fantastic literature are, with a few exceptions, not out to convert, but to set down a narrative story endowed with the consistency and conviction of inner reality only during the time of the reading: a game, sometimes a highly serious game, with anxiety and fright, horror and terror.
Many of the best fantastic stories begin in a leisurely way, set in commonplace surroundings, with exact, meticulous descriptions of an ordinary background, much as in a 'realistic' tale. Then a gradual - or it may be sometimes a shockingly abrupt - change becomes apparent, and the reader begins to realize that what is being described is alien to the world he is accustomed to, that something strange has crept or leapt into it. This strangeness changes the world permanently and fundamentally.
The fantastic postulates that there are forces in the outside world, and in our own natures, which we can neither know nor control, and these forces may even constitute the essence of our existence, beneath the comforting rational surface. The fantastic is, moreover, a product of human imagination, perhaps even an excess of imagination. It arises when laws thought to be absolute are transcended, in the borderland between life and death, the animate and the inanimate, the self and the world; it arises when the real turns into the unreal, and the solid presence into vision, dream or hallucination. The fantastic is the unexpected occurrence, the startling novelty which goes contrary to all our expectations of what is possible. The ego multiplies and splits, time and space are distorted.
In any event, whether a supernatural tale remains altogether fantastic or eventually modulates to the uncanny or the marvelous, the reader is faced with disconcerting ontological and perceptual problems.Indeed, the disorienting effect of the supernatural encounter in fiction seems to reflect some deeper disorientations in the culture at large.
Fantastic literature has been especially prominent in times of unrest, when the older values have been overthrown to make way for the new; it has often accompanied or predicted change, and served to shake up rational Complacency, challenging reason and reminding man of his darker nature. Its popularity has had its ups and downs, and it has always been the preserve of a small literary minority. As a natural challenger of classical values, it is rarely part of a culture's literary mainstream, expressing the spirit of the age; but it is an important dissenting voice, a reminder of the vast mysteries of existence, sometimes truly metaphysical in scope, but more often merely riddling.
(Washington) Irving was only the first of the writers of the American ghostly tale to recognize that the supernatural, exactly because its epistemological status is so difficult to determine, challenged the writer to invent a commensurately sophisticated narrative technique.
But the recurrent ambiguity of the American tale of the supernatural reveals both a fascination with the possibility of numinous experience and a perplexity about whether there was, in fact, anything numinous to be experienced. Writers often delighted in leading readers into, but not out of, the haunted dusk of the borderland.
We deal with so many nightmares on a regular basis. When I’m watching a horror movie, there’s a pattern, a sense of control in them. I’m just an observer, not having to deal with any of the repercussions. It’s a nice dream to think monsters play by the rules, that they’ve got a pattern you can unlock and follow. Real life’s messy, and the chaos leaves you devastated in the wake.
Nightmares are seldom a foreshadowing of real events, but always a showing of real fears.
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations.Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I can’t believe it.’ I whispered.‘You can’t let him lure you back in, Felicia. He’s wrong. He’s wrong!’ Vanian pleaded, I could feel the quiver of his magic, the wisps that were fighting against the iron burning into his wrists, I could feel the crackle as it fought in the air, against his emotions, against his pain. I shook my head, was about to speak but Adam grabbed him by the front of his shirt; as if a few more tears and shreds couldn’t go amiss. The tightness of his grip paled the Faerie’s cheeks, caused the blood to trickle down faster, dropping to the floor.‘My wife.’ He yelled, ‘She’s my wife, silverblood.’ With each growl of a syllable he accented it with a punch to Vanian’s face.I couldn’t take much more. I jumped over and pulled at Adam’s shoulders, fingertips driving into the nook of his collarbone, pressing down with as much as I had in me, anything to break his hold. He recoiled and rose his hand to me, at first I flinched but I stopped. He wouldn’t hurt me. He wouldn’t.
At that instant the hag's noisy breathing stopped and with it all other sound. Her eyes opened, showing only whites - milky ovals infinitely eerie in the dark root-tangle of her sharp features and stringy hair. The gray tip of her tongue traveled like a large maggot around her lips.
We go straight". I say again. "If we start making turns, we might not know what direction is what. If we keep going straight, at least we know how to get back to where we came from if we get into trouble. I know it's tiring, but walking uphill is a good thing-every step we take is a step closer to getting out." "I see shoulders droop, I hear heavy sighs. They don't want to agree with me; they want to go the easier way".
I've never been this dirty. I've never been this sweaty and disgusting. I've never been this afraid, this thirsty, this alone". "I haven't been a good leader, but--people are counting on me to take them to safety. I don't know if I'm twelve or twenty or if I'm twenty and I don't think age matters anymore-------There is a way out. I will find a way out.
I'm serious, Jim. You need to put this crap away. You walk into school on Monday talking to me, or anyone else, about the city's pesky troll problem, and you're not exactly going to get a lot of people saying, 'Gee, thanks for the warning.' It'll spread faster than mono. You think things are tough for us now? Jim, this will be the end. I'm sorry if you had a crazy nightmare. I really am. But I can't let you ruin our lives.
He paused in the hallway, sniffing the air. He scowled, sniffed some more. He pressed an intercom button on the wall. "Betty, I distinctly smell sewage. Could you get a plumber out here ASAP?" Several curly hairs fluttered in the air after he was gone. I clutched at the arm of the dentist chair. "This isn't a joke, Tub! I'm in trouble. We're all in trouble, the whole town, the whole world! You have no clue. You have no idea what kind of things we're dealing with here. There's a whole land of --
Is it...can we...is it safe?" Tub checked the lot but he seemed unconcerned. "Coach Lawrence nabbed him for practice. We live to fight another day, soldier." "No...I mean, the thing...is it...?" Tub frowned. "The thing. Hmmm. Can you be more specific? I clutched at the bumper and raised myself to unsteady feet. I patted the truck bed, taking solace in the cake of dust. It was real; I was not caught in a nightmare. I smeared the dust with my fingers and smelled it. "If you lick that, we're no longer friends," Tub said.
From Bralloc’s mounted position he could see over the heads of most of his men, but the thickening darkness of evening coupled with the storm made it impossible to see more than a few yards. He jerked at the reins and swung his horse around, pushing into the crowd. The large grey charger was nearly as mean-spirited as her owner; she snorted and bucked her head, then nipped, stomped and shoved her way through, giving every indication that she was enjoying herself. His men drew to either side, and the crawling excitement in Bralloc’s belly became an angry swarm of insects. The scout – the ballsy woman whose name he could never remember - stood several paces away. Bralloc paid her no heed, however, and the mixture of nervousness, relief and fear on her face didn’t even register in his mind: his eyes were locked on the captive at her side. His lips twitched into a smile and he licked them, like a ghoul eyeing a fresh corpse. He forced himself to move slowly, deliberately – sucking each individual drop of marrow from the bones of his anticipation..."-From 'Feral
Lilith came to Longinus in the night, as she often did, and the darkness of the cave was filled with the lustful sounds of their passionate couplings. Afterwards, as he lay back with his eyes closed, she ran her cool fingers playfully across his chest and whispered honeyed words in his ear.
A crush of bodies surrounded the featureless monument. The enraged dead clambered atop their ghastly kin. Caiaphas tucked his knees to his chest and hugged his legs tightly, staring at the scores of ragged, flailing hands as they scratched for purchase over the edge of the cylinder. Metal thrummed and thunder roared, filling his head. Now there were words within the deafening roar. “Straaaange,” they seemed to say. “Daaaace…” “Straaaangerrrr…” Then a quick, awful chant: “CAIAPHAS! FOREVER! CAI—” And with a piercing whistle it ended as his eardrums burst.
Hell, he now understood, went beyond simple torture. Hell inflicted agony with intermittent reprieves to maintain the hope of peace. Hell was not endless dark, but rare rays of sunlight to keep one’s eyes longing for their bright beauty. Hell forced hours of suffocation beneath the freezing water with times of release to keep one accustomed to the joy of breath, to let needful expectation be repeatedly stabbed by deprivation.
There were fat cats and skinny cats. The long-tailed and the bobbed. The daring young leapers, and the old windowsill sleepers. Balls of waddling fluff, smooth-coated prowlers, and hairless ones that looked fragile and wise. The tiger-striped, the ring-tailed, and the ones with matching coloured socks and mittens. There were tabbies and calicos. Manx and Persians. Siamese and Bombay. Ragdolls and Birmans. Maine Coons and Russian Blues. There were Snowshoes and Somalis, Tonkinese and Turkish, and many, many more. Brown and beige and orange and grey and black and white and silver cats, each with gleaming eyes of emerald, or sapphire, or amber. A rainbow of precious stones.
Cadavers and spirits are human refuse, and they are absurdly difficult to dispose of properly. When someone dies, a small gang of specialists is required to remove and inter the body in such a way that it can always be located precisely at any time while preventing it from ever appearing again.
Ask anyone what that means, what it means to see a miracle, and they will say that it's something impossible, but they mean that a miracle is something formerly believed to be impossible that turns out not to be, not to be impossible, in other words, but possible after all. If this were really true, then miracles would be the most ordinary things in the world, the most uninspiring things in the world, and what can one expect from people who have never been anything but ordinary and uninspired.
Thomas Randall and Christopher Golden not only are inventive writers but write in a sense to grab your attention cover to cover! I absolutely advise you to read,"The Waking" series. You'll love it if you are into the movie,"The- Grudge". I'm currently working on reading the second book of the trilogy.
When I was cooking I enjoyed a sense of being ‘out’ of myself. The action of dicing vegetables and warming oil made my hands tingle and my thoughts switch to a different hemisphere, right brain rather than left, or left rather than right. In my mind there were many rooms and, just as I still got lost in the labyrinth of corridors at college, I often found myself lost, with a sense of déjà vu, in some obscure part of my cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that plays a key role in perceptual awareness, attention and memory. Everything I had lived through or imagined or dreamed appeared to have been backed up on a video clip and then scattered among those alien rooms. I could stumble into any number of scenes, from the horrifically sexual, horror-movie sequences that were crude and painful, to visualizing Grandpa polishing his shoes.
I think that God that we have created and allowed to shape our culture through, essentially Christian theology is a pretty villainous creature. I think that one of the things that male patriarchal figure has done is, allowed under it's, his church, his wing, all kinds of corruptions and villainies to grow and fester. In the name of that God terrible wars have been waged, in the name of that God terrible sexism has been allowed to spread. There are children being born all across this world that don't have enough food to eat because that God, at least his church, tells the mothers and fathers that they must procreate at all costs, and to prevent procreation with a condom is in contravention with his laws. Now, I don't believe that God exists. I think that God is creation of men, by men, and for men. What has happened over the many centuries now, the better part of two thousand in fact, is that that God has been slowly and steadily accruing power. His church has been accruing power, and the men who run that church, and they are all men, are not about to give it up. If they give it up, they give up luxury, they give up comfort.
My power grew angry that it was confined to my petite frame and pulled against my taut skin. Growing bolder, it tore through my skin to lay flat against my outer edge. The glowing energy began to solidify against my flesh; it lengthened to mold itself to my frame and contained me in a transparent cocoon. I flexed my fingers against the waxy surface and began to panic. I was cut off from my coven now and could not feel their thoughts. I could see the panic on their faces as I fell onto my side to convulse.
Envy and respect are not the same things...Before I endow you with respect, I should find out whether your curiosity is intellectual or merely morbid. Not that those who gawk at train derailments are so different from those who conduct autopsies; both want, at some level, to know what has happened, and, by extension, what will happen. Did the liver fail because of the decedent's alcoholism or was some toxin administered? If the deliverer is found, he or she may be imprisoned or, in more honest times, hanged, and thus pose no further threat. Or for the gawker at the accident, espying loose parts not unlike his or her own parts strewn amid wreckage may lead to a sense of awe at death's power, or horror at life's fragility, either of which may be instructive in any number of ways.
With the sort of power these new processes granted them, the members of the brotherhood were in the perfect position to seize power. In any other country, a massive, bloody war would have ensued. Horrors would have stalked the land, unholy amalgamations of flesh would have fought on the fields, and the nights would have new, unspeakable terrors.Fortunately, this is Belgium we're talking about.
They want to control humankind through what they call selective breeding. The Nazis started it, but now the nwo are continuing it. See, the only way to control population is to first get it back down to manageable size. They're culling the herd, same way the game commission does when deer population gets out of control. That's why we've got diseases like cancer and aids. You telling me that we can put a little goddamn skateboard-looking robot on Mars and have it send pictures back, but we can't find a cure for cancer? There's a cure. You can bet on that, boys. There's a goddamn cure. They just won't release it because cancer helps cut down the population.
Ever since I arrived to a state of manhood, I have felt a sincere passion for liberty. The history of nations doomed to perpetual slavery, in consequence of yielding up to tyrants their natural born liberties, I read with a sort of philosophical horror; so that the first systematical and bloody attempt at Lexington, to enslave America, thoroughly electrified my mind, and fully determined me to take part with my country.
What I will add as an perfect example of a man who is passionate of his work, without wife, everything giving, no information about his life like mother, father or something like this... I will give as an example NightClawer. People often understand under this name some kind a horror, but unfortunately it's about a reporter and it's not horror. I will call it passion!
A lover finds his mistress asleep on a mossy bank; he wishes to catch a glimpse of her fair face without waking her. He steals softly over the grass, careful to make no sound; he pauses -- fancying she has stirred: he withdraws: not for worlds would he be seen. All is still: he again advances: he bends above her; a light veil rests on her features: he lifts it, bends lower; now his eyes anticipate the vision of beauty -- warm, and blooming, and lovely, in rest. How hurried was their first glance! But how they fix! How he starts! How he suddenly and vehemently clasps in both arms the form he dared not, a moment since, touch with his finger! How he calls aloud a name, and drops his burden, and gazes on it wildly! He thus grasps and cries, and gazes, because he no longer fears to waken by any sound he can utter -- by any movement he can make. He thought his love slept sweetly: he finds she is stone dead.I looked with timorous joy towards a stately house: I saw a blackened ruin.
When reading the history of the Jewish people, of their flight from slavery to death, of their exchange of tyrants, I must confess that my sympathies are all aroused in their behalf. They were cheated, deceived and abused. Their god was quick-tempered unreasonable, cruel, revengeful and dishonest. He was always promising but never performed. He wasted time in ceremony and childish detail, and in the exaggeration of what he had done. It is impossible for me to conceive of a character more utterly detestable than that of the Hebrew god. He had solemnly promised the Jews that he would take them from Egypt to a land flowing with milk and honey. He had led them to believe that in a little while their troubles would be over, and that they would soon in the land of Canaan, surrounded by their wives and little ones, forget the stripes and tears of Egypt. After promising the poor wanderers again and again that he would lead them in safety to the promised land of joy and plenty, this God, forgetting every promise, said to the wretches in his power:—'Your carcasses shall fall in this wilderness and your children shall wander until your carcasses be wasted.' This curse was the conclusion of the whole matter. Into this dust of death and night faded all the promises of God. Into this rottenness of wandering despair fell all the dreams of liberty and home. Millions of corpses were left to rot in the desert, and each one certified to the dishonesty of Jehovah. I cannot believe these things. They are so cruel and heartless, that my blood is chilled and my sense of justice shocked. A book that is equally abhorrent to my head and heart, cannot be accepted as a revelation from God.When we think of the poor Jews, destroyed, murdered, bitten by serpents, visited by plagues, decimated by famine, butchered by each, other, swallowed by the earth, frightened, cursed, starved, deceived, robbed and outraged, how thankful we should be that we are not the chosen people of God. No wonder that they longed for the slavery of Egypt, and remembered with sorrow the unhappy day when they exchanged masters. Compared with Jehovah, Pharaoh was a benefactor, and the tyranny of Egypt was freedom to those who suffered the liberty of God.While reading the Pentateuch, I am filled with indignation, pity and horror. Nothing can be sadder than the history of the starved and frightened wretches who wandered over the desolate crags and sands of wilderness and desert, the prey of famine, sword, and plague. Ignorant and superstitious to the last degree, governed by falsehood, plundered by hypocrisy, they were the sport of priests, and the food of fear. God was their greatest enemy, and death their only friend.It is impossible to conceive of a more thoroughly despicable, hateful, and arrogant being, than the Jewish god. He is without a redeeming feature. In the mythology of the world he has no parallel. He, only, is never touched by agony and tears. He delights only in blood and pain. Human affections are naught to him. He cares neither for love nor music, beauty nor joy. A false friend, an unjust judge, a braggart, hypocrite, and tyrant, sincere in hatred, jealous, vain, and revengeful, false in promise, honest in curse, suspicious, ignorant, and changeable, infamous and hideous:—such is the God of the Pentateuch.
In the course of my life I have had pre-pubescent ballerinas; emaciated duchesses, dolorous and forever tired, melomaniac and morphine-sodden; bankers' wives with eyes hollower than those of suburban streetwalkers; music-hall chorus girls who tip creosote into their Roederer when getting drunk...I have even had the awkward androgynes, the unsexed dishes of the day of the *tables d'hote* of Montmartre. Like any vulgar follower of fashion, like any member of the herd, I have made love to bony and improbably slender little girls, frightened and macabre, spiced with carbolic and peppered with chlorotic make-up.Like an imbecile, I have believed in the mouths of prey and sacrificial victims. Like a simpleton, I have believed in the large lewd eyes of a ragged heap of sickly little creatures: alcoholic and cynical shop girls and whores. The profundity of their eyes and the mystery of their mouths... the jewellers of some and the manicurists of others furnish them with *eaux de toilette*, with soaps and rouges. And Fanny the etheromaniac, rising every morning for a measured dose of cola and coca, does not put ether only on her handkerchief.It is all fakery and self-advertisement - *truquage and battage*, as their vile argot has it. Their phosphorescent rottenness, their emaciated fervour, their Lesbian blight, their shop-sign vices set up to arouse their clients, to excite the perversity of young and old men alike in the sickness of perverse tastes! All of it can sparkle and catch fire only at the hour when the gas is lit in the corridors of the music-halls and the crude nickel-plated decor of the bars. Beneath the cerise three-ply collars of the night-prowlers, as beneath the bulging silks of the cyclist, the whole seductive display of passionate pallor, of knowing depravity, of exhausted and sensual anaemia - all the charm of spicy flowers celebrated in the writings of Paul Bourget and Maurice Barres - is nothing but a role carefully learned and rehearsed a hundred times over. It is a chapter of the MANCHON DE FRANCINE read over and over again, swotted up and acted out by ingenious barnstormers, fully conscious of the squalid salacity of the male of the species, and knowledgeable in the means of starting up the broken-down engines of their customers.To think that I also have loved these maleficent and sick little beasts, these fake Primaveras, these discounted Jocondes, the whole hundred-franc stock-in-trade of Leonardos and Botticellis from the workshops of painters and the drinking-dens of aesthetes, these flowers mounted on a brass thread in Montparnasse and Levallois-Perret!And the odious and tiresome travesty - the corsetted torso slapped on top of heron's legs, painful to behold, the ugly features primed by boulevard boxes, the fake Dresden of Nina Grandiere retouched from a medicine bottle, complaining and spectral at the same time - of Mademoiselle Guilbert and her long black gloves!...Have I now had enough of the horror of this nightmare! How have I been able to tolerate it for so long?The fact is that I was then ignorant even of the nature of my sickness. It was latent in me, like a fire smouldering beneath the ashes. I have cherished it since... perhaps since early childhood, for it must always have been in me, although I did not know it!
Hardly had the light been extinguished, when a peculiar trembling beganto affect the netting under which the three children lay.It consisted of a multitude of dull scratches which produced a metallicsound, as if claws and teeth were gnawing at the copper wire. This wasaccompanied by all sorts of little piercing cries.The little five-year-old boy, on hearing this hubbub overhead, andchilled with terror, jogged his brother's elbow; but the elder brotherhad already shut his peepers, as Gavroche had ordered. Then the littleone, who could no longer control his terror, questioned Gavroche, but ina very low tone, and with bated breath:--"Sir?""Hey?" said Gavroche, who had just closed his eyes."What is that?""It's the rats," replied Gavroche.And he laid his head down on the mat again.The rats, in fact, who swarmed by thousands in the carcass of theelephant, and who were the living black spots which we have alreadymentioned, had been held in awe by the flame of the candle, so long asit had been lighted; but as soon as the cavern, which was the sameas their city, had returned to darkness, scenting what the goodstory-teller Perrault calls "fresh meat," they had hurled themselves inthrongs on Gavroche's tent, had climbed to the top of it, and had begunto bite the meshes as though seeking to pierce this new-fangled trap.Still the little one could not sleep."Sir?" he began again."Hey?" said Gavroche."What are rats?""They are mice."This explanation reassured the child a little. He had seen white mice inthe course of his life, and he was not afraid of them. Nevertheless, helifted up his voice once more."Sir?""Hey?" said Gavroche again."Why don't you have a cat?""I did have one," replied Gavroche, "I brought one here, but they ateher."This second explanation undid the work of the first, and the littlefellow began to tremble again.The dialogue between him and Gavroche began again for the fourth time:--"Monsieur?""Hey?""Who was it that was eaten?""The cat.""And who ate the cat?""The rats.""The mice?""Yes, the rats."The child, in consternation, dismayed at the thought of mice which atecats, pursued:--"Sir, would those mice eat us?""Wouldn't they just!" ejaculated Gavroche.The child's terror had reached its climax. But Gavroche added:--"Don't be afraid. They can't get in. And besides, I'm here! Here, catchhold of my hand. Hold your tongue and shut your peepers!
Eli snorted, her eyes narrowed.— Because I am like you.— What do you mean like me? I..Eli thrust her hand through the air as if she was holding a knife, said:— What are you looking at, idiot? Want to die, or something? — Stabbed the air with empty hand. — That what happens if you look at me.Oskar rubbed his lips together, dampening them.— What are you saying?— It's not me that's saying it. It's you. That was the first thing I heard you say. Down on the playground.Oskar remembered. The tree. The knife. How he had held up the blade of the knife like a mirror, seen Eli for the first time.
I have seen many cases like N. during the five years I've been in practice. I sometimes picture these unfortunates as men and women being pecked to death by predatory birds. The birds are invisible - at least until a psychiatrist who is good, or lucky, or both, sprays them with his version of Luminol and shines the right light on them - but they are nevertheless very real. The wonder is that so many OCDs manage to live productive lives, just the same. They work, they eat (often not enough or too much, it's true), they go to movies, they make love to their girlfriends and boyfriends, their wives and husbands . . . and all the time those birds are there, clinging to them and pecking away little bits of flesh.
great literature is literature that speaks to deep, fundamental human truths and experience in a way that is relatable to the reader and that may provoke engagement or facilitate insight into these truths and experiences. If these truths and experiences are about breaches of the normal, then surely horror has a place in literature, and in facts may proffer deep engagement with the most profound aspects of our existence. Sometimes only horror can say what needs to be said.
She suddenly felt herself gasping for air, as if she’d momentarily forgotten how to breathe. She rocked back in her chair and nearly fell over, then slumped against the green-covered table. The bowl fell from her fingers, shattering at her feet, broken glass scattering everywhere.
Strength and victory... What he would never praise himself for, but whose loss was his most obsessive fear.
When he unleashes on her everything falls together. Like a crick in the neck snapped into place, the boy's brain pops and is put right. It is a beautiful undoing, a beautiful becoming. He doesn't stop to think about it when the punches follow her down to the ground. He doesn't stop to notice when she goes still or when the pool of blood under her head pillows out into a great, liquid heart. He doesn't stop until he's pulled off her and he doesn't start to think again until that night, when he's back at home. For hours and hours his brain stays beautifully popped into place.
Through the red haze of my blood I see a strange expression on his face. His eyes have come alive, and I don't like it at all. He's getting off on this now in a way he wasn't before. My first thought is that my honesty is feeding him in a bad, bad way and my second thought is not to question my gut."These are going to be very good days," he says to me.
He looks up and up and up to get to her face. His mama's a tall lady, and he's only seven. He's overwhelmed by red. Red heels, red nails, red lips, red hair, red eyes. So help him, the boy has always thought his mama's copper-colored eyes damn near shined red. He looks into those eyes and knows she's come home funny.
I shut up. I don't fight, I don't scream. Shame rides alongside my terror. But somewhere deep, deep inside, I hear Mom tell me to trust my gut. My gut tells me I am blind and I am lost, and if I fought for freedom now, it would end in my death. I listen to my gut. Because I want to live.
Stephen King once wrote, “Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there’s little fun to be had in explanations; they’re antithetical to the poetry of fear.” In a horror story, the victim keeps asking why - but there can be no explanation, and there shouldn’t be one. The unanswered mystery is what stays with us the longest, and it’s what we’ll remember in the end.
You can’t blame yourself for what Socrates did. Those birds came because he wanted them to come, at least a part of him did. The pissed off part. Let that roll around in your brain for a while.”Jamie considered this. “No, Eddie. The hurt part, that’s what did it.”The crow shrieked again. It seemed louder, and that meant it was closer. Or maybe it was another crow, maybe several. Jamie and Eddie looked toward the sky, listening to the screams. Jamie spoke first.“We can’t let it happen again. We may be the only ones who know the truth about what Socrates can do.” “That thought probably has occurred to Socrates too.
A long time ago, there was a little girl called Mary. Now Mary, she was warned several times not to go to her neighbor’s house. Her neighbor was a grandmother. But Mary hardly listened, so she snuck off one night to spy on her. She tried the front door first, and it creaked open. Then suddenly, she heard a squeaking noise upstairs. She followed it – climbed up the wooden stairs where half of it was already rotten. She heard the squeaking noise again. It was coming from the library. She opened the door and hid behind a couch. She peered out, and she saw the grandmother.” Dave paused to drain his cup of coffee before continuing. My heart thudded so loudly, I thought that everyone could hear it. “So Mary gasped in disbelief as she heard the squeaking noise again, and the grandmother’s rocking chair was not moving at all. Then the grandmother opened her eyes and looked directly at her, holding her gaze steadily and sharply, and then suddenly, BOO!
As for my being a horror writer, I actually think horror is a very conservative genre. The horror comes when you do something wrong--when you challenge religion or society or nature--and then you must pay. I personally consider myself a radical, but I publish conservative material. That's quite a paradox.
Have a look around, my pretty, we are surrounded by Death in all forms – just the two of us are still alive –
I suppose the best way to tell the story is simply to narrate it, without an effort to carry belief. The thing did not require belief. It was not a feeling of horror in one's bones, or a misty outline, or anything that needed to be given actuality by an act of faith. It was as solid as a wardrobe. You don't have to believe in wardrobes. They are there, with corners. (The Troll)
The discovery of the horror tale at an early age was fortuitous for me. This sort of tale serves, in many ways, the very same purpose as fairy tales did in our childhood. It operates as a theater of the mind in which internal conflicts are played out. In these tales we can parade the most reprehensible aspects of our being: cannibalism, incest, parricide. It allows us to discuss our anxieties and even to contemplate the experience of death in absolute safety.And again, like a fairy tale, horror can serve as a liberating or repressive social tool, and it is always an accurate reflection of the social climate of its time and the place where it gets birthed.
It was not Christianity which freed the slave: Christianity accepted slavery; Christian ministers defended it; Christian merchants trafficked in human flesh and blood, and drew their profits from the unspeakable horrors of the middle passage. Christian slaveholders treated their slaves as they did the cattle in their fields: they worked them, scourged them, mated them , parted them, and sold them at will. Abolition came with the decline in religious belief, and largely through the efforts of those who were denounced as heretics.
I’ve seen how cigarettes went from being advertised in every type of media to being something found to be deadly… they can’t kill me no matter how many of them I smoke but I’ve seen humans die from smoking them… if I were you I would stop smoking them.”“Why should I? You smoke ‘em all the time, you chain-smoke cigarettes,” Mandy pointed out.“Yeah, I started doing that back in the Sixties… for reasons you likely saw on those VHS tapes… but I’m not a person, I’m Pollution, things like that aren’t dangerous to me but they are to you,” Alecto told her. “It’s not a good idea.
No. No… No!’ the fear ebbed my voice, cut through me like a knife. I ran, bare feet slipping and sliding over the floorboards. I turned the corner and headed for the backdoor.Run. Run. I must run.As soon as I reached the backdoor in the kitchen, pulling the barn door from the hinges, I felt his gaze upon me. Cinders and kindling crunched at my feet; what had once been my lovely mahogany kitchen furniture was now little more than firewood. My crockery and china splintered in shards and as I turned to face him, I felt them dig into my skin, cut me with every shiver that bolted through my frame.‘You wanted Hemlock House. You have, Hemlock House.’ His voice was dark, cruel and yet hauntingly light. As if cooing, whispering to a newborn. He was lounging against the countertop as if waiting for breakfast, as if waiting for something so meaningless.
I’m haunted. We all are, I guess. We’re parentless, friendless, unloved, abandoned. The spirits of our deceased emotional anchors and proofs of existence will follow and demean us until we too roam a quiet lifeless world alongside them — unable to speak — our histories written in beach sand.
This vacillation between assertion and denial in discussions about organised abuse can be understood as functional, in that it serves to contain the traumatic kernel at the heart of allegations of organised abuse. In his influential ‘just world’ theory, Lerner (1980) argued that emotional wellbeing is predicated on the assumption that the world is an orderly, predictable and just place in which people get what they deserve. Whilst such assumptions are objectively false, Lerner argued that individuals have considerable investment in maintaining them since they are conducive to feelings of self—efficacy and trust in others. When they encounter evidence contradicting the view that the world is just, individuals are motivated to defend this belief either by helping the victim (and thus restoring a sense of justice) or by persuading themselves that no injustice has occurred. Lerner (1980) focused on the ways in which the ‘just world’ fallacy motivates victim-blaming, but there are other defences available to bystanders who seek to dispel troubling knowledge. Organised abuse highlights the severity of sexual violence in the lives of some children and the desire of some adults to inflict considerable, and sometimes irreversible, harm upon the powerless. Such knowledge is so toxic to common presumptions about the orderly nature of society, and the generally benevolent motivations of others, that it seems as though a defensive scaffold of disbelief, minimisation and scorn has been erected to inhibit a full understanding of organised abuse. Despite these efforts, there has been a recent resurgence of interest in organised abuse and particularly ritualistic abuse (eg Sachs and Galton 2008, Epstein et al. 2011, Miller 2012).
Some readers may find it a curious or even unscientific endeavour to craft a criminological model of organised abuse based on the testimony of survivors. One of the standard objections to qualitative research is that participants may lie or fantasise in interview, it has been suggested that adults who report severe child sexual abuse are particularly prone to such confabulation. Whilst all forms of research, whether qualitative or quantitative, may be impacted upon by memory error or false reporting. there is no evidence that qualitative research is particularly vulnerable to this, nor is there any evidence that a fantasy— or lie—prone individual would be particularly likely to volunteer for research into child sexual abuse. Research has consistently found that child abuse histories, including severe and sadistic abuse, are accurate and can be corroborated (Ross 2009, Otnow et al. 1997, Chu et al. 1999). Survivors of child abuse may struggle with amnesia and other forms of memory disturbance but the notion that they are particularly prone to suggestion and confabulation has yet to find a scientific basis. It is interesting to note that questions about the veracity of eyewitness evidence appear to be asked far more frequently in relation to sexual abuse and rape than in relation to other crimes. The research on which this book is based has been conducted with an ethical commitment to taking the lives and voices of survivors of organised abuse seriously.
You want to know how to stop this killer? Forgive yourself, and he’lldisappear from your life forever.”“Thanks. I’ll be sure to do that.”And I know:1. This is almost the same conversation I’ve had with myself many timesbefore.2. Gordon’s only trying to help.But it doesn’t matter.I:1. Say, “See you later.”2. Step outside.3. Close the door.I don’t want to, really. I want to go back inside and believe Gordon’s words,like a child believing in a fairy tale, and I want to escape this nightmare forever.But I can’t.I realize now that it’s easy to tell the difference between a real problem andan imaginary one.It’s just the terror of facing the truth that’s hard.
Betty Knot was sitting on the porch now with her old mongrel dog. Both of them fast and peacefully asleep in the shade, almost comically so, the widow leaning in her rocker with her mouth open wide and the old dog sprawled at her feet. And seeing them there made him smile and then unexpectedly saddened him with a sudden forceful clarity. It was as though he had looked behind the scene on the porch across the street into some terrible scene in the future. Because they each were all the other had in the world by way of comfort and it was possible for him to understand in that moment the cruel eventuality that was blooming there. They were both so damn old. He sensed a sort of fate about them and sensed too that it would descend upon them soon, that soon either the woman would lose the dog or the dog would lose the woman and they had been together since the dog was a pup. When death came to one the other would be left alone, no familiar hand to pat the dog or cool wet nose to nuzzle the hand, and there would be no consoling either dog or woman, something fragile lost forever in some awful rending.
She remembers blood.A fine mist which goes deep into her lungs, over her skin and through the air. She remembers a desert at dusk. The sky indigo blue and the fire bright, so bright that she can see everything. Near the fire, in the night, all she knows is chaos wrapped in crimson. All is death and nightmare with a single solitary dancer who smiles cruelly as he moves. He is power and darkness. He is man and beast, silver coin eyes and that face, those claws and the agony of loss. Time stretches wide; seconds like vast eons swallow up her world. Vince is dead, his mother, his brother and her small son ripped apart and gushing as he/it moves. She is screaming, a howl of agony beyond words, primal and wordless. Still he moves, faster than air, faster than she could ever be. Blood drips from her face as she grunts, running with her lungs on fire and her last remaining hope wrapped in her arms.
…I’m afraid of what the digital age will do to the world, to the things we think are important… it’s almost like people want to believe in some illusion that they’re robots and forget altogether that they’re real, living people… but everything these days is disposable, even people themselves, and that’s why I’m afraid for the world,” Mandy confessed, looking depressed and worried.“So am I… but I’ll still watch all of it as the world dooms itself, because I want to see how it ends, and whether or not they’ll be intelligent enough to forget all of this digital illusion afterwards,” Alecto explained. “I’m sure that they’ll be able to realize how wrong it all is… even though the idiots outnumber most people these days, there are still enough intelligent people to fight against it.
The man raised the violin under his chin, placed the bow across the strings, and closed his eyes. For a moment his lips moved, silently, as if in prayer. Then, with sure, steady movements, he began to play. The song was like nothing Abbey had heard anywhere else. The notes were clear, sweet and perfect, with a purity of tone that not one violin in ten thousand could produce. But the song was more than that. The song was pain, and loss, and sorrow, an anthem of unrelenting grief for which no words could be sufficient. In its strains Abbey heard the cry of the mother clutching her lifeless child; of the young woman whose husband never returned from war; of the father watching his son die of cancer; of the old man weeping at his wife's grave. It was the wordless cry of every man, woman and child who had ever shaken a fist at the uncaring universe, every stricken heart that had demanded an answer to the question, “Why?”, and was left unsatisfied.When the song finally, mercifully ended, not a dry eye remained in the darkened hall. The shades had moved in among the mortals, unseen by all but Abbey herself, and crowded close to the stage, heedless of all but the thing that called to them. Many of the mortals in the audience were sobbing openly. Those newcomers who still retained any sense of their surroundings were staring up at the man, their eyes wide with awe and a silent plea for understa
So full. Full of lobster meat and the sadness of the lobster meat. Full of the feeling of having cracked hundreds upon hundreds of precious shells. Full of the sound and the sight of destruction, the lobsters dead in a pile, some of them with lipstick marks on their empty husks. Their voices piled up on one another. I felt a whispering coming from deep within my belly, the voices not yet at rest, and they said in a tone sympathetic and unsympathetic at the same time, Next Next Next. 'Well,' I said, 'what do we do next?' 'Lobster dinner?' he asked, chuckling a little as if I ought to be chuckling with him as well.
Horror is a shock, a time of utter blindness. Horror lacks every hint of beauty. All we can see is the piercing light of an unknown event awaiting us. Sadness, on the other hand, assumes we are in the know... The light of horror thus lost its harshness, and the world was bathed in a gentle, bluish light that actually beautified it.
I would like to turn in my skin and change it for a new epidermis. It feels as if I will never be able to rinse the sadness from my soul. All the while I am cognizant of the fact that I am trying to purge myself of my feelings. I start with my shell. I am in the water at least an hour. I immerse my head. My long, thick mane is so heavy, but I feel the lightness of my hair as it floats. I can hear my heart beating in my ears. I wonder what would happen if I died in this water. I drain the bathtub and refill it. I scrub my skin until it stings. I still don't feel clean. I close my eyes.I switch to lying on my back. I gaze at the heavens through the skylight on the ceiling above the tub. I am thinking about Isabella. I am struck by the feeling of uncleanness that I have been immersed in that day. I would imagine that this child feels unclean always, in body and in mind. I am hoping that the sheets in her foster home are snow white and fragrant. I am hoping that she felt safe. I am worried that she is so deeply alone and frightened. I know somewhere deep inside of me that the decisions and choices I made today were sound. I am praying, with eyes glued to the stars, that I will not awaken in the night with my heart beating out of my chest; that I will not be haunted by Francis's diseased body; that I will not perseverate on ever nuance of my day - the smells, the cockroaches, the piercing torment of Isabella's unseeing eye, her father's sore-ridden penis penetrating her tiny body. Yet in many ways this is an experience I hope never to forget. The pearls. I must not forget the pearls that I have promised her.
It’s often said that cowards make the best torturers. Cowards have good imaginations, imaginations that torment them with all the worst stuff of nightmare, all the horrors that could befall them. This provides an excellent arsenal when it comes to inflicting misery on others. And their final qualification is that they understand the fears of their victim better than the victim does himself.
When common objects in this way be come charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance; and these bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquerie of appearance that lent to them somehow the aspect of purposeful and living creatures. Their very ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant and hostile to us.
Paranoia. The more you think of an imaginary problem, the more you feel as though it’s real –
The marine underworld stretched below the ship and embodied many secrets. The disappearance of Olga had become one of the mysteries that would remain with Stefania and her family. The disappearance of her baby sister and sudden departure from her home had taught the ten-year-old that life was filled with uncertainties. But she was willing to forget that for a little while.She jumped down from the barrel and headed toward Liam, Felix, and the other shipmates. They would sing shanties and talk of the constellations, the sea, its creatures, and the legends. It would get her through another night.La Suerte was the only stability for her passengers with the infinite unknown all around them. The waters of the sea, the world below the surface, and the sky that stretched beyond the horizon was a representation of the limitless possibilities and dangers awaiting those aboard.
Today, acknowledgement of the prevalence and harms of child sexual abuse is counterbalanced with cautionary tales about children and women who, under pressure from social workers and therapists, produce false allegations of ‘paedophile rings’, ‘cult abuse’ and ‘ritual abuse’. Child protection investigations or legal cases involving allegations of organised child sexual abuse are regularly invoked to illustrate the dangers of ‘false memories’, ‘moral panic’ and ‘community hysteria’. These cautionary tales effectively delimit the bounds of acceptable knowledge in relation to sexual abuse. They are circulated by those who locate themselves firmly within those bounds, characterising those beyond as ideologues and conspiracy theorists. However firmly these boundaries have been drawn, they have been persistently transgressed by substantiated disclosures of organised abuse that have led to child protection interventions and prosecutions. Throughout the 1990s, in a sustained effort to redraw these boundaries, investigations and prosecutions for organised abuse were widely labelled ‘miscarriages of justice’ and workers and therapists confronted with incidents of organised abuse were accused of fabricating or exaggerating the available evidence. These accusations have faded over time as evidence of organised abuse has accumulated, while investigatory procedures have become more standardised and less vulnerable to discrediting attacks. However, as the opening quotes to this introduction illustrate, the contemporary situation in relation to organised abuse is one of considerable ambiguity in which journalists and academics claim that organised abuse is a discredited ‘moral panic’ even as cases are being investigated and prosecuted.
Allegations of multi-perpetrator and multi-victim sexual abuse emerged to public awareness in the early 1980s contemporaneously with the denials of the accused and their supporters. Multi-perpetrator sexual offences are typically more sadistic than solo offences and organised sexual abuse is no exception. Adults and children with histories of organised abuse have described lives marked by torturous and sometimes ritualistic sexual abuse arranged by family members and other care-givers and authority figures. It is widely acknowledged, at least in theory, that sexual abuse can take severe forms, but when disclosures of such abuse occur, they are routinely subject to contestation and challenge. People accused of organised, sadistic or ritualistic abuse have protested that their accusers are liars and fantasists, or else innocents led astray by overly zealous investigators. This was an argument that many journalists and academics have found more convincing than the testimony of alleged victims.
There are two types of memory frequently experienced by individuals who have had overwhelming trauma that has been suppressed psychologically or chemically. The first is general memory, experienced as an adult, in which there is a natural recall of early events. The other is the memory that is often associated with post traumatic stress syndrome (PTSS). The person suddenly smells, sees and feels as though he or she is actually living the event that took place months or years earlier.Many soldiers who survived horrifying combat experiences have PTSS. This has frequently been discussed in terms of Vietnam veterans who suddenly mentally find themselves in the jungle, hiding from the enemy or assaulting people they see as a threat. The fact that they have not been in Vietnam for decades and that they are experiencing the flashbacks in shopping malls, at home or at work does not change what they are mentally reliving. But PTSS has existed for centuries and has affected men, women and children in the midst of all wars, horrifying natural disasters and other traumatic experiences. This includes physical and sexual abuse when growing up.the PTSS Cheryl was experiencing more and more frequently, in which she found herself seeing, feeling and re-experiencing events from her childhood and adolescence had become overwhelming. She knew she needed to get help.
I was caged within a four dimensional cube that eclipsed the world around me in an icy mist. I screamed; begging someone, anyone to hear my pleas, but my voice had been extinguished and left me with a slight wheeze from what little oxygen I had. I could glimpse the field of energy as it shrank through the safety of my circle to envelop me in a blazing grip. I was alone; unbearably separated from my haven.
Imagine being just strong enough to remember what life was like, feeling things, your heartbeat, the world around you. And imagine you couldn’t have it anymore, couldn’t even properly remember it, but there was just enough that some deep part of you knew what you were missing. Wouldn’t you do anything to get it back, if it was right there for the taking? Wouldn’t you be willing to kill for it?
For a moment or two before the spell took effect, he was aware of all the sounds around him: rain splashing on metal and leather, and running down canvas; horses shuffling and snorting; Englishmen singing and Scotsmen playing bagpipes; two Welsh soldiers arguing over the proper interpretation of a Bible passage; the Scottish captain, John Kincaid, entertaining the American savages and teaching them to drink tea (presumably with the idea that once a man had learnt to drink tea, the other habits and qualities that make up a Briton would naturally follow).Then silence. Men and horses began to disappear, few by few at first, and then more quickly – hundreds, thousands of them vanishing from sight. Great gaps appeared among the close-packed soldiers. A little further to the east an entire regiment was gone, leaving a hole the size of Hanover-square. Where, moments before, all had been life, conversation and activity, there was now nothing but the rain and the twilight and the waving stalks of rye. Strange wiped his mouth because he felt sick.
All of us had problems, it seemed, whose sources were untraceable, crossing over one another like the trajectories of countless raindrops in a storm, blending to create a fog of delusion and counter-delusion. Powerful forces and connections were undoubtedly at play, yet they seemed to have no faces and no names, and it was anybody's guess what we - a crowd of deluded no-talents - could have possibly done to offend them. We had been caught up in a season of hideous magic from which nothing could offer us deliverance.("Gas Station Carnivals")
The first handkerchief was tied to a second, yellow handkerchief. He fed both through the window and kept pulling. Attached to it was a red one. Then a green one. “Go away, you goddamn clown!” Jenny ordered. But Benny the Clown continued to pull out handkerchief after handkerchief. Five…ten…fifteen…then… That’s not a handkerchief.
Then, idly scratching his nose, he walks to the bookcase in the living room and stoops before a set of drab brown Victorian volumes gathering dust on the second shelf from the bottom.How amusing, he thinks, as he withdraws one of them-amusing that a key to dark and ancient rites should survive in such innocuous-looking form.A young fool like Freirs would probably refuse to believe it. Like the rest of his doomed kind, he'd probably expect such lore to be found only in ancient leather-bound tomes with gothic lettering and portentously sinister titles. He'd search for it in mysterious old trunks and private vaults, in the "restricted" sections of libraries, in intricately carved wood chests with secret compartments.But there are no real secrets, the Old One knows. Secrets are ultimately too hard to conceal. The keys to the rites that will transform the world are neither hidden nor rare nor expensive. They are available to anyone. You can find them on the paperback racks or in any second-hand bookshop.
Outside the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness where night is coming on, the sun declining in ghastly blood-streaked splendour like a public execution across, it would seem, half a continent, where live only bears and shooting stars and the wolves who lap congealing ice from water that holds within it the entire sky. All white with snow as if under dustsheets, as if laid away eternally as soon as brought back from the shop, never to be used or touched. Horrors! And, as on a cyclorama, this unnatural spectacle rolls past at twenty-odd miles an hour in a tidy frame of lace curtains only a little the worse for soot and drapes of a heavy velvet of dark, dusty blue.
If we were to gain God's perspective, even for a moment, and were to look at the way we go through life accumulating and hoarding and displaying our things, we would have the same feelings of horror and pity that any sane person has when he views people in an asylum endlessly beating their heads against the wall.
Her world fragmented into dozens of sharp, cutting shards, shedding the salty blood and saltier tears that ringed the bitter cocktail of her despair. She was caterpillar and butterfly, both, caught in a cocoon of raw nerves and open sores; she was insanity, wrapped up in the thin, transient wrappings of a temporary lucidity; and she was afraid, because an innate desire lay in the bottom reaches of her psyche for the very poison that was killing her.
Confidence is what we get when we take fear, face it and replace it.
We know—more from the faces immortalized on a handful of photographs than from the words of survivors—that the women and men who experienced that moment in Hiroshima believed they had encountered the beginning of the end of the world. There will never be enough future to prove them wrong.
....Oh, what???.... Can you repeat... okay... I will say I'm against every your though (What can yo do about that?) (Oh, oh you poor little kid, oh, oh you poor little man you can't do anything here is the story)...Once upon a time there was two women and one man,... they weren't let to go outside... they both were married to the same man... it was said to them "If They go outside they won't come back", but the truth was who goes outside he will be slaughtered, every finger one by one will be cutted, then little pushing inside a knife in the body, a lot of blood goes outside in the same time the other woman also get punished if the one get's. She is punished to drink the other woman blood, when this process is going again and again the man removes the clothes and he start jerk off on their faces..., (Yeah I know you will try to kill him, but you can't), you are bound with metal and rope handcuffs your legs and your arms. On your head you have a mask, if you move it detectes and it explodes when it explodes your face goes ugly from ugly you goes disable you are dead because this mask kills the brain... The other woman is next to a trap which detectes if she goes out of one zone, it goes like this if there is so much pressure it won't happen this, but if there isn't it goes very bad... The man is above few meters and he jerkoff on their faces and he does what he wants... and so on and so on... YOu can't change it, once you are the killer (Very bad for you, ...man), once you are the victim wow that's very bad I few awful if I was a victim somebody will jerk off on my face and I'm not a gay....! If this happen remind me to kill my self, I can't live with the thought that I'm a gay...
he night beyond the window was still, mordant white snow, punctuated only by the eerie dark of the trees, gumshoeing their way along the edge of the path outside. Their skeletal fingers clawed up at the stars, held down by an insidious, weightless lacing of snowflakes. I gazed idly at the moon and wondered if it truly had the power to sway the will of men.
Neely McIntire," I said, clamping a sweaty hand behind her neck. "Friendship be damned!" Hayden yanked me forward. I had time to make a very girly sound before his lips began to move furiously over mine. His touch left behind the tingle of cinnamon gum. One of his hands slowly slid down and pressed into the small of my back. For a second, I thought the sun had washed over me. But this heat cuddled around me, pushing its way through my clothes. "Stmmmmp," I tried to say around his lips. My knees wobbled as he wound his fingers into the curls at my neck, holding my face firmly against his. "No." The hot pressure of his hand increased. A rumbling protest came from his throat when I dug my nails into his collarbones. "Lemme go," I managed to gasp when he kissed the corner of my mouth. "No," he whispered. His voice became a yielding puff of smoke. It slipped into my ears and coaxed something familiar from the broken depths. The urge to fight drained away. This wisp of memory warmed me, relaxed tensed muscles, but tightened other places. My fists uncurled and gripped his shoulders. "Why are you doing this?" "I want you to come back to me, Neely," he said, wrapping his arms around my waist to press our hips together. Fiery lips caressed my face and neck. "I know you're in there somewhere. Come back, come back, come back," he whispered between kisses.
Do you know why the lotus is one of my favorite flowers?" I cocked my head to one side so I could see his expression. He shook his head. "This beautiful flower lives in the most vile, muddy water of swamps and bogs," I said and rubbed the smooth metal of the pendant between my fingers. He frowned. "No, seriously... the grosser the environment, the better," I said. "So let me get this straight. You like a flower that lives in disgusting places?" One of his eyebrows rose. "That ain't right." "No, I love this flower," I corrected. He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye, "Seriously?" "What?" You don't believe me?" "Sure, I believe you. It's just weird." "I'll tell you why, but only if you promise not to laugh," I said. He nodded. Taking a cleansing breath, I rested my head against the seat, closed my eyes, and took that scary first step. "This flower stays in the mud and muck all night long." I peeked at him without moving my head. His face had become set in the smooth lines of one who listens intently. "Then, at sunrise, it climbs toward the light and opens into a pristine bloom. After the sun goes down, the bloom sinks into the mire. Even though it spends the whole night underwater, the flower emerges every morning as beautiful as the day before." Smiling, I swiveled in my seat to face him. "I love this flower because it reminds me that we get second chances every day, no matter what muck life drags us through.
Come in." The kid turned and walked toward the house. "I'll help you if I can." He paused, his brown eyes turned toward Stacy who now stood open-mouthed. "But you'll have to do something for me in return." I frowned. "Like what?" "Hide me from my mother," he said. His eyes were shiny with fresh tears. I snorted. "Do you mean your mother, the beauty queen?" "No," he said softly. His face suddenly seemed older. "I mean my mother, the monster.
Oh my God," Mrs. McIntire screamed. She'd dropped to her knees, the dark sand and water soaking into her jeans. "Neely!" Mr. McIntire held his wife while she screeched her daughter's name over and over. "She's going to be fine, sweetie," he kept saying. I really wanted to believe him. "Is she on the other side?" I paced the shore. I couldn't see anything except a piece of driftwood lying at the water's edge. "I don't see her." Mr. McIntire didn't answer, only pointed across the rolling water. A log had washed up on the shore. It looked like maybe the water had rubbed all the bark off and left a naked, saturated trunk behind. "Tell me where she is." Aggravated, I stared until my eyes blurred with stress. "All I see is a damn log." "Son," Sheriff Mills said from behind me. "That ain't a log.
Calling a book "Young Adult" is just a fancy way of saying the book is censored. People used to say they like to read books about romance, true crime, comedy, horror or science fiction. But these days people simply say they like to read "Young Adult" books. As if that were a topic. But that's the thing: Young Adult is not a topic, it's a level of censorship. Saying "I like Young Adult books" is just another way of saying "I like books that have been dumbed down for children. I like books with no big words and no difficult abstract concepts. Nothing that will strain my brain." People like to brag that they used to start reading at an early age, as if that were a badge of honor, a sign of intelligence. Nobody brags about when they started to watch TV. But books are being dumbed down so much these days, it's really not a sign of great intelligence when you're a grown up and you struggle your way through Green Eggs and Ham.
So in that sense, I and my fellow horror writers are absorbing and defusing all your fears and anxieties and insecurities and taking them upon ourselves. We’re sitting in the darkness beyond the flickering warmth of your fire, cackling into our caldrons and spitting out spider webs of words, all the time sucking the sickness from your minds and spewing it out into the night.
Having money is about handling it the correct way. In my lifetime, I've both lost and made millions.
You only fail in life when you decide to give up.
I am absolutely convinced without any uncertainty that the old adage, History Repeats Itself is a valid assertion.
Some of The Best Writers in The World Died Penniless.
Believe None of What You Hear, And Only Half of What You See.
When Trying To Achieve Your Dreams, Never Let Anyone or Anything Stand in Your Way
Never Take Life For Granted.
There Is A Fine Line Between A Man of God And One Who Serves The Devil.
You Never Have To Worry About Forgetting Anything, If You Just Tell The Truth.
No matter what I tried to do or become in life, the macabre followed me everywhere I went: In my house, in my head, in my nightmares, on the roughest streets, in the most desolate corn fields, to even areas where many mortals refuse to go.” Until finally one day it dawned on me, and then it all clicked – why fight it.
You Never Have To Worry About Anything, If You Just Tell The Truth.
Meeting writers is usually disappointing, at best. Writers who write sexy thrillers aren't necessarily sexy or thrilling in person. Children's book writers might look more like accountants, or axe murderers for that matter. Horror writers are very rarely scary looking, although they are frequently good cooks.
Darkness is a defining characteristic of Rotters. But it’s worthy to remember that darkness is just that—it’s dark—and what is being concealed in the dark is not just the horrible and fearsome, it’s also the inspirational and moving. Horror means nothing without happiness; dark means nothing without light. Rotters may make you feel scared, but hopefully it will also make you simply feel. It’s that kind of book, or at least I hope it is.
Mike couldn’t believe that Mr. Mackey’s secret tragedy was connected to his store, and no one had ever told him.“Do you think he’d ever take it back?” “Why would he? His son was never found, and he still blames your dad for it. I think it’s his way of making himself feel better about the accident. He thinks horror movies are evil or something.” “That’s stupid. Most kids are more scared of him than they are of horror movies,” Mike said, “He shouldn’t blame my dad.” “He thinks he’s protecting the kids,” Tim said, rolling his eyes. “Well, if he is trying to save kids, why is he so mean to us? Everyone’s afraid of him. Even Jack.” “I don’t know. I guess he’s just a cranky old man. Don’t take it personally. He’s had it rough. He has to stand on that playground everyday knowing that just over that fence, his son’s body is down there somewhere.” “Then why doesn’t he teach at another school?” “I don’t know, bud. Sometimes people just like to torture themselves.” - Saving Hascal's Horrors
Don’t tell Mom, but I think my little emergency last night was a sign. And I was thinking of you when it happened. So, I’m worried that this is a prediction about you. Do you have something big planned? Something dangerous that you’re going to do?” Mike looked away. He didn’t want to lie to her but he also couldn’t tell her his plan. “Well, whatever it is, don’t do it, okay? You’re going to get the feeling soon too. I know it,” she yawned, “It feels like it’s a long way off, but I’ve never had this strong a reaction before. And now that I’m stuck in bed, I can’t help you…or stop you. So please, whatever you’re doing, let it go, okay? Especially if it’s about the shop. Just let me handle it.” “I’ll be careful,” he said. “Huh?” she yawned again. He didn’t answer. Her eyelids grew heavy until they closed all the way. Mike lifted the sheet that was turned down from the bed and draped it over her. Then, he left the room, closing the door behind him. - Saving Hascal's Horrors
It was a sordid scene. Philip leaned over the rail, staring down, and he ceased to hear the music. They danced furiously. They danced round the room, slowly, talking very little, with all their attention given to the dance. The room was hot, and their faces shone with sweat. It seemed to Philip that they had thrown off the guard which people wear on their expression, the homage to convention, and he saw them now as they really were. In that moment of abandon they were strangely animal: some were foxy and some were wolflike; and others had the long, foolish face of sheep. Their skins were sallow from the unhealthy life the led and the poor food they ate. Their features were blunted by mean interests, and their little eyes were shifty and cunning. There was nothing of nobility in their bearing, and you felt that for all of them life was a long succession of petty concerns and sordid thoughts. The air was heavy with the musty smell of humanity. But they danced furiously as though impelled by some strange power within them, and it seemed to Philip that they were driven forward by a rage for enjoyment. They were seeking desperately to escape from a world of horror. The desire for pleasure which Cronshaw said was the only motive of human action urged them blindly on, and the very vehemence of the desire seemed to rob it of all pleasure. The were hurried on by a great wind, helplessly, they knew not why and they knew not whither. Fate seemed to tower above them, and they danced as though everlasting darkness were beneath their feet. Their silence was vaguely alarming. It was as if life terrified them and robbed them of power of speech so that the shriek which was in their hearts died at their throats. Their eyes were haggard and grim; and notwithstanding the beastly lust that disfigured them, and the meanness of their faces, and the cruelty, notwithstanding the stupidness which was the worst of all, the anguish of those fixed eyes made all that crowd terrible and pathetic. Philip loathed them, and yet his heart ached with the infinite pity which filled him.He took his coat from the cloak-room and went out into the bitter coldness of the night.
I have no idea how long Quisser was gone from the table. My attention became fully absorbed by the other faces in the club and the deep anxiety they betrayed to me, an anxiety that was not of the natural, existential sort but one that was caused by peculiar concerns of an uncanny nature. What a season is upon us, these faces seemed to say. And no doubt their voices would have spoken directly of certain peculiar concerns had they not been intimidated into weird equivocations and double entendres by the fear of falling victim to the same kind of unnatural affliction that had made so much trouble in the mind of the art critic Stuart Quisser. Who would be next? What could a person say these days, or even think, without feeling the dread of repercussion from powerfully connected groups and individuals? I could almost hear their voices asking, "Why here, why now?" But of course they could have just as easily been asking, "Why not here, why not now?" It would not occur to this crowd that there were no special rules involved; it would not occur to them, even though they were a crowd of imaginative artists, that the whole thing was simply a matter of random, purposeless terror that converged upon a particular place at a particular time for no particular reason. On the other hand, it would also not have occurred to them that they might have wished it all upon themselves, that they might have had a hand in bringing certain powerful forces and connections into our district simply by wishing them to come. They might have wished and wished for an unnatural evil to fall upon them but, for a while at least, nothing happened. Then the wishing stopped, the old wishes were forgotten yet at the same time gathered in strength, distilling themselves into a potent formula (who can say!), until one day the terrible season began. Because had they really told the truth, this artistic crowd might also have expressed what a sense of meaning (although of a negative sort), not to mention the vigorous thrill (although of an excruciating type), this season of unnatural evil had brought to their lives.("Gas Station Carnivals")
There are sacraments of evil as well as of good about us, and we live and move to my belief in an unknown world, a place where there are caves and shadows and dwellers in twilight. It is possible that man may sometimes return on the track of evolution, and it is my belief that an awful lore is not yet dead.
It's funny isn't it??YOu don't want to stop it??Don't ya??...I don't give a shit about your opinion what I want I will do...You are now part of this story, unfortunately, just by reading this you make yourself part of this story, like it or not that's how it goes.Once upon a time there was one girl and one boy staying home banned to go outside everything was locked it wasn't one day, 2 days it was whole 10 years. Their family always was outside communicating with the other people and you didn't even exist, they knew you but they didn't wanted you... it was somewhere in the end of the Second War in which 50 soldiers just came in home, you were screaming... again and again they asked what's that... your mother said that she will handle it... and what??Slap after slap, kick after kick then the father comes playing with the knife and he was juggling and one moment he made the knife with the spike in front of your eyes he tied your hands, he put a Scotch tape on your mouth and what??? He was taking your eye... by the knife and eating them... then he started fast and fast hitting with the knife without looking in random place and in this game..... it ended horrible??The boy was first without eyes the girl was a second without a legs, years and however her tongue was cut... why??Evil should speak... evil is on the first place. Never ends, there isn't even and beginning it's inside!
...That insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life.
Evil should not be, Detective Vera. Truly never can be. But in defining it as such, an inherent human bond with negativity confirms its very existence. Its mere acknowledgement cancels its credibility. Evil is nothing—the lack of anything of substance— made concrete as a balance to everything else. Evil is not, yet it is a part ofeach human, because humans welcome its participation in their lives. They speak of it in anger or disgust, fear or even wonder— the most appropriate response— giving it a stronger foundation with every passing thought it distorts. Though within their pliable minds, they welcome it with the glee of the ignorant, nurturing the unthinkable, thinking the unimaginable, imagining the most horrid, abysmal designs, embellishing them with an insidious veracity until evil is as substantial a reality as their next breath. I strive for something else, beyond evil’s claustrophobic clutches. I strive to transcend evil by becoming pure nothing. I strive as my followers strived.” He paused, his ideology a cancer, spreading… “I am, yet I strive to not be. Do you understand, comrade?” His tone suggested fellowship, disciples of the same obscene religion. ...
Walpurgis Night, when, according to the belief of millions of people, the devil was abroad - when the graves were opened and the dead came forth and walked. When all evil things of earth and air and water held revel. This very place the driver had specially shunned. This was the depopulated village of centuries ago. This was where the suicide lay; and this was the place where I was, alone - unmanned, shivering with cold in a shroud of snow with a wild storm gathering again upon me! It took all my philosophy, all the religion I had been taught, all my courage, not to collapse in a paroxysm of fright.(Dracula's Guest)
As survivors and procreators, we unravel stories that at their root are not dissimilar from the habitual behaviors seen in nature. But as beings who know they will die we digress into episodes and epics that are altogether dissociated from the natural world. We may isolate this awareness, distract ourselves from it, anchor our minds far from its shores, and sublimate it as a motif in our sagas. Yet at no time and in no place are we protected from being tapped on the shoulder and reminded, “You’re going to die, you know.” However much we try to ignore it, our consciousness haunts us with this knowledge. Our heads were baptized in the font of death; they are doused with the horror of moribundity.
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
What humans want most of all, is to be right. Even if we're being right about our own doom. If we believe there are monsters around the next corner ready to tear us apart, we would literally prefer to be right about the monsters, than to be shown to be wrong in the eyes of others and made to look foolish.
The sinister, the terrible never deceive: the state in which they leave us is always one of enlightenment. And only this condition of vicious insight allows us a full grasp of the world, all things considered, just as a frigid melancholy grants us full possession of ourselves. We may hide from horror only in the heart of horror. (“The Medusa”)
It's poor judgment', said Grandpa 'to call anything by a name. We don't know what a hobgoblin or a vampire or a troll is. Could be lots of things. You can't heave them into categories with labels and say they'll act one way or another. That'd be silly. They're people. People who do things. Yes, that's the way to put it. People who *do* things.
You wouldn't think that people would believe that we all got so incredibly beat up—in so many interesting ways—from a bear attack. Especially not when Carmel is sporting a bite mark that is a spot-on match for wounds found at one of the most horrifying crime scenes in recent history. But I never fail to be surprised by what people will believe.
Stare at him," said Ghost. "They won't bite you if you keep staring at them."Steve backed away. "They bite?"Not really. They hiss at you, mostly. The only time geese are ever dangerous is when you happen to be standing on the edge of a cliff. I heard about a guy that almost got killed that way."By geese?"Yeah, there was a whole flock of them coming after him. All hissing and cackling and stabbing at his ankles with their big ol' beaks. He didn't know you had to stare them right in the eye, and he panicked. They backed him right over a fifty-foot cliff."So how come he didn't die?"This guy had wings," said Ghost. "He flew away.
Very well, but remember this... I'll be looking at you when you're laid on the cross and the twelve blows are crashing down on your limbs. When the crowd is finally tired of your screams and wandered home, I will climb up through your blood and sit beside you. I will look deep into your eyes... and drop by drop I will trickle my disgust into them like burning acid until... finally... you perish.
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling .... When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and [yet] with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience.
The stuff of nightmare is their plain bread. They butter it with pain. They set their clocks by deathwatch beetles, and thrive the centuries. They were the men with the leather-ribbon whips who sweated up the Pyramids seasoning it with other people's salt and other people's cracked hearts. They coursed Europe on the White Horses of the Plague. They whispered to Caesar that he was mortal, then sold daggers at half-price in the grand March sale. Some must have been lazing clowns, foot props for emperors, princes, and epileptic popes. Then out on the road, Gypsies in time, their populations grew as the world grew, spread, and there was more delicious variety of pain to thrive on. The train put wheels under them and here they run down the log road out of the Gothic and baroque; look at their wagons and coaches, the carving like medieval shrines, all of it stuff once drawn by horses, mules, or, maybe, men.
They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements, of howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains, of hooded monks and headless horseman, swirling mists and sudden winds, insubstantial specters and sheeted creatures, vampires and bloodhounds, bats and rats and spiders, of men found at dawn and women turned white-haired and raving lunatic, and of vanished corpses and curses upon heirs.
Night was a very different matter. It was dense, thicker than the very walls, and it was empty, so black, so immense that within it you could brush against appalling things and feel roaming and prowling around a strange, mysterious horror.
I could hear the chaotic laughter trailing behind me. It turned the ageless trees into a menace. They loomed around me, while hiding him. The branches tore at my skin in an effort to bind me, while weeds sought to shackle my ankles, so that I could go no further. The pain they caused was minor, when I compared it to the searing inferno at my core.
The dark dangerous forest is still there, my friends. Beyond the space of the astronauts and the astronomers, beyond the dark, tangled regions of Freudian and Jungian psychiatry, beyond the dubious psi-realms of Dr. Rhine, beyond the areas policed by the commissars and priests and motivations-research men, far, far beyond the mad, beat, half-hysterical laughter... the utterly unknown still is and the eerie and ghostly lurk, as much wrapped in mystery as ever.
Why should not a writer be permitted to make use of the levers of fear, terror and horror because some feeble soul here and there finds it more than it can bear? Shall there be no strong meat at table because there happen to be some guests there whose stomachs are weak, or who have spoiled their own digestions?
To feel our character, our personality, and our personal, hard-won history fade from being is to be exposed to whatever lies beneath these comforting, operational conveniences. What remains when the conscious and functioning self has been erased is mankind's fundamental condition – irrational, violent, guilt-wracked, despairing, and mad.
Lo!" cried the demon. "I am here! What dost thou seek of me? Why dost thou disturb my repose? Smite me no more with that dread rod!" He looked at Cabal. "Where's your dread rod?""I left it at home," replied Cabal. "Didn't think I really needed it.""You can't summon me without a dread rod!" said Lucifuge, appalled."You're here, aren't you?""Well, yes, but under false pretences. You haven't got a goatskin or two vervain crowns or two candles of virgin wax made by a virgin girl and duly blessed. Have you got the stone called Ematille?""I don't even know what Ematille is."Neither did the demon. He dropped the subject and moved on. "Four nails from the coffin of a dead child?""Don't be fatuous.""Half a bottle of brandy?""I don't drink brandy.""It's not for you.""I have a hip flask," said Cabal, and threw it to him. The demon caught it and took a dram."Cheers," said Lucifuge, and threw it back. They regarded each other for a long moment. "This really is a shambles," the demon added finally. "What did you summon me for, anyway?
I can't imagine you give apologies, Ten had said before, and she'd been right, but Liraz thought that she would now, She would apologize for Savvath. If her voice was her own. If it wasn't reeling out of her, rising and falling in a sound that might have been laughter and might-if she weren't Liraz and it weren't unthinkable-have been sobbing.In truth, it was both. She was going to lose her arms, the clean way or the less clean, and here's where the laughter came in: It was horrific, and it was sadistic, and it was also, literally, a dream come true.
It's why I get miffed at all the dashing around in recent zombie films. It completely misses the point; transforms the threat to a straightforward physical danger from the zombies themselves, rather than our own inability to avoid them and these films are about us, not them. There's far more meat on the bones of the latter, far more juicy interpretation to get our teeth into. The first zombie is by comparison thin and one dimensional and ironically, it is down to all the exercise.
You know, there was a time when childbirth was possibly the most terrifying thing you could do in your life, and you were literally looking death in the face when you went ahead with it. And so this is a kind of flashback to a time when that's what every woman went through. Not that they got ripped apart, but they had no guarantees about whether they were going to live through it or not. You know, I recently read - and I don't read nonfiction, generally - Becoming Jane Austen. That's the one subject that would get me to go out and read nonfiction. And the author's conclusion was that one of the reason's Jane Austen might not have married when she did have the opportunity...well, she watched her very dear nieces and friends die in childbirth! And it was like a death sentence: You get married and you will have children. You have children and you will die. (Laughs) I mean, it was a terrifying world.
Behind every great hatred is a love story. For I am a man who has known and tasted love. I say “a man” because that is how I know myself. Look at me, and what do you see? Do I not take the form of a man? Do I not feel as you do, suffer as you do, love as you do, mourn as you do? What is the essence of a man, if not these things?
THERE IS A LOVELY LITTLE horror story about the peasant who started through the haunted wood—the wood that was, people said, inhabited by devils who took any mortal who came their way. But the peasant thought, as he walked slowly along:I am a good man and have done no wrong. If devils can harm me, then there isn't any justice.A voice behind him said, “There isn't.
Deep inside her (ih her harrowed soul) she felt a glowing ember of fury at the man responsible for this. Tha man who had put her in this position. She looked at the pistol lying beside the basin, and knew that if he were here, she would use it on him without a moment's hesitation. Knowing that made her feel confused about herself. It also made her feel a little stronger.
You have the right to remain silent,' the big cop said in his robot's voice. 'If you do not choose to remain silent, anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. I'm going to kill you. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand your rights as I have explained them to you?
Rockwood didn't have a movie theater or an IHOP or a strip mall. But it did have two churches, a ramshackle bar, and last (but certainly not least) Wacky Willie's Deluxe Goofy Golf, a barren landscape of wilted ferns and plastic flamingos with peeling paint. Wacky Willie had added the 'Deluxe' when finally ridding the thirteenth hole windmill of a stubborn family of bats after a great and terrible struggle that would forever be known as 'The Fearsome Bat War of Rockwood County' by Willie, but was usually referred to as 'That Time Willie Had to Get Rabies Shots' by everyone else.
...Don't be surprised, and I say it darkly, do not be surprised if you lose your Luke in this cause; perhaps Mrs. Dudley has not yet had her own mid morning snack, and she is perfectly capable of a filet de Luke á la meuniére, or perhaps dieppoise, depending upon her mood; if I do not return" -and he shook his finger warningly under the doctor's nose- "I entreat you to regard your lunch with the gravest suspicion." Bowing extravagantly, as befitted one off to slay a giant, he closed the door behind him.
I'll tell you something of the forbidden horrors she led me into - something of the age-old horrors that even now are festering in out-of-the-way corners with a few monstrous priests to keep them alive. Some people know things about the universe that nobody ought to know, and can do things that nobody ought to be able to do.
In one picture, the pool was half hidden by a fringe of mace- weeds, and the dead willow was leaning across it at a prone, despondent angle, as if mysteriously arrested in its fall towards the stagnant waters. Beyond, the alders seemed to strain away from the pool, exposing their knotted roots as if in eternal effort. In the other drawing, the pool formed the main portion of the foreground, with the skeleton tree looming drearily at one side. At the water's farther end, the cat-tails seemed to wave and whisper among themselves in a dying wind; and the steeply barring slope of pine at the meadow's terminus was indicated as a wall of gloomy green that closed in the picture, leaving only a pale of autumnal sky at the top. ("Genius Loci")
Miss Millick wondered just what had happened to Mr. Wran. He kept making the strangest remarks when she took dictation. Just this morning he had quickly turned around and asked, "Have you ever seen a ghost, Miss Millick?" And she had tittered nervously and replied, "When I was a girl there was a thing in white that used to come out of the closet in the attic bedroom when you slept there, and moan. Of course it was just my imagination. I was frightened of lots of things." And he had said, "I don't mean that traditional kind of ghost. I mean a ghost from the world today, with the soot of the factories in its face and the pounding of machinery in its soul. The kind that would haunt coal yards and slip around at night through deserted office buildings like this one. A real ghost. Not something out of books." And she hadn't known what to say. ("Smoke Ghost")
(W.D.) Howells asserted that the Americans' 'love of the supernatural is their common inheritance from no particular ancestry.' Their fiction, he added, often gathers in the gray 'twilight of the reason,' on 'the borderland between experience and illusion." Howells's geographical metaphor was derived, of course, from Hawthorne's idea of a moonlit 'neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.' Whether literally, as in Cooper's The Spy, or metaphorically, as in Hawthorne's works, the neutral territory/borderland was the familiar setting of the American romance. As American writers came to realize, not only was there a borderland between East and West, civilization and wilderness, but also between the here and the hereafter, between conscious and unconscious, 'experience and illusion' - psychic frontiers on the edge of territories both enticing and terrifying.
Mademoiselle De Lafontaine – in right of her father, who was a German, assumed to be psychological, metaphysical and something of a mystic – now declared that when the moon shone with a light so intense it was well known that it indicated a special spiritual activity. The effect of the full moon in such a state of brilliancy was manifold. It acted on dreams, it acted on lunacy, it acted on nervous people; it had marvelous physical influences connected with life. Mademoiselle related that here cousin, who was mate of a merchant ship, having taken a nap on deck on such a night, lying on his back, with his face full in the light of the moon, had wakened, after a dream of an old woman clawing him by the cheek, with his features horribly drawn to one side; and his countenance had never quite recovered its equilibrium.
I discovered news of old horrors in old books; read intelligence of old atrocities in old periodicals; always in the back of my mind, every day a bit louder, I heard the seashell drone of some growing, coalescing force; I seemed to smell the bitter ozone aroma of lightings-to-come.
I turn away and stare through the window at the field where the scotch broom creeps yellow as hell toward my doorstep. Six years and it has advanced from the hinterlands to the picket fence in the back yard. Six more years and it will have chewed this house to the foundation, braided my bones in its hair.
I said, "I want to wear something funny and cool. Marjorie, could I wear your sparkly baseball hat?"The three of us looked at Marjorie.Now I remember thinking that her answer could change everything back to the way it was; Dad could find a job and stop praying all the time and Mom could be happy and call Marjorie shellfish again and show us funny videos she found on YouTube, and we all could eat more than just spaghetti at dinner and, most important, Marjorie could be normal again. Everything would be okay if Marjorie would only say yes to me wearing the sparkly sequined baseball hat, the one she'd made in art class a few years ago.The longer we watched Marjorie and waited for her response, the more the temperature in the room dropped and I knew that nothing would ever be the same again.She stopped twisting her spaghetti around her fingers. She opened her mouth, and vomit slowly oozed out onto her spaghetti plate.Dad: "Jesus!"Mom: "Honey, are you okay?" She jumped out of her seat and went over to Marjorie, stood behind her, and held her hair up.Marjorie didn't react to either parent, and she didn't make any sounds. She wasn't retching or convulsing involuntarily like one normally does when throwing up. It just poured out of her as though her mouth was an opened faucet. The vomit was as green as spring grass, and the masticated pasta looked weirdly dry, with a consistency of mashed-up dog food.She watched Dad the whole time as the vomit filled her plate, some of it slopping over the edges and onto the table. When she finished she wiped her mouth on her sleeve. "No, Merry. You can't wear my hat." She didn't sound like herself. Her voice was lower, adult, and growly. "You might get something on it. I don't want you to mess it up." She laughed.Dad: "Marjorie..."Marjorie coughed and vomited more onto her too-full plate. "You can't wear the hat because you're going to die someday." She found a new voice, this one treacly baby-talk. "I don't want dead things wearing my very special hat.
[M]y mother read a horror novel every night. She had read every one in the library. When birthdays and Christmas would come, I would consider buying her a new one, the latest Dean R. Koontz or Stephen King or whatever, but I couldn't. I didn't want to encourage her. I couldn't touch my father's cigarettes, couldn't look at the Pall Mall cartons in the pantry. I was the sort of child who couldn't even watch commercials for horror movies - the ad for Magic, the movie where marionette kills people. sent me into a six-month nightmare frenzy. So I couldn't look at her books, would turn them over so their covers wouldn't show, the raised lettering and splotches of blood - especially the V.C. Andrews oeuvre, those turgid pictures of those terrible kids, standing so still, all lit in blue.
It was an unusual sunset. Having sat behind opaque drapery all day, I had not realized that a storm was pushing in and that much of the sky was the precise shade of old suits of armor one finds in museums. At the same time, patches of brilliance engaged in a territorial dispute with the oncoming onyx of the storm. Light and darkness mingled in strange ways both above and below. Shadows and sunshine washed together, streaking the landscape with an unearthly study of glare and gloom. Bright clouds and black folded into each other in a no-man's land of the sky. The autumn trees took on the appearance of sculptures formed in a dream, their leaden-colored trunks and branches and iron-red leaves all locked in an infinite and unliving moment, unnaturally timeless. The gray lake slowly tossed and tumbled in a dead sleep, nudging unconsciously against its breakwall of numb stone. A scene of contradiction and ambivalence, a tragicomedic haze over all. A land of perfect twilight.
She stooped for a stone and dropped it down.'Fancy being where that is now,' she said, peering into the blackness; 'fancy going round and round like a mouse in a pail, clutching at the slimy sides, with the water filling your mouth, and looking up to the little patch of sky above.''You had better come in,' said Benson, very quietly. 'You are developing a taste for the morbid and horrible.' ("The Well")
I put it to the great man [Hitchcock], the key to fictitious terror is partition or containment: so long as the Bates Motel is sealed off from our world, we want to peer in, like at a scorpion enclosure. But a film that shows the world is a Bates Motel, well, that's... the stuff of Buchloe, dystopia, depression. We'll dip our toes in a predatory, amoral, godless unive3rse, but only our toes.
The dead are jealous, jealous, jealous and they will do anything to keep you from the living, the lucky living. They will argue with you, and distract you, and if that doesn't work, they will even let you hug them, and dance for you, and kiss you, and laugh, anything to keep you. The dead are selfish. Jealous. Lonely. Desperate. Hungry. ("The Chambered Fruit")
It's a rotten world, Miss Millick,' said Mr. Wran, talking at the window. 'Fit for another morbid growth of superstition. It's time the ghosts, or whatever you call them, took over and began a rule of fear, They'd be no worse than men.' ("Smoke Ghost")
This was to be my last trip. Sailing great distances was dangerous, and not very profitable in today's world. I walked down the worn wooden step to the captain's cabin, the creaking of the ship keeping time with my steps. Opening the door I found him bent over an old map."Where are we captain?" I asked, hoping it was close to home."See this spot, where it says "Here there be monsters"?" he said pointing to an image of a horrid beast."Certainly, but you and I both know such creatures don't exist!!"The captain laughed, and looking up at me with an evil glint in his eye said, "Who's talking about sea monsters?". As he spoke the skin from one corner of his mouth fell loose, exposing a yellow reptilian skin beneath."What?" I yelled, and as I turned to run for the cabin door I heard screams and loud moans coming from the deck, and the crew quarters below.I felt fetid breath on the back of my neck, "Aye matey, here there be monsters
It had all begun on the elevated. There was a particular little sea of roots he had grown into the habit of glancing at just as the packed car carrying him homeward lurched around a turn. A dingy, melancholy little world of tar paper, tarred gravel, and smoky brick. Rusty tin chimneys with odd conical hats suggested abandoned listening posts. There was a washed-out advertisement of some ancient patent medicine on the nearest wall. Superficially it was like ten thousand other drab city roofs. But he always saw it around dusk, either in the normal, smoky half-light, or tinged with red by the flat rays of a dirty sunset, or covered by ghostly windblown white sheets of rain-splash, or patched with blackish snow; and it seemed unusually bleak and suggestive, almost beautifully ugly, though in no sense picturesque; dreary but meaningful. Unconsciously it came to symbolize for Catesby Wran certain disagreeable aspects of the frustrated, frightened century in which he lived, the jangled century of hate and heavy industry and Fascist wars. The quick, daily glance into the half darkness became an integral part of his life. Oddly, he never saw it in the morning, for it was then his habit to sit on the other side of the car, his head buried in the paper.One evening toward winter he noticed what seemed to be a shapeless black sack lying on the third roof from the tracks. He did not think about it. It merely registered as an addition to the well-known scene and his memory stored away the impression for further reference. Next evening, however, he decided he had been mistaken in one detail. The object was a roof nearer than he had thought. Its color and texture, and the grimy stains around it, suggested that it was filled with coal dust, which was hardly reasonable. Then, too, the following evening it seemed to have been blown against a rusty ventilator by the wind, which could hardly have happened if it were at all heavy. ("Smoke Ghost")
That done, I sank into an uneasy sleep wherein I dreamed of an assembly line of pale, bloodless girls walking down an endless dark street and moaning softly for help. Somewhere, toward the edge of my inner vision, a shadowy figure pursued them with long, beckoning arms.Goddamn booze!Somewhere in the midst of this ghoulish girl parade Cairncross materialized and hung a garland of garlic around my neck, glaring at me with his good eye and intoning, 'Go and sin no more.' Vincenzo appeared at Cairncross' side and together they laughed insanely, then vanished in a puff of sulphurous smoke.I made several high-minded resolutions, muttered half-heard but sincere-sounding prayers to all the recently deposed saints, thrashed and rolled clean off the bed.I might just as well have stayed up.
He talked about terrible meetings in lonely places, of cyclopean ruins in the heart of the Maine woods beneath which vast staircases led down to abysses of nighted secrets, of complex angles that led through invisible walls to other regions of space and time, and of hideous exchanges of personality that permitted explorations in remote and forbidden places, on other worlds, and in different space-time continua.
Yet, despite all, it is a difficult thing to admit the existence of ghosts in a coldly factual world. One's very instincts rebel at the admission of such maddening possibility. For, once the initial step is made into the supernatural, there is no turning back, no knowing where the strange road leads except that it is quite unknown and quite terrible. ("Slaughter House")
Franz said 'Your picture, Viki, suggests that sense of breaking-up we feel in the modern world. Families, nations, classes, other loyalty groups falling apart. Things changing before you get to know them. Death on the installment plan – or decay by jumps. Instantaneous birth. Something out of nothing. Reality replacing science fiction so fast that you can't tell which is which. Constant sense of deja-vu - 'I was here before, but when, how?' Even the possibility that there's no real continuity between events, just inexplicable gaps. And of course every gap – every crack – means a new perching place for horror.
As I shivered and brooded on the casting of that brain-blasting shadow, I knew that I had at last pried out one of earth's supreme horors-one of those nameless blights of outer voids whose faint demon scratchings we sometimes hear on the farthest rim of space, yet from which our own finite vision has given us a merciful immunity.
Even the most impassioned devotee of the ghost story would admit that the taste for it is slightly abnormal, a survival, perhaps, from adolescence, a disease of deficiency suffered by those whose lives and imaginations do not react satisfactorily to normal experience and require an extra thrill
Gosnell turned almost no one away from the Women’s Medical Society clinic. This is not meant as a compliment. Repentant Gosnell employee Adrienne Moton testified he would perform abortions on any girls or women with no concern about the age of their babies. The only times she could recall Gosnell refusing to perform an abortion was when somebody’s Social Security number couldn’t be verified. In those cases, Gosnell was worried that the “patient” was an undercover cop.
On mounting a rising ground, which brought the figure of his fellow-traveller in relief against the sky, gigantic in height, and muffled in a cloak, Ichabod was horror-struck on perceiving that he was headless!--but his horror was still more increased on observing that the head, which should have rested on his shoulders, was carried before him on the pommel of his saddle!
Is it because I'm a girl?"Reluctantly, Bill nodded his head.She looked at him for a moment, her lips trembling, and Richie thought she would cry. Instead, she exploded. "Well, fuck you!" She whirled around to look at the others, and they flinched from her gaze, so hot it was nearly radioactive. "Fuck all of you if you think the same thing!" she turned back to Bill and began to talk fast, rapping him with words. "This is something more than some diddly shit kids game like tag, or guns, or hide and go seek, and you know it, Bill! We're supposed to do this, that's part of it! And you're not going to cut me out just because I'm a girl, do you understand? You better. Or I'm leaving right now!
One evening coming in with a candle I was startled to hear him say a little tremulously, "I am lying here in the dark waiting for death." The light was within a foot of his eyes. I forced myself to murmur, "Oh, nonsense!" and stood over him as if transfixed.Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror - of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision - he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath - "The horror! The horror!"I blew the candle out and left the cabin. The pilgrims were dining in the mess-room, and I took my place opposite the manager, who lifted his eyes to give me a questioning glance, which I successfully ignored. He leaned back, serene, with that peculiar smile of his sealing the unexpressed depths of his meanness. A continuous shower of small flies streamed upon the lamp, upon the cloth, upon our hands and faces. Suddenly the manager's boy put his insolent black head in the doorway, and said in a tone of scathing contempt -"Mistah Kurtz - he dead.
I wonder how much- or how little- they remember. I am somehow convinced that they don't remember any of it, because they don't need to remember. I'm the only one that hears the voice of the Turtle, the only one who remembers, because I'm the only one who stayed here in Derry. And because they're scattered to the four winds, they have no way of knowing the identical patterns their lives have taken. To bring them back, to show them that pattern....yes, it might kill some of them. It might kill all of them.
Bill suited the action to the word, getting up and leaning over the handlebars and pumping the pedals at a lunatic rate. Looking at Bill's back, which was amazingly broad for a boy of eleven-going-on-twelve, watching it work under the duffel coat, the shoulders slanting first one way and then the other as he shifted his weight from one pedal to the other, Richie suddenly became sure that they were invulnerable...they would live forever and ever.
But if you wish, you can imagine that the Shadow does wait for your return and that it does remember everything that has gone before and that it doesn’t let you accept yourself as perfect until you let it. There is truth in that. That is why a child usually cries as soon as it’s born. With its first breath, the Shadow returns.
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
Amari swung around in her seat to look back and there was indeed a small girl sitting on the boundary wall. She didn’t seem to be looking at the car that had just passed but up ahead. Amari turned around to see what she was looking at and she saw it, up ahead, the farm house that she could only assume was their new home.
The only way to achieve success is by believing you can achieve your goals, no matter what. The story you tell yourself has the power to transform your life or destroy it. When you change your story, you can change your life.
I assure you, if Uncle Henry had stepped out from among the trees in a little copse which borders the path at one place, carrying his head under his arm, I should have been very little more uncomfortable than I was. To tell you the truth, I was rather expecting something of the kind.
I saw the massive stone altar first begin to glow like a ruby; then it was a heart of liquid gold like a solid single-crystal chrysoprase: the gold intensified into ice-cold emerald and passed into the dark sapphire of an arctic sky; this again withdrew into a violet so deep that the visual purple of the eye itself seemed absorbed in that depth, that abyss of color in which sight was being drowned. And as this intensification of vibrancy seemed to sweep across the visible spectrum up to those ranges where energy absorbs all mass and that which can pierce the most solid is itself fine beyond all substance, so it seemed with hearing. That abyss of sound which I had been thinking of as only depth, it, too, seemed to rise or, rather, I suppose I was carried up on some rising wave which explored the deep of the height.As the light drew toward the invisible, I experienced a sound so acute that I can only remember feeling to myself that this was the note emitted when the visible universe returns to the unmanifest—this was the consummatum est of creation. I knew that an aperture was opening in the solid manifold. The things of sense were passing with the music of their own transmutation, out of sight. Veil after veil was evaporating under the blaze of the final Radiance. Suddenly I knew terror as never before. The only words which will go near to recreating in me some hint of that actual mode are those which feebly point toward the periphery of panic by saying that all things men dread are made actually friendly by this ultimate awfulness. Every human horror, every evil that the physical body may suffer, seemed, beside this that loomed before me, friendly, homely, safe. The rage of a leaping tiger would have been a warm embrace. The hell of a forest wrapped in a hurricane of fire, the subzero desolation of the antarctic blizzard, would have been only the familiar motions of a simple well-known world. Yes, even the worst, most cunning and cruel evil would only be the normal reassuring behavior of a well-understood, much-sympathized-with child. Against This, the ultimate Absolute, how friendly became anything less, anything relative.
My Dear Friend,You do not know me, but I know you. Since you first breathed in this world, I have watched you. The hopes you have wished, the worries you have feared, the sins you have committed–I know them all. I am The Observer, The Recorder. I am also The Punisher. The time has come for your punishment. Listen closely, the hourglass runs low.
Dread is the first and the strongest types of fear. It is that tension, that waiting that comes when you know there is something to fear but you have not yet identified what it is. The fear that comes when you first realize that your spouse should have been home an hour ago; when you realize that a window you are sure you closed is now open, the curtains billowing, and you're alone in the house.Terror only comes when you see the thing you're afraid of. The intruder is coming at you with a knife. The headlights coming toward you are clearly in your lane. The Klansmen have emerged from the bushes and one of them is holding a rope. This is when all the muscles of your body, except perhaps the sphincters, tauten and you stand rigid; or you scream; or you run. There is a frenzy to this moment, a climactic power-but it is the power of release, not the power of tension. And bad as it is, it is better than dread in this respect: Now, at lest, you know the face of the thing you fear. You know its borders, its dimensions. You know what to expect.Horror is the weakest of all. After the fearful thing has happened, you see its remainder, its relics. The grisly, hacked-up corpse. Your emotions range from nausea to pity for the victim. And even your pity is tinged with revulsion and disgust; ultimately you reject the scene and deny its humanity; with repetition, horror loses its ability to move you and, to some degree, dehumanizes the victim and therefore dehumanizes you. As the sonderkommandos in the death camps learned, after you move enough naked murdered corpses, it stops making you want to weep or puke. You just do it. They've stopped being people to you.
The wolf had begun hunting human prey. They were plentiful in the dark city streets and provided enough good meat to satiate his gnawing hunger. He was still very careful not to let any who saw him live. To do otherwise would displease the Master. He would only stalk those people that were foolish enough to walk alone in the night
If there’s anything in life that’s an undisputed fact, it’s this: Buildings with strange symbols carved in their lintels are bad news. You rarely find symbols leading to unicorns and fields of candy—and even that’s bad news if you’re diabetic.
People which deserv support are people likeVsauce (A guy who I don't know how to describe... but as overall awesome character.)Rob Dyke (How he won't deserv one support or many?)... what he is doing is blowing mind it's about Anatomy of Murder and Serial KIllers files... that's crazy. And the best of all you can find a lot of information about many prisoners.
I am amazed at how much I can learn by watching interviews of successful people.
Life is so fragile and unpredictable, especially when you are in a gang or in a life of crime. It’s like playing poker; you think to yourself that you have a good hand. However, it is only when you reveal your hand do you sometimes discover to your horror that someone else’s hand is better.
In March of 1915, all three of Lord and Lady Chetwynd-Pitt's sons'd been gassed, blown up or machine-gunned in the very same week at the battle of Neuve-Chapelle. All three. Imagine that: On Monday, you've got three sons, by Friday you've got none. Lady Albertina had just, y'know, caved in. Physically, mentally, spiritually, brutally.
The city had grown, implacably, spreading its concrete and alloy fingers wider every day over the dark and feral country. Nothing could stop it. Mountains were stamped flat. Rivers were dammed off or drained or put elsewhere. The marshes were filled. The animals shot from the trees and then the trees cut down. And the big gray machines moved forward, gobbling up the jungle with their iron teeth, chewing it clean of its life and all its living things.Until it was no more. Leveled, smoothed as a highway is smoothed, its centuries choked beneath millions and millions of tons of hardened stone. The birth of a city... It had become the death of a world.
I Know Many Horror Authors Are Depreesed or Act Misabrle With Their lives. This Seems To Go With The Territory. For Example, Best-selling Horror Author, Joe Hill Talks About His Own Depression And Anxiety And How He Is Too Afraid To Take A Pill Because, of How This May Deminish And Destroy His Creative Side of Writing Horror. I Myself Happen To Feel The Exact Opposite. I Almost Always Noticed A More Creative Output In My Writing When On Pills.
You Can Not Me Honest To Others, If You Are Not First Honest With Yourself.
I Do Not Like Canadians, I Love Them.
You Can Not Be Honest With Others, If You Are Not First Honest With Yourself.
I Grew Up In A Family With No Prejudices. My Father Always Believed There Were Good And Bad In Every Ethnic Background, And Nationality.
Ever Since I Can Remember, I Have Always Been a Huge Advocate for Women and Children.
The Internet Changed My Life.
I Have Always Had A Facination With England, And Their History.
Still onto This Day, I Dawdle to Be Plagued With The Same Unfortunate Reoccurring Nightmare. In My Horrifying Dream, there is an Attractive Women With Piercing Blue Eyes And Light Brownish Hair, Sporting A Lengthy Red Dress With Extended Dark Black Heals Who Kills Me On Christmas Day. In My Dream I am Listening to A Christmas Song… “Jingle Bells” While Rambling Down a Dark Corridor Inside A Home. I am Shot in The Back of The Head And The Music Box Lingers Playing The Same Tune. I Can See Nothing but The Bottom of Her Mends, And Then All Becomes Ample Dark.
I Know Many Horror Authors Are Depressed or Act Miserable With Their lives. This Seems To Go With The Territory. For Example, Best-selling Horror Author, Joe Hill Talks About His Own Depression And Anxiety And How He Is Too Afraid To Take A Pill Because, of How This May Diminish And Destroy His Creative Side of Writing Horror. I Myself Happen To Feel The Exact Opposite. I Almost Always Noticed A More Creative Output In My Writing When On Pills.
If You Are Not Getting Any Kind of Negative Feedback, Than You Probably Are Not Working Hard Enough.
Through their discomforts Dom and Phil were missing everything of interest: the sudden strip marshes, the faces in the rock formations, the perfect lakes, the awesome måskoskårså valley grooved into the earth during the Ice Age, the golden eagle circling above it, and the views of a landscape it was impossible to believe existed in Europe.
In My Case, It Did Not All Start With A Mouse, Instead It Started With A House.
I Believe When People Go To Hell, They Relive Their Worst Life Experience, Over And Over Again.
I Wish This To Never End.
Nothing Makes Me Feel Happier Than Seeing A Child Smile From Happiness.
Jealousy can instigate the cruellest act, or more to the point, hatred can. Miss Bennett was the one who found Nathan lying at the bottom of the stairs in the cellar, said he must have slipped or something, especially with one leg being so much weaker than the other. They as good people never would have suspected their own daughter of pushing him. That she never showed emotion over her brother’s death was put down to trauma. I could see what they could not—a child incapable of any kind of feeling apart from selfishness. I can still picture him now, lying on his stomach, his head twisted at an unnatural angle, eyes glazed like one of Rhiannon’s dolls. She was then about seven years old with the face of an angel and a nature as cruel as anyone on death row.
Once and for all, let us speak the paradox aloud: "We have been force-fed for so long the shudders of a thousand graveyards that at last, seeking a macabre redemption, a salvation by horror, we willingly consume the terrors of the tomb...and find them to our liking.
The mist covered the ground like the white veil over a new bride's face. The air was thick with smoke - smelling of death and decay. The birds were no longer singing their sweet songs, nor were there any immediate signs of life in the area. The charred ground crunched under my feet and I realized it was the only sound I could hear in the eerie silence. I looked up at the once milky moon and cringed at its new bright crimson color. What could've possibly caused the moon to turn blood red? I thought to myself as I continued to walk cautiously through the unrecognizable forest.
As sonner began as sooner finished... the guilt is after you. I feel it, I see it and I smell you have done something..., didn't you??Something bad... isn't it??Tell me... don't be afraid I won't do anything bad... (I will just cut your fingers one by one... on your hands... it will be one bloody night... Then I will start with your legs finger by finger with axe... then I will start removing little from you.... the flesh from you!)
Mind", can't make differences between real and not..., (OFF NOW THAT..., then that...), you are saying lie after lie..., then believing in false stuff. And thinking in positive sides so to scream not much as the other do, but as always you one moment scream you can't stop it... Now putting against me a knife and saying "Go away... give me my daughter... give me her back"..., don't you see the people laugh at you, don't you see it. Look their faces, with so many smiles, but they aren't people, they are from the army, off, off for god sake they are soldiers which have guns. Have killed few people, have taken your daughter and they are many as a number than you and your whole family... Probably this part as an General I must skip it, because it's logical however look it and from this side, nobody will sacrifice so you to be happy... you will die.. O, o, the poor little girl crying in front of the people, she just saw her mother pointing with a knife against the soldiers and now she is killed by one of the soldiers.
It felt oily inside her head. There were strings of Xavier Stancliff caught inside of her, holding on and spiderwebbing out as he plotted and waited and thought: this is all the bitch deserves. Swallowing, Sandra pushed herself off the bed. It was late and the room was dark. She could see the bundled lump of Jack beneath his own covers. He’d left the television on and the light flickered down the tiny hall. Shadows danced and Sandra shivered as she left the room.In another life, she would have told Danny and Jack about the man. Danny would have whispered, “It’s alright,” and smoothed back her hair from her face and kissed her, lips dry and coarse on her forehead. Then he and Jack would’ve left while she was sleeping. They would’ve trampled the flowers and climbed into Xavier Stanliff’s window and when Sandra woke up there would have been one less man in the world.
If you want your son or daughter to be positive. Like to enjoy life and so on and so on - focus on the positive, nature, birds, quite and fast waterfalls... If you want to be negative which will mean a killer, a slaughter focus on the negative. Kill infront of the eyes a chicken slaughter it, fast and quick... do it often, read scary horror books!
Times goes by your choice, if you make your days wonderful the days will go fast... and interesting and memorable.... If you do it in boring way they will go like watching a film which doesn't have something to make you get interested without games, crimes, horror, thriller, romance and every single other genre which you think without it the film is awful... but not only genre, but genres!
I'm sure that the book is incrediable, phenomenal and so on and so on going in positive direction... But the film wasn't made well (I'm talking about NeedFul Things by Stephen King), the effects weren't good, some scenes were missed, for example I'm very curiouis how does the guy kills his wife with the harmer... The scene reminds me for Shining, but Unfortunately in the Shining there were more possibilities to be saw this scene, than in this film... If some disadvantages will be fixed, then I'm sure that the film will be pretty interesting, however to don't forget about the quality!
Saw... then The Cube and many other films which I have saw or I will be on the way to see are brutal. But as far as last which as for now I have watched is Old 37, it's very brutal.Unfortunately, I will call this film or I will add that there are facts out there which show that it's based on true stuff. There are outside such type of people which do such thing, that you haven't saw. Feel happy, if you see them you won't go back you should run.
Tilly screamed. Anna’s shocked brain only registered annoyance at the sound. Really, when had someone screaming ever solved a problem? She recognized her fixation on this irritation as her own way of avoiding the horror in front of her, but only in a distant and dreamy sort of way.
To Eden with me you will not leaveTo live in a cottage of crazy, crooked eaves.In your own happy home you take care these nights; When you let your little cat in, please turn on the lights! Something scurries behind and finds a cozy place to stare, Something sent to you from paradise, with serpents to spare: Tongues flowering; they leap out laughing, lapping. Dissapear
If Mistery, Crime, Horror, True Crime, SuperNature, Fiction, Non-FIcition and many other categoris if they didn't exist, and people didn't find a way to relax. Nobody will be never on the way to reach the place where almost a lot of are now, people don't want normal life they want to view the life through a killer.
Are we to have nothing tonight?" said one of them, with a low laugh, as she pointed to the bag which he had thrown upon the floor, and which moved as though there were some living thing within it. For answer he nodded his head. One of the women jumped forward and opened it. If my ears did not deceive me there was a gasp and a low wail, as of a half smothered child. The women closed round, whilst I was aghast with horror. But as I looked, they disappeared, and with them the dreadful bag.
I finally find a girl I could really be with, maybe the only girl in the world, and I had what? Two months with her? It's not enough. After everything she went through - everything I went through - we deserve more than that. Or maybe we don't. Anyway, life doesn't work like that. It doesn't care about fair and unfair.
Had Moreau had any intelligible object, I could have sympathized at least a little with him. I am not so squeamish about pain as that. I could have forgiven him a little even, had his motive been only hate. But he was so irresponsible, so utterly careless! His curiosity, his mad, aimless investigations, drove him on; and the Things were thrown out to live a year or so, to struggle and blunder and suffer, and at last to die painfully.
She collected herself, and rose from the floor. “Until you have a better grasp on what we’re dealing with here, I’d appreciate your immediate proximity.”I did as she asked. She was the expert, after all.But what a terrifying thought, that the world’s foremost expert knew only enough to live in horror.
And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrilled me- filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before; So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating, "'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door- Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door;- This it is, and nothing more.
Now, however open a person manages to be, there is one possibility to which he remains as closed as ever: the possibility that when he uncovers his deepest anxieties he will find hidden inside them certain horrifying truths which his whole effort to control his life has been designed to keep repressed.
Horror immobolizes us because it is made of contradictory feelings: fear and seduction, repulsion and attraction. Horror is a fascination...Horror is immobility, the great yawn of empty space, the womb and the hole in the earth, the universal Mother and the great garbage heap...With horror we cannot have recourse to flight or combat, there remains only Adoration or Exorcism.
Cinema – all art really – has great power. Power to illuminate. Power to transform. For those of us who experience film as literature, classic movies comprised an introductory education in the genre. As kids, many of us went searching through library shelves for obscure source novels after seeing some old movie or other. It was the start of many an adventure.
Shirts and jeans litter the asphalt, the empty fabric limbs askew as if they're attempting to escape. Blood smears Sarah's lips as she struggles against the chest of a dirty looking man with a beard. Terror. Terror is the only word my mind can seize on and it forgets what it means. I forget how to think - to move.
The truth,” Mrs. Hodgkins says, standing back up and turning to her cold marble pupils, “is imagination without boundaries is like a gun, it can be dangerous and kill.” She turns slightly and points to the back of her head to demonstrate. Her brains spill over the left crevice of her skull, clinging like hardened jelly. “Or imagination can save lives.
The old folks say there is only black and white. That may do for their tidy lives, but it doesn’t apply to all of us. We, Supergirls for real and the wretched creature at my feet, live in the gray and the mist. We may never see the stars, but we believe in the dream of them.
My mother used to say not sleeping was the sign of a guilty mind. It could have been. There was a lot in my mind to feel guilty about. When you’re drunk and trying to sleep, your thoughts are visited by the ghosts of those deeds whose heat still glows hottest in your personal darkness. Our actions burn much longer than the moments in which they occur. And drunks like me, we hide from the glow of the embers by fueling other fires and hiding within the flames.
Just as there are broken people, there are broken places on this earth. Some have always been broken. All cities have such neighborhoods at their edges, and this city is all edges … block after block of bleakly hopeless outskirts.People don’t bury dead cities. They abandon them. They abandon them to the poorest of the poor, to the lost and the doomed.
Trolls have existed on this planet for as long as humans. This is what I was told and what I translated to Tub. The first mention of them in recorded history is from ninth-century Norway, when the nefarious creatures began showing up in song, verse, and bedtime stories to keep misbehaving children in line. According to Norse folklore, trolls are one of the Dark Beings, the purest embodiments of evil, and they scurried from between the toes of Ymir, the mythic six-headed Frost Giant whose murdered body became the universe in which we live; his bones became the mountains, his teeth boulders, and so forth.
And in the echo of that gladness, horror blooms within me. In its own strange way, it's a horror as deep as any I've experienced so far. I've succeeded in taking another human hostage, in making him urinate on himself. I made a plan to torture someone, and then I carried it out, and it satisfied me to do so. As much hurt and hell as the Wolfman has caused, I don't want to be his judge and jury, his jailer and tormentor. I don't want to be that person. I want to be good. I don't want to fall into a big, black pit of darkness, because what if I can't get out?
Daylight does not lend itself to terror: objects and people are plain to see; and we encounter there only those things which dare to show themselves in the glare of day. But night, opaque night denser than walls, night, empty and infinite and so black and fathomless that terrifying things reach out and touch us, night when we feel horror stirring, mysteriously prowling―night seemed to him to hide some unknown, imminent, threatening danger. What could it be?
The Earth was not dead. She had been sick, yes, weakened by an infestation. Now she was ridding herself of it. For those who remained alive the choice was a simple one, whether they realised it yet or not: Work with the land-- respect it and give back to it-- or die.
preserve my sanity, for to this I am reduced. Safety and the assurance of safety are things of the past. Whilst I live on here there is but one thing to hope for, that I may not go mad, if, indeed, I be not mad already. If I be sane, then surely it is maddening to think that of all the foul things that lurk in this hateful place.
There was a muffled pop, the sound of a small pumpkin exploding in a microwave oven.Morris cut the wheel to the left and there was another bump as the Biscayne went back into the parking area. He looked in the mirror and saw that Curtis's head was gone.Well, no. Not exactly. It was there, but all spread out. Mooshed. No loss of talent in that mess. Morrie thought.
As Roran watched, the man's arms, neck, and chest shriveled, and his bones appeared in sharp relief-from the bowlike curve of his collarbones to the hollow saddle of his hips, where his stomach hung like an empty waterskin. His lips puckered and drew back farther than they were intended to over his yellow teeth, baring them in a grisly snarl, while his eyeballs deflated as if they were engorged ticks being squished empty of blood, and the surrounding flesh sank inward.
Your friend will pay deeply for what he’s done here tonight,” Chance snarled once he wiped off most of the blood. “You can tell him to run as far and as fast as he can, I’ll get him. Just let him know that once this is all over, it’s just gonna be you and me and a world full of corpses.
Once upon a time there was a king, and the king commissioned his favorite wizard to create a magic mirror. This mirror didn’t show you your reflection. It showed you your soul—it showed you who you really were.The wizard couldn’t look at it without turning away. The king couldn’t look at it. The courtiers couldn’t look at it. A chestful of treasure was offered to anyone who could look at it for sixty seconds without turning away. And no one could.
Longche willed himself to change into his true vampire form. As the helpless vampire watched the transformation, it started screaming. It was still screaming when Longche's rows of razor-sharp teeth sank into its throat. It had been thousands of years since he had drunk the blood of vampires. With each creature he consumed, he could feel himself growing stronger.Growing stronger - and growing closer to the Dark Mother, who was waiting to exact a terrible revenge upon him.
What?' He cried, darting at him a look of fury: 'Dare you still implore the Eternal's mercy? Would you feign penitence, and again act an Hypocrite's part? Villain, resign your hopes of pardon. Thus I secure my prey!'As He said this, darting his talons into the Monk's shaven crown, He sprang with him from the rock. The Caves and mountains rang with Ambrosio's shrieks. The Daemon continued to soar aloft, till reaching a dreadful height, He released the sufferer. Headlong fell the Monk through the airy waste; The sharp point of a rock received him; and He rolled from precipice to precipice, till bruised and mangled He rested on the river's banks. Life still existed in his miserable frame: He attempted in vain to raise himself; His broken and dislocated limbs refused to perform their office, nor was He able to quit the spot where He had first fallen. The Sun now rose above the horizon; Its scorching beams darted full upon the head of the expiring Sinner. Myriads of insects were called forth by the warmth; They drank the blood which trickled from Ambrosio's wounds; He had no power to drive them from him, and they fastened upon his sores, darted their stings into his body, covered him with their multitudes, and inflicted on him tortures the most exquisite and insupportable. The Eagles of the rock tore his flesh piecemeal, and dug out his eyeballs with their crooked beaks. A burning thirst tormented him; He heard the river's murmur as it rolled beside him, but strove in vain to drag himself towards the sound. Blind, maimed, helpless, and despairing, venting his rage in blasphemy and curses, execrating his existence, yet dreading the arrival of death destined to yield him up to greater torments, six miserable days did the Villain languish. On the Seventh a violent storm arose: The winds in fury rent up rocks and forests: The sky was now black with clouds, now sheeted with fire: The rain fell in torrents; It swelled the stream; The waves overflowed their banks; They reached the spot where Ambrosio lay, and when they abated carried with them into the river the Corse of the despairing Monk.
They say revenge is a dish best served cold. This isn’t correct. Revenge is a dish best served lukewarm or at room temperature (depending on the room) with a side of sauerkraut lightly sprinkled with pepper, a generous helping of golden brown roasted potatoes, and a large loaf of marble rye, washed down with any kind of unfiltered wheat beer.But whatever you do—and remember this, as it can be a matter of life or death—don’t put any sort of fruit in the beer. Fruit doesn’t belong in beer.
Some teeth long for ripping, gleaming wet from black dog gums. So you keep your eyes closed at the end. You don't want to see such a mouth up close. before the bite, before its oblivion in the goring of your soft parts, the speckled lips will curl back in a whinny of excitement. You just know it.
At bottom, you see, we are not Homo sapiens as all. Our core is madness. The prime directive is murder. What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle. And that is what the Pulse exposed five days ago.
Melody exploded. "THIS ISN'T LIKE GETTING A FISH TO SEE IF I COULD BE RESPONSIBLE ENOUGH FOR A PUPPY!" She took a deep breath, calmed herself and lowered her voice. She then repeated the statement as if doing so removed the stink of the outburst."I'm well aware of that," said Lonnie. "And not to poke it with a stick, but you don't see any puppies sniffing around that empty fish bowl, do you?
Spring, if it lingers more than a week beyond its span, starts to hunger for summer to end the days of perpetual promise. Summer in its turn soon begins to sweat for something to quench its heat, and the mellowest of autumns will tire of gentility at last, and ache for a quick sharp frost to kill its fruitfulness. Even winter — the hardest season, the most implacable — dreams, as February creeps on, of the flame that will presently melt it away. Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition, to save it from itself.
Horror itself is a bit of a bullied genre, the antagonist being literary snobbery and public misconception. And I think good horror tackles our darkest fears, whatever they may be. It takes us into the minds of the victims, explores the threats, disseminates fear, studies how it changes us. It pulls back the curtain on the ugly underbelly of society, tears away the masks the monsters wear out in the world, shows us the potential truth of the human condition. Horror is truth, unflinching and honest. Not everybody wants to see that, but good horror ensures that it's there to be seen.
I could not help feeling that they were evil things-- mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething , half-luminous cloud-background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial; and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.
And she arose from her deathbed in a gossamer gown, with eyes the color of starlight and hair as black as the night. And those who were her captors trembled, for the scent of death and madness emanated from her soul, and yet she was not dead. She moved like the spiders that creep in the treetops, and none could look away. Taking her first captor in hand, she fed deep and ravenous. And so it was that Myst, Queen of the Indigo Court, was born from the blood of the dead.
We know what happened to those who chanced to meet the Great God Pan, and those who are wise know that all symbols are symbols of something, not of nothing. It was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current. Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish tale. But you and I, at all events, have known something of the terror that may dwell in the secret place of life, manifested under human flesh; that which is without form taking to itself a form.
There will never be slaves in Britain,' Godalming continued, 'but those who stay warm will naturally serve us, as the excellent Bessie has just served me. Have a care, lest you wind up the equivalent of some damned regimental water-bearer.'In India, I knew a water-bearer who was a better man than most.
Sing a song of suspense in which the players die.Four and twenty ravens in an Edgar Allan Pie.When the pie was broken, the ravens couldn't sing.Their throats had been sliced open by Stephen, the new King.The King was in his writing house, stifling a laughWhile his queen was in a tizzy of her bloody Lovecraft.When the dead maid got the garden for her rank as royal whore,King's shovel made it double and he married nevermore.
Neither spoke, but lat silently listening to the ticking of the clock. A stair creaked, and a squeaky mouse scurried noisily through the wall. The darkness was oppressive, and after lying for some time screwing up his courage, he took the box of matches, and striking one, went downstairs for a candle.At the foot of the stairs the match went out, and he paused to strike another; and at the same moment a knock came so quiet and stealthy as to be scarcely audible, sounded on the front door.The matches fell from his hand and spilled in the passage. He stood motionless, his breath suspended until the knock was repeated. Then he turned and fled swiftly back to his room, and closed the door behind him. A third knock sounded through the house.
Rena: Come on. Who was that man?Keiichi: I-I don't know him!Rena: Liar. What were you talking about?Keiichi: S-S-Something that doesn't have anything to do with you!Rena: Oh...Ah-ha-ha. Oh. So it has nothing to do with us...Keiichi: Th-That's right...Rena: You're lying!!
One should let one's nails grow for a fortnight. O, how sweet it is to drag brutally from his bed a child with no hair on his upper lip and with wide open eyes, make as if to touch his forehead gently with one's hand and run one's fingers through his beautiful hair. Then suddenly, when he is least expecting it, to dig one's long nails into his soft breast, making sure, though, that one does not kill him; for if he died, one would not later be able to contemplate his agonies. Then one drinks his blood as one licks his wounds; and during this time, which ought to last for eternity, the child weeps.
Middling monsters died at the point of pitchforks, burned with torches, or at the butt of silver-capped canes wielded by angry, geriatric Poles. Middling people were dime-a-dozen, emptied souls, shorn sheeple, human husks. A good monster didn’t worry about what it was doing; it just did it. A true predator didn’t worry about guilt, or being popular, or anything. It just cruised along, living for the kill, surviving. A good person, well, she’d put a bullet in her head or weigh her feet down and throw herself into the Chicago River, holding her breath until she went to the sludgy, filthy bottom, and had to open wide and breathe water until she died.
Beware, William of Mercia, you heeded not our warnings and you can no longer turn back, but the path ahead is strewn with danger, to you, and to those who travel with you. This is but the beginning. The legions of the underworld await you, armies will seek to destroy you, but only you can know the true course.
Our fiction is not merely in flight from the physical data of the actual world…it is, bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction, nonrealistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic – a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation…our classic [American] literature is a literature of horror for boys
There are those who don't understand the nobility of horror fiction. 'Isn't there enough horror in the world?' they ask. For all other forms of literature, the value of human life is optional. For horror fiction, it's absolutely necessary. If we don't value the life of the threatened protagonist, we can't be scared. And through our fear, we better understand the individual fears and values of our species across the world.
Even if I had convict ancestry, I wouldn’t be ashamed of it. As far as I’m concerned, the real criminals back in those days weren’t twelve-year-old boys nicking a loaf of bread or a pair of socks to ward off hunger and blisters. No, it was those who exploited them; keeping the battler in the gutter while they sat around in their manors, sipping tea and admiring portraits of their toffee-nosed great grandfathers.
Monsters in movies are us, always us, one way or the other. They’re us with hats on. The zombies in George Romero’s movies are us. They’re hungry. Monsters are us, the dangerous parts of us. The part that wants to destroy. The part of us with the reptile brain. The part of us that’s vicious and cruel. We express these in our stories as these monsters out there.
There had stood a great house in the centre of the gardens, where now was left only that fragment of ruin. This house had been empty for a great while; years before his—the ancient man's—birth. It was a place shunned by the people of the village, as it had been shunned by their fathers before them. There were many things said about it, and all were of evil. No one ever went near it, either by day or night. In the village it was a synonym of all that is unholy and dreadful.
Sad-looking brown eyes, they wrenched his heart like a gut punch. Worse – hell, worse – a bloke could punch him in the head but he’d stay up, and grin through the bloody split lip, intimidating his attacker; but there was no honour in wounds inside, wounds that only you could deal with.
In a way, Darius brings the vampire back to a more classical interpretation. A modern day Dracula who is charming, sensual, and completely monstrous. There is no pretense of humanity with him. He considers himself a member of a species that is the true apex predator of the world, feeding on humans and using them as puppets for their own bizarre games. He's not struggling with any inner angst. Most humans are either food, entertainment, or useful tools to him. Sometimes all three. He finds the modern popular interpretation of vampires both amusing and useful for his own agenda.
His body walks out onto the darkened stage , and a roar goes up from the crowd. He stands in front of the mic, and he can feel his face twist in a sneer-the Elvis sneer from his dreams-though he never told it to move. He is powerless now, a spectator at his own moment of glory.
Succumbing finally, she lets out a loud shriek as her vehicle stops at a red light. “Fuck.” She hollers cursing the night. Cursing the shadows, cursing the unknown condemned she intends to meet this evening. Tears roll down her cheeks landing on her bullet proof vest.
To these children, the door William has just come through is a portal. Being shoved through it means a trip to hell where only demons come to visit and the man before them fits that description; his deep, hard eyes frame his long, winding scar and behind him, flames rise as the smell of smoke and charring meat waft into the room.
Oh incomprehensible pederasts, I shall not heap insults upon your great degradation; I shall not be the one to pour scorn on your infundibuliform anus. It is enough that the shameful and almost incurable maladies which besiege you should bring with them their unfailing punishments.
Maloney looked around my room and nodded like he approved of the extravagance surrounding him: the inch-thick carpet with its diamond designs, the half moon flock of the wallpaper, and the antique furniture, polished to a museum quality shine. The two goons he brought with him flanked the door, equally impressed, I could tell by their dropped jaws and roving, wanton eyes. One of them set a briefcase on the floor beside him. Finally Maloney’s eyes found me, and his expression turned from amazement to shock.“I didn’t expect you to be--”“A Vampire?” I asked, feeling the touch of a smile form on my lips.
Noc knew that his girlfriend was better as he got to the door of Kay’s living room. This he could tell by the sound of her screaming at Turney for some infraction on the Son of Time’s part. He opened it to see her soaking wet, cornering Turney by the stereo and holding a ball of Hellfire. Noc burst out laughing at the normalcy of the whole thing.
Working with some real dirt seemed fitting for a woman whose hands felt like they would remain forever filthy. She decided to go after the thickets of weeds that seemed determined to ruin her garden, just as she had gone after those dark things crawling from her drain that seemed determined to ruin her life. Summer rains had nourished the thick tangles. Healthy and strong, the weeds twisted along the yard’s edges in dense tuffs. Eden’s hoe whacked away, and at least she felt some satisfaction denying those flower-killers the opportunity to strangle the remaining beauty from her world. She swung the hoe like a pissed off Grim Reaper.
A ten-year-old Amanda wandering around the sights and sounds of a carnival. Trying to take it all in as such an event was much larger than the backroads of isolated territory from whence she grew up. She could not imagine this many people assembled in one place. It was made more disturbing by the fact none of them seemed familiar. Short for her age, she wandered unnoticed among the crowds and began to feel the first stirrings of fear. The loud talk, the screaming children, the long lines of procession, along with the myriads of odors created a miasma that she wanted to flee. The laughter and the faux expressions of joy on the faces of people, took on the maroon tones of a nightmare. She could imagine underneath the laughter, were horrid screams about to erupt.
On the outside, I 'm a husband and a father to three sons. I end to keep quiet and stay to myself. That way I stay out of trouble as much as possible. Some people say I'm almost too quiet but it's like that saying goes, it's the quiet ones you have to watch out for...
Krisztina played the song. It was a lament made of eight notes, repeated. It was an empty melody. It sounded elemental too; it made Krisztina think of the snow falling beyond the window and across Budapest. She wondered if it was snowing in England. Alice’s mother would be here again later, all the way from London. There was so much grief. They were mourning her little girl before she had gone. Without realising she heard these words making themselves part of the song. She played what she could, her head down, her face solemn and determined. She went back to the start, and felt the world falling away, the tears drying on her face. She heard the words coming, falling like the luminous snow. After a few minutes she looked across what seemed like a huge divide to Alice on the bed and faltered. In the house of the body, the lights were being extinguished, one by one. The floors were now bare, the walls unadorned, all sound hollow and lost; all that remained was the ghost of what was, the glimmer of the melody, the tune, the song of a life lived and lost in three minutes.
I was crying for the little girl I had been, who had withstood terrifying nightmares of death and blood and war and maiming. And when I had tried to share those horrors, the shock on my friends' faces had told me I was not normal, and I should keep my dreams to myself.
Spooky Twisties:All things Spooky, here beginThey lay and wait, in books within.They sometimes pass, in open space.Then leave and go, without a trace.Some appear on the spot.Some we know, others not.Sometimes we are afraid to say,“leave us now”, or beg to stay.At times they leave a sign beyond,A gentle breeze, or note from song.Be not afraid, to read story’s close.For in the dark, your spirit goes.
This apartment, which you no doubt profanely suppose to be the shop of Will Wimble the undertaker --a man whom we know not, and whose plebeian appellation has never before this night thwarted our royal ears --this apartment, I say, is the Dais-Chamber of our Palace, devoted to the councils of our kingdom, and to other sacred and lofty purposes.
But he doesn't see what's so great about leaving your mark on things. You have a life and then it ends and you're dead. Living it is the point, not proving to other people that you were there. The whole thing is really just water pouring down a plughole, but that's absolutely fine. Standing water gets stagnant.
Seated in the middle of the floor with its back to me was the naked figure of a baby of, perhaps, two years, prattling wordlessly in its sing-song treble as it played with a pile of gleaming white objects arranged about it in a circle. One of these, a globular thing of peculiar configuration, it grasped in its right hand, and banged down noisily among the rest. Opposite, just discernible in the shadowy corner, sat the largest brindled cat I had ever seen, dreamily watching the play through half closed, flame-yellow eyes. I suppose it must have been many minutes that I stood there dumbfounded, staring at this incredible spectacle, before my dazed senses registered its full hideousness, and then a strangled gasp escaped me, for I saw that the toy in the child’s hand was a tiny human skull and that all the other white things were the various bones of an infant skeleton!
Logically, it doesn’t make sense for people to make stories of things that go bump in the night during a full moon.” He paused for a moment, then added one final comment. “No, Megan… it’s during a new moon that the night is darkest. It’s during a new moon… that the real monsters come out.
You have no idea what it’s like, knowing you’re going to die in an hour. Sixty short minutes are now the only things that separate you from the other side. From the country undiscovered by the living. From that inevitable end we all must face. Guess that’s what the whole death row thing is about, though. If you ask me now if I feel sorry for what I’ve done, I’d have to tell you plainly the answer is no. I’d do it all again, given the opportunity. I’d kill them all. Over, and over, and over. The court-appointed psychiatrist described me as having a “severe antisocial personality disorder with excessive violent tendencies.” But I’m letting you know now I never stood out in a crowd. Never drew attention to myself. I was just a regular woman, one you’d see in the convenience store, and smile at politely. Who would have ever suspected what I was capable of? All those people. Those useless, useless people. I gave them a use. I was an artist. And my canvas of choice was the clean human skull.
The idea that the spirits of those once tortured in the house might still be there was the avenue his imagination began to explore. The groaning of the wood sounded like screams from the dungeon and the clunking pipes were the implements of torture. His bedcovers seemed to offer less protection than they had done in his younger years, he felt naked and at the mercy of his thoughts, and it wasn’t long before the skull he’d seen in the cellar had a face, manifested by fear and imagination.
Defeated, Jo turned her head as the knives hurdled through the air. There was another photograph on the wall: a shot of Franny Jo had never seen before. As the woman in the photo watched her knives driven home, the corners of her mouth turned up. For the first time ever, Jo was privy to a genuine smile on the lips of Franny Trymark.
I was going to make the little hound here part of your display, but you know, against all odds, I’ve found myself growing to like the little guy! You were going to be a girl transforming into a werewolf, but now I think you’ll be part of my Hansel & Gretel display. I needed a trespassing little snoop!
Arguably, horror may be understood as a fictional indulgence in fantasies of violence, and our fascination with it seen as a form of sublimation of repressed desires. If we accept this line of thinking, then horror has the benefit of, at least, being one of the most honest of genres.
The day had begun like any other ordinary day for Barnabas Crackle. That is to say, as extra-ordinarily as his days typically began, which were the usual for our faithful protagonist.
Hanging from every corner, above every window, standing on every shelf and tabletop, were dozens of handmade birdcages. Nomi had crafted them all, mostly out of old fishing twine, scraps of nets, and chicken wire. Woven in between the bars of the cages were bits of seashells, crab shells, pebbles, and driftwood she had scavenged along the beach. In a pinch she had made a few out of old clothes hangers she had scissored apart and woven together with strips of a negligee or shirt. Each one was personal, each one was unique, each one was a story
The organism - there was no other thing she could think to call it - churned and moved as it propelled itself across the ground, the living bodies of animals briefly appearing before being submerged in a sea of bugs as others rose to the surface. And then there were the bones. At first she didn't quite understand what she was seeing. For a moment she believed that they were pieces of wood - limbs of trees picked up by the undulating mass - but when she saw the skull, its jaw hanging open in a silent scream, she understood the horror of what it was. the remains of victims were a part of its body, flowing within the multitude that made up its mass.
Your heart is burning strong with righteous indignation... That flame is scattering sparks that may set fire elsewhere. That fire of yours will one day spread to others seeking a just world. The point is whether you have a torch in your heart or not. To light a fire to others.
I stared into the man's lifeless eyes. His face was blue, but it could've been from the cold. His body was bloated, but he could've just been fat. None of this explained the crows lining up on the tree branch though. --The Body By the Tree
For the first time she realized she'd spent so much time mourning a world that had ended ages ago, hoping to resurrect it, that she'd never paid attention to what it was becoming. Or returning to again, now that it was unfettered. Where were the centaurs, she might have asked instead. Where were the gorgons, the furies, the giants and the gods?
The adjuration to be "normal" seems shockingly repellent to me; I see neither hope nor comfort in sinking to that low level. I think it is ignorance that makes people think of abnormality only with horror and allows them to remain undismayed at the proximity of "normal" to average and mediocre. For surely anyone who achieves anything is, a priori, abnormal.
He clicked the Save button, and there was the sound of a trumpet fanfare. A cleverly designed Flash animation in emerald green illuminated in gold leapt out at him in a 3D effect like the titles of an epic film: WELCOME, ASH, TO BIG BROTHER, THE AVENGER! The words exploded in a shower of gold dust. A voice boomed chillingly, ‘If you want help to sort them out, look no further! Big Brother will avenge you!
Something big was trapped inside him, some great sadness, and he felt if he could cry, or even articulate it in speech, it would relieve the pressure and provide him some measure of relief. But he couldn't reach it. He couldn't find a way to address it. He wondered if it would become the thing that defined him.
I hear you're quite the writer. Quite the teacher's pet.""I... I don't know what you mean.""No? Then maybe you're in for a surprise. And maybe it won't be a nice one."Kate heard her voice lashing out, braver than she felt."I don't know what you're talking about. But nothing that pertains to me is any of your business.'The match hissed again. She saw his black, black eyes flickering."You're right. How inconsiderate of me."Shaken, Kate willed her feet to move her forward."You should be more careful," Pearce said. "Anyone could find your key. Anyone could get into your cabin."Kate whirled to face him. "I have a roommate. I'm not alone.""A roommate?" And he sounded like he was smiling... a dark strange smile as if she'd said something particularly funny. "If someone wanted to get you," Pearce said slowly, and another match went out, "a roommate wouldn't stop them. They'd just get you. Wouldn't they?
I hear you're quite the writer. Quite the teacher's pet.""I... I don't know what you mean.""No? The maybe you're in for a surprise. A maybe it won't be a nice one."Kate heard her voice lashing out, braver than she felt."I don't know what you're talking about. But nothing that pertains to me is any of your business.'The match hissed again. She saw his black, black eyes flickering."You're right. How inconsiderate of me."Shaken, Kate willed her feet to move her forward."You should be more careful," Pearce said. "Anyone could find your key. Anyone could get into your cabin."Kate whirled to face him. "I have a roommate. I'm not alone.""A roommate?" And he sounded like he was smiling... a dark strange smile as if she'd said something particularly funny. "If someone wanted to get you," Pearce said slowly, and another match went out, "a roommate wouldn't stop them. They'd just get you. Wouldn't they?
With apologies to Judy Garland and Cole Porter, all the world does NOT love a clown. John Wayne Gacy might have been the final nail in the coffin in terms of anyone associating clowns with funny (if a bunch of clowns die, do they all fit into one coffin?)
The water wasn't the same down here. Water is what runs out of the kitchen taps or a playground drinking fountain. It fills bathubs and pools and yes, of course, the ocean- but at a certain depth, water becomes a barrier from all you remember, all you think you know.You're trapped within it, a plaything of it.Focus erodes. Your thoughts mutate. The pressure.The pressure.The soul can't cope with that. It shouldn't be expected to.Humans weren't built for this. There's a reason nothing lives down here.Or nothing should.
Ha!’ cackled the fiend, ‘I expect you’d like revenge on that husband of yours. Murder shouldn’t go unpunished, and no creature enjoys delivering chastisement as much as I. What about giving him a taste of his own medicine? If you’d be so kind as to lend me your body, I’ll set him dancing to my tune.’The wife’s spectre grimaced and nodded, at which the wicked Likho stripped off the nightgown, then the dead woman’s pliant skin, peeling back the flaccid folds. These it left in a slack heap. It gobbled her flesh and sucked the bones clean. These it hid behind the stove, before inserting itself inside the empty, wrinkled carcass, taking the former position of the corpse. Its fat tongue swiped the last juices from around its lips.When the husband returned home, all was as it had been; there was not a speck of blood to be seen, although the strangest smell of rotten eggs lingered
Inside, there was a bed, and upon the bed there was a woman. More beautiful was she even than the damask rose while her scent, drifting through the open window, was that of the night dew. Her hair was silken as the raven's wing. Quite naked, she lay, so still upon the bed, her eyes closed in reverie.The young man looked first upon her breasts, where her hand rested. And upon each breast, there was a rosebud nipple. Upon each nipple there was a tip most tender. Upon each tip there was a milky drop. Chin lifted, lips parted, she milked her maiden breast.'What I would give to suckle at that teat,' thought he. from 'Against Faithlessness' in Cautionary Tales
Good and evil exist in all of us. a moment’s temptation takes us on a wrong path. On that path may lurk foul fiends,inhuman, yet feeding, needingall our weaknesses: vanity, indolence and envy,Easy fruits for evil appetites,our flesh, a tasty afterthought,our bones flung asunder.
The air changes. Then that invisible spider crawls up my spine, tickling the hairs behind my neck. I have come to know this spider these last couple of years. It whispers there’s something else in the room, breathing with you, watching you, grinning at you.I hate that damn spider.
Here, at the edges,Whispering to you,And we’re not alone; not aloneHere, in the dark.We are behind the door, in the corners,In the room where you’ve just extinguished the light.We flicker in the shadow you cast on the wall.We are the prickle on the back of your neck.Curled, in words unspoken,We are the shiver on your uneasy flesh,The creep of the unknown on your skin.Can you feel us?Here, at the edges.From the Foreword of Cautionary Tales - by Emmanuelle de Maupassant
The orchestra strikes up with ‘Stockholm in My Heart’, and everyone joins in. Hands sway in the air, mobile phone cameras are raised. A wonderful feeling of togetherness. It will be another fifteen minutes until, with meticulous premeditation, the whole thing is torn to shreds. Let us sing along for the time being. We have a long way to go before we return here. Only when the journey has softened us up, when we are ready to think the unthinkable, will we be permitted to come back.
There, conspicuous in the light of the conflagration, lay the dead body of a woman—the white face turned upward, the hands thrown out and clutched full of grass, the clothing deranged, the long dark hair in tangles and full of clotted blood. The greater part of the forehead was torn away, and from the jagged hole the brain protruded, overflowing the temple, a frothy mass of gray, crowned with clusters of crimson bubbles—the work of a shell.The child moved his little hands, making wild, uncertain gestures. He uttered a series of inarticulate and indescribable cries—something between the chattering of an ape and the gobbling of a turkey—a startling, soulless, unholy sound, the language of a devil. The child was a deaf mute.Then he stood motionless, with quivering lips, looking down upon the wreck.
Hidden in a toolbox, in the rafters of his four-car garage, was an envelope full of pictures taken by a private detective...They were pictures of a scrawny, boyish looking nine year old with a wide mouth and a tangle of brown hair...Her eyes were oblong and deep set, their color hidden from the camera by the slant of the sun. The angles and planes of her face were oddly beautiful just then, in that moment, frozen on Kodak paper. A hint of the woman she would someday become.
It’s a long story, but one you’ve never heard before. This story is about a place that dwells on the mountain; a place where bad things happen. And you may think you know about the bad things, you may decide you have it all figured out but you don’t. Because the truth is worse than monsters or men.
My father saw him one time. We live in mexico, on the farm, and Father went to feed the horses. At night. Little man was standing there giving hay to the horses. And Father watch and he came and he told Mother, 'Jedushka Di Muvedushka feeding the horses'. He don't get scared, nothing. In the morning we go look, the horses' hair all braided. So Beautiful! All their hair braided.
Here are the stories written on the Book of Blood. They are a map of that dark highway that leads out of life towards unknown destinations. Few will have to take it, most will go on peacefully along lamplit streets, ushered out of living with prayers and caresses. But for a few, a chosen few, the horrors will come, skipping to fetch them off to the highway of the damned...
I’ve always felt a little lost in life, like I never received complete instructions on who I'm supposed to be. Everyone else around me seemed to know exactly who they were. Their lives would fly right by me; their GPS’s locked on to destinations while I just sat idling in the street. In high school I never did any extracurricular activities because I couldn't figure out if I was a sports person or a music person. And it was no different in college. I wandered through four different majors, unable to decide who I wanted to be. I just felt like a blank slate.And if I was a blank slate, Micah York was The Starry Night - authentic, beautiful, perfect. He was my exact antithesis which is what attracted me to him in the first place. He was born knowing exactly who he was and what he was about. His confidence and certainty in himself was an all but tangible element of him.
Even though it’s pleasing to boast about achievements I have earned in my generation, nothing makes me more content in the world than just having the exciting opportunity to share my passion of work with the public. What is even more exhilarating, is being able (having the capability) to spend quality time with my loving wife, (Gloria) and family doing what I love most in the world -- writing. Their total well-being and health, along with my health too means everything to me. I have had my fair share of narrow escapes in my life to know how important my family, and health are to me. I will never take that for granted again – ever.
Touch the stone,' said Beliah, 'and you will touch "reality", or what the ignorant of all ages think "reality" is. That kind of truth will kill you, man. You won't see morning! I have kept you all your life from such things as remorse, terror, pity. Touch the stone, and those same angels will change you into an old poor pathetic deluded dying creature. Hubert, a nurse has to shave you, your hand shakes so much. You know that don't you? You dribble at every orifice, Hubert. You've begun to smell this past year or two...' He suddenly howled as if I had actually touched the stone,'YOU WILL BE RAVAGED IN FIRES OF GRACE!'I heard Nurse McGregor in the next ward. 'Good evening,' came her cheerful voice to the looney who had strangled his sweetheart and then buried her in his garden. 'Is it cocoa tonight, or tea, or milk?"Beliah was weeping. Outside the eaves dripped. The whole earth was drenched with the grief of Beliah. He wept inside me. I felt his marvellous tears on my face.
Emily, there are enemies everywhere. We have to be on our guard, especially for the next couple of weeks.’ Theo sighed unhappily. ‘This is going to be the longest fortnight of my life.’ ‘That’s saying something,’ I joked, ‘given how long you’ve lived.’ ‘Exactly,’ he said, without smiling.
Franklin Fletcher dreamed of luxury in the form of tiger-skins and beautiful women. He was prepared, at a pinch, to forgo the tiger-skins. Unfortunately the beautiful women seemed equally rare and inaccessible. At his office and at his boarding-house the girls were mere mice, or cattish, or kittenish, or had insufficiently read the advertisements.
No, you will never been tamed, you are a monster, the eternal wild one. I often wonder where you came from, only someone with something to hide has such a cloudy beginnings. Who are you? Or more importantly who were you? There is only the odd bits that are known about you and nothing is set in stone. Do you even know the real you behind the charade? The fact that you are aroused by virginity, is a worrying fascination. I would not be surprised if the person who turned you realised what a monster he'd created. They were not called Frankenstein by any chance? Maybe you are a creature of many parts? Did you destroy your creator as well in a fit of rage? Is that why your are always looking for your virgin bride? Only you take beautiful swans and turn them into ugly ducklings. You will never return to that life that you give up. Stop trying to recreate them.
True vampires that want to build a strong family does not go around turning people just because they want to. But even the most sensible of vampire can be tempted by beauty. When you come across someone whose beauty seems to be made of the stars themselves, then you want to preserve that beauty forever. Despite knowing that it may not be the best idea in the world. But then beauty is a power all of its own.
And then I saw her, who I could have only assumed with Aura Tsang, a very petite women, with the exotic features of those you associate with an Asian background complete with slick dark hair but the most amazing piercing blue eyes, the type that any Aryan would have be proud of. She seemed to have the persona that made her a person of the world,Yet, there was the energy that she was giving off, a energy of a powerful and brave woman who could and would take on the world and yet she had the gentlest smile complete with dimples. I was transfixed by her and I felt that my heart would burst into a thousand of pieces if she spoke to me, which of course she would and it did.
But it was not hateful bile that was thrust from me, it was an angry hatred that can only come from those that I had been repressed over the years. It was just subtle cracks that were forming and that was my response coming through. I spoke about the lies that she had subjected the family to, and her gross laziness, expecting Dad and now me to drop everything for her, were she could just as easily get here. And no she can not say I may not be in as this was essentially a night job. It was always the same old role that she wanted to play, the wounded wife and mother, by those that supposedly loved her but this was a self opposed persona and I told her as such. I do not know who was more shocked by the change in me, me or mother. What was shocking was mother's response, that Dad had always called me the specially impossible child, mother had always focused on the impossible part, but now she could finally see why Dad had thought I was special as well. It was a moment of rapture that was disturbed by the book demanding attention, or should I say the person in the book was demanding attention? And with that the spell was broken and mother returned to her normal self, bemoaning that if I did not go visit her soon that I would be written out of the will and I meekly said I would visit soon.
As she walked to the stairway, he pulled her back with a light tug on her shoulder. "They're responding to you now." Turning to face him, she said, "Responding to me? What did I say?" "The hallway was full of them. When you said we were going downstairs to eat, they started filing down the stairs." "They all took the stairs?" Eddie nodded, his shining, gifted eyes watching the ghostly procession. He said, "They don't want to be far from you, Jess. And I'm not entire sure it's well intentioned." "Come to use," the voices whispered.
There is a saying that when someone is struck down without warning that he "didn't know what hit him." It's a bit of a copout, providing the excuse that what happened wasn't the individual's fault at all. That it couldn't have been avoided and no one is to blame.Frankly, that's just a bunch of hokey horseshit.
Wrath crawled out from the well,on direction from Hell,to get back what it once lost.With vengeance in mind,it set out to find,a specified soul to accost.When the Hell-well beckoned,Mother’s will now reckoned,her dead soul now wholly enslaved.Embodied in a rotting husk,the corpse reeked of putrid musk,her being wholly depraved.
Envy said, “Girl, I remember well,ye, who I flung from Hell,and not a day has passed, I haven’t missedthe loss of your soul that I mourned,I’ve been bereft and forlorn,for the sweet taste of your flesh I’ve yet to kiss.But no worries—bygones,that’s the past—long gone,I don’t hold a grudge, no, in no way.And though your family they did swindlemy joy of flaying ye on a spindle, I begrudge ye not a little, so let’s play.So, merely toss your token in my well,and all your dreams I will unveil,for ye alone, them I’ll grant.Come closer, little Penny,your hands I know are not empty,ye have something I dreadfully want.
In hundreds of years of wish fulfillment,never once to the demon’s bereavement,had a wish gone unable to be yielded.It was love this day, which defeated the curse,and there in Hell there was little worse,than the dark forces of evil gone unwielded.
A grey-suited figure with badly-scuffed shoes was squatted over a woman’s body, obscuring her face and upper torso. A loose, white dress; torn, now mostly red. A pattern of rose petals, drenched in blood. One of her sandals was missing, scarlet streaks and spatters on her jade-green polished toenails and pale, slender ankles. Another step took him around the hunched and twitching figure. It ignored him, intent on its work. Then its victim came fully into view … and he saw her ruined face.
The stinging slap against her cheek whipped her head sideways. Her hand reflexively went to her burning face. "I told you no," Tobe said, barely above a whisper. Daphne had no words. He'd never so much as hinted at touching her in anger before. She now understood what stunned speechless meant.
Many veterans feel guilty because they lived while others died. Some feel ashamed because they didn’t bring all their men home and wonder what they could have done differently to save them. When they get home they wonder if there’s something wrong with them because they find war repugnant but also thrilling. They hate it and miss it.Many of their self-judgments go to extremes. A comrade died because he stepped on an improvised explosive device and his commander feels unrelenting guilt because he didn’t go down a different street. Insurgents used women and children as shields, and soldiers and Marines feel a totalistic black stain on themselves because of an innocent child’s face, killed in the firefight. The self-condemnation can be crippling.The Moral Injury, New York Times. Feb 17, 2015
Simon stopped listening. He realised he'd had enough. Enough of the theories, enough of the mystery, enough of the bullshit. Enough of the soldiers and guns and MI5. Enough of bugs in phones and in people he cared about. Enough of not being cared about back. Enough of uncertainty and lies and civilisation, collapsing or not. Enough of is part in it, his place, his role; the character of Simon Parfitt and all the baggage it entailed.
There's so many kids," he said low enough so only Jessica could hear. "We're going to walk right into them in two more steps." If it gave Jessica pause, he didn't sense it. Instead she seemed to pull him faster. A frigid hand closed around his heart, freezing the ebb and flow of his blood. Eddie gasped, overcome with the chill of a thousand deep, dark graves.
This was a part he didn't like. It made him feel like a jailer, or a kidnapper. "Another sin, another string of Hail Marys," he said, sitting on the edge of the bed. So much was riding on this. It could all blow up in their faces. If he was still a betting man, that's where he'd lay his money. Too many moving parts that weren't in line with one another. Praying wasn't an option. God didn't have time for deceivers.
She fished a gum wrapper and pen from her bag and wrote down her number. "I'd like to stay friends with you and Jason. That's my cell number. You can call me any time you want, except at two-thirty-six in the morning." Alice cocked her head. "How come I can't call you at two-thirty-six/" "I need that minute to sleep," Jessica said, smiling.
Which grave are we in?" she said. "The oldest." She felt Eddie's puzzlement. "That can't be possible. He looks like he was just buried." "There must be something at work in the chemistry of the island that's preserving his body. It's like the incorruptibles, bodies that weren't preserved in any special way that don't decay. Catholic saints like Bernadette and Padre Pio are said not to have decomposed even though they died a long, long time ago. Environmental factors can cause a kind of mummification." Jessica said, or thought, "This is bizarre. I'm getting a lesson on mummification while in the coffin of a dead man.
You told us this place was haunted. How haunted is it?"Paul cast a quick glance at the house. "I'm not sure. When they found the bodies twenty years ago, the place became off-limits. That was horror enough. There were whispers of strange stuff going on before then, but no one is alive who could verify a thing. Somehow, an urban legend grew about the whole island. "Don't go near haunted Ormsby Island. They say a reporter went out alone one night just after the mass murder had been discovered and never came back. Since anyone who had committed the murders was either dead or gone at that point, it had to be the island itself that offed the reporter. Mitch, Ormsby Island isn't even on most maps of Charleston Harbor. Locals will turn away the moment you even say its name.
Clarke, in the deep folds of dream, was conscious that the path from his father’s house had led him into an undiscovered country, and he was wondering at the strangeness of it all, when suddenly, in place of the hum and murmur of the summer, an infinite silence seemed to fall on all things, and the wood was hushed, and for a moment in time he stood face to face there with a presence, that was neither man nor beast, neither the living nor the dead, but all things mingled, the form of all things but devoid of all form. And in that moment, the sacrament of body and soul was dissolved, and a voice seemed to cry “Let us go hence,” and then the darkness of darkness beyond the stars, the darkness of everlasting.
For a moment, Simon's sympathetic nervous system forgot he was arachnophobic. The sight of those spindly legs rising, like an ink drawing popping out of paper into three-dimensional space, should have caused a surge of adrenaline, a yelp of panic, and at least three feet of involuntary back-peddling.
Something was wrong with the devices themselves. Digging deep into the internal structure of the circuit boards with powerful microscopes, Simon's team had discovered broken and incorrect connections, electronic dead-ends, short circuits, and nonsensical pathways.
He reached the ground floor and flung the door open, fleeing into the street. He glanced back and saw that she wasn't following, so he slowed to a halt. His pulse raced. The entranceway was dark, the door swinging slowly closed. Movement to his left caught his attention: the camera on the corner of the building that covered the resident's parking. It swivelled to point directly at him, and he stared at it for a moment, suddenly doubtful it was a closed-circuit system after all.He ran for his car, and the camera followed.
There was one moment of intersection, when the topic of hate-watching came up. "Why do you watch TV shows--and keep watching them--if you don't like them?" Terrence asked.Simple: Some days, all you have is gazing upon horror, and the small comfort of being surprised that it is not yours.
She emerged from the shadows like an apparition, and he was taken aback by her beauty. Never in his wildest dreams had he expected to chance upon such a vision of loveliness in those harsh and unforgiving mountains. Her beautiful face, long black hair, and slender figure enchanted him.
It was dark enough that I couldn't make out their features, but I could see that someone was cutting through the links of the fence. There was a sense of urgency about those that watched him, some of them turning to peer over their shoulders into the brush and foliage that edged the fence. I watched them in horror, a sense of dread washing over me. What kind of horrors had they led to our very doorstep?
He roused from a joyous dream of feasting, of drinking blood and sucking warm marrow from the bone. His sons and daughters swarmed like ants upon the surface of the Earth, ripe in their terror, delectable in their anguish. He swept them into his mouth and their insides ran in black streams between his lips and matted his beard. This sweet dream rapidly slipped away as he stretched and assessed his surroundings. He shambled forth from the great cavern in the mountain that had been his home for so long.
Captain! You can't hold them off! I tried! I swear! They've been artificially enhanced, sir! But all the humans died out - there's bones out there by the millions! They were all suffocated by cuteness! The World is full of kiitens, oh the horror!'My God,' Hadrian said. "They've finally did it! All those oh-so-cute-my-cuddy-kittens-here's-a-pic bastards! They finally went and did it!
Curtis Bane screamed and though I came around fast and fired in the same motion, he’d already pulled a heater and begun pumping metal at me. We both missed and I was empty, that drum clicking uselessly. I went straight at him. Happily, he too was out of bullets and I closed the gap and slammed the butt of the rifle into his chest. Should’ve knocked him down, but no. The bastard was squat and powerful as a wild animal, thanks to being a coke fiend, no doubt. He ripped the rifle from my grasp and flung it aside. He locked his fists and swung them up into my chin, and it was like getting clobbered with a hammer, and I sprawled into a row of trash cans. Stars zipped through my vision. A leather cosh dropped from his sleeve into his hand and he knew what to do with it all right. He swung it in a short chopping blow at my face and I got my left hand up and the blow snapped my two smallest fingers, and he swung again and I turned my head just enough that it only squashed my ear and you better believe that hurt, but now I’d drawn the sawback bayonet I kept strapped to my hip, a fourteen-inch grooved steel blade with notched and pitted edges—Jesus-fuck who knew how many Yankee boys the Kraut who’d owned it gashed before I did for him—and stabbed it to the guard into Bane’s groin. Took a couple of seconds for Bane to register it was curtains. His face whitened and his mouth slackened, breath steaming in the chill, his evil soul coming untethered. He had lots of gold fillings. He lurched away and I clutched his sleeve awkwardly with my broken hand and rose, twisting the handle of the blade side to side, turning it like a car crank into his guts and bladder, putting my shoulder and hip into it for leverage. He moaned in panic and dropped the cosh and pried at my wrist, but the strength was draining from him and I slammed him against the wall and worked the handle with murderous joy. The cords of his neck went taut and he looked away, as if embarrassed, eyes milky, a doomed petitioner gaping at Hell in all its fiery majesty. I freed the blade with a cork-like pop and blood spurted down his leg in a nice thick stream and he collapsed, folding into himself like a bug does when it dies.
I stare at my freakish eyeball, gaze into the distorted pupil until it expands and fills the mirror, fills my brain and I’m rushing through vacuum. Wide awake and so far at such speed I flatten into a subatomic contrail. That grand cosmic maw, that eater of galaxies, possesses sufficient gravitational force to rend the fabric of space and time, to obliterate reality, and in I go, bursting into trillions of minute particles, quadrillions of whining fleas, consumed. Nanoseconds later, I understand everything there is to understand. Reduced to my “essential saltes” as it were, I’m the prime mover seed that gets sown after the heat death of the universe when the Ouroboros swallows itself and the cycle begins anew with a big bang.
Other folk thought the Rage was simple bloodlust, a berserk savagery that neither knew nor cared what its target was, and so it was when it struck without warning. But when a hradani gave himself to it knowingly, it was as cold as it was hot, as rational as it was lethal. To embrace the Rage was to embrace a splendor, a glory, a denial of all restraint but not of reason. It was pure, elemental purpose, unencumbered by compassion or horror or pity, yet it was far more than mere frenzy.
The town knew about darkness. It knew about the darkness that comes on the land when rotation hides the land from the sun, and about the darkness of the human soul. The town is an accumulation of three parts which, in sum, are greater than the sections. The town is the people who live there, the buildings which they have erected to den or do business in, and it is the land.
Rushing out the door on his way back to the street, he ran into someone with his shoulder. Turning to apologize to them, he stopped, horrified at what he saw.It was the white-eyed man he’d met a week ago. “Watch your back.” He said standing there just long enough for Raven to take in the meat between his teeth, the milky, nearly opaque color of his eyes and the madness within them. Then, after only a few seconds, he was gone, vanished into the crowd as if he had never existed. Certain his mind was playing tricks and tired of being terrified for his sanity, he headed down the street as fast as he could in pursuit. As he rushed through the tightly packed crowd, he saw others like the man he’d just seen, and each of their white eyes gazed blankly into his. A woman here, a hunched drifter there, shapes and faces that shifted and darted all around him. “Watch your back.” They hissed, and he tried to move faster, his heart racing and the nerves of his body jangling painfully with fear as he fought to get beyond them. Hands reached out for his clothes, pulling him in different directions as they tugged and he struggled to be free. Their fingers felt like talons clasped into the folds and gaps of his clothing, ripping and popping stitches in their fervor to gain some small grasp on his flesh beneath his jacket. Along with the horror of their cold, dead eyes, he could smell some strangeness—a sickly sweet smell of rot and decay only barely closeted by preserving fluids. The smell dug into his sinuses as their fingers and hands dug at him. He gagged, his teeth clenched tight as he exerted energy he didn’t really have. He pushed away from them and on through the empty space he saw at the end of this group of pedestrians. Many of whom mingled with what he now felt must be the dead, wholly unaware of why he flailed and pushed against them.
He came through the door howling, an axe arched high over his head. His eyes danced in madness, stuck fast on the two of them kissing, caught in their embrace and unaware of him. For a moment they went on, oblivious, untouched by the madman soon to come. It was a bright bubble of illusion on the eve of utter and complete madness. She was the first to see. The image of her stepfather captured in Mateo’s eyes, the furious glee of the Nazi’s vengeance, sharp and mirrored in their emerald beauty. Soon those eyes were wide with terror and sorrow in a moment of unbidden regret caught at the end of such happiness.
Later, Aldapuerta spent two years at medical school where he learned the geography of the human body and something of its almost infinite capacity for suffering anddegradation. He took especial delight in tending to the physically incapacitated and wasthankful for the loose coats that “prevented the matrona from spotting the engorged cock that I would occasionally press against the bedridden patient”.
THE THING WAS AN EXPERT IN HORROR, BUT THIS HUMAN HORROR INDEED EXCEEDED ANY OTHER POSSIBLE FATE. NOT ONLY BECAUSE IT WAS WITHOUT MERCY, BUT BECAUSE IT WAS ACTED UPON RATIONALLY AND WITHOUT COMPULSION. IT WAS A CHOICE. THE KILLING WAS UNRELATED TO THE LARGE WAR, AND IT SERVED NO OTHER PURPOSE THEN EVIL. MEN CHOSE TO DO THIS TO OTHER MEN AND INVENTED REASONS AND PLACES AND MYTHS IN ORDER TO SATISFY THEIR DESIRE IN A LOGICAL AND METHODICAL WAY.
Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.”— “Supernatural Horror in Literature
Hurrying on, Barbee nodded to the workman as casually as he could. His skin felt goose-pimpled under the thin red robe, and he couldn't help shivering to a colder chill than he felt in the frosty air. For the quiet city, it seemed to him, was only a veil of painted illusion. Its air of sleepy peace concealed brooding horror, too frightful for sane minds to dwell upon. Even the cheery bricklayer with the lunch pail might - just might - be the monstrous Child of Night.
The marine underworld stretched below the ship and embodied many secrets. The disappearance of Olga had become one of the mysteries that would remain with Stefania and her family. The disappearance of her baby sister and sudden departure from her home had taught the ten-year-old that life was filled with uncertainties. But she was willing to forget that for a little while.She jumped down from the barrel and headed toward Liam, Felix, and the other shipmates. They would sing shanties and talk of the constellations, the sea, its creatures, and the legends. It would get her through another night.La Suerte was the only stability for her passengers with the infinite unknown all around them. The waters of the sea, the world below the surface, and the sky that stretched beyond the horizon was a representation of the limitless possibilites and dangers awaiting those aboard.
Shawn slowly climbed the old wooden stairs, listening to the low creak that sounded from his footsteps. He hoped the wood wouldn’t collapse beneath him. But the stairs held strong and a moment later he joined his friend in the kitchen of the old house, a wave of suffocating humidity washing over them as they stepped deeper into its secrets.
Compassion for human hurt, a humble sense of our impermanence, an absolute valuation of justice—all of our so-called virtues only trouble us and serve to bolster, not assuage, horror. In addition, these qualities are our least vital, the least in line with life. More often than not, they stand in the way of one’s rise in the welter of this world, which found its pace long ago and has not deviated from it since. The putative affirmations of life—each of them based on the propaganda of Tomorrow: reproduction, revolution in its widest sense, piety in any form you can name—are only affirmations of our desires. And, in fact, these affirmations affirm nothing but our penchant for self-torment, our mania to preserve a demented innocence in the face of gruesome facts.By means of supernatural horror we may evade, if momentarily, the horrific reprisals of affirmation. Every one of us, having been stolen from nonexistence, opens his eyes on the world and looks down the road at a few convulsions and a final obliteration. What a weird scenario. So why affirm anything, why make a pathetic virtue of a terrible necessity? We are destined to a fool’s fate that deserves to be mocked. And since there is no one else around to do the mocking, we will take on the job. So let us indulge in cruel pleasures against ourselves and our pretensions, let us delight in the Cosmic Macabre. At least we may send up a few bitter laughs into the cobwebbed corners of this crusty old universe.Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Admittedly, this is not a practice likely to find universal favor. True macabrists are as rare as poets and form a secret society by the bad-standing of their memberships elsewhere, some of their outside affiliations having been cancelled as early as birth. But those who have gotten a good whiff of other worlds and sampled a cuisine marginal to stable existence will not be able to stay themselves from the uncanny feast of horrors that has been laid out for them. They will loiter in moonlight, eyeing the entranceways to cemeteries, waiting for some propitious moment to crash the gates and see what is inside.Once and for all, let us speak the paradox aloud: “We have been force-fed for so long the shudders of a thousand graveyards that at last, seeking a macabre redemption, a salvation by horror, we willingly consume the terrors of the tomb…and find them to our liking.
Compassion for human hurt, a humble sense of our impermanence, an absolute valuation of justice—all of our so-called virtues only trouble us and serve to bolster, not assuage, horror. In addition, these qualities are our least vital, the least in line with life. More often than not, they stand in the way of one’s rise in the welter of this world, which found its pace long ago and has not deviated from it since. The putative affirmations of life—each of them based on the propaganda of Tomorrow: reproduction, revolution in its widest sense, piety in any form you can name—are only affirmations of our desires. And, in fact, these affirmations affirm nothing but our penchant for self-torment, our mania to preserve a demented innocence in the face of gruesome facts.By means of supernatural horror we may evade, if momentarily, the horrific reprisals of affirmation. Every one of us, having been stolen from nonexistence, opens his eyes on the world and looks down the road at a few convulsions and a final obliteration. What a weird scenario. So why affirm anything, why make a pathetic virtue of a terrible necessity? We are destined to a fool’s fate that deserves to be mocked. And since there is no one else around to do the mocking, we will take on the job. So let us indulge in cruel pleasures against ourselves and our pretensions, let us delight in the Cosmic Macabre. At least we may send up a few bitter laughs into the cobwebbed corners of this crusty old universe.
Where moments before the bright morning sun flickered through the branches of the huge oak trees surrounding the property, every-thing in a ten yard radius immediately went pitch dark. The air, already a chilly fifty degrees, dropped past freezing in an instant, and the pressure changed to the point where he thought his eardrums might burst.
If I catch you, I might do anything. I might strip the skin from your bones as I drain you dry. Or I might drag you into my chambers and have you pleasure me in ways you cannot even imagine. I might even take mercy on you, and that would be the cruelest injustice of all, because for you, it would only be a temporary reprieve.
A figure held his daughter in the rocker. In the dim light he couldn’t make out the features, but the sight of anyone he didn’t know sitting in Wendy’s rocker with their daughter was enough to scare the shit out of him. Judging by the shuddering movements of his daughter’s body it had frightened her too, had caused her to mewl. He wanted to charge forward and reclaim his daughter, but he didn’t know what would happen if he acted so quickly. What would he do if it hurt her? What would he do if it killed her? “What-what do you want? I’ll do anything just don’t take my daughter. She’s…all I have left.”The figure stopped rocking and slowly eased its way to its feet. There’s not much light in the room but as it moved closer to the bed and it settled the baby in her crib, he saw just enough of her face in the moonlight.“Wendy?” His voice is as full of horror as it is with awe. He can’t help but be horrified at the sight of her now, the way that death has changed her, making her a terrible figure indeed. Her eyes are strange; some depth, some dark and terrible nothing has swallowed up all of her light, and in this first moment he swears he can feel the awful cold of that operating room coming off of her flesh. She is so small and so hard to look at, as if his mind can’t quite focus on her form. Through the bars of the crib he can see her anger and hear the terrible, alien sound of her hiss. “What do you want?”She doesn’t answer him, staring cold and blank through those stark white bars, and then she was scrambling toward him across the floor, making him press flat against the wall to get away from her skittering shape.
There she was, up on that bed pushing and pushing just as they’d practiced. She was dilated and the tension had been building to this moment all day. He had never been so glad to be a writer. It meant that he could be here and he could be at home, helping her as much as he liked after the baby was born. Wendy was sweating and bleary-eyed, focusing so very hard on the movement of her baby down the birth canal that it took her a moment to hear what anyone said to her. The pain was clearly unimaginable and he wished he could have taken some of it from her, but she’d insisted on a natural birth and that’s just what she was doing.“Are you okay, Babe?” She’d grown extra quiet in the last few moments, tension lines growing deeper in her face, her hands clawing at the bed rails as she pushed. She was trying so hard to endure and to get through that he had to ask again. “Are you okay?”She looked at him from the bed with all the nurses and the doctor flitting about the room watching her vital signs, monitoring the baby’s heart rate and her own and of course, guiding the course of the birth itself. She said something he barely heard. “No, no something is…”and then they all knew.
Great revelations of nature, of course, never fail to impress in one way or another, and I was no stranger to moods of the kind. Mountains overawe and oceans terrify, while the mystery of great forests exercises a spell peculiarly its own. But all these, at one point or another, somewhere link on intimately with human life and human experience. They stir comprehensible, even if alarming, emotions. They tend on the whole to exalt.
Flakes of snow swirled and danced across the porch. The Overlook faced it as it had for nearly three-quarters of a century, its darkened windows now bearded with snow, indifferent to the fact it was now cut off from the world… Inside its shell the three of them went about their early evening routine, like microbes trapped in the intestine of a monster.
I am inundated with feeling. I feel like a pinball machine on tilt. All the buzzers are ringing, lights are flashing, and I am about to fry my circuits. Nothing is coming in,and nothing is going out. I feel electrified. The wires ignited, sparked, and fizzled. I want it all to slow down. I go right to the water to douse my flame. I immerse myself in the hot water. I want to wash the smells off my body. I can smell Isabella's hair, her breath, and her child vaginal scent. My hair smells of smoke,and I want to wash Francis off me.
There are matters in that book, said to be done by the express command of God, that are as shocking to humanity, and to every idea we have of moral justice, as any thing done by Robespierre, by Carrier, by Joseph le Bon, in France, by the English government in the East Indies, or by any other assassin in modern times. When we read in the books ascribed to Moses, Joshua, etc., that they (the Israelites) came by stealth upon whole nations of people, who, as the history itself shews, had given them no offence; that they put all those nations to the sword; that they spared neither age nor infancy; that they utterly destroyed men, women and children; that they left not a soul to breathe; expressions that are repeated over and over again in those books, and that too with exulting ferocity; are we sure these things are facts? are we sure that the Creator of man commissioned those things to be done? Are we sure that the books that tell us so were written by his authority?...The Bible tells us, that those assassinations were done by the express command of God. And to read the Bible without horror, we must undo every thing that is tender, sympathising, and benevolent in the heart of man. Speaking for myself, if I had no other evidence that the Bible is fabulous, than the sacrifice I must make to believe it to be true, that alone would be sufficient to determine my choice.
Chapter 4,‘Organised abuse and the pleasures of disbelief’, uses Zizek’s (1991) insights into cite political role of enjoyment to analyse the hyperbole and scorn that has characterised the sceptical account of organised and ritualistic abuse. The central argument of this chapter is that organised abuse has come to public attention primarily as a subject of ridicule within the highly partisan writings of journalists, academics and activists aligned with advocacy groups for people accused of sexual abuse. Whilst highlighting the pervasive misrepresentations that characterise these accounts, the chapter also implicates media consumers in the production of ignorance and disdain in relation to organised abuse and women’s and children’s accounts of sexual abuse more generally.
Every time he studied this instrument, with its slender, gleaming steel rod that tapered down to such needle-like sharpness, he wondered why it was necessary to have things like this in the world. If it were truly only for chopping ice, you'd think a completely different design might do. The people who produce and sell things like this don't understand, he thought. They don't realize that some of us break out in a cold sweat at just a glimpse of that shiny, pointed tip.
He slammed the door and ran blindly down the corridor, grabbing at handles. What exactly had he seen? They had been eating with their bare hands, but somehow the only thought he could hold on to was a kind of sickened gratitude that he had been unable to see their faces.
The crying wailed, somewhere beneath the planks. Several sweeps of the light showed that the cellar was otherwise deserted. Though the face mouthed behind him, he ventured down. For God’s sake, get it over with; he knew he would never dare return.
Unlike the rest he had seen of the bungalow, the hall beyond the door was dark. He could see the glimmer of three doors and several framed photographs lined up along the walls. The sound of flies was louder, though they didn’t seem to be in the hall itself. Now that he was closer they sounded even more like someone groaning feebly, and the rotten smell was stronger too.
Billy sipped the last of his coffee from the mug and shut down his laptop. 1,000 words wasn’t great but it also wasn’t as bad as no words at all. It hadn’t exactly been a great couple of years and the royalties from his first few books were only going to hold out so much longer. Even if he didn’t have anything else to worry about there was always Sara to consider. Sara with her big blue eyes so like her mother’s. He sat for a moment longer thinking about his daughter and all they’d been through since Wendy had passed. Then he picked up his mug with a long sigh and carried it to the kitchen to rinse it in the sink. When he came back into his little living room and the quiet of 1 AM he wasn’t surprised to find her there over to the side of the bookshelf hovering close to the floor just beyond the couch. Wendy. Her eyes were cold and intense in death, angry and spiteful in a way he’d never seen them when she was alive. What once had been beautiful was now a horror and a threat, one that he’d known far too well in the years since she’d died. He and Sara both. He stood where he was looking at her as she glared up at him. Part of her smaller vantage point was caused by kneeling next to the shelf but he knew from the many times she’d walked or run through a room that death had also reduced her, made her no higher than 4 or 4 and half feet when she’d been 6 in life. She was like a child trapped there on the cusp between youth and coming adulthood. Crushed and broken down into a husk, an entity with no more love for them than a snake. Familiar tears stung his eyes but he blinked them away letting his anger and frustration rise in place of his grief.“Fuck you! What right do you have to be here? Why won’t you let Sara and I be? We loved you! We still love you!”She doesn’t respond, she never does. It’s as if she used up all of her words before she died and now all that’s left is the pain and the anger of her death. The empty lack of true life in her eyes leaves him cold. He doesn’t say anything else to her. It’s all a waste and he knows it. She frightens him as much as she makes him angry. Spite lives in every corner of her body and he’s reached his limit on how long he can see this perversion, this nightmare of what once meant so much to him.He walks past the bookshelf and through the doorway there. He and Sara’s rooms are up above. With an effort he resists the urge to look back down the hall to see if she’s followed. He refuses to treat his wife like a boogeyman no matter how much she has come to fit that mold. He can feel her eyes burning into him from somewhere back at the edge of the living room. The sensation leaves a cold trail of fear up his back as he walks the last four feet to the stairs and then up. He can hear her feet rush across the floor behind him and the rustle of fabric as she darts up the stairs after him. His pulse and his feet speed up as she grows closer but he’s never as fast as she is. Soon she slips up the steps under his foot shoving him aside as she crawls on her hands and feet through his legs and up the last few stairs above. As she passes through his legs, her presence never more clear than when it’s shoving right against him, he smells the clean and medicinal smells of the operating room and the cloying stench of blood. For a moment he’s back in that room with her, listening to her grunt and keen as she works so hard at pushing Sara into the world and then he’s back looking up at her as she slowly considers the landing and where to go from there. His voice is a whisper, one that pleads. “Wendy?
Time snapped and Hagerty found himself speeding toward the woman in the straitjacket. Grabbing her by the shoulders, he pulled her off the corpse and held her at arm's length. He caught a glimpse of Kalish's face and the shredded mess where his throat should have been.
These friends - and he laid his hand on some of the books - have been good friends to me, and for some years past, ever since I had the idea of going to London, have given me many, many hours of pleasure. Through them I have come to know your great England; and to know her is to love her. I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is.
The spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organised religion, in India and elsewhere, has filled me with horror and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost always it seemed to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition, exploitation and the preservation of vested interests.
It’s horrible," she said.He looked at her in surprise. Horrible? Wasn’t that odd? He hadn’t thought that for years. For him the word “horror” had become obsolete. A surfeiting of terror made terror a cliché. To Robert Neville the situation merely existed as natural fact. It had no adjectives.
The introduction to horrors so young impressed on me just how helpless and vulnerable I was. Parents are supposed to empower their children to live without them but in my family, I wasn’t given permission to be my own person. I thought I needed them to live and then they abandoned me. It’s no wonder I felt so unempowered well into my adult years.
Good horror is written by people who understand that fear is one of the cardinal passageways into the core of humanity. Good horror is generally written by folks who grew up on horror; books, movies, etc. You can’t simply decide to write—in any genre—if you don’t first have an understanding of the topic and a strong mental backlog of reference.
He pulled my skirt up. I began to worry. Everyone knew he had broken in girls before and I didn't want it to happen to me. I said, 'No. Get off, please.' He pulled me down the alley and pushed me to the ground. As I lay on my back worrying about my new blue coat, he pushed his fingers up between my legs — and rammed himself into me.I was crying. His lips were pressed against mine but I was motionless, like a small corpse. He grunted and I knew it was over. He got up, I just lay there on the ground, my tights round my ankles. The clock was striking twelve.As he walked away, he turned and said, 'I've always wanted to do it to you. I like your mouth'.When I got in, my mum said, 'Tracey, what's wrong with you?' I showed her my coat, the dirt and the stains, and told her 'I'm not a virgin any more.' She didn't call the police or make any fuss. She just washed my coat and everything carried on as normal, as though nothing had happened.But for me, my childhood was over, I had become conscious of my physicality, aware of my presence and open to the ugly truths of the world. At the age of thirteen, I realised that there was a danger in innocence and beauty, and I could not live with both.(describing childhood rape)
Oh little Poupchette, some may tell you that you are nobody's child, a child of defilement, a child begotten in fear and horror. Some may tell you that you are a child of abomination conceived in abomination, a tainted child, a child polluted long before you were born. Do not pay attention to them, my little sweetheart, please do not listen to them; listen to me. I say you are my child and I love you. I sometimes say that out of horror, beauty and purity and grace are born. I say I am your father for ever. I say the loveliest rose can bloom in contaminated soil. I say you are the dawn, the light of all my tomorrows, and the only thing that matters is the promise you represent. I say you are my luck and my forgiveness. My darling Poupchette, I say you are my whole life.
The crow cawed again overhead, and a strong sea wind came in and burst through the trees, making the green pine needles shake themselves all over the place. That sound always gave me goose bumps, the good kind. It was the sound an orphan governess hears in a book,before a mad woman sets the bed curtains on fire.
River had never lost his cool, not since I'd know him. That was the thing about River. He was calm. Calm as a summer's day. Calm as a gentle nap in the sun. Even when girls were fainting and men were slitting their throats in front of you.
When sleep came, I would dream bad dreams. Not the baby and the big man with a cigarette-lighter dream. Another dream. The castle dream. A little girl of about six who looks -like me, but isn’t me, is happy as she steps out of the car with her daddy. They enter the castle and go down the steps to the dungeon where people move like shadows in the glow of burning candles. There are carpets and funny pictures on the walls. Some of the people wear hoods and robes. Sometimes they chant in droning voices that make the little girl afraid. There are other children, some of them without any clothes on. There is an altar like the altar in nearby St Mildred’s Church. The children take turns lying on that altar so the people, mostly men, but a few women, can kiss and lick their private parts. The daddy holds the hand of the little girl tightly. She looks up at him and he smiles. The little girl likes going out with her daddy. I did want to tell Dr Purvis these dreams but I didn’t want her to think I was crazy, and so kept them to myself. The psychiatrist was wiser than I appreciated at the time; sixteen-year-olds imagine they are cleverer than they really are. Dr Purvis knew I had suffered psychological damage as a child, that’s why she kept making a fresh appointment week after week. But I was unable to give her the tools and clues to find out exactly what had happened.
That Abbie is such a freaking brat who doesn’t know anything! My William is wasting away in that castle and that stuck up, self-righteous cow doesn’t even care because now she’s just all ooooo, Peter I love you! Well I don’t love Peter and he’s a jerk. Let’s go bust down the door!” She sat back and calmly pushed her hair from her face, “Now would you get me a soda?
His mind, grooved through the uncounted ages to ultimate despair, soared up insanely. His legs and arms glistened like tongues of living fire as they writhed and twisted in the light that blazed from the portholes. His mouth, a gash in his caricature of a human head, slavered a white frost that floated away in little frozen globules.
From the first, Istanbul had given him the impression of a town where, with the night, horror creeps out of the stones. It seemed to him a town the centuries had so drenched in blood and violence that, when daylight went out, the ghosts of its dead were its only population.
Spittle flew from Jango’s lips as he shouted at the man in a woman’s voice that sounded like it was made of cyanide and sugar that had been laced with the patter of blood dripping on an abattoir floor, “This is the truth about The Killer, ain’t it baby? You’re just a big ol’ bag of screams under all that big, bad muscle, ain’t you?
William sees it all happen again. The pain is not in the event. The subjection to it and his powerless state each time is where his anguish lies. He is unable to influence the situation, despite his desire. He sees the nest outside his house. He sees the baby bird that fell. The mother bird cries frantically for her lost chick. William knows as he approaches the chick that if he touches it his scent will linger, and the mother will reject it. Circling around the fallen creature William hopes it will flee from him, back toward the tree from which it had fallen. His presence only intensifies the creature’s fear. It speeds to his left, heading for the street. Again William tries to flank the bird, but it is too frightened to return to the nest. The chick’s mother wails vainly. William walks into the street trying to herd the bird to safety. The stop light a block away has just turned green. The driver accelerates. William moves from the car’s path and it runs over the bird. The momentum from its wake lifts the bird to the underside of the car, breaking its neck, but not killing it. William watches the bird roll helplessly. It is silent for a second, before it begins to whimper. Its contorted head dangles limply from its body. The noise is tragic. The bird’s mother hears the chick’s pain, but nothing can be done. She laments. A second speeder crushes the chick, leaving only a wet feathered spot in the street. As the cars continue to pass, only one bird is heard. A mother’s grief falls deafly on an unconcerned world.
Quinn seemed to have become one of a jaded philosophical society, a group of arcane deviates. Their raison d'etre was a kind of mystical masochism, forcing initiates toward feats of occult daredevilry - "glimpsing the inferno with eyes of ice", to take from the notebook a phrase that was repeated often and seemed a sort of chant of power. As I suspected, hallucinogenic drugs were used by the sect, and there was no doubt that they believed themselves communing with strange metaphysical venues. Their chief aim, in true mystical fashion, was to transcend common reality in the search for higher states of being, but their stratagem was highly unorthodox, a strange detour along the usual path toward positive illumination. Instead, they maintained a kind of blasphemous fatalism, a doomed determinism which brought them face to face with realms of obscure horror. Perhaps it was this very obscurity that allowed them the excitement of their central purpose, which seemed to be a precarious flirting with personal apocalypse, the striving for horrific dominion over horror itself.("The Dreaming In Nortown")
When she first saw him, she took him for a ghost. His jet-black hair fluttered in the breeze as he walked, letting her see his eyes. They seemed haunted, lost in some way. He was tall and gaunt, starkly pale in his black clothes. He was the very picture of Anton, even sharing his world-weary eyes of deepest blue. She could hardly look away from this apparition, an echo of all the memories and dreams that had haunted her these many years.
As he sat up, he heard soft dripping sounds from the bathroom, little plips like water slipping over the edges of the tub and into the floor. The hairs on the back of his neck rose as he realized where he‟d last heard that sound. His muscles tight with strain from his earlier exertions, he stood and walked warily toward the half open bathroom door and the tub beyond it. Slipping quietly past the door, he saw that the curtain was drawn, and again the shadowed figure lay behind it. One long, slim, leg dangled from the end of the tub, beads of water gliding down its length and off the polished toes. At the other end he saw a mass of auburn curls, matted deep red near the porcelain of the tub. It was the dream and the vision again, more real now, too strong to deny. Shaking, he moved toward the curtain, gagging on the sickly smell of rust and roses, feeling the thin nylon glide between thumb and palm as he pulled it back to reveal his darkest nightmare and deepest regret. He could see the crimson water now, blood bubbles gliding over its surface and clinging to the legs dangling over the tub‟s edge. When he‟d pulled the curtain completely away from the tub and around to its opposite side, he saw her face. Her eyes were closed and he saw that her lids were bruised and purple against the translucent paleness of her face, drained completely dead white under the makeup she‟d brushed on before she‟d died. Staggering by the sight of her, he knelt by the tub and extended one shaking hand to touch her cheek. It all seemed as if he‟d walked into a horror film and once again he needed to prove to his mind that this wasn‟t real. His hand shook as he lifted it nearer to her flesh, waiting for the corpse, the supposedly dead and buried to move. He touched his quivering fingers to her face, feeling its claylike reality. The sensation caused an immediate shudder of revulsion and he fought not to vomit. Even as the moment came, the sight of her moving in the water startled him and he jumped away from the tub. It wasn‟t an obvious movement at first, only soft breaths moving in and out of her nostrils, but then her chest rose and fell with it and he quaked, feeling unstable where he knelt on the floor.Her eyes opened next and he felt the blood fall out of his face, wanting to scream but too afraid he would cause her to take some action, to reach out and touch him, proving well and forever that he was indeed insane. Scream and you might as well slit your own throat. He swallowed the scream like a rock and stared as her eyes moved slowly in their sockets, locking on him. Slowly, as if she‟d lost control of her muscles, she rose from the tub and looked down at him, smiling. Blood water slid down her bare body, over her neck, down her back and the smooth ridges of her breasts, to slip slowly down her thighs and down over her calves. A puddle spread on the floor, and as it extended toward him he struggled to his feet, skittering away from it. As he watched it spread, he shivered, weak as he started to cry frantic, horrified tears. Breaking down, he looked back up at her face and slipped to the floor once more, his knees incapable of sustaining his own weight. The smile grew wider as she strode to his shivering form, thrown on his side and struggling to rise. The blood water seeped into his clothes, making him sick, a drop of it trickling along the lobe of his ear and into it. And then she leaned down, holding those dim, stained curls of auburn out of her face and tucking them behind her ear. Her lips parted, blue beneath the strong crimson red of her lipstick, and she spoke into his ear with the chill breath of the dead. His eyes grew wide and horrified as she spoke, the hair on his neck rising, sending a maddening shiver of fear through him. “I‟ve returned, Raven.” She whispered “And I want what is mine.” The last thing he saw before his mind, finally, thankfully, shut down was her face in front of his. They were pursed for a kiss.
Tell me, Eric,” he said, licking a droplet from the corner of his mouth. “Have you ever tasted blood?” My mouth was so dry I could barely find the voice to answer him. “What an odd question...” “But a valid one. Well, have you?” “I’ve cut my lip before, so yes, I suppose I have tasted blood, but...” “Not your own, you foolish boy.” He let out a short, derisive laugh and leaned in so that he was only a few inches from my face. “I mean the blood of another.” “Good God, Stefan, of course not!” “Pity...
When I first read Lovecraft around 1971, and even more so when I began to read about his life, I immediately knew that I wanted to write horror stories. I had read Arthur Machen before I read Lovecraft, and I didn’t have that reaction at all. It was what I sensed in Lovecraft’s works and what I learned about his myth as the “recluse of Providence” that made me think, “That’s for me!” I already had a grim view of existence, so there was no problem there. I was and am agoraphobic, so being reclusive was a snap. The only challenge was whether or not I could actually write horror stories. So I studied fiction writing and wrote every day for years and years until I started to get my stories accepted by small press magazines. I’m not comparing myself to Lovecraft as a person or as a writer, but the rough outline of his life gave me something to aspire to. I don’t know what would have become of me if I hadn’t discovered Lovecraft.
Last night they came again. The soldiers had set up a defense perimeter, but there were simply too many—they must have come by the hundreds of thousands, a huge swarm that blotted out the stars. Three soldiers killed, as well as Cole. He was standing right in front of me; they actually lifted him off his feet before they bored through him like hot knives through butter. There was barely enough of him left to bury.
My father had a healthy disregard for social conventions: he once let me paint the house windows in rainbows with my watercolor set, to my mother's horror, and he'd clap for trees that he thought were doing a good job of exploding into red during the fall.
Imagine all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring at the door-bell!
In the dark behind the glare of the television, like a mannequin behind it, I could see a silhouette and it wasn’t moving. It was maybe six foot high with its shoulders hunched and I blinked to make sure it was real. The TV fuzzed grey and white and black and I had a lump in my throat that I couldn’t swallow away. “Rory” I whispered. Clawing out gently beneath the duvet cover, reaching for his hand. But I couldn’t find it. And he didn’t answer.
He fills me with horror and I do not hate him. How can I hate him, Raoul? Think of Erik at my feet, in the house on the lake, underground. He accuses himself, he curses himself, he implores my forgiveness!...He confesses his cheat. He loves me! He lays at my feet an immense and tragic love. ... He has carried me off for love!...He has imprisoned me with him, underground, for love!...But he respects me: he crawls, he moans, he weeps!...And, when I stood up, Raoul, and told him that I could only despise him if he did not, then and there, give me my liberty...he offered it...he offered to show me the mysterious road...Only...only he rose too...and I was made to remember that, though he was not an angel, nor a ghost, nor a genius, he remained the voice...for he sang. And I listened ... and stayed!...That night, we did not exchange another word. He sang me to sleep.
Hello, Kanta. They're saying interesting things about you on the news," she said. "I wondered if you'd survived.""He didn't," I said. "I killed him."Silence."I killed Mkhai, too," I said. "Tens of thousands of years, gone in the blink of an eye.""Why are you telling me this?" asked the voice."Because you're next," I said. "I'm the demon slayer. Come and get me.
It had been a bad trip ... fast and wild in some moments, slow and dirty in others, but on balance it looked like a bummer. On my way back to San Francisco, I tried to compose a fitting epitaph. I wanted something original, but there was no escaping the echo of Mistah Kurtz' final words from the heart of darkness: "The horror! The horror! ... Exterminate all the brutes!
The girl's face was the color of talcum. Her uncle's was a death mask, a bone structure overlaid by parchment. Shane's was granite, with a glistening line of sweat just below his hair line. He'd never forget this night, the detective knew, no matter what else happened for the rest of his life. They were all getting scars on their souls, the sort of scars people got in the Dark Ages, when they believed in devils and black magic. ("Speak To Me Of Death")
The thing, whatever it was - and no one was ever sure afterwards whether it was a dream or a fit or what - happened at that peculiar hour before dawn when human vitality is at its lowest ebb. The Blue Hour they sometimes call it, l'heure bleue - the ribbon of darkness between the false dawn and the true, always blacker than all the rest of the night has been before it. Criminals break down and confess at that hour; suicides nerve themselves for their attempts; mists swirl in the sky; and - according to the old books of the monks and the hermits - strange, unholy shapes brood over the sleeping rooftops.At any rate, it was at this hour that her screams shattered the stillness of that top-floor apartment overlooking the Pare Monceau. Curdling, razor-edged screams that slashed through the thick bedroom door. ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")
And the bubbles of light again rose and fell, and in their disordered, irregular, turbulent maze, mingled with the wan moonlight. And now from these globules themselves as from the shell of an egg, monstrous things burst out; the air grew filled with them; larvae so bloodless and so hideous that I can in no way describe them except to remind the reader of the swarming life which the solar microscope brings before his eyes in a drop of water - things transparent, supple, agile, chasing each other, devouring each other - forms like nought ever beheld by the naked eye. As the shapes were without symmetry, so their movements were without order. In their very vagrancies there was no sport; they came round me and round, thicker and faster and swifter, swarming over my head, crawling over my right arm, which was outstretched in involuntary command against all evil beings. ("The House And The Brain")
Inevitably, his vision verged toward the fantastic; he published a scattering of stories - most included in this volume - which appeared to conform to that genre at least to the degree that the fuller part of his vision could be seen as "mysteries." For Woolrich it all was fantastic; the clock in the tower, hand in the glove, out of control vehicle, errant gunshot which destroyed; whether destructive coincidence was masked in the "naturalistic" or the "incredible" was all pretty much the same to him. RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK, THE BRIDE WORE BLACK, NIGHTMARE are all great swollen dreams, turgid constructions of the night, obsession and grotesque outcome; to turn from these to the "fantastic" was not to turn at all. The work, as is usually the case with a major writer was perfectly formed, perfectly consistent, the vision leached into every area and pulled the book together. "Jane Brown's Body" is a suspense story. THE BRIDE WORE BLACK is science fiction. PHANTOM LADY is a gothic. RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK was a bildungsroman. It does not matter.
He handed me something done up in paper. 'Your mask,' he said. 'Don't put it on until we get past the city-limits.' It was a frightening-looking thing when I did so. It was not a mask but a hood for the entire head, canvas and cardboard, chalk-white to simulate a skull, with deep black hollows for the eyes and grinning teeth for the mouth. The private highway, as we neared the house, was lined on both sides with parked cars. I counted fifteen of them as we bashed by; and there must have been as many more ahead, in the other direction. We drew up and he and I got out. I glanced in cautiously over my shoulder at the driver as we went by, to see if I could see his face, but he too had donned one of the death-masks.'Never do that,' the Messenger warned me in a low voice. 'Never try to penetrate any other member's disguise.' The house was as silent and lifeless as the last time - on the outside. Within it was a horrid, crawling charnel-house alive with skull-headed figures, their bodies encased in business-suits, tuxedos, and evening dresses. The lights were all dyed a ghastly green or ghostly blue, by means of colored tissue-paper sheathed around them. A group of masked musicians kept playing the Funeral March over and over, with brief pauses in between. A coffin stood in the center of the main living-room. I was drenched with sweat under my own mask and sick almost to death, even this early in the game.At last the Book-keeper, unmasked, appeared in their midst.Behind him came the Messenger. The dead-head guests all applauded enthusiastically and gathered around them in a ring.Those in other rooms came in. The musicians stopped the Death Match. The Book-keeper bowed, smiled graciously. 'Good evening, fellow corpses,' was his chill greeting. 'We are gathered together to witness the induction of our newest member.' There was an electric tension. 'Brother Bud!' His voice rang out like a clarion in the silence. 'Step forward.' ("Graves For Living")
The car drives through, stops while the man closes and fastens the prickly gate behind it. The bell shuts off; the stillness is deafening by contrast. The car goes on until the outline of a house suddenly uptilts the searching headlight-beams, log-built, sprawling, resembling a hunting-lodge. But there's no friendliness to it. There is something ominous and forbidding about its look, so dark, so forgotten, so secretive-looking. The kind of a house that has a maw to swallow with - a one-way house, that you feel will never disgorge any living thing that enters it. Leprous in the moonlight festering on its roof. And the two round sworls of light played by the heads of the car against its side, intersecting, form a pear-shaped oval that resembles a gleaming skull. ("Jane Brown's Body")
The glove comes off, flops loosely over, and there's suddenly horror beating into his brain, smashing, pounding, battering. He reels a little in his chair, has to hold onto the edge of the table with both hands, at the impact of it.A clawlike thing - two of the finger extremities already bare of flesh as far as the second joint; two more with only shriveled, bloodless, rotting remnants of it adhering, only the thumb intact, and that already unhealthy-looking, flabby. A dead hand - the hand of a skeleton - on a still-living body. A body he was dancing with only a few minutes ago.A rank odor, a smell of decay, of the grave and of the tomb, hovers about the two of them now.A woman points from the next table, screams. She's seen it, too. She hides her face, cowers against her companion's shoulder, shudders. Then he sees it too. His collar's suddenly too tight for him.Others see it, one by one. A wave of impalpable horror spreads centrifugally from that thing lying there in the blazing electric light on O'Shaughnessy's table. The skeleton at the feast! ("Jane Brown's Body")
Our little tribal circles, bound by social contracts and selfish mutual need. Everyone working in their own greedy self-interests and huddling together with their tribe, at war with all those outside who they regard as barely human. What breaks a human mind out of that iron cage of mistrust, is a sacrifice. The martyr who gives up everything, who abandons all personal gain, who lays down his life for the good of those outside his group. He becomes a symbol all can rally around. So instead of trying to make a selfish, violent primate somehow empathize with the whole world, which is impossible, you only need to get him to remember and love the martyr. As one is forgotten, another must replace it.
From this moment on, nothing is what it seems. You're not a human being, you're a character- and filmmakers are doing everything in their power to kill you even now. Supernatural powers and curses are real, and numbers like 666 and 237 can kill you just as easily as a butch knife.Log cabins are slaughterhouses, cornstalks are antennas for evil, and aliens never, ever come in peace.
As McMasters raised the shotgun, the man removed his glasses. There were fields of stars where his eyes should have been. But they weren’t reflections of the night sky. These stars were a glimpse of a dim and distant future where the very laws of physics had been reduced to relics of a forgotten age. Feeble as dying embers, they were the palsied mourners at time’s wake.McMasters could hear the ultimate silence and feel the biting cold of the one true void. The promise of the eternal nothing beckoned to him. There was a sort of peace in the death it represented, not the death of mind and body but of shape and form. It was the final revelation, the casting off of life’s illusion in favor of the void’s embrace. from "Riders of the Necronomicon
There are things so horrible that even the dark is afraid of them. Most people don't know this and this is just as well because the world could not really operate if everyone stayed in bed with the blankets over their head, which is what would happen if people knew what horrors lay a shadow's width away.
Right at this moment, I only want silence. I believe that the end of life is silence in the love people have for you. I've actually been running through what people have said about the end. Religion says that the end is one thing, because it serves their purpose. But great thinkers alike haven't always agreed. Shakespeare knew how to say it better than anyone else. Hamlet says 'The rest is silence.' And when you think of the noises of everyday life, you realize how particularly desirable that is. Silence.
Would to Heaven we had never approached them at all, but had run back at top speed out of that blasphemous tunnel with the greasily smooth floors and the degenerate murals aping and mocking the things they had superseded-run back, before we had seen what we did see, and before our minds were burned with something which will never let us breathe easily again!
Julian tried to keep a pleasant smile on his face, though already it felt strained. He was uncomfortable with people who used the word blessed as a part of their everyday speech. The implication was that God was intervening in the minutiae of their lives, hanging around and helping them with their jobs or children or household chores as though He had nothing better to do. Maybe it was true, Julian thought wryly. Maybe that was why there were wars and murders and earthquakes and hurricanes. God was too busy helping real estate agents find new listings to deal with those other issues.
If I did not believe in life, if I were to lose faith in the woman I love, if I were to lose faith in the order of things, even if I were to become convinced, on the contrary, that everything is a disorderly, damned, and perhaps devilish chaos, if I were struck even by all the horrors of human disillusionment-still I would want to live, and as long as I have bent to this cup, I will not tear myself from it until I've drunk it all!
Now the screams were awful to hear as men burned like candles all along the deck. Black smoke billowed over the sea. Argurios could not believe what he was watching. At least fifty helpless men were dying in agony. One man managed to free himself and leap into the sea. Amazingly, when he surfaced the flames were still consuming him.All along the beach there was silence as the stunned crowd watched the magical fires burning the galley and it's crew.
Your desire for vengeance will cause countless deaths, child,” she said, pointing a crooked finger at Rhylie. “Innocents will be caught up in your maelstrom, their lives torn apart. People you have never met, and will never know will die beneath your shadow if you do not stop. You tear the galaxy asunder with each step you take towards Vorcia.
When I first saw her she dropped her purse and was scrambling to find her glasses. I was two doors down on the right side of the hall, so I walked over and picked them up. I handed them to her and she slipped them on. Her hair was a mess and her face was pouring sweat. I was too and I was itching to get into my apartment. Living on the fourth of five floors was hot, but I had air conditioners in every room with big enough windows. The four machines made it like an ice box and I loved it. Some nights when it got cool enough outside, my windows would fog and I’d see my breath. I turned and walked back to my small place and she called out. “Thank you! Most people don’t notice me!” I turned back to her and smiled, our eyes locked. Her glasses were thick, and they magnified her eyes several times. It was strange looking at them, but I kept my gaze on her for a few seconds as I turned back to my place. I looked her over. Her small breasts stood out against her stomach, which bulged slightly as if she was three or four months pregnant. I didn’t think she was, because she wasn’t straining as hard as I would think a pregnant woman would in this heat. She was attractive in a subtle way, not my usual type. She was tall, about six feet almost, and her long hair was curly, the bones in her hands and wrists stood out. She was skinnier than I ever liked. I’ve always preferred girls with a heft to them. Something about her made me curious, she felt…different.
Infants never learn to soothe themselves to sleep. They learn, abandoned in seclusion, that no matter the volume of their despondence, no matter the force of their tears, when they are alone and frightened, no-one will ever come to their rescue. Infants do not soothe themselves. They merely surrender. And it is caged in their cribs where the infants learn, in the face of their demons, to remain silent and submitting.
Wives of criminals, Massau later reflected, were indeed an interesting lot. There are those who, real panthers in madness, defend their men with claws out; there are the cold and insensitive ones, who wrestling step by step, discuss each argument and answer your questions with other questions; there are the stubborn ones who can pass the entire night in total silence against the light of the interrogation; there are still others, who, shaken and in distress, discover as you do that they have lived for years beside a monster.
I once made a solemn vow that I could not keep... I am from this world. Even with all its failures and suffering it is still worthy of my best efforts... and wishing it was otherwise does not make it so." Eiij'lam told the king.
If you were to tell the thing down at the bottom of that pit it had napped through forty-two presidential inaugurations, eight British coronations, sixteen popes and three number ones by the Danish pop group, Aqua, it would have told you to stop talking nonsense and shut the fuck up. It had slept, somewhat peacefully, through Emmet’s Insurrection, World War I and II, Vietnam, and even the Great War of Blur Vs. Oasis.
Todd’s wife was one of those women with a forced smile perpetually cemented on her face. Even after being chased by a mob of homicidal maniacs and attempting to barricade doors with barstools she kept up appearances, practicing for the days when her husband would be running for public office. When she saw her son poking at their former mail carrier’s dead body a look of utter horror came across her face for the slightest instant. She caught herself and put that smile back on so quickly Will wondered if she might have pulled a few cheek muscles. “Trevor!” she hissed through clenched teeth. “Trevor, you get away from that this instant! You don’t know what kind of diseases that man had. Children shouldn’t play with dead things.” Will looked at Todd and smirked. “Cute kid. How many of those things do you think are out there?
I once made a solemn vow that I could not keep... I am from this world. Even with all its failures and suffering it is still worthy of my best efforts... and wishing it was otherwisedoes not make it so." Eiij'lam told the king.
The Kahn spoke to his disfigured expert. Mal-Greb, confused at first, listened, nodded and bowed his head like the slave he was. Jani Beg momentarily seized with energy grabbed the smaller man by the shoulders and breathed into his face “Hurl them back to Hell!”The wild look in the Kahn’s eyes was something that Mal-Greb understood.And so they began.
Underground, in the dark wet hole that was home to the spiders and the rats, something moved. It had no right to be down there but it belonged nowhere else. Half drowned half alive it pushed the water ahead of it into the culverts and drains as it passed. Right under the city and out into the suburbs and fields these tunnels fed into the river and the network of canals that had fed the industrial revolution. A thousand eyes, some blinded, that had never seen the sun strained in the soiled darkness. It struggled on and it listened with a thousand ears not its own and it cried.
Many of my readers are women and some of them email me their thoughts about the stories I’ve written. Almost all of them find a delicious pleasure in being totally frightened by the strange and dark side of life. Perhaps it’s because horror books are an escape from our sometimes-mundane lives? Or could it be that many of us actually do have a private darker side that we like to explore secretly through books, movies and music?
Every small town has at least one house the children whisper about; the type of house that has always been abandoned; where the once pristine white paint has faded to a grimy gray; where the windows are boarded, and the lawn never grows; where children hold their breath and close their eyes as they pass by. A house that sounds like it contains an army of whispering spirits when the wind whistles through the nearby trees.In the town of Blackwood, that house could be found on Creep Street. It had stood there as long as he could remember.
The smell slaps me sideways. Like when Mom grabs a container she forgot about from the back of the fridge and she says, “Here Mickey, smell this and see if it’s still good,” and I open it and take a whiff before noticing the fuzz. Like that.
In supernatural horror stories, however, magical thinking is a completely different matter. Those characters contending with what seems to be the work of magic will deny till the very last moment that anything magical is going on. They will invoke reason and evidence and eek out corroborations for the cause of their problems. But readers of these stories are rarely, if ever, on the side of these characters. They desperately want to believe that there is indeed something magical going on and they are primed to accept it whenever it occurs. Some readers especially enjoy a story with bad magic, as it assures them that magic is confined to fiction and will not leak into their real lives. This is the most perverse form of magical thinking and the one least likely to be recognized as such.
Joey glanced at his alarm clock and saw it was just before midnight. His eyes drifted to his bookshelf. Lined up in a row, in the order of their publication, were all of the Spook Boys books, a series of kids’ books about two adventurous brothers who were constantly getting into mischief as they explored haunted houses and spooky old castles, or tried to solve mysteries involving missing diamonds or stolen paintings. Joey envied the characters in those books—he wanted his own life to be made up of such exciting, implausible adventures. But maybe his imagination had gotten carried away. Maybe his mind, saturated with such fictional tales, was more than willing to play tricks on him when it came to houses like the one on Creep Street.
That her niece should find such profound pleasure in the company of a thirteen-year-old black girl--and, more to the point, always within the precincts of Elinor's house--was a slap in Mary-Love's face. She decided, without saying anything more to James, to wreck Grace's perfection of happiness. Grace would learn that she, Mary-Love, was the source of all felicity within the Caskey family.
Mary-Love liked to see herself as the family cornucopia, dispensing all manner of good things, unstintingly, unceasingly. She considered herself amply rewarded by her children's gratitude, and if she perceived that her children were not sufficiently grateful, she could make something of that, too.
Am I Dead?"Had she fallen to her doom and this was all an elaborate fantasy? Was this the place between life and death? Her eyes welled up with tears and she ran towards the man that wasn't there, wanting to cling to him, to find something to save her from this torture.
The gravedigger knew a fine trick. When the worms looked unhappy he would leave his place in the mausoleum and go up into the sunshine. He would go empty-handed, but when he returned, with him came a most exquisite corpse. The worms would rejoice, and they would feast upon the corpse until they were fat and could feast no more. The young would come with the old to see this trick and glory in it. No worm knew where the gravedigger got his corpses, but they were always succulent and nourishing. They praised the gravedigger’s generosity. -- From "Worms
Lionel was filled with awful remorse. He asked where had Thomas been last seen, and the boy told him he was headed for the church. Lionel nodded and went home to fetch his shotgun. Throughout the crisis he had done no violence, preferring to preach the sanity of pacifism to the flock. This was different. This was a requirement of the father to the son. He prayed over the shotgun while Darla wailed with the children in the living room. He got in his truck and drove to the church. -- From "The South Fork Penance
I don’t know. How can you know? I…I’m a monster. When I’m hungry, I might do anything.""Oh no, of course I couldn’t possibly understand you." Violet’s shadowed face seemed to be wearing a grim and serious smile. "I know, you woke up one day and found out that you couldn’t be the person you remembered being, the little girl everybody expected you to be. You just weren’t her any more, and there was nothing you could do about it. So your family decided you were a monster and turned on you." Violet sighed, staring out into the darkness."Believe me, I do understand that. And let me tell you - from one monster to another - that just because somebody tells you you’re a monster, it doesn’t mean you are."just now you told me what you did because you want me to stop you from eating Pen. If you were a real monster, you wouldn’t have done that, would you?" Trista’s eyes stung, and she wiped strands of cobweb away with her sleeve."Idiot," added Violet, for good measure.
A monster crosses over into the everyday world. The mortals struggle and show great courage, but it’s no use. The monster kills first the guilty, then the innocent, until finally only one remains. The Last Boy, the Last Girl. There is a final battle. The Last One suffers great wounds, but in the final moment vanquishes the monster. Only later does he or she recognize that this is the monster’s final trick; the scars run deep, and the awareness of the truth grows like an infection. The Last One knows that the monster isn’t dead, only sent to the other side. There it waits until it can slip into the mundane world again. Perhaps next time it will be a knife-wielding madman, or a fanged beast, or some nameless tentacled thing. It’s the monster with a thousand faces. The details matter only to the next victims.
Romance is not the giving of flowers, or any other gift. It is a way of life, a way of being. Romance is every thought, gesture, and deed on your part to make another feel special, even if only for a moment. For a moment can last a lifetime in the heart of the recipient, be that the one you love, or a complete stranger.
He knew what he had found here, a precious treasure that had remained hidden away for so long. To the right man, she could give more happiness and fulfilment than any amount of gold, or gems. Just by holding her in his arms, he knew this. He had the key to her heart in his hands. All he had to do was unlock her, and he would enjoy the most wondrous chest of delights. He knew it and he knew, too, that nothing would ever compensate him should he lose her.
Black vomit came gushing out Samantha’s mouth, adding to the puddle already on the floor. Samantha was covered in a sheen of sweat, crouched on all fours on the wooden hallway floor, like an animal. Her thick yellow fingernails made deep scratches in the wood as her body convulsed with each new expulsion of the black vomit. Her hair was long and thick and full; thicker and fuller than he had ever seen it. It reminded him of a lion’s mane. Her skin was a sickly pale grey with disturbing red boils the size of grapefruit and weeping puss-filled black blotches where others had burst. Spider webs of blue veins were visible under the skin all over her body.
Irwin was difficult to wake; the poor man was totally wiped out. He collapsed in one of the soft office chairs the moment Smith let him, sliding back into slumber. After he was settled, I sat at my desk and reviewed Smith’s…no, Charles’s notes, shuffling the paper irritably to bring the print into focus. Someday, I’d come up with a melody that fixed my sight problems. And tomorrow, I thought, mocking myself, I’ll find a way to sing away fleas and retire rich.
This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men's thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the lake of Hali; and my mind will bear for ever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with its beautiful stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth--a world which now trembles before the King In Yellow.
Remember that if I were born of the underworld, you were born of flowers. You are the blood the forest feeds upon, and it is you who gave the woods their dark magic. Time doesn’t exist, and in another world I never left you. I’ve transformed your wounds into a scepter for a queen. The nightcatcher may think that she’s had her victory - but your veins are buried in the map of the earth and she can never have you. She thinks she can own the universe because she’s enslaved gods and eaten stars, but she couldn’t even kill me, living here in her tunnels, because you protected me with your love.
The White Hand did not fry all the brain. He fried somefrom the right hemisphere and some from the left. Theremaining brain, The White Hand wrapped in tin foil,carefully. Tomorrow is, after all, another day, and food should be keptin storage so it won’t go bad.
Those who did better were those who didn't wait idly for help to arrive. In the end, with systems crashing and failing, what mattered most and had the greatest immediate effects were the actions and decisions made in the midst of a crisis by individuals.
He was too damn old to run now, too tired of that romantic idea of freedom that infected the heads of the young and later killed most of them with crushing disappointment. The Cassinis had always made sure he was just comfortable enough to want to sit tight and not risk the generosities they’d afforded him, and the older he got, the more comfortable he became. Comfort had a way of killing the romance in just about everybody.
He hurried back. Walls seemed to shift and advance. Right here, it must be. Wasn’t this passage too short? No, it wasn’t a wall that blocked his way, only fog. The fog retreated before him—then at once yielded up a wall. Staggering crimson letters caught in the web of graffiti spelled KILLER.
Wielding a hammer, however, you’re at the very heart of the experience, being flooded with wonderful sensations that simply can’t be yours if you use a firearm. Now, you might be asking yourself how I came to discover the splendors of hammer attack. I’ll tell you. You won’t want to hear it, though.
It was a hideous ancient thing that stood on tiger feet in the middle of the floor. Like a showpiece. And he did enjoy showing it. He would bring his friends upstairs to the master bathroom so that they could admire the monstrosity while he told them the whole long boring story of how he’d gotten it at an estate sale in Hollywood. Some bimbo actress from the silent-screen days had supposedly slit her wrists while she was in the thing. ‘Cashed in her chips,’ Harold liked to say. ‘In this very tub.
It's safe to say that 'Horror,' as a fictional genre, has claim to it's own canon. There is a definite history that can be traced back to the origins of human language, both orally and written, and now multimedia based. We at this point, have access to the full gambit of 'genre' Horror in all its hybrid forms (electronically at least). Sub-genres ensure that Horror can and will multiply in its complexities and evolve along with human fears.
He looked up at the round, stained glass window in front of him, a blurred kaleidoscope backlit in the morning sun. It glowed. The color of heaven. Of her hair. He sat back and cracked open the dry, leather cover of a pew Bible, and a mixture of sweat and tears christened its pristine pages.
As she felt his fangs against her neck, she was in another world. There was screaming. A woman was somewhere in agony. Everything was black, and the tormented scream was overwhelming, echoing through the emptiness. After the screaming subsided, there was panting, loud and steady, and it wasn’t as dark anymore. There was a room visible now, in a reddish light. A pale man with black hair hovered over a woman dressed in white. She lay on a bed, looking disheveled and sweaty. Her brown-black hair clung to her wet forehead and shoulders. She was covered in blood. The man sat next to her, and held her close to him. He stroked her hair as her chest heaved desperately. “I love you, my dearest Katerina,” he said, cradling her in his strong arms. “Soon, we’ll be together forever.” Everything faded to black once more, and the woman stopped breathing. All was silent and still.
Woodward and Bernstein,” Jared said from seemingly nowhere.“What?”“They were just two reporters. Yet, they broke the Watergate scandal. They toppled an administration. That’s us.”“We’re Woodward and Bernstein.” Alec said, pointing between him and Jared.“Woodward, Bernstein, and Lucy,” Lucy corrected.
Would you teach me, Seth?’Seth smiled and leaned back in his seat. ‘You do realise, of course, that you have no idea what you ask of me?’ Seth replied after a moment.‘Of course,’ Christopher replied quietly. ‘Could you tell me?’‘No. That is the problem you see,’ Seth said. ‘Magic is something you can never prepare someone for. Magic will make you, Christopher. It will find all the secret empty places of longing in you and fill them more surely than any other love. And magic will break your heart.’ A slight, rather sad smile crossed Christopher’s face for a moment. ‘I know what you’re thinking. You think your heart is already broken, you think that this crooked and winding way is the only path left for you now. But you’re wrong. The heart breaks like every wave on the beach and there’s a darkness you’ll have to pass through that you can’t even see from where you are now.
I hate this night. I hate that it makes me a person so truly removed from the real me; this man who sits in silence in his parlor – purposely quarantined from his family – is not who I want to be. But on Halloween night, this awful impostor wafts over me like morning fog, and I know there’s no resisting him. Like one anticipates the common cold brought on by a harsh winter, I know this broken and terrified man will soon be visiting when the evening of October 31st falls upon us. And on this yearly autumn night, he will sit and drink. And remember.
The tales of pure terror, of course, are completely naturalistic in their content, and must stand or fall by their merit alone. But what about the supernatural stories? Can we, the children of a scientific age, give any credence to these medleys of devils, ghosts, and other psychical invasions? There is only one answer: we can and do. We are dealing with stories, not with scientific dissertations. And if, as stories, they have the ring of truth, we'll believe them, as stories, implicitly.("Introduction")
I’m an old man, now. I’ve been alone since my 17th birthday. I’d wanted to marry, have a bunch of kids, and maybe be a grandpa. The big family around the Thanksgiving table, laughing and pouring wine and cracking jokes and harmlessly teasing the missus—I wanted that. I wanted to do something good with my life—something right. I didn’t want what happened to Danny, my best childhood friend, to be the only mark I’d ever make in this world. But I thought it best not to fancy such hopes and dreams: a family, love. I’d been cursed by my best friend, and I thought it right not to inflict that curse on anyone who’d be foolish enough to love me.
As the thing came closer, what was left of Nick’s body became revealed and I could see how the dead boy’s eyes had bled from the trauma inflicted upon him; they dripped with steady succession onto the floor between his splayed legs. He looked like a rejected marionette tossed haphazardly in the corner by a frustrated puppeteer, his head drooping so low that his chin rested against his chest. His motionless arms lay at his sides, both of them squeezed into tight fists, as if he’d died futilely trying to defend himself.
The last clear thought I have is of my grandmother’s rust-colored wall clock ticking away in the darkness of my apartment—my sanctuary where I dreamed and desired and hoped for goodness and love. I wonder how long that clock will tick without anyone around to hear it. I wonder if maybe I should have taken my grandmother’s silverware or jewelry instead. I wonder – if I knew then what I know now – if I still would have approached Jade that first night and invited her into my life, only to watch as she took it from me and fed it to some Godless thing, as my mother had called it. Would I still have given myself over to her, knowing it would end the same way, with the barbaric flicker of hope that this time she could love me?
He walked steadily, feeling them behind him. His stride did not falter; he pretended they weren’t there. He pretended that all was well—that those hideous things knew nothing about what he had done earlier in the night. But each pumpkin he passed nearly leapt off its porch or railing or wooden chair, expanded and morphed and throbbed as if in a funhouse mirror, and joined the procession behind him. The wind picked up, suddenly and fiercely, and construction paper decorations adorning the houses that surrounded him flapped helplessly against their doors and windows. The man ducked against the cold wind, and from the pursuing army of the jack-o’-lanterns behind him. Cardboard skeletons with fastener joints and witches with shredded yarn hair and ghosts with cotton ball sheets and black crayon eyes escaped their thumbtacks and scotch tape and newspaper twine and they flashed and danced in his face. He brushed at them desperately with his hands, attempting to tear a hole through them and escape.
The clear stars before him took to shuddering and he knew why; they shuddered at sight of what was behind him. He had never divined before that strange Things hid themselves from men, under pretence of being snow-clad mounds of swaying trees; but now they came slipping out from their harmless covers to follow him, and mock at his impotence to make a kindred Thing resolve to truer form. He knew the air behind him was thronged; he heard the hum of innumerable murmurings together; but his eyes could never catch them - they were too swift and nimble; but he knew they were there, because, on a backward glance, he saw the snow mounds surge as they grovelled flatlings out of sight; he saw the trees reel as they screwed themselves rigid past recognition among the boughs.
His indirect way of approaching a character or an action, striving to realize it by surrounding rather than invading it, is ideally suited to the indefinite and suggestive presentation of a ghost story.(introduction to "Sir Edmund Orme" by Henry James)
I stumble across the sea of tarmac, finding pavement, concealment and a brick wall. Palms brace against the scrubby surface. My stomach churns and then bubbles over, burning my throat as acrid yellow acid spills from my lips in frothy discomposure. It splatters the pavement like a spray of blood.
He got up and ran on, pitching himself down the hill, flying through the branches of the firs, leaping roots and rocks without seeing them. As he went, the hill got steeper and steeper, until it was really like falling. He was going too fast and he knew when he came to a stop, it would involve crashing into something, and shattering pain.Only as he went on, picking up speed all the time, until with each leap he seemed to sail through yards of darkness, he felt a giddy surge of emotion, a sensation that might have been panic but felt strangely like exhilaration. He felt as if at any moment his feet might leave the ground and never come back down. He knew this forest, this darkness, this night. He knew his chances: not good. He knew what was after him. It had been after him all his life. He knew where he was - in a story about to unfold an ending. He knew better than anyone how these stories went, and if anyone could find their way out of these woods, it was him.("Best New Horror")
I found a brief piece of by Antonio Vivaldi around this time which became my ‘Pinhead Mood Music’. Called Al Santo Sepolcro (At The Holy Sepulchre), it opens more like a piece of modern orchestral music, and although it it moves toward Vivaldi’s familiar harmonies, there is always the threat that it will fall back into dissonance. The piece progresses in an exquisite agony, poised on a knife edge between beauty and disfigurement, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. Perfect.
.” I watched her sip at the drink some more. She was strong, healthy, but also petite enough that I was certain I could overpower her. I’d made the right decision not to tranquilize her, I thought. Slipping some powerful barbiturate into a mixed drink wasn’t something I was above, but it always felt like such a lost opportunity. I liked the fight, the tightening and clenching of a woman’s body as she writhed for freedom. I felt the slow swelling of arousal between my legs and made no effort to disguise it.
Carroll was eleven years old when he saw The Haunting in The Oregon Theater. He had gone with his cousins, but when the lights went down, his companions were swallowed by the dark and Carroll found himself essentially alone, shut tight into his own suffocating cabinet of shadows. At times, it required all his will not to hide his eyes, yet his insides churned with a nervous-sick frisson of pleasure. When the lights finally came up, his nerve endings were ringing, as if he had for a moment grabbed a copper wire with live current in it. It was a sensation for which he had developed a compulsion.Later, when he was a professional and it was his business, his feelings were more muted - not gone, but experienced distantly, more like the memory of an emotion than the thing itself. More recently, even the memory had fled, and in its place was a deadening amnesia, a numb disinterest when he looked at the piles of magazines on his coffee table. Or no - he was overcome with dread, but the wrong kind of dread.("Best New Horror")
Sandy’s was one of those places that made poor, white trash feel like high-class consumers. This was the kind of place you’d take your mistress to, but never your wife. Wives expected better. Mistresses were impressed by the blandness of the over-priced wine and the vast Italian menu options.
Yep,” I said, rolling the body onto its back and staring into the horrified, bloated face, “you’re a single-bagger. My kinda gal.” I gave her a smile and a friendly wink. The face stared back at me with that same frozen look of terror. “Oh, stop being so dramatic,” I said, “You’ll be pretty again, I promise.
More accurately, on the bed and on the table lay various pieces of what had once been a body.Holmes was leaning with his back against the wall, his countenance deathly white. "The door was open," he said incongruously. "I was passing by, and the door was open.""Holmes," I whispered in horror."The door was open," he said once more, and then buried his face in his hands.
There's a danger and a beauty to the moment which seems out of time. It pierces something deep inside of him, bypassing his rationale, and it touches his very core. In a sudden shock of illumination, and of knowing, he recognizes this woman is his destiny, and their fates are intertwined.
The images start to darken and she feels another hunger well up in her, this one having to do with another kind of desire. The desire to feed, to possess, and the aggressive thrill of a predator capturing and killing its prey as it tears into unspoiled flesh. Its teeth ripping and rending and the satisfying coppery taste of blood. There is the ultimate moment of surrender of drinking away the life essence. The pinnacle of lust which mounts in the very last breath, when the light drains from the victim's eyes and when the soul fades... Then there is only a triumphant cry to the moonlight and the beckoning depths of the ever waiting water.
The rivers had been drained overnight and what was left were things no person should have to image let alone see. She had been smart enough to stay away. But, other humans— were curious. They saw and the image planted in their heads made them bait for the demons.When they extended their hands and offered them peace of mind, the humans accepted without hesitation.
The people faded away, the arches, the vaulted roof vanished. I raised my seared eyes to the fathomless glare; and I saw the black stars hanging in the heavens: and the wet winds from the Lake of Hali chilled my face.("In The Court of the Dragon")
The world of shadows and superstition that was Victorian England, so well depicted in this 1871 tale, was unique. While the foundations of so much of our present knowledge of subjects like medicine, public health, electricity, chemistry and agriculture, were being, if not laid, at least mapped out, people could still believe in the existence of devils and demons. And why not? A good ghost story is pure entertainment. It was not until well into the twentieth century that ghost stories began to have a deeper significance and to become allegorical; in fact, to lose their charm. No mental effort is required to read 'The Weird Woman', no seeking for hidden meanings; there are no complexities of plot, no allegory on the state of the world. And so it should be. At what other point in literary history could a man, standing over the body of his fiancee, say such a line as this: 'Speak, hound! Or, by heaven, this night shall witness two murders instead of one!'Those were the days.(introduction to "The Weird Woman")
But sometimes i have to ask myself this question. its true that to us his imaginings are nothing but the inventions of a busy mind. But to him, there simply is no other reality. Further more, he is happy there, so why, I ask myself, why in the name of healing him must we drag him painfully into the world of our own reality?'- Doctor's Memo
A spring sun was shining on the rue St. Honore, as I ran down the church steps. On one corner stood a barrow full of yellow jonquils, pale violets from the Riviera, dark Russian violets, and white Roman hyacinths in a golden cloud of mimosa. The street was full of Sunday pleasure-seekers. I swung my cane and laughed with the rest. Someone overtook and passed me. He never turned, but there was the same deadly malignity in his white profile that there had been in his eyes. I watched him as long as I could see him. His lithe back expressed the same menace; every step that carried him away from me seemed to bear him on some errand connected with my destruction.I was creeping along, my feet almost refusing to move. There began to dawn in me a sense of responsibility for something long forgotten. It began to seem as if I deserved that which he threatened: it reached a long way back - a long, long way back. It had lain dormant all these. years: it was there though, and presently it would rise and confront me. But I would try to escape; and I stumbled as best I could into the rue de Rivioli, across the Place de la Concorde and on to the Quai. I looked with sick eyes upon the sun, shining through the white foam of the fountain, pouring over the backs of the dusky bronze river-gods, on the far-away Arc, a structure of amethyst mist, on the countless vistas of grey stems and bare branches faintly green. Then I saw him again coming down one of the chestnut alleys of the Cours la Reine.("In The Court of the Dragon")
The sleepless hum of the city was abidingly in his ears, and the lamps that dotted the misty pavements stared at him blinkingly all along the route. The tall black buildings rose up grimly into the night; the faces that flitted to and fro along the pavements, kept ever sliding past him, melting into the darkness; and the cabs and 'buses, still astir in the streets, had a ghostly air as they vanished in the gloom.("An Unexpected Journey")
As it recurred again and again, it set me thinking of what my architect's books say about the custom in early times to consecrate the choir as soon as it was built, and that the nave, being finished sometimes half a century later, often did not get any blessing at all: I wondered idly if that had been the case at St. Barnabe, and whether something not usually supposed to be at home in a Christian church, might have entered undetected, and taken possession of the west gallery. I had read of such things happening too, but not in works on architecture.("In The Court Of The Dragon")
He stood just near the club’s steps, his back to me along the foggy English night, and it was not until I’d passed him and began my ascent of the many steps that I’d heard his voice. The voice I knew, in all my years of living upon the Earth, that I would never forget. Even then I had known this. It was the slippery way of his tongue, or perhaps it was the coolness of which his words passed across the air and slid its way into my ears as though they were only meant for me.
A kiss is such an amazing thing -- So simple, so complex. The only human act that gives while it receives. Mouth to mouth, it almost seems the eating of one another. Maybe that’s all we are, food for each other. Why, I believe there’s a poem in there somewhere. Another kiss to inspire my muse, Desirée, and I’ll tell you something else you don’t know.
It was like some mad scientist threw a bunch of DNA into a blender and this is what came out. What the heck could it be? Was it some kind of alien? A scientific experiment gone horribly wrong? Did we have a Dr. Frankenstein living in Billings? Seriously, the creature looked like a resurrected Wookiee made from spare parts.
From the short story (and anthology containing it) DONNY DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE :Donny acted like he didn’t hear me. “You can’t send your mom off into eternity looking like that, Artie. She wouldn’t like it.” He reached into my mother’s casket, shoved his fingers into her mouth like it was the most logical thing in the world. “Donny, you can’t --!” “I’m just making her look right, Artie. It’s what she would want.” He tugged hard at my mom’s lips. I knew they were cold because I had kissed them a few moments earlier, and for a moment I felt convinced my friend had completely lost his mind. But when I looked inside Mom’s casket I knew Donny had done something only a best friend would think to do. My mother was smiling again. And she looked just the way I remembered her, the way I would always want to remember her. I got so choked up I couldn’t talk for a few minutes. Finally I managed, “My mother always told me you could make her smile.
From "Lady In Waiting" in the anthology The Morgue :Now I have yet to meet the corpse could hold up its end of a conversation, so at most I might whistle while fixin’ one up ‘stead of engagin’ myself in any small talk that’s goin’ to be so one-sided anyways. But Cindy Flowers’ corpse weren’t no ordinary body when it walked upright, and it sure weren’t ordinary just because it was lyin’ before me in a pine wood box. So for the first time I felt the need to get a few things said to one of our visitors, and I leaned down to get myself real close to her face. Her eyes was closed ‘cause Pa had already sewed her lids shut.
From "Lunchtime At The Justice Cafe" :The waitress snarled a grin that lasted just long enough to show a mouthful of stained yellowed teeth, then turned suddenly serious. “‘Course I’m not the one to talk about these folks, I ‘spose. You see, I used to do a bit of eavesdroppin’ in my day before the sheriff put a stop to that.” She lifted the stringy blond hair from the side of her face, the opposite side from where she had hidden her pencil. There was a small hole about the size of a quarter where her ear should have been. “As you can see, Mr. McAllister, Sheriff Sweet puts a fairly high price on mindin’ your own business in Justice,” she added, refilling his cup. “You want some pie?”
so this is my collection of human body parts, Dr. Silkston," he said proudly, walking into the storeroom. "each organ is here fro a reason, a purpose. you see this one," he said, pointing to a cylinder containing what appeared to Thomas to be a section of a small intestine with a hole in it. "'Tis a duelist's jejunum. that is the bullet hole, right through the middle. and this, this is the Marquis of Rockingham's heart," he announced proudly. " he gave me a permission to have it a fore he died
It feels as though Tony's a ghost, a wisp of someone I once loved, or never loved at all and thought was someone else. I don't feel anything, not even when he fucks me. I wonder if he knows. I wonder if he believes I still want him. I always tell myself it's the last time, but I don't leave. i exist instead inside this shell of a life we've created.
The minister paused in his narrative. At that moment there came a tremendous blast of wind which shook the windows of the manse, and burst open the hall door, and caused the candles to flicker and the fire to go roaring up the chimney. It is not too much to say that, what with the uncanny story, and the howling storm, we all felt that creeping sort of uneasiness which so often seems like the touch of something from another world - a hand stretched across the boundary-line of time and eternity, the coldness and mystery of which make the stoutest heart tremble. ("Sandy The Tinker")
Henry,' at last said one, again dipping the spoon into the flaming spirit, 'hast thou read Hoffman?''I should think so,' said Henry.'What think you of him?''Why, that he writes admirably; and, moreover, what is more admirable - in such a manner that you see at once he almost believes that which he relates. As for me, I know very well that when I read him of a dark night, I am obliged to creep to bed without shutting my book, and without daring to look behind me.''Indeed; then you love the terrible and fantastic?''I do,' said Henry. ("The Dead Man's Story
At this point, a few words on this term 'horror' are perhaps called for. Some amateurs of this kind of literature engage in endless hairsplitting disputes, centered around this word and its close companion 'terror', as to which' stories may so be categorized and which may not, and whether or not descriptions such as weird or fantasy or macabre are preferable. The designation 'horror', with its connotations of revulsion, satisfies me no more than it does the purists but I believe that it is the only term which embraces all the stories in this collection and which succinctly suggests to the majority of readers what is in store for them. Horror then, in this instance, covers tales of the Supernatural and of physical terror, of ghosts and necromancy and of inhuman violence and all the dark corners and crevices of human belief and behavior that lie in between. ("An Age In Horror" - introduction)
One day you see a man walking down the road, the next day you come to his yard and find him dead... Why is it that he cannot do what the living do? It is because the thing that gave power to these parts is no longer there. That is the duppy, and that is the most powerful part of any man. Everybody has evil in them, and when a man is alive... he will not abandon himself to many evil things. But when the duppy leaves the body, it no longer has anything to restrain it and it will do more terrible things than any man ever dreamed of.- From 'Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica', Zora Neale Hurston, 1938
Our house was an old Tudor mansion. My father was very particular in keeping the smallest peculiarities of his home unaltered. Thus the many peaks and gables, the numerous turrets, and the mullioned windows with their quaint lozenge panes set in lead, remained very nearly as they had been three centuries back. Over and above the quaint melancholy of our dwelling, with the deep woods of its park and the sullen waters of the mere, our neighborhood was thinly peopled and primitive, and the people round us were ignorant, and tenacious of ancient ideas and traditions. Thus it was a superstitious atmosphere that we children were reared in, and we heard, from our infancy, countless tales of horror, some mere fables doubtless, others legends of dark deeds of the olden time, exaggerated by credulity and the love of the marvelous. ("Horror: A True Tale")
I shook with cold and fear, without being able to answer. After a lapse of some moments, I was again called. I made an effort to speak, and then felt the bandage which wrapped me from head to foot. It was my shroud. At last, I managed feebly to articulate, 'Who calls?''Tis I' said a voice.'Who art thou?''I! I! I!' was the answer; and the voice grew weaker, as if it was lost in the distance; or as if it was but the icy rustle of the trees.A third time my name sounded on my ears; but now it seemed to run from tree to tree, as if it whistled in each dead branch; so that the entire cemetery repeated it with a dull sound. Then I heard a noise of wings, as if my name, pronounced in the silence, had suddenly awakened a troop of nightbirds. My hands, as if by some mysterious power, sought my face. In silence I undid the shroud which bound me, and tried to see. It seemed as if I had awakened from a long sleep. I was cold.I then recalled the dread fear which oppressed me, and the mournful images by which I was surrounded. The trees had no longer any leaves upon them, and seemed to stretch forth their bare branches like huge spectres! A single ray of moonlight which shone forth, showed me a long row of tombs, forming an horizon around me, and seeming like the steps which might lead to Heaven. All the vague voices of the night, which seemed to preside at my awakening, were full of terror. ("The Dead Man's Story")
No wonder that the ghost and goblin stories had a new zest. No wonder that the blood of the more timid grew chill and curdled, that their flesh crept, and their hearts beat irregularly, and the girls peeped fearfully over their shoulders, and huddled close together like frightened sheep, and half-fancied they beheld some impish and malignant face gibbering at them from the darkling corners of the old room. By degrees my high spirits died out, and I felt the childish tremors, long latent, long forgotten, coming over me. I followed each story with painful interest; I did not ask myself if I believed the dismal tales. I listened and fear grew upon me - the blind, irrational fear of our nursery days. ("Horror: A True Tale")
This is indeed one of the true tragedies of lycanthropy, that the subject of such evil pacts and nefarious deeds is ignorant of his place in the plot that besieges this humble hamlet.”– Aleister Creed, WitchfinderThe Trial of John Goode by Gabriel Salmon and Thome Ward
Alex: "You asked earlier why us humans fear death. I suppose it is the unknown - not knowing what awaits on the other side. But now I know, and I still fear it."The Darkness: "?"Alex: "But now I fear the living - in fact, I now fear life more than death!
The questions push me further into the space in between, the place where my madness lays waiting for me. I struggle with each question, determined to extract some sort of answer, an explanation for everything that has happened so far. But no answers come and I’m forced to acknowledge the feeling lodged between my two worldsTerror.
It was Stevenson, I think, who most notably that there are some places that simply demand a story should be told of them. ...After all, perhaps Stevenson had only half of the matter. It is true there are places which stir the mind to think that a story must be told about them. But there are also, I believe, places which have their story stored already, and want to tell this to us, through whatever powers they can; through our legends and lore, through our rumors, and our rites. By its whispering fields and its murmuring waters, by the wailing of its winds and the groaning of its stones, by what it chants in darkness and the songs it sings in light, each place must reach out to us, to tell us, tell us what it holds. ("The Axholme Toll")
Evan had heard it all before. A paradise underground, made for things like the worm in front of him. A place where Evan would forget he had ever been human, forget he had a mother, maybe even forget his own name. This thing did not remember its own, Evan was sure of it.
Host: For those of you just tuning in, our guests tonight are the amazing Murder Magician, and his lovely minion, The Assistant...Assistant: Charmed, I'm sureHost: Who recently killed The Rumor. And you were awarded the Oppenheimer prize for villainy at last week's annual summit for dastardly deeds-- what are you going to do with all that money?Murder Magician: Well, I'm so glad you asked that-- because I spent all the money on this giant MURDERBOT, and I've been dying to show it off!Assistant: It's true... every penny.Host: Wow! That's impressive! So what does it do?Murder Magician: Well, Mr. Clark... it murders people.Laughter.Murder Magician: I'm serious.Assistant: He is.