For those of you who may not know the movie “Hellraiser” and the franchise it spawned was based on the novella “The Hellbound Heart” by Clive Barker. When I first read “The Hellbound Heart” it was because I had seen that Hellraiser was based on a novella and I thought to myself (having not overly […]
via 5 Things “The Hellbound Heart” Taught Me About Writing — Richard Klu
Good writers read. That’s pretty much a given. Good writing incorporates elements of multiple genres. If a horror novel was only horrifying things happening and no suspense or romance you just get horrific events happening one after another. If all you read is science fiction you don’t gain knowledge of other elements. There are happy books and sad books. Books that teach you about creating endings that pull at the heart of your readers. Books that make you feel like a warrior or inspire you through the journey of the characters. There are so many ways to tell a story that you could spend a lifetime in a genre and never experience the focus of other genres. Taking in a variety expands your mind and exercises your imagination.
It’s like exercising a new muscle group. You might have great disdain for romance or horror but one day find yourself drawing…
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The unfathomable power of creatures. Creatures that are huge, planet size, or so ancient that our lifespans are nothing. Nothing makes you feel so small and unimportant as cosmic horror.
Sometimes you just need to know your really closer to the size and significance of an ant than other parts of the universe. In relation to the sun, you and an ant have a closer size. If an ant is .1 inches tall (estimate; the ants keep moving) your average height is about 5,6 or 66 inches. You’re looking at 1 to 660 ratio. So in relation to us to a creature of that magnitude, we would be looking at a creature 43,560 inches tall (66 inches x 660) or 3,630 feet tall. Burj Khalifa built in 2010 was only 2,717 ft tall. Something of that size is just unfathomable. You’d be twice as tall as the Sears Tower…
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The works and mythos developed by famed author H.P. Lovecraft have been extremely popular in recent years. This has prompted numerous games, books, and movies. With all his popularity who was the man behind the mythos? Here are 16 facts about H.P. Lovecraft.
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Tick, tock. Goes the old clock. Echoing through my small home. Tick, tock, the grandfather clock beside me. Ticking and tocking and making me wish I’d never bought the damned thing. My old wooden chair creaks as I lean left to the dining table and grasp a bottle of liquor. I pour a small class and down the contents quickly. Then I pour myself another glass.
Bang, thud. The floor shakes and the clock chimes as thunderous booms echo just outside the nearby window. Then silence. Silence and tick tocking. My eyelids grow heavy in these late hours. My nerves are on edge. Thump. A noise from the next room. Thump, tick, thump, tock. It is here again.
Here for me I assume. But there really is no way to know. It could be here simply for fun. Simply to walk around a stranger’s home, watch them sleep…
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Synopsis: A dark and electrifying novel about addiction, fanaticism, and what might exist on the other side of life.
In a small New England town, over half a century ago, a shadow falls over a small boy playing with his toy soldiers. Jamie Morton looks up to see a striking man, the new minister. Charles Jacobs, along with his beautiful wife, will transform the local church. The men and boys are all a bit in love with Mrs. Jacobs; the women and girls feel the same about Reverend Jacobs — including Jamie’s mother and beloved sister, Claire. With Jamie, the Reverend shares a deeper bond based on a secret obsession. When tragedy strikes the Jacobs family, this charismatic preacher curses God, mocks all religious belief, and is banished from the shocked town.
Jamie has demons of his own. Wed to his guitar from the age of thirteen, he plays…
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Science is important component of H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction, particularly his later tales. In fact, Lovecraft was one of the pioneers of weird fiction, integrating cutting edge science (at least for the time) into his stories. This is one of the reasons why Fritz Lieber called him the “Literary Copernicus” of horror fiction. He was known to revise / modify stories to account for new scientific information that was made available to the public. Probably his more famous instance of doing this is associated with identifying Yuggoth has being the dwarf-planet Pluto discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930.
Clyde Tombaugh by Andrei Kedrin
For someone who is known for creating mood and atmosphere and generally ignores character development, Lovecraft utilized a variety of tropes in representing scientists in his stories. Thus, for the next set of articles, we will review the variety of scientists that appear in Lovecraft’s stories. The…
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The King in Yellow is a book of short stories by American writer Robert W. Chambers, first published by F. Tennyson Neely in 1895. The book is named after a play with the same title which recurs as a motif through some of the stories. The first half of the book features highly esteemed weird stories, and the book has been described by critics such as E. F. Bleiler, S. T. Joshi and T. E. D. Klein as a classic in the field of the supernatural. There are ten stories, the first four of which (“The Repairer of Reputations”, “The Mask”, “In the Court of the Dragon”, and “The Yellow Sign”) mention The King in Yellow, a forbidden play which induces despair or madness in those who read it.
I recently borrowed an audio book of The King in Yellow (support your local library!) as part of my Halloween reading list. I’d heard so much about it, and how it…
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Thomas Joyce is back! This week, Thomas reviews Now That We’re Alone, the new collection from Nicholas Day, published by Bizarro Pulp Press. The book contains 11 short stories and fans of weird horror should definitely jump on-board. Thanks, as always, to Thomas for this thoroughly in-depth review.
I am new to the work of Nicholas Day. Sure, I had seen the front cover image for this collection (by Jim Agpalza) pop up on social media (isn’t it incredible!?), but I wasn’t familiar with any of Nicholas’s work. From reading this collection, it became clear that he has been busy doing what many young writers do when they start out; submitting short stories while honing his craft. And it certainly seems to have worked for him. He has already released a debut novella, Necrosaurus Rex (Bizarro Pulp Press, 2015), to critical acclaim and he seems to have done it…
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I love watching movies especially when I’m with my family or friends. I love horror, mystery, crime and suspense movies but at the same time I really hate it. I don’t like how some horror films end. Sometimes, it is too corny and not worth it like I just wasted my time watching it. Some […]
For those of you who may not know the film “Hellraiser” and the franchise, it generated started with the novella “The Hellbound Heart” by Clive Barker. When I initially read “The Hellbound Heart” it was on the grounds that I had seen that Hellraiser was based on “The Hellbound Heart”. Curiosity got me into horror […]
Raise your hand if you like horror. Oh. Excuse me. I didn’t see that your hand was severed! It’s okay, just feed me a topic and I’ll unleash the hounds of horror upon the unsuspecting victims who dare to read such a dark tale about…well…did you decide yet? Think of something scary. Really scary. […]
Cabal of Horror 