Sepulchral Stories

As someone who had attempted to be a writer of horror novels at one point in my life, I had read most of Stephen King and Peter Straub up to that point, with liberal excursions into the older works of H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe as well as British writers like Stoker and Stevenson. But I haven’t read a horror novel in fifteen years and I have mostly lost interest in a genre that has degenerated into teen vampire stories and poor writing overall. What has begun to interest me lately, however, is short fiction of many different varieties. And with the proliferation of so many public domain works for e-readers, there is much more available than there used to be, which was primarily relegated to Dover thrift editions in the past. One of my recent finds while sifting through public domain horror on my Kindle is Oliver Onions. Great ghost stories like these are what make up the small amount of fiction reading I do these days, as well as an interest in going back through the stories of H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe in chronological order.

While I have many irons in the fire at this point in my life, I did want to carve out a small amount of time to comment on the weird fiction that I occasionally read. My writing about horror films is elsewhere on my own personal blogosphere, and I don’t have much interest in any modern horror fiction at all. Nor am I interested at all in science fiction, except where it crosses the border into the unexplainable. My primary goal is to analyze these works and, as such, there will be what in today’s vernacular are called “spoilers.” Within this framework, however, I do want to maintain some shock value for the reader and not give absolutely everything away. Still, there will be times when I feel that “what” happens in the story is less important to preserve than “how” the author tells it. So, be forewarned. In general, this will not necessarily be an ongoing concern, but from time to time I’ll drop in and write about the horror stories I read and share my observations.