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Americans love to think they reinvent everything they touch, which gives us license to make the same universal mistakes. But we do add a uniquely belligerent gusto to our observances that feels like misplaced pagan bloodlust, mistaken for patriotism.
Mark 5:1-20 tells the story of a man who lived among the tombs of the dead. This strange figure wandered through the hills and burial caves of Gerasa day and night, screaming ceaselessly and cutting himself with stones. The man, we are told, “had an evil spirit in him.”
There are no holidays in the month of August, and everyone is glad to see its back. But not this year, damn it. This year, we’re making August fun! We’ve rounded up the most electric work, the kinds of stories and poetry that can keep your swamp cooler going.
I love a mystery, and cosmic horror is a place where the mysteries are never fully solved. The persistence of our curiosity about monstrous cosmic indifference, or malice, is part of the thrill. Writing this story, I fixated on Carcosa, on the challenge of making it into a compelling character.
I don’t like “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe. This is what I’m thinking while I am helping my daughter through the last bits of her Gothic Literature class. She doesn’t actually need my help, she just wants it. The class was taught by a woman who was clearly passionate about the Gothic.
I first visited Haw Par Villa as a kid. Weirdly, I was most afraid of the exhibit that shows the “good souls” standing on the silver and gold bridges to cross into paradise. For some reason I interpreted that exhibit to mean that the good souls would be standing on that bridge forever.
There is no working, thinking creature that does not have their thoughts, their life, their whole essence, alienated from them. Whether you work as a labourer, a gardener, a chef, a cleaner, a brickie, a middle-manager, an assistant, you have your very life purchased from you (if you’re lucky enough to be paid). When I worked in grounds maintenance for the council, I certainly sold my inability to feel what is now a continual ache in my hips
I can’t explain or even begin to fathom the tangled mess of -isms afflicting my nation and my planet. I am a writer and editor of speculative fiction and what I know, what I deeply and profoundly know, is that none of this had to happen this way. That there can and ought to be other worlds than this.
I think both the inspector and Gemma are characters who find solace in each other because they are trying to mediate these brutal social forces that they didn’t choose, but were born into, which is something I relate to. How are you supposed to make decisions for yourself, or even just survive, when you inherit a world other people made for you?
Adam-Troy Castro examines a thriller (What Happened to Nina? by Dervla McTiernan) whose ending puts it squarely in the realm of horror. He also discusses A Scout Is Brave, a new novella by Will Ludwigsen and a zombie movie you might want to check out.
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