It’s been over a year since we published Ghost stories by Victorian women, a “further reading” list chosen by Professor Melissa Edmundson, which followed neatly on from her anthology Avenging Angels, published by Victorian Secrets. Now seems an especially good time to follow up on that list, with most people self-isolating and hungry for recommendations, and from short stories we jump to novellas. Authors one might expect such as Margaret Oliphant and Charlotte Riddell feature on this new list by Edmundson, an expert on 19th and early 20th women writers of the supernatural, but did you know Little Women author Louisa May Alcott wrote sensation fiction under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard? Read on as Edmundson walks us through seven brilliant authors of the supernatural.
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Father versus son, reality versus magic and a whole lot more… modern horror master Ramsey Campbell is back.
I used to avoid “funny” ghost stories. Humour seemed at odds with the effect I sought from reading about the supernatural. It dispelled the atmosphere, leaving the stories, and the reader, disenchanted. Later on, I learned that horror could be funny, and that funny things can be horrific.
A frail shadow of a creature, trudging slowly from room to empty room. No aim beyond watching the long days pass. The drip of water, the echo of soft music. Time becomes a tangible thing, cold and suffocating. We dream of grass, of sky, of sun…
Eden by Tim Lebbon conjures up what you’d get if you crossed Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation with the lurid “creature feature” paperbacks of the 70s and 80s: a world in which eco-politics and the unchecked powers of nature have created a hostile environment for humans, stalked by blood-thirsty animal predators and the living forest itself.
The idea of a staunch anti-Semite writing about the Holocaust might sound like an entirely different kind of horror story than those we usually enjoy here at Sublime Horror.
The problem with Alien: Resurrection, contrary to popular opinion, is not that it’s a bad film. Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s fourth instalment in the Alien series has a lot of good elements; Ripley-8’s gleeful progression into inhumanity contrasts impeccably with the pathos of Call’s self-hatred, for example, and Jeunet seems to genuinely want to do something new with the sci-fi palette. No, the problem with Alien: Resurrection is that it’s not quite Alien enough. Or maybe the problem is that it’s a bit too Alien. Either way, it tries to be both the darkly comic, baroque sci-fi epic that Jeunet obviously wanted it to be and the more conceptual piece that screenwriter Joss Whedon seemed to originally intend, whilst leaving the actual Alien elements feeling tacked on.
The seedy underbelly of a small Missouri town is exposed when two young girls are brutally murdered one snowy night in this gripping psychological thriller. The opening chapter in The Familiar Dark is titled “The End.” and is a short, shocking page and a half that draws the reader straight into the narrative.
“They died during a freak April snowstorm, blood pooling on a patchy bed of white.”
Almost a year on from falling deeply in love with M. Dressler’s compelling ghost story The Last to See Me, I was looking forward to reading the sequel, I See You So Close, but some doubts continued to ferment in the back of my mind. Was a sequel necessary? How could the story keep its compelling, taut conflict? Though I feel that the sequel lost some of the first book’s narrative immediacy, the tale stays with me as more of a cosy ghost story – one where a spirit has transcended the shackles of her own trauma in order to go on and seek to help others.
Taken at face value it’s difficult to describe Richard Stanley’s adaptation of Lovecraft’s The Colour Out Of Space as a good film. The cast grind their way through a frankly abysmal screenplay and, although both Joely Richardson and Madeleine Arthur manage to tease out excellent performances, Nicolas Cage appears to cosplay Nicolas Cage.
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