Back in November, I met Claude Lalumière at the Yellow Door readings, where he read from his phantasmagorical mosaic Venera Dreams: A Weird Entertainment. His latest book details the history of a mysterious city-state and its erotically-charged populace of artists and madmen. It is a visionary piece of work filled with atavistic rituals, ancient goddess cults, and …
Continue reading Venera Dreams: A Weird Entertainment by Claude Lalumière
I have never read a more Halloween Father's Day story than "A Kiss with Teeth" by Max Gladstone. In this dark but ultimately heartwarming tale, Dracula has moved to suburbia to raise a family, but begins to grow apart from his wife Sarah and his son Paul as he suffers from the seven-year itch. It …
Book reviewing can be a perilous profession, especially when the author of the book in question knows a thing or two about alchemy and Runic magic. In such cases, it is not advised to write an overly negative review, for fear of reprisals on the part of the sorcerer in question. Unfortunately, in M. R. …
Continue reading Weird #5 Casting the Runes by M.R James (1911)
In "Srendi Vashtar" (1908) by Saki, a sickly boy named Conradin has a lively imagination exasperated by the dreariness of his Edwardian childhood. Having been given five years to live by a doctor whose "opinion counted for very little" (53), he declares, in the midst of his loneliness and boredom, that his polecat-ferret is a god. …
No weird tale that I have read captures a sense of dread and impending doom so subtly and beautifully in its descriptions of the natural world as "The Willows" by Algernon Blackwood (1907), the third story included in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Tales. In this story, two canoeists journey down the …
Continue reading Weird #3 The Willows by Algernon Blackwood (1907)
"The Screaming Skull" (1908) by Francis Marion Crawford, the second story in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's anthology The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, takes us into the mind of disturbed retired sailor as the skull of a possibly murdered friend haunts his guilty conscience. Told in the first person in what the editors …
Continue reading Weird #2 The Screaming Skull by F. Marion Crawford (1908)
In the spreading of the weird fiction virus, "which book was first sick?" (Miéville, "Afterweird," 1116). Alfred Kubin's novel Die andere Seite (The Other Side) can be thought of as 'Patient Zero,' or at least the one Ann and Jeff VanderMeer thought acceptable to identify for the purposes of their anthology The Weird: A Compendium of Strange …
Continue reading Weird #1 The Other Side (excerpt) by Alfred Kubin (1908)
Matthew Rettino 