A chilling tale in which monks gaslight the protagonist about the existence of a suffering man
Tag: fantastic
The Goddess in Him
Kurghan, a time-traveling Scythian blacksmith with a jewellery business in Montreal's Plateau neighbourhood, notices that his son Altai is losing the culture of his people. Kughan longs for nothing less than to feel the wind in his hair again and to ride his horse on a leopard hunt. He wants the same for his son. …
Weird #5 Casting the Runes by M.R James (1911)
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)
Weird #4 Srendi Vashtar by Saki (1910)
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. …
Weird #3 The Willows by Algernon Blackwood (1907)
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 …
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Weird #2 The Screaming Skull by F. Marion Crawford (1908)
"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)
Underworld as Otherworld: Combined and Uneven Development in Charles de Lint’s Urban Fantasy Fiction
While a text asking you to believe in fairies and spirits might seem flaky, seeing as this gives us no solid program to reclaim the city, such faith does awaken the desire to see the postmodern, uneven city restored from its ruins
Matthew Rettino 