A weird emanation of energy straight out of Blue Man Group, the "blue bodies" are doubles that haunt the narrator of "The New Rays."

A weird emanation of energy straight out of Blue Man Group, the "blue bodies" are doubles that haunt the narrator of "The New Rays."
A window into another dimensions opens up a nostalgic view of another world, but not is all as it seems.
A harrowing tale questions why science can be so cruel to animals
What if an insect camouflaged itself to deceive the apex predator of Planet Earth: human beings?
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)
Last week's post discussed the Indiana Jones series and the works of pulp fiction author A. Merritt, who may have partly influenced the movies. One modern (or postmodern) narrative continues the tradition of what I call archaeological adventure fiction: the video game series Uncharted. Hero Nathan Drake is a professional thief, who believes he is …
Continue reading Archaeological Adventure Fiction II: Uncharted: Poe’s Fortune
"Archaeology is the search for fact. Not truth. [...] So forget any ideas you’ve got about lost cities, exotic travel, and digging up the world. You do not follow maps to buried treasure and "X" never, ever, marks the spot. Seventy percent of all archaeology is done in the library. Research. Reading. We cannot afford …
Continue reading Archaeological Adventure Fiction I: Indiana Jones and the Genre of Enlightenment
Every once in a while, I pick up a book that inspires me into creativity and haunts my dreams. Perdido Street Station by China Miéville is one such book, a celebration of the alien, the urban, and the grotesque. New Crobuzon is a corrupt city with an underground network of criminals--only a part of whom …
To create the animated stone, take the juice of a Saturnine herb to extract mercury and evaporate it to get the purest earth. Join this with its like in equal weight and dissolve both with a crude metallic humor. Putrify for forty days. You may also calcine the earth with fire alone, join it with …