Brody Island, Maine, 1983. While college student June Branch is staying with her cop boyfriend Liam, four escaped convicts break into the house and take Liam captive. To defend herself, June grabs an antique axe from a household collection and succeeds in decapitating one of the men – but as the axe turns out to…
Spacewarp, Shift and The 77: Reviving British Anthology Comics
The phrase “British comics” has, over recent decades, seen a quite drastic shift in meaning. For a long time, British comics were affordable entertainment that youngsters picked up at the newsagent with their pocket money, and which covered a variety of genres from knockabout comedy to swooning romance, sporting exploits to high-flying sci-fi. Today, however,…
Life, Death and Twisted Romance: The Taxidermist’s Lover by Polly Hall
Scarlett Pepper’s husband Henry is a skilled taxidermist, but despite his talents, he is struggling to get by in a dwindling marketplace. While surfing the net Scarlett comes across the work of another taxidermist, Felix De Souza. Unlike the Henry, a reclusive soul who mistrusts the Internet, Felix proudly showcases his creations to the public…
REVIEW: Wit, Weirdness and Warped Ethics: Lakewood by Megan Giddings
Lena Johnson receives an invitation to take part in the Lakewood Project, which purports to be a series of research studies relating to mind, memory, personality and perception. There is something about the letter that makes her uncomfortable – but with paid expenses, housing and perhaps even life insurance, Lena finds the offer more enticing…
Modern Hauntings, Victorian Torments: Belle Vue by C. S. Alleyne
Claire Ryan has been evicted by her landlord, but chances to find an affordable alternative: a flat in a building that was once a Victorian asylum called Belle Vue. Her boyfriend Alex, a history student, is more than happy with this development as he can base his latest research project around the building’s heritage. In…
Black Magic and Dark Secrets: Alexis Henderson’s The Year of the Witching
Immanuelle Moore is a teenage girl who lives in Bethel, a town gripped by an authoritarian religion. The Good Father of Bethel’s faith is opposed by a Dark Mother, a demonic figure associated with witchcraft and devilry. Immanuelle has been treated with suspicion from birth as her late mother, Miriam, was a witch. Yet she…
[PATREON EXCLUSIVE] She Who Must Be Obeyed: Wonder Woman’s Secret Origin as Victorian Villainess
Our monthly Patron-exclusive essay series continues. You can read all of these incredible analyses for as little as a dollar a month on our Patreon. Somewhere in a remote corner of the world is a land known to outsiders only in legend. It is a matriarchy, ruled for thousands of years by a queen who has…
Remembering Charlee Jacob: Containment
Reading through Charlee Jacob’s fiction, it is easy to identify the varieties of horror that she found most fertile. For one, she showed a particular fascination with relationships between predators and prey: strong characters, often men, brutalising women and children in a process that warps and damages both victim and perpetrator. Jacob’s stories incorporate this…
REVIEW: Plunge is a Thoughtful Love-Letter to 1980s Sci-Fi Horror
The survey ship Derleth sank in April 1983, all hands lost. Forty years later, a coastal station picks up an automated distress call from the vessel: a recent tsunami has left the Derleth partly above sea level on an Alaskan reef, allowing its solar-powered systems to reactivate. The company that owns the ship hires salvage…
REVIEW: Daphne Byrne is a Voyage Through Gothic Visions
New York, 1884. Frederick Byrne has died, and his widow visits a medium in the hopes of contacting his spirit. But it is the couple’s daughter, a bullied fourteen-year-old named Daphne, who turns out to be a magnet for supernatural phenomena. She has nightmares of strange creatures, undergoes harrowing visions when awake, and is followed…
Remembering Charlee Jacob: Season of the Witch
Season of the Witch was nearly the last Charlee Jacob novel to be published (only one more, Containment, was to follow), yet it was the first that she wrote. She penned it in the ’80s, after which it remained a “trunk novel” until 2016. Jacob evidently revised the manuscript to some extent prior to its…
PATREON EXCLUSIVE: Infinite Crisis: Fifteen Years Later
Our monthly Patron-exclusive essay series continues. You can read all of these incredible analyses for as little as a dollar a month on our Patreon. This year marks the fifteenth anniversary of DC’s Infinite Crisis event, which itself was published to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of Crisis on Infinite Earths. That notorious series, published between…