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…
Remembering Charlee Jacob: The Myth of Falling
Published in 2014 by Sinister Grin Press, The Myth of Falling is both Charlee Jacob’s final collection of short stories and the single most personal work in her bibliography. In most of her collections, save for Up, Out of Cities that Blow Hot and Cold with its brief introductions for each story, Jacob allowed her…
REVIEW: The Dollhouse Family Has Dark Surprises in Every Corner
The story of The Dollhouse Family begins when a little girl named Alice inherits a gift from an obscure relative: an antique, lavishly-detailed dollhouse, complete with five little dolls in period costume. These toys offer Alice some escapism from her unhappy home environment, dominated as it is by her abusive father. And if she says…
Vampires on the Margins: Forbidden Desires
One reason for the enduring appeal of the vampire as a concept is its erotic element, and this is something that manifests in both heterosexual and homosexual terms. From the lesbian vampire exploitation films of the seventies to the queer undead of Anne Rice’s bestsellers, modern audiences have come to expect vampires to exist outside…
REVIEW: The Low, Low Woods is a Haunting Tale of Strange Memories
Sitting in a cinema together, teenage friends El and Vee realise that neither of them has any memory of the film that has just ended. They soon find that Vee has unexplained mud on her shoes, no-one else went to see the film, and the sole staff member present is behaving oddly. Clearly, something has…
The Twisted Ones: T. Kingfisher, Arthur Machen, and Weird Perspectives
Melissa (Mouse to her friends) is tasked with clearing out the North Carolina cottage that once belonged to her grandmother, a woman known for her cruelty to all those around her – including her husband Cotgrave, Mouse’s “step-grandfather”. Once Mouse temporarily moves into the woodland cottage, her main companions are her dog Bongo and her…
Remembering Charlee Jacob: Still
Still, published in 2007, is perhaps Charlee Jacob’s most accessible novel. This is not to say that it is more conventional than her other books: the dreamlike surrealism, loose narrative structure and graphic portrayals of depravity that characterise much of her oeuvre are all present and correct. Rather, Still is comparatively accessible because of its…
Vampires on the Margins: Women’s Perspectives
Modern vampire fiction has been shaped in large part by female authors: Anne Rice, Charlaine Harris, Nancy Collins, Laurell K. Hamilton, Stephenie Meyer and others each played a part in establishing vampire literature as the thriving commercial genre that it is today. In terms of both authorship and readership, it is safe to say that…
Vampires on the Margins: The Black Vampyre
The development of vampire fiction throughout the nineteenth century is often boiled down to four key authors. Dr. John Polidori established the genre in 1819 with his short story “The Vampyre”. James Malcolm Rymer demonstrated that vampires could find popular success through longer-form storytelling with his penny dreadful saga Varney the Vampire, completed in 1847….