Cover (1987), the third novel by Jack Ketchum, is an exploration of trauma and territory that cements his reputation as a writer of psychological horror. Originally published the year when scars of the Vietnam War were being re-examined through contemporary conflicts, the novel uses a remote forest setting to bridge two distinct U.S. experiences: the pampered lives of successful Angelenos and the haunted existence of a man who never truly left the jungle.

Plot Summary: A New Jungle

The narrative unfolds in 1987, alternating the perspectives of Bernard Kelsey, a successful but troubled novelist, and Lee Moravian, a Vietnam vet living off the land as a pot grower. Lee has retreated to a "loveless forest" in the United States, finding a new jungle where he can play soldier, facilitated by alcoholism and a deepening psychosis that prevents him from adjusting to the World. When Kelsey and a small group of fr…

Read more

There are traps and traps. Richard Haigh traps his characters at isolated Hobb’s Farm, situated under the heat-baked summer slopes of Mynydd Du. Farm owners Edwin and Alice Thompson are trapped in a pressure cooker of financial desperation. Their son, Paul Thompson, a heavy drinker already trapped into perpetually washing away his anxieties with vodka, struggles to maintain an intensive, high-stakes agricultural investment with a herd of mutated, hump-backed Buckland White pigs. The arrival of Paul's portly, sedentary brother Richard, Richard's wife Jean, and their young children, Marcus and Debbie, further erodes domestic stability.

Haigh imbues this family plot with financial dread with palpable sexual anxiety. He does this particularly via the habits of Gwyneth Pentecost, the precocious sixteen-year-old daughter of taciturn farm manager Arthur.

The spark for this combustible family material: a de…

Read more

The Birds (1936) is a beautifully weird novel, more After London than Ballard or John Christopher. Or Daphne Du Maurier.

In it, attacking birds eliminate UK native species before mounting their assault on modern life. While the first-person eyewitness narrative wisely and carefully offers no scope, context, or boffin persiflage, this only speeds accumulation of dread.

Read more

Readers of instant remainder books will recognize the cover of Tales of Witchcraft. I came close to purchasing this book many times at Barnes and Noble and Half-Price books over the decades. The selection of authors is strong, and the inciting incident for each tale is usually a cut above.

Subscribe now

In Saki's "The Peace of Mowsle Barton" (1911), Crefton Lockyer moves to a quiet farmhouse to escape city life but immediately discovers a spiteful message on a barn door accusing a local woman of being a witch. Disillusionment with spreading rural tumult follows.

The incident in M. R. James's "The Fenstanton Witch" (1990) occurs when two 16th-century Cambridge Fellows hear about a local witch’s burial and decide to conduct a midnight expedition to her grave to steal ingredients for magical spells. James is always a delight, and here the college milieu is observed with fine wit.

For N. Dennett's "Unburied Bane" (1933), a playwright seeking inspiration for a thriller leads his wife to a decaying, isolated farm occupied by a repulsive old woman.

In "The Toad Witch" (1991) by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, a young girl becomes obsessed with a local woman she believes is a witch.

Ron Weighell's "Carven of Onyx" (1991) begins when renovations at a priory reveal a concealed altar.

A. M. Burrage's "Furze Hollow" (1923) is launched when a city clerk taking a shortcut across a common at midnight hears eerie pipe music.

Something like panic struck at Hurlow. Moffat’s calm confession of fear withdrew the prop upon which he had leaned. Down there, among the motionless shadows, lurked invisible things, things that were nameless, shapeless, and malignant; things which could see without being seen. One of the long lost terrors of childhood returned to him, and like a child he put his hand into Moffat’s.

‘What are we to do?’ he asked in a whisper, longing for Moffat to suggest that they should go.

‘What can we do? It seems that we are only men and not heroes. We can only stay here and watch.’

Read more

In his introduction to the story collection The Door To Doom (1980), editor Douglas Greene defines Carr's appeal:

Sometimes in the same book, unspeakable horrors exist side by side with uproarious comedy. Part of Carr’s mastery of the detective novel was this ability to combine the terrifying atmosphere of Edgar Allan Poe with the humor of P. G. Wodehouse.

Despite the fact that Carr wrote in the mood of neo-gothic horror or high comedy, almost all his novels are formal detective stories. No detective novelist was more scrupulous in giving every clue to the reader and in presenting rational explanations of all the seeming impossibilities. Carr handled clues, suspects and motives with such dexterity that few readers are able to predict the solutions.

* * *

"The Legend of the Cane in the Dark" (1926) makes for interesting reading next to "New Murders …

Read more

I want to be transparent about the tools I use behind the scenes.

Reading, reflecting, and sharing honest book reviews is the heart of this Substack newsletter. Every single opinion, critique, rating, and final word you read here comes directly from me. However, to help me organize my thoughts and sharpen my writing, I use AI tools as a research and editing assistant.

Here is what that looks like:

What AI Does:

• Summarizing complex plot structures or historical context to refresh my memory while writing.

• Formatting, proofreading, and double-checking for clarity or typos

• Brainstorming different ways to frame a theme or section header.

What AI Never Does:

• Form opinions: It doesn't read the books for me, or decide whether a book is good, bad, or somewhere in between.

• Write the core review: Every analysis, personal reaction, and recommendation is written, vetted, and polished by me, before being posted by me.

My goal is to deliver thoughtful reviews you can trust. Using AI behind the scenes gives me more time to focus on the part that matters most: reading great books and sharing my genuine take on them with you.

Jay

27 July 2026

William F. Nolan’s Helltracks blends Western, crime, and supernatural horror elements against a uniquely unforgiving Montana landscape around the Little Belt Mountains.

Subscribe now

Plot Summary

The novel follows two primary and converging narrative threads.

The Ventry Family and the Train: Following the death of his wife, aging sheep rancher Paul Ventry faces the departure of his daughter, Amy, who seeks a new life in the city. When Amy vanishes after boarding what she describes in a postcard as an "old black steamer," Ventry becomes obsessed with finding a train that authorities insist no longer exists. His search leads him into the mountains, where he discovers a terrifying truth: an ancient steam locomotive has achieved a sentient, organic life, hunting human prey to sustain its existence.

The Serial Killer: Alternating the Ventry family storyline is the journal of Edward Michael Timmons, a "positive thinking" serial killer known as the "Big Sky Strangler." Timmons traverses Montana's highways, recording his clinical, cold-blooded murders and his twisted justifications for them.

The novel culminates as Paul Ventry’s son, Josh, and Josh’s companion Cris Mitchell—a mining executive and explosives expert—confront the living train in a desperate bid for survival and vengeance.

Location and Atmosphere

Nolan utilizes the modern Montana landscape as a vivid and essential horror component. The setting shifts between vast open spaces of prairies to claustrophobic depths of the Little Belt Mountains.

Nolan’s atmosphere conveys localized mysticism, drawing on indigenous beliefs that certain sacred areas allow nature to reshape itself into organic life. This creates a "fierce, compact" mood characterized by isolation, grief, and an underlying dread of entities that shun the sun and travel only by night.

Structure and Comparison

Nolan notes in his afterword1 that he wrote the serial killer thread and the Ventry thread as separate units before braiding them together. This provides an off-kilter rhythmic counterpoint between the grounded psychological horror of a human predator and the grander, supernatural horror of the living train.

Helltracks’ theme of a small community or family unit facing evil in the wilderness draws comparisons to Chet Williamson’s 1989 novel Dreamthorpe. Williamson similarly explores how a setting's dark history and landscape can manifest as modern terror. Dreamthorpe is also structured in alternating chapters with a serial killer’s trek.

Changes from "Lonely Train A' Comin'" (1981)

Helltracks is an expansion of Nolan’s short story, originally titled "The Train." I first read it in the 80s as "Lonely Train A' Comin'" (1981).

Key changes include:

Subplot Addition: The character of Edward Timmons (the serial killer) was not in the original story; Nolan integrated him from another short piece, "The Cure," to provide the secondary narrative layer needed for a full-length novel.

Character Depth: In the short story, Paul Ventry is a stolid widower whose sister, Amy, dies after boarding the train. The novel expands the family dynamic significantly, adding Josh Ventry and Cris Mitchell, and changing Amy from Paul's sister to his daughter to heighten the emotional stakes.

Setting Realism: Nolan initially wrote the story without having visited Montana. After a 1981 research trip, he shifted the setting to include specific geographic locations like Ross Fork and Lewistown, posing supernatural elements in carefully realised surroundings.

Significance of the Dual Narratives

The decision to follow both a family battling a supernatural train and a serial killer writing his memoirs serves as a fast-paced study of "twin evils."

Human vs. Inhuman Evil: Timmons represents the "negative energy" of human depravity—a calculated, conscious choice to destroy life. The train represents an evolutionary, instinctual "spirit life"—an organism that has achieved life over a century, but has not achieved thought.

The Intersection of Trauma

By pushing both plot threads, Nolan explores how different tracks end in violent death. The Ventry family’s search for answers to a family member’s death—and the killer coming to grips with his insanity—both lead to the same wilderness: whether evil is human-made or supernaturally born, its impact on both the innocent and the culpable is equally devastating.

Hell tracks lead to Hell, but it is only a final destination for some.

Jay

6 May 2026

Leave a comment

Fourth Wall Phantoms (2025) by Joshua Cutchin uses narratology as a framework to explore experiences of high strangeness and the paranormal.

Cutchin argues that UFOs, cryptids, and spirits are not merely objective or subjective events, but embodied narratives. He uses the Ouroboros as a central metaphor: a continuous feedback loop where human stories, media, and imagination bleed into reality, and reality in turn shapes those stories, creating a boundary where fiction becomes fact.

The traditional dramatic concept of the "fourth wall" ceases to be a secure barrier separating an audience from a performance, mutating instead into a highly porous, bi-directional door through which fictions can physically step into and address our lives.

To unpack this methodology, my analysis will first supply a chapter-by-chapter summary of Cutchin’s text, highlighting his specific focus on narratological mechanics, tulpas, screen memories, Proppian morphology, and metalepsis.

Armed with this critical toolkit, I will explore Lucy Clifford’s 1882 Victorian horror story, "The New Mother." By examining the physicalization of fictional bogeymen, we will chart precisely how the tale serves as an active script for a full-scale incursion of high strangeness.

Chapter Synopses

1. The Fourth Wall is a Door

Narratological Focus: The breaking of the "fourth wall"—the imaginary boundary between a performance and the audience.

The High Strangeness Connection: Cutchin introduces the core concept of "fictional incursions," where characters or tropes from fiction manifest in waking reality. He reviews accounts of individuals seeing entities like Donald Duck or comic book characters. Cutchin frames high strangeness as operating on "dream logic" that breaches the fourth wall of consensus reality, turning an artistic barrier into a literal doorway.

The Metaleptic Shatter: In narratology, metalepsis occurs when a character breaks the fourth wall to address the audience. Or when an author steps into their own creation. Cutchin posits that when humans experience high strangeness—such as a UFO or cryptid encounter—a literal "metaleptic shatter" occurs. The phenomenon forces the witness to realize they are not passive audience members looking at a separate, objective event; rather, the phenomenon "looks back" and draws the human directly into the unfolding cosmic script.

The Phenomenon as a Mirror: Cutchin argues that the phenomenon behaves like a manipulative director or projectionist. It reaches across the fourth wall into the audience's collective mind-store to pull out familiar imagery—whether it's sci-fi film tropes, folklore, or personal memories—and uses them as masks to interface with us.

Co-Authoring Reality: Because the fourth wall is a door, the exchange goes both ways. Human imagination, fear, media trends, and stories do not just stay contained within our minds; they feed back into the ether, "re-writing" the templates and forms that the phenomenon utilizes to breach our consensus reality. Humanity is simultaneously the audience, the actors, and the co-authors of the anomalous experience.

2. The Truth is Stranger

Narratological Focus: The externalization of the creative process and authorial inspiration.

The High Strangeness Connection: Cutchin documents numerous historical and modern accounts of writers (e.g., Charles Dickens, Alan Moore, Robert E. Howard) whose fictional characters materialized physically or autonomously dictated stories. This chapter illustrates the Ouroboros in action: intense human imagination "kindles" a narrative until it rebels against its creator and crosses over into physical space, interacting with the audience as an independent entity.

3. Mind Over Matter, Matter Over Mind

Narratological Focus: The metaphysical and philosophical underpinnings of narrative construction (Idealism, Panpsychism, and Retrocausality).

The High Strangeness Connection: Exploring how stories materialize, Cutchin contrasts the concepts of tulpas and egregores (thoughtforms) with Eric Wargo’s theory of retrocausality—where future experiences loop backward to inspire past creative works. Cutchin posits an ex nihilo (out of nothing) space at the center of the time-loop where the Ouroboros feeds on itself, allowing human consciousness and a living universe to co-create the physical landscape of the weird.

4. Lying Saucers

Narratological Focus: Science fiction as a modern mythology; the concept of "screen memories."

The High Strangeness Connection: Cutchin focuses on UFO encounters that mimic science fiction films and pop culture (e.g., “Star Wars” Ewoks, “Star Trek” Vulcan ears, or Michael Jackson stage personas appearing during abductions). He argues that the phenomenon utilizes our media catalog as a script. The Ouroboros loop is explicitly traced via the term "flying saucer" itself: a typo/misnomer in historical media loop-back to cause the phenomenon to physically adjust its shape to match media-bred media expectations.

5. Props to Propp

Narratological Focus: Structuralism and Vladimir Propp’s 31 functions of the folk "wondertale."

The High Strangeness Connection: Cutchin maps the standard alien abduction narrative directly onto Propp's structural blueprint for fairytales. He demonstrates that the traumatic, confusing steps of an abduction match the narrative beats of a protagonist being tested by an "adversary" and receiving a "magical agent." Cutchin aligns this with Peter Gilet's work to show that both fairytales and high strangeness encounters are driven by a singular, underlying initiatory archetype embedded in reality.

6. Beyond Us and Within Us

Narratological Focus: Cinematic techniques (multiperspectivity, setting, and character-effects).

The High Strangeness Connection: The phenomenon mimics the mechanics of a film director or projectionist. Just as a setting in horror literature mirrors a character's internal psyche, the landscapes of high strangeness—utilitarian UFO rooms or dark, isolated woods—exteriorize the subconscious states of the experiencer. The Ouroboros loop here shows humans acting simultaneously as the audience, the actors, and the co-authors of the anomaly.

7. Metalepsis Mundi

Narratological Focus: Metalepsis—the structural violation of narrative levels (e.g., an author stepping into their own book or a character attacking the reader).

The High Strangeness Connection: Cutchin frames the entire physical universe as a layered narrative. When a person encounters a cryptid or a UFO, a "metaleptic shatter" occurs. He applies Jeffrey Kripal’s "Super-Story" to show that by looking at the phenomenon, the human reader inadvertently invites the phenomenon to look back, drag them into the text, and permanently alter their life's plotline.

8. The pH of Disbelief

Narratological Focus: The suspension of disbelief and the corrosive role of absolute certainty.

The High Strangeness Connection: Cutchin discusses how the absurd, "bizarre theater" of paranormal events (like trickster behavior in crop circles or nonsensical statements from ufonauts) is deliberately designed to short-circuit human rationality. The Ouroboros loop requires a delicate "acidity" or balance of belief; absolute skepticism or absolute dogma kills the narrative loop. The phenomenon produces absurd fictions to stay safely in the liminal zone between fact and fiction.

9. Monstrum

Narratological Focus: The etymology of monsters as "demonstrations" or signs pointing to a deeper text.

The High Strangeness Connection: Shifting to cryptozoology, Cutchin argues that cryptids (Bigfoot, Mothman, lake monsters) are not hidden biological animals, but living narrative punctuation marks. They are physical manifestations of the untamed wilderness or psychological trauma, breaking the fourth wall to remind humanity of the wild, unmapped chapters of reality.

10. Made of Stories

Narratological Focus: The narrative architecture of memory and identity.

The High Strangeness Connection: Cutchin looks at the realm of spirits and ghosts. Rather than surviving consciousness or electromagnetic echoes, Cutchin argues that spirits are literally made of stories. They are independent narrative fragments that attach themselves to physical spaces or living people, using the Ouroboros loop to pull energy from our attention to keep their fading storylines alive.

11. Ghost Written

Narratological Focus: Pseudepigrapha, pastiche, and the evolution of folklore templates.

The High Strangeness Connection: Cutchin analyzes how the specific iconography of the paranormal changes across centuries. He shows how Victorian literary inventions of fairies and ghosts eventually rewrote older folk beliefs. The updated literary templates then leaked back into the collective unconscious, dictating how modern eyewitnesses physically see and experience encounters.

12. Folklore in Superposition

Narratological Focus: Quantum-like narrative superposition (the intersection of multiple genres).

The High Strangeness Connection: Cutchin explores cases that defy clean categorization—where a single event simultaneously looks like a UFO sighting, a fairy encounter, and a poltergeist haunting. He suggests that before an event is observed and written down into a human journal, it exists in a narrative superposition. The Ouroboros loop collapses this wave function based on whatever cultural genre the observer is most familiar with.

13. Ideas Have People

Narratological Focus: The concept of autonomy in memes, ideas, and archetypes.

The High Strangeness Connection: Reversing the materialist view that humans possess ideas, Cutchin argues that powerful narrative ideas and archetypes possess us. He presents accounts of everyday people who unwittingly begin to embody specific mythological figures or deities without prior knowledge of them. The archetype uses the human as an instrument to physically enact its story in our world.

14. Prometheus with a Paintbrush

Narratological Focus: The artist as a literal shaman and demiurge.

The High Strangeness Connection: Cutchin concludes the main text by positioning the human creative act as a deeply volatile, magical operation. When artists, filmmakers, and writers build cohesive worlds, they are stealing Promethean fire. They do not just reflect reality; they feed the Ouroboros. They write the code that the phenomenon uses to breach the fourth wall, meaning humanity bears a creative responsibility for what haunts its steps.

Case Study: Lucy Clifford's story "The New Mother”

Lucy Clifford’s 1882 "The New Mother" is a chilling moral allegory that operates as a pristine example of the psychological and narrative mechanisms Joshua Cutchin explores in Fourth Wall Phantoms. By examining the trajectory of the two children, Blue-Eyes and Turkey, through Cutchin's advanced literary criticism toolkit, we can map how a seemingly rigid Victorian cautionary tale mutates into a terrifying display of high strangeness, narrative entities, and the breakdown of consensus reality.

1. The Fourth Wall as a Door & Fictional Incursions

In Cutchin’s framework, the "fourth wall" is not a static boundary between a text and its audience, but a porous door through which fictions can step into reality. Clifford’s story explicitly literalizes this concept through the threat of the New Mother.

Initially, the New Mother is introduced purely as a textual/linguistic construct—a horrific fable invented by the biological mother to enforce an interdiction ("if you are very naughty... I shall have to go away and send home a new mother, with glass eyes and wooden tail"). The children treat it as an impossibility, a fiction: "There is no mother with a wooden tail and glass eyes... they would be much too expensive to make."

However, the children's subsequent escalating acts of real naughtiness serve as a kindling threshold. They obsessively focus on the narrative rules laid out by a mysterious, wild village girl. By throwing water on the fire, breaking the clock, and smashing a looking-glass, they are not simply misbehaving; they are ritually enacting a script that shatters the fourth wall.

The climax of the story features a terrifying fictional incursion: the linguistic bogeyman materializes in the physical world. The children hear something heavy being dragged outside and look out the window to behold the flashing of two glass eyes beneath a black satin poke bonnet. The fictional nightmare has breached the fourth wall of their cottage, physically cracking and splintering the painted door with her wooden tail.

2. The Co-Creation Hypothesis & The "Mind Store"

Cutchin outlines the Co-Creation Hypothesis, suggesting that the high strangeness entities we encounter are tailored by a living universe using masks plucked from our own cultural "mind store."

In "The New Mother," the agent of this manifestation is the wild village girl with the peardrum. The peardrum itself acts as a physicalized symbol of the narrative process: it is a musical instrument with a box on the side containing a little peasant man and woman who only dance for truly naughty children. The girl refuses to show Blue Eyes and Turkey the dance because the children are inherently "good."

Driven by an absolute obsession to see this hidden narrative, the children inadvertently co-create their own doom. They draw upon the specific, horrifying imagery provided by their mother’s warning. When the environment warps around them—marked by the broken clock striking eleven and the discordant clanging of the peardrum—the universe reflects back their chosen script. They expected a monster with glass eyes and a wooden tail, and through their compliance with the narrative rules of the village girl, that is precisely the placeholder reality gives them.

3. The Structuralist Fairytale Template (Propp & Gilet)

Mapping Clifford's narrative onto Vladimir Propp’s 31 functions of the wondertale and Peter Gilet's streamlined model reveals a horrifying inversion of the classic initiatory archetype Cutchin describes:

Function I (Absentation): The story opens with a missing family member—the father is far away at sea. Later, the biological mother absents herself, taking the baby with her.

Function II & III (Interdiction & Violation): The mother delivers an explicit interdiction: "Don’t look at any strangers you meet, and be sure you do not talk with them." Blue-Eyes and Turkey immediately violate this by engaging with the wild girl with a peardrum by the stones.

The Villain / Adversary / Donor: In a bizarre metaleptic twist, the wild village girl acts simultaneously as the Donor (offering a magical agent/secret through the peardrum) and the Adversary. She tests the children, telling them it requires "a great deal of skill to be naughty well."

Function VIII (The Villain Causes Harm): Unlike traditional fairytales where the Hero overcomes the test, Blue-Eyes and Turkey fail the moral calculus. The harm caused is the permanent exile of their real mother and the arrival of the New Mother.

The Double & Failed Return: Gilet notes that characters can exhibit a "preoccupation with the normal world." The children clean the cottage, wash the floor, and rub the tins in a desperate attempt to return to consensus reality. But they have gone too far past the threshold. They are cast out into the forest forever, sleeping on dead leaves, looking back at a home that is permanently closed to them and occupied by an alien entity.

4. Philosophical Idealism and the Metaleptic Shatter

Cutchin utilizes Idealism—the philosophy that reality is fundamentally mental and continuous with our consciousness—to explain why the weird cannot be "scienced away." In "The New Mother," space and matter become entirely subordinate to the psychological and narrative state of the characters.

When the children fully commit to their "naughtiness," the environment reflects their inner moral decay. The fire is extinguished, the white boards are neglected, and the clock is broken. A metaleptic shatter occurs when the boundary between the mother's warning (the text) and the children's physical home breaks down.

The New Mother represents what Cutchin refers to as a meaning event or an acausal synchronicity elevated to a horrific peak. Her features are explicitly unnatural, inorganic, and robotic—glass eyes, a wooden tail—resembling the bizarre, clichéd, or "fake" presentation often reported by alien abductees or witnesses of high strangeness (such as the stiff, caricatured Men-in-Black or the mechanical, cartoonish flying saucers). She is a literal puppet of the story who has usurped the role of the director.

Conclusion: The Ouroboros of the Final Flash

The story closes on a haunting image that perfectly encapsulates Cutchin's concept of the eternal, living nature of text:

"Now and then, when the darkness has fallen and the night is still... a blinding flash comes through the window, and they know it is the light from the new mother's glass eyes..."

This blinding flash through the cottage window behaves exactly like the anomalous light phenomena at the heart of UFO and cryptid encounters. It is an engine of radical doubt.

The children are trapped in an ongoing, looping nightmare where they must watch their old home from the dark forest, haunted by a physicalized fiction they co-authored but can never dismantle. They wanted to see a story dance, and in the end, they became the captive, tormented characters imprisoned within it.

Conclusions

Fourth Wall Phantoms serves as an valuable toolkit for students, readers, and critics of horror fiction. By bridging the gap between theoretical narratology and the lived experiences of high strangeness, Cutchin strips horror of its clinical, materialist limitations and restores it to its true home: the realm of profound psychological and spiritual meaning. Rather than viewing genre tropes—such as screen memories, shape-shifting entities, and bizarre theatrical plots—as mere consumer contamination or trivial clichés, Cutchin forces us to recognize them as essential components of an underlying, universal structure. He elegantly demonstrates that our oldest legends, modern horror pulps, and contemporary cinematic nightmares are not just idle fabrications; they are the literal vocabulary of a living, co-creative reality.

Cutchin's Framework

At the heart of Cutchin's framework is an uncompromising refusal to let the "certainty fetish" of absolute skepticism or rigid dogma sanitize the weird. By treating both textual fiction and real-world encounters as part of an overlapping Ouroboros loop, his methodology offers a superior, more holistic way to track the evolution of horror. This lens proves that the hard lines we draw between an author's imagination and a witness's testimony are fundamentally illusory. When we analyze horror through this unified, Kripalian perspective, a story like Lucy Clifford's "The New Mother" ceases to be a Victorian warning and becomes an active, terrifying map of how human dread can kindle and physicalize an anomaly.

Cutchin’s framework leaves the reader with the deeply unsettling, yet thrilling realization that the boundary between fact and fiction is entirely porous—and that when we peer into the abyss of horror fiction, we are looking directly into a mirror of our own reality.

Cutchin's Skill

Cutchin’s unique skill lies in his autodidactic ability to weaponize dense, often impenetrable narratological concepts—such as metalepsis, multiperspectivity, and Proppian morphology—and transform them into concrete, highly scannable tools for exploring everyday strangeness. He steers clear of the reductionist "free-for-all" traps of simulation theory or the multiverse, instead choosing to work within parameters that protect the raw, emotional human element of the encounter. Walking this razor-sharp line with characteristic humility and agnosticism, Cutchin avoids coming off like a rigid lecturer, choosing instead to act as a grounded, insightful guide through the marginal dirt of the paranormal landscape. Ultimately, his brilliant study succeeds because it does not try to scientifically explain away the mystery. Instead, Cutchin teaches us how to feel its truth, providing an essential and enduring roadmap for anyone brave enough to ask the right question: why do horror stories continue to leak out of the darkness and into our lives?

Jay

20 July 2026

Subscribe now

Share

Introduction by Mike Ashley

I did not expect to find lost stories by writers well known in the field, and was thus delighted to find a previously unreprinted story by E. F. Benson, one of the greats of the supernatural. Some may also recognise the names of F. Britten Austin and Guy Thorne, popular in their day for their unusual and often daring fiction. But most of these writers have been unjustly forgotten even though some, such as Elsie Norris, Huan Mee, James Barr, Lumley Deakin and Philippa Forest, wrote quite a few weird tales—and, in the case of Jack Edwards, many.

Subscribe now

"On the Embankment" (1919) by Hugh E. Wright

A penniless young man, new to London, encounters eccentric bums at a Thames embankment bench he hopes to sleep on.

"The Mystery of the Gables (1908) by Elsie Norris

A skeptic investigates overnight at a haunted house. Only in the morning does he discover it was property of a…

Read more

This is a brief book, accessible and free of most obscurantist jargon.

There are practical nuts-and-bolts explanations of procedures and double-checkings that an exorcism is warranted.

There are several personal accounts of exorcisms, as well as of near death experiences that are truly horrific.

I'm a Marxist and an atheist. The authority of the RC church is in the largest context waning. Some defenders of religion claim God is proven by intelligent design and the clockwork universe. Amorth's book is the coin's other side: there is a literal demonic kingdom set up to harry and torture humanity and rob it of presence before God.

There can certainly be some very spectacular phenomena during exorcisms, such as speaking in tongues — that is, speaking in foreign or esoteric languages — the overturning of the eyes, and levitation. I recall two cases: the first was that of a young mechanic who worked not far from my community at Rome and who, even before the exorcism was initiated, began to levitate just as I placed my hand on his shoulder. Five people could not hold him still. The second incident was related to me by Father Candido: he exorcized a young peasant girl of seventeen, who was more accustomed to speaking in her dialect than in Italian. While he was reciting the formulas in Latin, Father Candido was distracted by the continuous questions addressed to him by the two priests who had accompanied the girl. After having had enough, he said to them in Greek rather than in Italian (perhaps he was tired), “Shut up! Stop that!” Immediately the girl turned toward him and asked him, in a satanic manner: “Why do you order me to be quiet? Tell it to these two who continue to interrupt you!”

***

An Exorcist Explains the Demonic is not a book to think about at 3am, the hour when men have feet of clay.

Jay

18 July 2026

To understand how Camille Paglia would approach these iconic horror fiction protagonists, one must first look at her fundamental view of the horror genre itself.

In Sexual Personae, horror is not a modern entertainment or a social aberration; it is the raw, violent eruption of the daemonic and the chthonian through the fragile, artificial scaffolding of civilized society. Horror occurs when our highly structured Apollonian world—ruled by the illusion of order, logic, and clean visual lines—is flooded by the blind, amoral realities of nature, biology, and the unconscious.

Norman Bates: The Tragic Male Heroine of the Maternal Maw

Norman Bates of Robert Bloch's Psycho is a textbook example of the male heroine crushed by the weight of a devouring family romance. In Paglia's framework, Norman is not a mere clinical case study, but a captive of the archetypal Great Mother. His mother, surviving as a murderous inner voice and a preserved physical corpse, represents the inescapable reality of the maternal matrix that denies the male child his autonomy.

Norman's hobby of taxidermy is a desperate, ritualistic attempt at psychoiconicism. By stuffing dead birds and preserving his mother’s body, he uses a form of static, Apollonian artistry to freeze and deny the natural process of chthonian decay. When "Mother" takes over his personality, she acts as a bloodthirsty, castrating femme fatale, rising up to murder any young woman who threatens her absolute rule. Norman’s voyeurism—spying on guests through a hidden peephole—represents the failure of the western eye to maintain its protective aesthetic distance. The moment his eye is stimulated, the clean lines of his identity dissolve, and he plunges back into the daemonic violence of the womb-tomb.

Jack Torrance: The Collapse of the Patriarchal Serekh

In The Shining, Jack Torrance represents the fragile, over-constructed ego of the western father attempting to build a defensive barrier against the chaotic forces of nature. His writing, his job, and his authority as head of the household are all Apollonian structures designed to suppress his underlying failures. However, when he is isolated within the Overlook Hotel, he enters a massive, snowbound temenos of the daemonic past.

Paglia would categorize Jack's regression as a catastrophic surrender to chthonian forces. The hotel, with its shifting corridors and bloody history, acts as a physical manifestation of the untamed id, unleashing the monstrous desires of his own ancestral family romance. Jack's slide into homicidal mania represents the failure of social conditioning; his civilization is stripped away, exposing the raw aggression that lies beneath our ethical assumptions. Rather than mastering his environment, the patriarch is utterly consumed by it, demonstrating how easily the proudest male will can be shattered and reclaimed by the amoral wilderness.

Father Karras: The Floundering Priest as Male Heroine

Father Damien Karras of Blatty’s The Exorcist represents the effete, intellectualized modern church, which has lost the fierce, militant conviction of early sky-cults. Floundering under the heavy burden of guilt and grief regarding his dying mother, Karras acts as a classic male heroine. He is passive, guilt-ridden, and paralyzed by the emotional complications of his own family romance.

The demon Pazuzu, taking possession of a young girl's body, is a pure eruption of the chthonian and the daemonic. The possession manifests through the grotesque degradation of the flesh—vomiting, levitation, and biological pollution—which directly mocks Karras's modern, scientific attempts to categorize the phenomenon as a psychiatric illness. Paglia would note that Karras can only achieve victory by abandoning his passive, intellectual stance and engaging in a raw, physical sacrifice. Like an ancient shaman or a tragic hero, Karras must invite the demon into his own body. His final leap through the window is a violent, self-mutilating act of the Apollonian will, reclaiming his masculine identity at the absolute limit of physical self-destruction.

Jack Seward: The Voyeuristic Guardian of Apollonian Sanity

Dr. John "Jack" Seward in Stoker’s Dracula represents the late-Victorian attempt to use science, technology, and mental categorization to defend against the daemonic. As the superintendent of an insane asylum, Seward uses his phonograph to record and analyze madness, hoping that the cold light of intellect can push back the night. Paglia would identify Seward's scientific drive as a manifestation of psychological heliotropism—a desperate turning of the mind toward rational order to stave off showdowns with the unknown.

Seward is ultimately brought face-to-face with the chthonian when his beloved Lucy Westenra is transformed into a voluptuous, blood-drinking vampire. Lucy rises from her tomb as a demonic femme fatale, turning the passive male characters into helpless objects of her amoral hunger. Seward’s relationship with Lucy is defined by a tense, voyeuristic psychoiconicism. He is transfixed by the sight of her beauty and her horror, unable to act until the older patriarch, Van Helsing, restores the group's Apollonian willpower. The final act of driving a wooden stake through Lucy's heart is a brutal, necessary ritual designed to destroy her transgressive, fluid nature and return her to the static, safe boundaries of death.

Dorian Gray: The Beautiful Boy as Destroyer

Dorian Gray is the absolute zenith of the beautiful boy persona in western literature. Paglia would approach Dorian as a sublime, artificial creation who uses his ephebic, androgynous perfection to escape the physical realities of the chthonian swamp. Dorian’s beauty represents physicality without physiology; he does not age, sweat, or reproduce, remaining forever frozen in a state of Apollonian stasis.

To achieve this, Dorian relies on a literal division of his identity, projecting his biological reality onto his portrait. The canvas becomes a heavy, secret psychoicon, absorbing the putrefaction, the years, and the moral rot of his amoral lifestyle. Dorian navigates his world with the cold, witty detachment of the English epicene, treating his crimes and his lovers as mere elements of an exquisite, theatrical design. However, his pursuit of pleasure inevitably leads him to the squalor of the London docks, seeking raw, daemonic sensations. His final attempt to knife the portrait is a tragic miscalculation of the will. In attempting to destroy the record of his sins, he ruptures the illusion of his own artifice, and his body instantly collapses back into the wrinkled, rotting, and chthonian truth of nature.

Glossary

Daemonic: The amoral, chaotic, and primitive force of nature and the unconscious. Originating from the Greek daimon (a lower divinity or guardian shadow), it represents the nocturnal realm of sex, cruelty, and metamorphosis before Christianity rebranded it as purely evil.

Male Heroine: A male persona who assumes a traditionally feminine position of passivity, emotional internalization, suffering, or vulnerability under the crushing weight of chthonian nature or maternal dominance.

Chthonian: Literally "of the earth," but specifically referring to earth's bowels, slime, rot, and subterranean ooze rather than its surface. It represents the blind, dehumanizing brutality of biology, Darwinian waste, and the maternal matrix that humanity represses to maintain order.

Beautiful Boy: An ephebic androgyne representing the height of Apollonian visual perfection. By freezing male youth in sculptural stasis, this persona serves as a weapon against chthonian decay, though it carries a latent, destructive narcissism.

Family Romance: The Freudian matrix of incestuous and hostile childhood psychodynamics that individuals carry into adulthood. It turns all adult romance and power struggles into a crowded theater of ancestral ghosts.

English Epicene: A uniquely British persona of stylized, cold, and witty androgyny. It neutralizes physical and sexual force through social artifice, dandyism, and aggressive wordplay.

Femme Fatale: The fatal woman; an extrapolation of biological realities who embodies nature’s amoral, castrating, and vampiric supremacy. She stands as a mesmerizing, placid reminder of male vulnerability.

Great Mother: The prehistoric, morally ambivalent archetype of nature as both creator and destroyer. She represents the overwhelming "belly-magic" of procreation that condemns men to lifelong sexual anxiety.

Psychological Heliotropism: The compulsive, involuntary turning of the human mind toward light, clarity, and Apollonian form as a survival defense mechanism against terrifying chthonian darkness.

Psychoiconicism: The crystallization of intense psychological obsessions, taboos, or sexual personae into static, arresting visual images that effectively paralyze narrative plot and progression.

Lesbianism (Taste vs. Behavior): Taste refers to an internalized, self-contained aesthetic sensibility and poetic reserve. Behavior refers to the literal physical act, which can either rupture the ritualistic, pooled purity of the female body or mirror male patterns outside of social conventions.

Application to Critical Approaches to Horror Fiction

Over the last 150 years, horror fiction has mapped the failure of humanism to suppress the chthonian and the daemonic. A Paglian critique views horror not as a social aberration, but as the raw eruption of amoral nature through civilization's frail Apollonian crust.

The Gothic and the Trans-Sexual Monster: Gothic horror relies on the daemonic fluidity of its monsters. The vampire (from Le Fanu's “Carmilla” to Stoker's Dracula) acts as a femme fatale or an epicene invader, using psychoiconicism to paralyze victims through visual fixation.

The Devouring Mother and Slasher Dynamics: Twentieth-century horror (e.g., Hitchcock's “Psycho,” Ridley Scott's “Alien”) directly evokes the terrifying terrain of the Great Mother and the vagina dentata. Norman Bates acts as a tragic male heroine trapped within a lethal family romance.

The Aesthetic of the Wound: Modern body horror utilizes the chthonian reality of the human body—its fluids, mutations, and structural vulnerability—to shatter the delusion of a unified, clean Apollonian ego.

Ramifications per Chapter

Chapter 1: Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art

Appetite and aggression are recognized as inescapable natural forces rather than social mistakes.

The daemonic unconscious consistently subverts liberal attempts to create civilized, no-fault sexuality.

Art and objectification function as aggressive, necessary defenses against chthonian chaos.

Family romance ensures that human eroticism remains a ritualized combat driven by ancestral ghosts.

The femme fatale persists as an enduring archetype of male vulnerability to the biological matrix.

Chapter 2: The Birth of the Western Eye

The shift from chthonian earth-cult to Apollonian sky-cult creates the linear, historical western mind.

Psychological heliotropism transforms the eye into a projectile weapon used to classify and dominate space.

The Great Mother’s "belly-magic" is repressed by male "head-magic" through monumental architecture.

Psychoiconicism begins as an apotropaic defense mechanism to freeze the terrifying, shifting mask of nature.

Feminine glamour emerges as a highly stylized, artificial enclosure designed to mask biological mystery.

Chapter 3: Apollo and Dionysus

Western personality hardens into an Apollonian "One" to resist the fluid "Many" of chthonian nature.

Dionysian identity expands through empathy but destroys the boundaries of individual civil rights.

Daemonic transvestism in ritual serves as an initiation to master or propitiate maternal power.

The beautiful boy enters western art as a pristine, non-reproductive alternative to the vegetable womb.

Tragedy develops as an Apollonian cage built to contain the brutal reality of Dionysian sparagmos.

Chapter 4: Pagan Beauty

The beautiful boy’s self-contained narcissism effectively halts the generational decay of natural time.

Lesbian taste historically prioritizes internalized poetic distance over overt visual exhibitionism.

The femme fatale reemerges whenever the Apollonian order becomes overly rigid, sterile, or decadent.

The chthonian meltdown of form (as seen in Medea) shatters the proprioceptive integrity of the ego.

Imperial Roman decadence transforms sacred Dionysian orgy into an aggressive, mechanistic theater of the eye.

Chapter 5: Renaissance Form: Italian Art

The Black Death unmoralizes the body, forcing a resurgence of raw chthonian and physical awareness.

The beautiful boy is resurrected in Christian art, turning saints into highly charged homoerotic icons.

Mathematical perspective functions as an aggressive Apollonian grid deployed to trap volatile nature.

Mannerism disrupts high classic harmony by injecting daemonic instability and spatial distortion.

The Great Mother stealthily returns to high culture under the stylized mask of the Renaissance Madonna.

Chapter 6: Spenser and Apollo: The Faerie Queene

Epic narrative constantly threatens to stall into static, highly voyeuristic psychoiconicism.

The Amazonian woman warrior externalizes a fierce, armored Apollonian resistance to the marital matrix.

The daemonic is split into competing moral allegories that fail to fully suppress pagan energy.

Psychological heliotropism drives the poem's constant flight from damp, labyrinthine chthonian woods.

Sadomasochistic undercurrents highlight the inherent aggression built into the western gaze.

Chapter 7: Shakespeare and Dionysus: As You Like It and Antony and Cleopatra

The English epicene emerges through theatrical cross-dressing, using wit to bypass physical gender limits.

Mercurial androgyny temporarily liberates the text from the rigid hierarchies of the state.

Cleopatra acts as the ultimate Great Mother and femme fatale, dissolving Roman political lineage.

The conflict between Rome and Egypt literalizes the eternal war between Apollonian gold and Dionysian red.

Metamorphosis of identity shifts from a terrifying natural curse to a fluid, celebratory art form.

Chapter 8: Return of the Great Mother: Rousseau vs. Sade

Rousseau's benign view of nature triggers a massive cultural regression back to the chthonian swamp.

Sade exposes nature's true identity as an amoral, fascist engine of destruction and will-to-power.

The Great Mother reclaims her ancient, catastrophic sovereignty over human moral constructs.

Perfect social freedom is demonstrated to automatically unleash violent, sadomasochistic compulsions.

The enlightenment ego realizes it is merely a fragile hostage to blind biological imperatives.

Chapter 9: Amazons, Mothers, Ghosts: Goethe to Gothic

The Gothic genre formalizes a collective dread of returning to the devouring maternal matrix.

The male heroine appears as the paralyzed, hypersensitive victim of ancestral curses.

Daemonic femaleness fractures into highly polarized archetypes: the pure maiden and the predatory hag.

Family romance becomes explicitly incestuous as a defensive retreat from an alienating social order.

Narrative structure yields to psychoiconicism, favoring atmospheric arrest over propulsive action.

Chapter 10: Sex Bound and Unbound: Blake

The womb is identified as a secretive, oppressive temenos that traps human imagination.

Attempts to abolish sexual guilt inadvertently strengthen the mechanical tyranny of nature.

The phallic line is aggressively turned against the soft, engulfing ovals of maternal space.

The daemonic is recognized as the true, energetic core of both artistic and spiritual vision.

Gender polarization is seen as a necessary, productive torment required to generate human culture.

Chapter 11: Marriage to Mother Nature: Wordsworth

The chthonian reality of the landscape is systematically sentimentalized into a safe pastoral mother.

The poet assumes the role of a nurturant male heroine, internalizing nature's passive rhythms.

Psychological heliotropism is abandoned in favor of a quietistic immersion in natural cycles.

The masculine will-to-power is suppressed, leading to a profound, melancholic loss of poetic scale.

Autonomous human identity risks total dissolution by voluntarily surrendering to the landscape.

Chapter 12: The Daemon as Lesbian Vampire: Coleridge

The daemonic breaks through pastoral defenses as a fluid, predatory, and nocturnal force.

Lesbian behavior is coded as an uncanny, vampiric invasion that drains the passive victim's identity.

The male heroine (Christabel/Coleridge) is completely paralyzed and silenced by the pre-Olympian snake.

Psychoiconicism reaches an absolute peak, freezing the narrative in a state of hypnotic dread.

The femme fatale is unmasked as the ancient, cold, and amoral reality of mother nature.

Chapter 13: Speed and Space: Byron

The masculine ego uses velocity and expansive space as weapons to outrun the chthonian swamp.

The beautiful boy persona is politicized, combining ephebic glamour with aggressive, martial action.

Family romance is flagrantly violated through incestuous defiance of conventional social limits.

The Byronic dandy uses the epicene mask of style to conceal a profound, underlying nihilism.

Erotic pursuit is driven by a hidden, desperate desire to be permanently liberated from sexual need.

Chapter 14: Light and Heat: Shelley and Keats

Shelley’s psychological heliotropism pushes lyric form into a weightless, discorporeal sky-cult.

Keats surrenders completely to the heavy, passive, and damp textures of the chthonian matrix.

The Keatsian poet acts as a classic male heroine, swooning beneath the intensity of sensation.

Androgyny oscillates between Shelley’s airy, intellectual ideals and Keats’s rich, maternal fluids.

The creative imagination realizes it must consume itself to achieve transient Apollonian perfection.

Chapter 15: Cults of Sex and Beauty: Balzac

The energy of the capitalist marketplace is recognized as a modern, urban variant of the daemonic.

The androgyne is treated as an exotic, unstable commodity produced by over-civilized societies.

Family romance becomes a complex financial transactions matrix where desire is routinely bought and sold.

The femme fatale adapts to the city, transforming biological castration into social and economic ruin.

Material objects take on a numinous, fetishistic personality that actively dominates human actors.

Chapter 16: Cults of Sex and Beauty: Gautier, Baudelaire, and Huysmans

High Decadence aggressively elevates artifice as a supreme moral protest against corrupt nature.

The femme fatale is celebrated for her cold, psychopathic affectlessness and mineral purity.

Chthonian disgust is transformed into a refined, voyeuristic aesthetic of decay and decomposition.

The beautiful boy is explicitly tied to death, becoming a sterile, prized art object under glass.

Psychoiconicism completely dominates the text, replacing narrative motion with heavy, sensory icons.

Chapter 17: Romantic Shadows: Emily Brontë

The female imagination bypasses social convention to unleash an astonishing, masculine will-to-power.

Heathcliff functions as a daemonic telluric force, a human manifestation of the brutal, unyielding moors.

The central family romance is an aggressive, solipsistic mirror-incest that utterly rejects the social contract.

Chthonian violence is accepted as nature’s absolute law, operating far above human ethics.

The soft, conventional feminine persona is completely obliterated by raw, cosmic energy.

Chapter 18: Romantic Shadows: Swinburne and Pater

The Great Mother returns as an all-engulfing, maternal sea that demands total male submission.

The Swinburnian male actively seeks out painful, sadomasochistic domination by the supreme femme fatale.

Pater’s Mona Lisa stands as the ultimate psychoicon, summarizing and paralyzing all human history.

The dandy's eye becomes highly specialized, viewing the external world through a screen of decadent fatigue.

Identity is conceptualized as a continuous, shifting stream of impressions drifting toward dissolution.

Chapter 19: Apollo Daemonized: Decadent Art

Apollonian visual clarity is corrupted by a dark obsession with chthonian violence and dismemberment.

The femme fatale dominates the visual arts as a glittering, snake-entwined idol of execution.

The beautiful boy's athletic contour shifts toward a frail, wasted, and highly stylized effeminacy.

Psychoiconicism becomes the dominant cultural mode, producing hypnotic, fetishistic imagery.

The western gaze recognizes its own deep, inherent complicity with sadomasochistic voyeurism.

Chapter 20: The Beautiful Boy as Destroyer: Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray

The beautiful boy persona is weaponized, using perfect form to inflict moral and social destruction.

Psychoiconicism is literalized: the art object assumes the burden of aging, biology, and sin.

The dandy’s epicene aestheticism replaces ethical duty with the absolute supremacy of the eye.

Family romance is rejected in favor of a sterile, entirely self-referential narcissistic mirror.

The attempt to live life purely as an art work ends in a catastrophic, violent return to natural decay.

Chapter 21: The English Epicene: Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest

The English epicene achieves perfection by transforming human society into a cold game of wit.

Physicality and the chthonian requirements of sex are entirely suppressed by flawless surface decorum.

Gender roles become highly stylized, interchangeable masks worn for purely artistic amusement.

The maternal presence is neutralized by converting the Great Mother into a comic social gatekeeper.

Language is weaponized as an aggressive, stylized defense framework deployed against natural emotion.

Chapter 22: American Decadents: Poe, Hawthorne, Melville

Poe’s landscapes literalize a terrifying, claustrophobic descent into the chthonian womb-pit.

The vagina dentata is sublimated into devouring natural vortices like the maelstrom.

Melville's Moby Dick stands as the ultimate daemonic titan of nature, resisting all human classification.

The male heroine appears as the brooding, self-doomed explorer broken by cosmic indifference.

Psychoiconicism fixes the American imagination on stark, unyielding symbols like the scarlet letter.

Chapter 23: American Decadents: Emerson, Whitman, James

Emersonian optimism utilizes psychological heliotropism to aggressively deny natural malice.

Whitman turns the solitary, masturbatory self into an all-inclusive, fluid Dionysian cosmos.

Henry James adopts the heavy, intricate transvestism of a eunuch-priest of the Great Mother.

The Jamesian late style functions as a massive, labyrinthine apotropaion designed to fence out raw life.

Lesbian taste subtly organizes the social register, substituting refined observation for action.

Chapter 24: Amherst’s Madame de Sade: Emily Dickinson

The New England spinster is unmasked as a brilliant, fiercely aggressive Madame de Sade.

Lyric economy is weaponized into sharp Apollonian knives used to dissect mother nature's details.

The daemonic is compressed into tiny, explosive stanzas vibrating with sadomasochistic tension.

Psychological heliotropism wars continuously against the heavy, cold attraction of the grave.

Dickinson achieves absolute selfhood by transforming her bedroom into an impenetrable, sacred temenos.

Jay

14 July 2026

My first shared-world horror anthology was Under the Fang (1991), edited by Robert R. McCammon. After that, paperbacks of Book of the Dead (1989) and Still Dead (1992), both concocted by Skipp and Spector. All three of these anthologies were uneven and featured stories the complete negation of their editorial program and its ostensible universe.

A quarter century later, editor Jonathan Maberry tries to rack the rebellious Romero-verse billiard balls with some structural respect for the Aristotelian unities of the original 1968 film classic. The results are, to be kind, mixed.

Subscribe now

The anthology opens with Joe R. Lansdale’s “Dead Man’s Curve,” a story that feels somewhat humdrum despite its high-octane premise. It follows a drag race in Texas that is interrupted by a line of staggering ghouls in hospital gowns. The protagonists eventually sacrifice one of their own—the arrogant Matt—…

Read more

Introduction: The Ghostland and the Horizon

In his seminal work Ghostland (2019), our current editor Edward Parnell explored how the East Anglian landscape serves as a "canvas for the uncanny," where personal grief and literary history bleed into one another. In this new anthology, Parnell curates a selection that acts as a physical manifestation of what he calls the Horizon of Expectations: the cultural and emotional baggage a reader brings to a ghost story.

This collection is not merely a "best of" regional horror; it is a psychogeographical study of how our expectations of a landscape—flat, isolated, and ancient—shape the terrors we find there.

Subscribe now

The 5 Elements of the East Anglian Horizon

1. Topography: The Landscape as Dynamo

As Parnell argues, in East Anglia, the land is a participant.

Key Example: "Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad" (M. R. James). The bleak shingle beach and cru…

Read more

Charles L. Grant’s editorial priorities for Horrors center on a sophisticated, psychological approach to the genre that he famously termed "quiet horror." Rather than relying on mindless gore (though that begs the question whether depictions of physical violence can ever be mindless–JR), Grant’s selections prioritize perversion of the familiar.

Whether it is a childhood toy in Stephen King’s “The Monkey,” a spouse in Dennis Etchison’s “The Dead Line,” or the sanctity of a family home in David Morrell’s “Black Evening,” Grant chooses stories where the note of universal malevolence arises from rot within everyday life.

“Introduction” by Charles L. Grant

Grant discusses the mechanics of horror, arguing that "a little revulsion is good for the soul" when handled with skill. He explains that the best horror uses shock minimally and manipulates the reader's mind by assuming normal situations that turn ho…

Read more

As a reader I had a soft spot for seagoing fiction.

In his introduction to From the Depths and Other Strange Tales of the Sea, editor Mike Ashley nods toward the reasons for a sea story's uncanny power and appeal. He writes, “There is much that is both frightening and awesome about the oceans of the world.” Frightening and awesome also serve as a suitable definition for the sublime, a kind of terror-inspiring grandeur that appeals aesthetically in the way it allows the human observer to savor their own diminished stature. Anyone who has studied the paintings of Ivan Aivazovsky will recognize the note herein struck.

Subscribe now

“The Ship of Silence” (1932) Albert Richard Wetjen

You and your mates have been put aboard a derelict to claim salvage rights. The derelict is crewless. The only living thing found is a parrot. Said parrot continuously screams the last words of its dying shipmates.

Read more

When we look closely at E. Phillips Oppenheim’s The Double Life of Mr. Alfred Burton (1913) through a Machenean lens, it becomes clear that Oppenheim was riffing on—or at least walking a parallel pedestrian path to—Machen’s masterpiece of suburban mysticism, “A Fragment of Life” (serialized 1904, published in The House of Souls). Both books explicitly explore a "rending of the veils" shrouding the absolute truth from all human interactions.

Below is a comparative analysis of five similarities and five differences between the two texts based on my reading of The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton by E. Phillips Oppenheim and “A Fragment of Life” in The House of Souls by Arthur Machen.

Similarities

1. The Protagonist and the "Little Man" Archetype:

Both protagonists are cogs in the late-Victorian/Edwardian London capitalist machine. Alfred Burton is a third-rate house agent and auctioneer’s clerk pulling in forty-four shillings a week. Edward Darnell is a City clerk counting coupons and earning a hundred and forty pounds a year.

2. The Aesthetic and Moral Reversion of Domestic Life:

Once the veil is pierced, both men experience an identical, instantaneous physical and mental revulsion toward the shoddy, pretentious vulgarity of their suburban villas. Alfred looks at his home, "Clematis Villa" in Garden Green, and suddenly finds the magenta velvet suite, the framed oleographs, his wife's dyed feathers, and her cheap perfume completely unendurable. Similarly, Darnell looks at his house in Edna Road, Shepherd's Bush, his wife's cherry-coloured bodice, the framed photogravures, and the ugly network of material grey walls, recognizing them as an unhandsome, phantasmal nightmare.

3. The Vision of London Unveiled:

For both men, a mystical awakening shifts their literal perception of London. Alfred wanders into St. James's Park at dawn, suddenly sensing a "clear white light" that lets him effortlessly write transcendental prose about what he sees. Darnell experiences an identical nocturnal transformation, where a dull back-alley of London suddenly glows like a violet, the pavement feels like velvet, and the air smells of holy incense. To both men, London is momentarily transformed into a city of the Arabian Nights.

4. The Supernatural Inciting Incident:

The "rending of the veils" in both narratives is driven by an ancient mystery intruding upon modern life. Alfred plucks and eats a brown bean from a plant left behind by an old Eastern mystic in a locked room at Idlemay House, which he is showing to a potential renter. Darnell's awakening is rooted in old family pocket-books, a great-grandfather's portrait, and ancient Welsh manuscripts tracing his lineage back to a historic saint. Both rely on a hidden catalyst to break their hereditary amnesia.

5. The Destructive Nature of Unadulterated Truth:

In both works, absolute truth behaves like a solvent on the social glue of middle-class respectability and stability. Alfred can no longer function in business because he is forced to admit that "antique" furniture is stained deal and most rental properties are cholera traps, destroying his employer’s trade. Darnell is similarly paralyzed; he rejects the common sense of the world, stops going to his traditional church (which he identifies as a "meaningless blasphemy"), and realizes that the ordinary lifestyle of his peers is sunk past all thinking in absurdity.

Differences

1. Satirical Comedy vs. Holy Asceticism:

Oppenheim treats Alfred's transformation with a witty, lighthearted, and deeply secular sense of irony. The comedy stems from an honest auctioneer confusing a room full of shady brokers. Machen, conversely, treats Darnell’s awakening with the intense, solemn gravity of an authentic religious sacrament. For Machen, the transformation is a matter of profound askesis—the slow, agonized purging of the soul to recover the ecstatic state of paradise before the Fall.

2. Intellectual Pessimism vs. Mystic Elation:

When Alfred’s eyes are first opened, he attends an Ibsen play and is instantly plunged into an unfamiliar state of "intellectual pessimism," finding that absolute truth can occasionally feel cold, unpleasant, and isolating. Darnell, by contrast, feels an unutterable height of "ineffable bliss" and trembling joy. For Darnell, truth is never a pessimistic burden; it is an ecstatic shield against the confusion of the mortal pageant.

3. The Presence of Dark Spiritual Peril: Oppenheim's secondary world is entirely benign—it is a world of art galleries, beautiful walled gardens, and delicate music. Machen’s universe, however, features deep spiritual dangers. Darnell is explicitly warned by his ancestral books (Sylva Sapientum) about the horrific perils of misusing the Holy Well, and he recalls childhood memories of a young girl driven to demonic, screaming madness by accidentally stumbling into dark, occult, primitive witchcraft on the lonely hills.

4. The Fate of the Child:

Both stories feature a young boy caught in the crossfire of the transformation, but their trajectories diverge wildly. Alfred’s son picks up a dropped bean and becomes an artistic prodigy who copies Botticelli heads and demands a toothbrush—until the effect wears off and he happily returns to playing hopscotch and using his books as catapult ammo. In Machen's world, children playing in the garden next door are suddenly struck down by an silent, chilling terror when their parents call them, behaving as if a "ghastly horror" had seized them, reflecting a permanent cosmic weight.

5. The Sober Compromise vs. Total Transmutation (The Conclusions):

The most radical difference lies in their endings. Oppenheim delivers a classic, sober conclusion of Edwardian compromise: Alfred’s beans run out, he smoothly slides back into his old sharper Cockney personality, reconciles with his materialistic wife, and gleefully uses his new corporate wealth to buy a luxury motorcar and a flashy country estate. Machen’s Darnell undergoes a complete, irreversible transmutation. He completely abandons the illusion of his London life, masters the old Latin tongue, and vanishes into the ancient forest to be eternally reunited with his true love by the clear well of life.

Oppenheim gives his characters temporary but shattering honesty, followed by relapse into everyday atomized banality. Machen's characters attain sublime escape, opening the door to perichoresis.

Jay

16 June 2026

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

I have Mike Ashley to thank for pointing out When It Was Dark. In his anthology Glimpses of the Unknown: Lost Ghost Stories (2018) he introduces the story "A Regent of Love Rhymes" (1905) by C. Ranger Gull, and in doing so writes:

One of the bestselling and most controversial books of the winter of 1903–4, was a thriller, much in the vein of The Da Vinci Code, though a whole century earlier. It tells of an attempt to discredit Christianity by planting an antiquity which “proves” the Resurrection never happened, and then considers what impact that would have on civilisation. Yet it wasn’t by any of the major writers you might anticipate—certainly not Hall Caine or R. H. Benson or M. P. Shiel. The book was When It Was Dark by Cyril Ranger Gull (1876–1923)—not a name that instantly springs to mind. It was published under his better known alias Guy Thorne….

When It Was Dark: The Story of a Great Conspiracy, is an apocalyptic theological novel. Read today, it remains a fast-moving exercise, with high-stakes plotting and plenty of melodrama. It manages to be both a theological thriller and a sprawling social catastrophe novel, tracking the "before, during, and after" of a crisis that threatens to unmoor social stability.

Subscribe now

The novel is deeply rooted in the anxieties of its time, particularly the "Jew-hate" prevalent in the UK during and after the Boer War. Thorne portrays Jewish characters as physical and ethical outsiders, a sentiment Thorne conveys through his own narrative voice rather than delegating it to specific characters. Though, within this framework, Thorne crafts a villain of immense complexity: the millionaire Jewish manufacturer and politician Constantine Schuabe.

Schuabe plans and funds a fraudulent archaeological discovery in Jerusalem proving Christ's resurrection never happened. He believes this will lead to an era of “common sense” and the end of the Christ delusion.

Later, facing unintended consequences of his plot’s success, there is a delicious irony that his orchestrated chaos has put Schuabe’s own factories, fortune, and parliamentary seat, at risk.

Thorne’s greatest narrative strength lies in his characterizations across the class divide. He meticulously follows a group of petty bourgeois church officials—the earnest curate Basil Gortre and the fiery Father Ripon—alongside the pragmatic journalist Harold Spence. These men are firmly set against the bourgeois capitalist and political grandee Schuabe and his forger, the morally bankrupt archeologist Sir Robert Llwellyn.

The novel also offers a grim, fascinating look at the condition of women in the early 20th century. Llwellyn’s wife is depicted as a neglected, demoralized domestic "serf," a victim of her husband’s cruelty. Llwellyn’s affair with showgirl Gertrude Hunt underscores the moral rot that leaves him vulnerable to Schuabe’s blackmail. In contrast, Helena Byars, Gortre’s fiancée, serves as a pillar of traditional Victorian virtue.

Thorne suggests that while the conspiracy is rooted in the material world, the supernatural is undeniably at work. The heroes are aided by a series of sharp intuitions, uncanny coincidences, and the providence of being in the right place at the right time. Conversely, villains Schuabe and Llwellyn are blinded by their arrogance. They both gloat to Gortre that his Church "has not long to live," alerting the curate whose instincts tell him there is something suspect about the discovery of the tomb in Jerusalem.

The middle section of the novel, where the "discovery" is made public, is a tour de force of speculative chaos. Thorne spends considerable time detailing unrest spurred by a growing collapse of faith. Without the moral and ideological "whip" of Christianity, the capitalist world spirals. In Rhodesia, white settlers decide to return to open slavery; in Jerusalem, Muslim populations call for jihad against the weakened colonial powers; and in East Asia and Eastern Europe, millions of "natives" become restless as the foundations of imperial systems are kicked away. Thorne clearly argues that without the Christian mythos, global order is ever only a house of cards.

We root for Thorne’s heroes precisely because they use their specific professional specialities to unite and fight back. It is a procedural victory: Spence uses his journalistic instincts, Gortre uses his theological conviction, and Ripon uses his street-level pastoral experience. Harold Spence, in particular, emerges as a prototype for the modern crusading journalist, possessing the grit and resourcefulness of a John Buchan hero.

The novel concludes with a "slingshot" ending. Rather than halting at the moment of victory, an Epilogue provides three distinct "pictures" of the characters five years after the crisis. We see the lasting scars on the survivors and the ultimate fates of the conspirators—Schuabe’s descent into madness and Llwellyn’s pathetic end. It is a satisfying, long-form resolution that elevates the book from a mere thriller to a novel of emotional consequence. Despite its period-specific flaws, When It Was Dark remains a gripping, expertly paced narrative about the fragility of class society and the enduring power of conviction.

Jay

5 May 2026

"The Devil’s Manuscript" – S. LEVETT-YEATS

Much like the earlier American Tom Walker, John Brown the ruined publisher trades everything for a decade of commercial success.

"The Tractate Middoth" – M. R. JAMES

The story of a coincidence that enriches the life of William Garrett, sending him"from being an assistant in a great library.... to his present position of prospective owner of Bretfield Manor, now in the occupation of his mother-in-law, Mrs. Mary Simpson."

"The Whisperers" – ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

This story is an outstanding example of the risks of living with physical books, whether boxed or shelved.

"Fingers of a Hand" – H. D. EVERETT

Automatic writing ensures the survival of two maiden aunts and their young charges during summer vacation.

"Mr. Tallent’s Ghost" – MARY WEBB

Can one's rage at family members ensure their committal?

"The Book" – MARGARET IRWIN

[Mr. Corbett] hurriedly chose a Dickens from the second shelf as appropriate to a London fog, and had returned to the foot of the stairs when he decided that his reading tonight should by contrast be of blue Italian skies and white statues, in beautiful rhythmic sentences. He went back for a Walter Pater.

He found Marius the Epicurean tipped sideways across the gap left by his withdrawal of The Old Curiosity Shop. It was a very wide gap to have been left by a single volume, for the books on that shelf had been closely wedged together. He put the Dickens back into it and saw that there was still space for a large book. He said to himself in careful and precise words: “This is nonsense. No one can possibly have gone into the dining-room and removed a book while I was crossing the hall. There must have been a gap before in the second shelf.” But another part of his mind kept saying in a hurried, tumbled torrent: “There was no gap in the second shelf. There was no gap in the second shelf.”

He snatched at both the Marius and The Old Curiosity Shop, and went to his room in a haste that was unnecessary and absurd, since even if he believed in ghosts, which he did not, no one had the smallest reason for suspecting any in the modern Kensington house wherein he and his family had lived for the last fifteen years. Reading was the best thing to calm the nerves, and Dickens a pleasant, wholesome and robust author.

Tonight, however, Dickens struck him in a different light. Beneath the author’s sentimental pity for the weak and helpless, he could discern a revolting pleasure in cruelty and suffering, while the grotesque figures of the people in Cruikshank’s illustrations revealed too clearly the hideous distortions of their souls. What had seemed humorous now appeared diabolic, and in disgust at these two favourites he turned to Walter Pater for the repose and dignity of a classic spirit.

But presently he wondered if this spirit were not in itself of a marble quality, frigid and lifeless, contrary to the purpose of nature. “I have often thought,” he said to himself, “that there is something evil in the austere worship of beauty for its own sake.” He had never thought so before, but he liked to think that this impulse of fancy was the result of mature consideration, and with this satisfaction he composed himself for sleep.

"The Library" – HESTER HOLLAND

New hire finds tough-going as she oversees a library.

"Midnight Express" – ALFRED NOYES

Finding yourself at a deserted train station at night, a spot that blossoms into one uncanny meeting after another, each spawning its own reversal.

"Herodes Redivivus" – A. N. L. MUNBY

Why are all bookselling weirdos fans of Gilles de Rais? A superb and uniquely observed story.

"W. S." – L. P. HARTLEY

What writer hasn't confused characters he punishes with real people? And what if tables were turned one fine day?

"What Shadows We Pursue" – RUSSELL KIRK

Another bookseller, this time not insane. The same cannot be said for the family he negotiates with over purchasing and removing the library of their recently deceased father. Nice cushiony Kirk prose.

"The Work of Evil" – WILLIAM CROFT DICKINSON

“Well,” I replied, lightly, “if he did dabble in the forbidden art he must have found it pretty ineffective. The very number of his books shows that. One would have thought that constant experiment followed by constant failure and disappointment would have been bound to bring disillusion.”

For a full minute Allan made no reply. Instead, he gazed at me with an odd look in his eyes.

“‘Ineffective’!” he said, at last. “I wish to God you were right! Do you see that safe over there? It contains one further book belonging to Gowrie’s collection. No one knows it is there but myself—and now you. That book is the one book which, at last, Gowrie found would work. Listen to me—you must listen to me—and I’ll tell you a tale of devilry that has tormented me ever since this collection came in. Then you’ll believe in ‘effectiveness’.”

"Revenant as Typewriter" – PENELOPE LIVELY

Writers used to let their typewriters do the thinking. Your results may vary.

"The Advent Visitor" – C. J. FARADAY

Superb telling. Ancient universities: ground zero for young scholars selling their souls for wisdom.

Conclusion

The Haunted Library offers a diverse and powerful exploration of the "antiquarian tradition" in ghost stories. From the corrupting influence of wealth in "The Devil’s Manuscript" to the dangers of collector's boxed stacks in "The Whisperers", the anthology highlights how books and manuscripts can serve as vessels for both psychological and supernatural terror.

These stories collectively underscore persistent unease with the past and the objects that record it, suggesting that research is not merely a pedantic pursuit but an act that can awaken powerful and often malevolent forces. Whether through the comic pastiche of "Mr. Tallent’s Ghost" or the Escher-like metafictional horror of "Midnight Express", the collection demonstrates that the motif of the haunted library remains a rich and "tempting" subject for authors.

Ultimately, The Haunted Library invites readers to consider the true power held within the written word—and to wonder whether it is the reader or the text that truly holds the upper hand.

Jay

3 May 2026

Share

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Alan Ryan’s 1982 novel The Kill is a masterwork of atmospheric horror that stands as a quintessential example of the "small-town-under-siege" subgenre that dominated the early 1980s. While many horror novels of this era relied on visceral shocks or high-concept monsters, Ryan focuses on the slow-burn disintegration of a community and the restorative power of human connection. At its heart, the book is a testament to the idea that a community’s greatest defense against the supernatural is not weaponry or ancient lore, but the simple, profound bonds of friendship and a shared sense of place.

A New Life in Deacons Kill

The story follows Megan Todd and Jack Casey, a young, professional couple from New York City who are disillusioned by the hollow, frantic pace of the publishing industry. Seeking a fresh start and a sense of permanence, they impulsively move to Deacons Kill, a quiet, isolated town in the northern Catskills. They lease an old farmstead from an acquaintance, intending to transition into lives as freelance creators—Megan as an artist and Jack as an editor and writer.

However, Deacons Kill is a place where the landscape itself seems to hold a grudge. The novel begins with the disappearance of a young girl, Carla Helbig, and the tension escalates when a visitor at a housewarming party, a girl named Candy, is brutally and inexplicably murdered by an invisible force on a hill known as Deacons Rise. As Jack and Megan settle into the rhythms of rural life, they find themselves drawn into a mystery involving an ancient, "stony" entity that views the town as its personal hunting ground—its "kill."

Read more

Introduction

Valentine recounts his early fascination with "Earth Mysteries," holy wells, and liminal landscapes that bridge our world and another.

‘Our Mortal Longing’

Walter de la Mare and the Modern Ghost Story: De la Mare pioneered stories focusing on spiritual absence and uncertainty rather than the physical, purposeful terrors of his predecessors.

More Modern Ghosts

Valentine explores Clemence Dane, Martin Armstrong, Gerald Bullett, and Horton Giddy, focusing on how their work blends modernity with eternity.

‘Wrapped in His Books’: Scholars in M.R. James’ Stories

James’ scholarly characters exhibit a resilient curiosity and a gentlemanly code of sang-froid when confronting the supernatural.

‘King Pharaoh’ M.R. James and the Folk-Song Collector

A muddled folk song about a roasted cock crowing connects to James’ scholarly interests and potential for macabre storytelling.

The Wrong Register: A Wilkie Collins Mystery

Valentine points out a crucial historical inaccuracy in Collins’ The Woman in White regarding reformed 19th-century marriage record-keeping.

Beyond Arcturus Collecting David Lindsay

Exploring Lindsay’s visionary work, Valentine notes that while A Voyage to Arcturus is an otherworldly aberration, his subsequent books balance mundane and metaphysical planes.

‘A Writer of Originality and Power’: a Note on J. Mills Whitham

A study of a forgotten Tolstoyan pacifist whose Hardyesque regional novels depict rural hardship with a sense of doomed nobility.

The Sphinx and the Book Collector: A Note on Norman Davey

Davey, an engineer and bibliophile, wrote high-spirited romances and wistful poetry celebrating the serendipitous joys of London book-hunting.

‘The Perfume of a Dying Rose’: Park Barnitz’s The Book of Jade

Barnitz’s sole, rare volume is a virulent celebration of Decadent nihilism, obsessively mingling themes of love and graveyard decay.

The Thunderstorm Collectors

Valentine reviews amateur 1930s meteorological surveys, finding characterful, nearly fantastical drama in narrative reports of lightning strikes and squall lines.

Devilled Almonds and Doomed Boys: Some Avant-Garde Poetry of 1920

An appreciation of the "riot of colour and artifice" in 1920s experimental poetry by Edith Sitwell and F.S. Flint.

Rococo Poet on the Rive Gauche: A Note on Ralph Cheever Dunning

An American opium addict in 1920s Paris, Dunning wrote archaic, sensuous verse admired by Ezra Pound for its singleness of vision.

Brooding Youth: Eight Cambridge Saturnines

A 1936 Cambridge anthology reveals a youthful preoccupation with the mystical, uncanny, and pagan, untouched by the era’s political ferment.

Arthur Machen and the Mysteries of the Grail

Machen viewed the Grail as a lost ritual from the independent Celtic church, suppressed yet lingering in the landscape.

Things Temporal, Things Eternal: James Branch Cabell and Arthur Machen in Correspondence

The two authors shared a high prose style but diverged; Machen sought hidden sanctity while Cabell employed ironic mockery.

‘It is Getting Very Late & Dark’: Arthur Machen’s Later Fiction:

Machen’s final stories show a writer still alert to folklore and the mind's reaches, warning that "darkness is undying".

Rapt in Secret Studies: Colin Still and the Mysteries of The Tempest

Still argued that Shakespeare’s The Tempest was meticulously shaped as an allegorical initiation into the ancient Greek Mysteries.

‘Literary Conjuring’: A.J.A. Symons’ The Quest for Corvo

Valentine characterizes this "experiment in biography" as a thrilling work of literary conjuring that heightens reality for dramatic effect.

A Home on the Borderland: William Hope Hodgson and Borth

This essay examines the Welsh coastal setting of Borth and its influence on Hodgson’s themes of the sea and liminal spaces.

Time and Time Again: Experiments in Time

A study of early 20th-century theories and fictional treatments of "time-slips" and parallel existences that challenge linear reality.

A Landscape Detective

Donald Maxwell is championed as an early "landscape detective" who explored ancient leys and rural mysteries with infectious enthusiasm.

Wanderers and Wayfarers

Valentine reviews ruminatory travelogues that preserve glimpses of transient landscapes, local legends, and eccentric strangers from a bygone Britain.

Brittle Gods

A reflection on finding "signs" and portents of the unearthly in obscure objects found at rural book fairs and markets.

The Joy of Obscure Journals

A celebration of the specialized, "far-fetched," and niche periodicals of 1932 that offered an alternative to mainstream trade papers.

English Almanacs

Historically popular and subversive, almanacs offered a fantastic, astrology-based alternative to church scripture for common readers seeking wonder.

The Red Lion

Investigating the "folk heraldry" of inn signs, Valentine questions traditional explanations for common names like the Red Lion.

Lost Sovereigns

Valentine explores Arthurian romances and Cornish traditions that imagine surviving descendants of ancient Greek or Byzantine imperial dynasties.

Arthur of the Seventies

A review of how 1970s scholarship attempted to rescue King Arthur from medieval romance, depicting him as a historical Dark Age warlord.

Through the Golden Valley to the Dark Tower

A "bookish weekend" pilgrimage through the Welsh Marches exploring the haunted Red Sandstone landscape and the literature it inspired.

Conclusion

Valentine’s learning and passion shines through this remarkable collection, traversing from obscure 1930s meteorology to the nuances of Arthurian myth. His writing transforms bibliophilic detail into a shared pleasure, inviting readers to join his curious travels through liminal landscapes and neglected literary byways, where the mundane consistently yields to the unearthly.

Jay

23 April 2026