Love Songs and Other Weirdness

For over one hundred years, literary horror has been with us as part of our everyday reading experience. Since Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto first hit the bookshelves, the notion of what scares us, what gives us goose-bumps and chills, has been hotly debated and widely interpreted.

Edgar Alan Poe, Bram Stoker and Sheridan le Fanu gave us the terrors of the grave, what lies within and what may come back from the other side; M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen gave us the strange and unearthly, made us question the nature of reality and humanity’s place within it; then H.P. Lovecraft terrified us by tearing apart the notion that reality is concerned about us at all.

Since then we’ve had Stephen King, winding himself tighter and tighter into his own navel, and Anne Rice wallowing gleefully through buckets of blood. Psychological horror and splatterpunk are the hallmarks of the day but is there still room for the weird tale in the current zeitgeist? Do people still read Lafcadio Hearn and Oliver Onions? Do Matthew Lewis, or Mary Shelley, still raise a shiver?

This collection takes the classic weird tale, the Edwardian ghost story, the Lovecraftian fiction, and updates those formats for a modern day readership: here are stranded phantoms; here are villains playing in Great Cthulhu’s toy box; here are strange and spooky folktales from Ancient Japan. Here is love gone sour, love defiled and love in first bloom: here is love and all the mess that goes with it.

These are love songs: to those early authors; to the genre itself. Love songs...and other weirdness.