The book I’m discussing today was one that I was seeing everywhere when the hardback first came out in the summer of 2020; it appeared on the New York Times bestseller list, and a bunch of horror book reviewers I follow, as well as pretty much all the “mainstream” book reviewing channels, were covering it. … More Books: Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Published in 1983, Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black has become a modern classic of old-school British gothic ghost stories. Not only has it had two film adaptations (a made-for-TV English production from 1989 with a screenplay by Nigel Kneale; and a financially successful 2012 adaptation starring Daniel Radcliffe and produced by a revamped Hammer … More Books: The Woman in Black by Susan Hill
Welcome to the latest installment of Silent Movie Watchalong! I’m doing a short one this time, but really, it shouldn’t matter much because this one is just excellent, and I’m sort of baffled at how it doesn’t get as much attention as some of the other films of the period. Clocking in at a little … More Silent Movie Watchalong: The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)
1997’s Asylum by Patrick McGrath was a novel that was recommended to me by a viewer of my book review videos on YouTube, and though I had heard the author’s name before, this was the first novel of his that I read. McGrath is a British writer, and Asylum is essentially a bleak, gothic thriller … More Books: Asylum by Patrick McGrath
Time for another silent movie watchalong! Our film today is a classic one, the 1924 Austrian film The Hands of Orlac, directed by Robert Wiene, starring Conrad Veidt (who also starred in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Man Who Laughs, incidentally), and based on a book by Maurice Renard. Not only is it wonderful and properly eerie, … More Silent Movie Watchalong: The Hands of Orlac (1924)
In the case of Anne River Siddons’s 1978 novel The House Next Door, I was actually first turned on to it through Stephen King’s nonfiction classic Danse Macabre, in which he chose it as one of his ten best “modern” horror novels (as of 1980) and devoted an entire chapter to discussing its themes. I’ve … More Adaptation Breakdown: The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons
In the mood for some Italian? Excellent; let’s mangia. Our movie we’re discussing is one I actually thought I hadn’t seen before, though when I got to one of the later scenes, I felt a definite tingle of recollection. See, when I was a kid, I saw a movie with this one scene that really … More Movies: The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (1971)
I first got interested in reading this book after seeing NUMEROUS recommendations for it on various horror book review channels on YouTube, and the fact that it was described as a Southern gothic further piqued my interest. The funny thing is, when I ordered my paperback copy off Amazon, I didn’t realize that the novel … More Books: The Elementals by Michael McDowell
The Scare Salon 