Jesse > Recent Status Updates

“Sardonicus”

As an intro to Ray Russell’s style, his Modern Gothic is powerful. It has teeth (no pun intended) that classic Gothic literature has seemed to lack in some aspects as his prose does not dance around the villain’s lurid exploitation of his hapless wife’s sexual vulnerability as the means by which he attempts to influence the hero.

Okay lol this was really freakin’ good. Maybe my favorite Poirot novel yet! Great case, great ending.

“The Rats In the Walls”, by H. P. Lovecraft

I read this one about four months ago in the “complete” fiction collection. The juxtaposition of the black cat named with a racial epithet and the idea of the… stock of the de la Poers being degenerated, some to quadrupeds, is not lost to me. It would be funny to see Piltdown Man referenced in earnest here if it weren’t for Lovecraft’s racism.

“The Ghost of Mohammed Din”, by Clark Ashton Smith

A short ghost story from one of H. P. Lovecraft’s best-known horror contemporaries. It’s a decent enough story, set in Muslim India, and the MC is the prototype of the action hero who remembers to be afraid of ghosts before they try to shoot them. Y’know, just in case it works.

“Sister Maddelena”, by Ralph Adams Cram

This is a ghost story about a princess who was forced to become a nun because she wouldn’t consent to a political marriage. She was ultimately (…willingly, to save the life of her boyfriend) murdered by the Sisters when her lover found her again. Idk if homicidal nuns were common in Italy. I can’t say that I didn’t get goosebumps when the ghost appeared.

“The Court of the Dragon”, by Robert Chambers

One of the stories in The King In Yellow, which I have but haven’t read yet. It’s gothic, cosmic horror, definitely more in the vein of Lovecraft. The general idea of TKiY is, DON’T READ TKiY!! But early on the narrator admits they have, and that’s why an unfathomably awful fate awaits them.