Snuffling and shuffling figures pick their ways gingerly o'er awesomely white icescapes. The fallen lie wailing in slush-choked gutters – hips and hopes shattered. Frozen water everywhere, but not a drop to drink (or flush the foetid loo with). Doomed cars spinning hideously into gaping chasms.

January, 2010. A non-stop horror show of chilblains, slight inconvenience, and unwashed stinkiness. God help us all…

But wait. All has not yet turned to hypothermic and frigid despair. There is still warmth (sort of) and joy (er…) left in the online world. For the next 7 days, Dreadful Thoughts will be keeping a Lovecraftian (hell)fire burning. So gather ye round this gnarled, gargantuan and ancient fireplace and let some H. P. sauce warm your brittle bones.

"The Outsider" (html) & "The Rats in the Walls" (html), (html), (pdf).

Thoughts? Reactions? Wild fancies?

January – as the fella said – is a gelid month. A hiemal, brumal, dismal and tenebrous month.

A month when the dankest and most abysmal recesses of the human mind kick into hideous half-life. Spewing forth noxious brain-fumes and strangling our seedlings of hope with worriment. A month of bad thoughts. A month of Dreadful Thoughts.

On that cheery & heartening note let's bid welcome to 2010 by bolting the doors, stoking the fires, and settling down to read (and chatter about) some choice spooky stories of yore.

For the fourteenth meeting of our Dreadful Thoughts Story Club we finally cast our baleful gazes in the direction of Howard Phillips Lovecraft – the mad 'n' bad warlock prince of 20th Century horror. He of the sinuously baroque and esoteric lingo. He of the awesome cosmic dread. He of the…er…not liking the non-white races so much.

Your (double-bill) reading assignments are as follows. See y'all next Monday.

Stories:

a) "The Outsider" (html)

b) "The Rats in the Walls" (html), (html), (pdf).

Discussion Opens: Monday, 11th January @ 9 p.m. (and runs for seven full days).

P.S: In case anyone's staring at this post, waiting for action – the discussion thread is actually located here. Refocus your gazes.

Suffragette. Modernist innovator. Paddler in the turbulent "stream of consciousness" (a phrase she allegedly coined). May Sinclair was once "one of the most successful and widely known of British women novelists". And then? Disappearance down that well-trodden path into obscurity. And then? Semi-revival by crusading Feminist scholars. And then? A starring role in this, the thirteenth (shriek!) meeting of our Dreadful Thoughts Story Club.

A 7 day discussion of her steamy & pulsating supernatural bonkbuster¹ – "The Nature of the Evidence" – starts here and starts now.

Well? Off ye go.

1. Warning: Description may not be remotely accurate. [back]

Right. Enough of this summer (such as it is) lark. Enough flip-flopping about suggestively licking 99s. Enough gambolling through meadows gaily tossing rose petals. The days are shortening and the nights will soon be growing long. Time to get back to the important things in life: horror, madness, wailing & shrieking, sobbing wretchedly. Yes, it's time for Dreadful Thoughts: Session 13.

Your homework? May Sinclair's sex-toplasmic tale of an uncanny ménage à trois: "The Nature of the Evidence" (1923). Read. Think. Make notes. Return here on Thursday for the start of a week-long chat.

Story: "The Nature of the Evidence" (html)

Discussion Opens: Thursday, 20th August @ 9 p.m. (and runs for seven full days).

After an enjoyable week spent discussing terrible slimy yokes in bunks and grimly determined brutes with small heads, we now turn our petrified gazes to Dreadful Thoughts 12 (we've reached the dirty dozen).

The singular thing about our next choice is that it's plural.¹ For the first time since DT 3 we're giving hungry punters not one but two slices of tasty horror. A double-bill of prime spooky badness.

Both tales come from a poisoned pen better known for producing not-so-nasty perennial favourites like The Railway Children & Five Children and It. I "speak", of course, of E. (or Edith) Nesbit: a writer whose (memorably savage & cruel) weird tales have, alas, become almost totally over-shadowed by her output for chiddlers. A real shame, but let's save further talk of that (and other things) for the actual discussion.

Here, then, is your homework.

Stories:
a) "The Shadow"² (pdf) [The pdf is "locked" to prevent printing, but that obstacle can easily be overcome by using this simple and natty program].

b) "Man-Size in Marble" (html), (pdf).

Discussion Opens: Monday, 27th April @ 9 p.m. (and runs for seven full days).

1. Sorry about that. I know it was awful. [back]
2. Suggested by Aishwarya. [back]

Though he was (in his day) prolific,¹ popular, and commercially successful – F. Marion Crawford's posthumous "literary star" appears to have faded quite quickly.² For the next seven days, however, Dreadful Thoughts will be waving a ragged Crawford-ian flag and trying to give his largely-forgotten name a very modest boost (either by praising him or slagging him off). An apt moment for such an exercise given that the one hundredth anniversary of his death has just passed.³

Though "weird tales" were but a small part of his overall output, it is to one such weird tale that we now turn – the damp, dark, seawater-drenched "The Upper Berth" (1886). So come ye salty dogs. Come ye land lubbers. Come ye Easter bunnies. Put down the washing. Pull closed the curtains. Tell us what ye think and thought.

1. Writing over forty books. [back]
2. David Stuart Davies, in his introduction to The Witch of Prague & Other Stories (Wordsworth Editions, 2008) ISBN: 9781840220902. [back]
3. April 9th, 1909. [back]

Update 09/04/09: By an odd, but happy, coincidence today is the 100th anniversary of F. Marion Crawford's death. Uncanny stuff.

Update 06/04/09: Oops. Sorry folks. It seems I mistakenly said that discussion of "The Upper Berth" would be kicking off on the 6th of April @ 9 p.m. – i.e. tonight. What I meant to say was that it would be starting on the 13th of April @ 9 p.m. – i.e. next Monday. Balls. Apologies. Corrected the error now. Hope to see y'all back here next Monday (ye've a whole 6 days to read the thing). Seriously – Brian Cowen's genitalia have my head in a spin…

Apologies, horror fans, for slacking off unforgivably in my role as ringmaster/chair of Dreadful Thoughts 10. The picturegate/Cowengate affair sprang up unexpectedly (like a nekkid reanimated corpse) and seized my attention & imagination. I promise to refocus my gaze and have my game face back on for meeting 11.

Speaking of which, your next assignment is "The Upper Berth" by F. Marion Crawford. Crawford (though relatively obscure now) was "one of the most popular and commercially successful authors of his day"¹ – and "The Upper Berth" remains his most often-anthologised tale.

Read it, ponder on it, enjoy it, and come back to talk about it. Discussion kicks off next Monday (the sixth) at 9 p.m. and runs for 7 days. Pop in and out when you can.

While I'm at it, I'd also like to remind readers that they should feel very free to nominate stories that they'd like to see covered. 'Tis a "club" after all and suggestions are most welcome (particularly as it relieves me of the job of having to choose).

In the spirit of restating things I might mention a few general points regarding the stories I (pretty randomly) select (and why they're selected).

The intention is not necessarily to hold up any of the stories chosen as lofty pinnacles of the horror form. In other words, I'm not making selections based primarily on their "excellence" (however you want to interpret that). Rather, I'm (pretty randomly) picking tales that seem (to me) interesting, unusual, weird, fun and so on – even when said tales have pretty clear narrative/structural deficiencies. Picking and poking at the bones, themes, preoccupations and images of "genre" stories is (for me at least) where the enjoyment really lies. The extent to which they're "good", "bad", or "mediocre" (in any conventional literary sense) doesn't particularly interest me (though it may, of course, be of interest to others).

Hope that's relatively clear. Just didn't want the club to seem (in any way) like my platform for promoting (and defending) my favourite things. I'm currently, for example, gobbling up the delicious no-frills/cheapo "Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural" series from Wordsworth Editions.² Quite a few of the authors Wordsworth have reprinted were practically unknown to me, and many of the tales they produced were/are decidedly half-baked and crude (churned out quickly perhaps, often primarily to earn a few bob). In lots of cases though, said tales do, at the very least, have a certain something about them. Something worth having a squint at and a chat about.

But enough of all that. Off you go and download the below straight into your brain matrix (or, if you're totally old school, print it out and read it with your eyes).

Story: "The Upper Berth" (html), (html).³

Discussion Opens: Monday, 6th April 13th April @ 9 p.m. (and runs for seven full days).

[Twitter Hashtag: #dtsc]

1. David Stuart Davies, in his introduction to The Witch of Prague & Other Stories (Wordsworth Editions, 2008) ISBN: 9781840220902 . [back]
2. Crawford's The Witch of Prague available at a recession-busting €3.30 (approx). [back]
3. The "Horror Masters" pdf excludes the introduction altogether. Avoid. [back]

Welsh Anglo-Catholic occultist. Member (briefly) of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Avowed anti-materialist. Inspirer of everyone's favourite pathologically racist horror grandmaster: H.P. Lovecraft. Sometime scandaliser of (an easily scandalised) Victorian society. Fearer/Lover of fauns who gambolled oftentimes in the dingly dell. These are but a few pieces of the puzzle that is/was Arthur Llewelyn Jones – a.k.a Arthur Machen (1863-1947).

This week we focus our dreadful magnifying glasses on his 1894 tale, "The Inmost Light". A story of (among other things) urban & sub-urban London – a city that became for Machen (one source suggest) "as numinous…as the Gwent of his boyhood". Oh and then there are the small matters of (what may or may not be) a human soul, its absence, and (shriek!) what rushes in to fill the void.

So pop open the nearest rotund bottle of Benedictine, repeat (endlessly) the jingle "Once around the grass, and twice around the lass, and thrice around the maple-tree", and get typing some lovely and interesting words.

Penury? Ruin? Weeping and gnashing of rotten teeth? Corpses putrefying in the streets – their strewn entrails being slurped up like spaghetti by ravenous curs? Demented pedestrians cracking open each other's heads to feast on the goo inside? All now everyday sights and experiences. The miasma of recession is choking us and changing life utterly.

There is, however, a tonic for (and antidote to) this all-consuming darkness – namely: horror. Horror by the gore-filled bucketful. Generous slices of horror served in dread-stuffed baps. Horror dripping from the walls & ceilings. Horror in the wardrobe. Horror under the bed. Horror, lovely horror.

Surrounding ourselves with (and immersing ourselves in) horror will, I guarantee,¹ free us from the crippling embrace of the recession succubus. Horror – it's the only sane choice.

And so, I find myself compelled (by forces mysterious) to channel lightning bolts of renewed enthusiasm into the comatose Dreadful Thoughts Story Club. We'll shock it from its deep slumbers and set it loose, once more, on a…er…fairly indifferent blogosphere. Hoorah!

Mewling babes, and other "adult" commitments, put paid to the club late last year, and pointed to the difficulty of gathering participants together online at a set/appointed time. Given that the dynamic created by "live" discussion was (for me) one of the best things about the "club", I recently toyed with the idea of using Twitter (or some such) to jazz things up and push the "live" side of things even more to the fore.

After consulting with a few of the club's regular "heads", however, I decided that a snappy, fast-paced commenting system just doesn't lend itself to involved and considered discussion of literature. People need time and space (if they need/want it) to think about their responses. In that spirit I've opted to slow things down instead of speeding (and funking) things up.

So what I propose is this. We pick a story. Go read it. I put up a post relating to it on a Monday and the discussion kicks off. We leave the discussion run till the following Monday, at which time I announce the story we'll be tackling for the next meeting. And on it goes.

Nothing spectacular or wildly exciting there I know! The reason this "open thread" approach didn't work the last time, I reckon, is because someone attempting to join in the morning after the "live" discussion would find 50-100 comments to wade through. Faced with that it was hard not to feel like the party was over and that you'd missed it. The week-long discussion approach should, in contrast, hopefully mean that the comments come slowly and steadily – making it easy to pop in and out as time permits.

So…I hereby announce what we'll be tackling for "Dreadful Thoughts Story Club 10".

Story: Arthur Machen's "The Inmost Light", (pdf), (HTML).

Discussion Opens: Monday, 23rd March @ 9 p.m. (and runs for seven full days).

Let me know what you think. And to anyone who missed out on the club's original run, I say this – "Please join us". I'll even give you a badge.

1. Note: Not a guarantee. [back]

Given the current global financial apocalypse I assume that most of you are now eating shoe leather for dinner, wailing yourselves to sleep in damp & draughty cardboard boxes, and shaking your sore-encrusted fists at an indifferent god. While I can't guarantee that the following cheap/free bits 'n' bobs will rouse you from your wretched misery, they may provide some small crumbs of comfort.

1) A Ghostly Genre: Short Fiction and the Supernatural.

From some of the same team of mad geniuses who brought us "It Came from the 1950s: Popular Culture, Popular Anxieties" comes "A Ghostly Genre: Short Fiction and the Supernatural". Taking place in the august surrounds of Trinity College Dublin this coming weekend (24-25 October), the conference features tasty talks on Robert Aickman, Sheridan Le Fanu, Henry James, M. R. James, Edith Wharton and many more besides. Yummy.

It's the closest thing to "Dreadful Thoughts: The Conference" we're ever likely to see, so I encourage (nay, demand) attendance…even though I can't (alas) make it myself. Pester Bernice or Elizabeth at this address for more info (tell 'em I sent you).

2) Wordsworth Editions – Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural.

I gleefully spat in the pinched and mean face of the recession today by purchasing six books. On my meagre wage that may (at first glance) seem the foolhardy extravagance of a doomed man, but look closer. The volumes in question – part of Wordsworth's groovy "Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural" series – all clock in at well under €4.00. Thrift and classic horror – together at last.

While it is (of course) a giddy joy to be able to pick up the collected stories of renowned authors (Conan Doyle, Henry James, Ambrose Bierce etc) for a modest fee, I get even more of a kick out of snapping up lesser-known delights. Today, for example, I got my mitts on Night Shivers: The Ghost Stories of J. H. Riddell and H. D. Everett's The Crimson Blind & Other Stories. Two relatively obscure gems, with funky covers, for the price of a bog-standard lunch. How can you refuse…even if the bailiffs are kicking down the door?

3) Dreadful Thoughts: Where Do We Go From Here?

Last Monday's meeting of the story club witnessed sad and raggedy clumps of tumbleweed blow through the blog. Numbers were down. Spirits were low. Your host was deflated.

However, with the passing of a week (and the buying of the aforementioned books) a sense of reinvigoration and renewal is in the air. "Damn it", thought I the other day, "There are still so many nooks & crannies of horror to explore and discuss. Without this damn'd club I'll stop reading these lovely, lonely tales and move on to something else." I don't want to do that just yet. For one thing, it wouldn't be fair to J. H. Riddell.

And so…I ask you. Does enthusiasm for, and interest in, the project still remain? Would changing times and days make a difference in terms of gathering people simultaneously together? Are there any changes to the (low-tech) format that might jazz proceedings up?

I'm still (almost in spite of myself) feeling the love for Dreadful Thoughts. With Halloween rapidly approaching it's an apt time to ask – "Is there life in the old dog yet?".

P.S: Don't forget. It's completely free.

Misanthrope? Misogynist? Satirist? Supernaturalist?

Tonight, on Dreadful Thoughts, we're not only getting out the club magnifying glass to squint at the werewolf myth (through the prism of "Gabriel Ernest"), but also asking (in strong, but non-judgmental, terms) what Hector Hugh Munro (a.k.a Saki) was ultimately all about.¹

Pop the kids under the stairs, lock your aged relations in the attic, crack open a bottle of whatever you're having yourself, and let's boogie.

Begin.

1. Not that such a reductive question can actually be answered of course. [back]

Being (occasionally) a collaborative sort who (occasionally) values input, I canvassed regular and semi-regular Dreadful Thoughts "members" as to what tale they'd most like to cover in Story Club session number 9. After last week's encounter with a Byronic "Vampyre", I was keen to maintain the current "Classic Monsters" theme. To that end, I placed a solitary limitation on suggestions – i.e., they had to concern themselves with lycanthropy. Werewolves, WereDucks, WerePorpoise, WereMoose¹ – all of these (and more) were fair game.

The votes are in and the result is a clear win for our dear old friend – Hector Hugh Munro – a.k.a Saki (he of the poisonous & razor-sharp pen). The tale of choice is the wee little gem – "Gabriel-Ernest" (1910). Clocking in at a mere 2445 words this is one for short bus journeys, medium toilet trips, or longish descents in an elevator. It should prove easy to consume for even the most time-poor of readers. Yum.

Details as follows.

Story: "Gabriel-Ernest" (html), (pdf), (Project Gutenberg page).

Meeting: Monday, 13th October, 9 p.m.

Go. Read. Now.

1. Mooses? [back]

Poor Polidori. That's the title of D. L. MacDonald's (critical) biography of the sometime author and physician we turn our attentions to on this damp, grey and windy night. And a fitting title it seems to have been when one considers a few of his woes.

For not only did the text of "The Vampyre" (which he appears to have left behind him in Switzerland in the autumn of 1816) get submitted to the New Monthly in London without his knowledge or consent, but, when it was eventually published it was described (by the magazine's proprietor, Henry Colburn) as "A Tale by Lord Byron". Ouch.

Add in Polidori's subsequent career failures, his dismissal (from his physician duties) by nasty Byron, and it's not entirely surprising that he opted for a romantic exit from this cruel world – taking his own life at the tender age of 26.

Yet the last laugh (or morbid chuckle) remains his. While many of Byron's other hangers-on are remembered only for their (sometimes literal…ooer) connections to his Lordship, Polidori's contribution to the genesis and development of the modern vampire mythos has ensured him a modest literary immortality.

Prior to Lord Ruthven's appearance, traditional (Serbian/Hungarian) vampires tended to be "bloated, shaggy, foul-smelling corpses who preyed on their immediate neighbours and relatives".¹ Not only that, but these grotesque revenants "were composed entirely of peasants".² Quick! Pass me my lavender-soaked handkerchief!

Polidori's transformation of the vampire from "bestial ghoul to glamorous aristocrat"³ established a template which blew away all competitors. Bram Stoker, Universal Pictures and Hammer (et al) would later finesse this model, thus helping to ensure its almost complete dominance, but Polidori's misattributed tale was (pretty much) where it all started.

With that I invite you to grab your flagons of blood-red wine and get chatting. My own contributions may be less fast and frequent than usual, owing to the fact that I'm currently laid up in bed with a bastardly cold. Offers of sympathy and understanding are encouraged. Sniff.

1. Polidori, John The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre (OUP, 2008), p. xii. [back]
2. Ibid. [back]
3. Ibid. xix. [back]

By way of buildup to next Monday's (miss it and you'll die crying) John Polidori Vampyre-fest, I hereby present a post on a strangely neglected topic. Namely, "Mathematics and the Undead".

Like many parents of glamorous (i.e. brown & damp) 70s Ireland my folks were doorstepped by one of the then ubiquitous (and aggressively persuasive) roving World Book salesmen. The end result of this exchange was a shelf full of sober volumes that told us more than we ever wanted to know about American state capitals and the intricacies of the US political system. Thrilling. The modest spoonful of sugar that helped this medicine go down came in the form of "Childcraft" – World Book's attempt to edutain and entercate the youth of planet earth.

Volume 13 in the series was Mathemagic, a typically sneaky example of the lengths adult educators often go to in their quest to groovify the ungroovy. Though most of its pages left me searching for "magic" that palpably wasn't there, a section called "Multiplying Vampires" kept me gripped and appalled.

"To stay alive", Mathemagic told us "a vampire has to bite about one person a week". After this (it continued) "the person bitten becomes a vampire too!". Note the exclamation mark used to punctuate that sinister piece of lore. In the original text it's a big round jolly one. The kind Enid Blyton might have used to cap a sentence like "Noddy had never tasted such smashing jam!". I'm looking at it right now. It's fantastically inappropriate.

Perhaps realising the unsettling oddness of its tone, "Multiplying Vampires" then shifts toward reassurance:

Many people believe there really are such creatures as vampires. But there aren't, of course. And you can use multiplication to prove to your friends that there's no such thing as a vampire.

Good ol' multiplication. There then follows a tedious passage that describes how vamps would create other vamps who would, in turn, create yet more vamps (and so on), before we're abruptly asked:

Do you see what is happening?

My response to this question, back in 1979, was something along the lines of "Yes I do see what is happening. The world is becoming progressively more well stocked with vampires. I'm scared. Make it stop."

But it doesn't stop:

At the end of the fifth week there would be two times sixteen, or thirty-two vampires, and so on. And, as this keeps on, the number of bloodthirsty vampires grows by leaps and bounds.

Waaah! And on we go. Tenth week? 1,024 vampires. Fifteenth week? 32,768 vampires. Twentieth week?

…there would be 1,048,536 vampires. That's right – more than a million vampires!

The gleeful italics and exclamation mark once again rubbed the stinky turd of fear firmly in our small anxious faces. By week 32 we're up to 4,294,967,286 vampires and we've sobbed ourselves into a hysterical puddle.

But wait a minute!

Go on…

There are only about four billion people in the whole world!¹

So that means…

…if there ever had been just one vampire, every person in the world would have been turned into a vampire in just thirty-two weeks! And because you know very well that you and your friends aren't vampires, you know there never was such a thing as a vampire. See?

The inevitable result of reading the words "because you know very well that you and your friends aren't vampires" was, of course, to start me suspecting the complete opposite – that all my friends were vampires. Far from offering crumbs of rational comfort, "Multiplying Vampires" ends up reading like juvenile propaganda slipped into the education system by actual vampires keen to keep pesky kids from sticking their grubby noses into their various global plots and schemes.

As if to practically admit to this suspicion the final double-page spread shows hordes of the undead lining up to enter an extravagant Gothic manor. Their HQ, no doubt, for "Operation Suck Childrens' Faces Off".

Look at the evil bastards. Laughing and leering it up thanks to the "Mathemagic" that proved they couldn't exist.

There's a lesson in there somewhere.

1. Betraying its age here. [back]