Weird Murmur

  Mark Samuels, "Apartment 205" in The White Hands and Other Weird Tales  (Tartarus Press, 2003). Stories of cosmic horror are often most effective when the specifics of the terrifying discovery (or the collation of the facts) are ambiguous. The reader is typically left in the dark with only a vague hint of what drove a protagonist to lose their mind. We don’t see the horrifying passages in the Necronomicon. We don’t peek behind the veil and see the Great God Pan. We don’t get to read Act II of the “King in Yellow.” There is a good reason for this, as readers, we would almost certainly be disappointed. It is much better to leave the details vague because anything that can be said will undermine the great mystery and the horror the reader injects. These are usually truths that we aren’t supposed to be able to handle anyway! With that said, Mark Samuels pulls off the impossible. He reveals the mind-blowing discovery made by the protagonist in “Apartment 205” and still preserves...

Looking back over what I have read in 2025 (you can see the entire reading list HERE ), the following are some favorites (in no particular order). Novels  (favorite 7 of 30) The Mysteries of Udolpho, Ann Radcliffe (1794) Titus Groan, Mervyn Peake (1946) The Ghost Pirates, William Hope Hodgson (1909) Conquer, Edward Erdelac (2020) The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty (1971) The Charwoman's Shadow, Lord Dunsany (1926) The Three Imposters, Arthur Machen (1895) Short Stories  (favorite 46 of 393) Walking Aunt Daid, Zenna Henderson Spettrini, Matthew Bartlett No Abiding Place on Earth, Matthew Bartlett Window, Bob Leman Loyalty, Matthew M. Bartlett Bellow of the Steamship Cow, Aaron Dries The Death of Odjigh, Marcel Schwob My Sad Dead, Mariana Enriquez The Happy Children, Arthur Machen Frontier Death Song, Laird Barron The Tower, Marghatina Laski New England Gothic Part 2, Matthew M. Bartlett It Doesn't Do What You Think It Does, Brian Evenson The Strange Design of Master Rignolo, Th...

For the month of December I have been reading a short ghost story everyday as a kind of Ghost Story Advent Challenge. Here are the final five stories!   Day 20: The Family Night Watchman (2024) by Can Xue This story is set in the south of China during the hot summers when the children sleep on water-cooled bamboo beds in the middle of the road. Cars don’t usually drive through overnight, so they don’t worry about that. Most of the kids fear the corpse drivers that make shrieking noises and wander the night on foot. Little Fly isn’t as scared as most, and he wants to meet one. Something about this story captures the way children remember and navigate the world.   Themes : Ghosts of Family, Past/Present/Future, A Child’s Perspective.   Day 21: An Incident in Monte Carlo (2024) by Peter Straub I was saddened when Peter Straub, author of one of the best ghost story novels of all time, Ghost Story , died in 2022. I suppose this story works as a ghost tale on a meta-...

  For the month of December I am reading a ghost story everyday as a kind of Ghost Story Advent Challenge. I’ll post about the stories that I read at the end of each week. I’m discovery some wonderfully weird tales. Day 14: "Those I Have Never Known" (2024) by Katherine Cart   If you feel a little tickle in your throat and then something hairy brushing your back molars, it might be a ghost coming up headfirst. Just reach in there and pull the bugger out! Sometimes ghosts live inside of us and only reveal themselves after we give up all the things we use to cover ourselves. Then repeat, to cover them all up again.  Themes: Ancestral Influence, Commercialism, Haves and Have-Nots, Shame.   Day 15: " Lady Ferry" (1879) by Sarah Orne Jewett A child is sent to a colonial estate, where she befriends an impossibly old woman who lives in the tower.  The relationship between Lady Ferry and the child is a sweet one, and the story, as a recounting of a childhood experience,...

  For the month of December I am reading a ghost story everyday as a kind of Ghost Story Advent Challenge. I’ll post about the stories that I read at the end of each week. I’m discovery some wonderfully weird tales. Day 7: " The Lost Ghost" (1903 ) by Mary E. Wilkins “. . . it don’t do anybody in this world any good to see things that haven’t any business to be seen in it.” Sitting with their sewing and crochet, the two women of the framing story are wonderful characters. The ghost in this story likes to pull the cat’s tail, which the cat clearly does not like. Otherwise, it is a sweet and most helpful little ghost. The ghost is an eerie one, and its back-story is chilling. This is a sad ghost story, though with lots of charm and a happy ending. Themes: Ghost Can’t Find Their Way, Ghost-Child, Tragic Death.       Day 8:  “Drive" (2024) by Brian Evenson As an unwilling would-be ritual sacrifice, you must be careful when attempting your escape. Killing y...

  For the month of December I am reading a ghost story everyday as a kind of Ghost Story Advent Challenge. I’ll post about the stories that I read at the end of each week. I’m discovery some wonderfully weird tales.   Day 1: “Bad Company” (1955) by Walter de la Mare If you thought soul-saving, death-bed confessionals were cutting it close, boy oh boy, get a load of this ghost. I guess dying and all gives you… perspective. If it is true that you should never go to bed angry, I suppose it is even more important not to die angry. Themes: Regret, Unfinished Business, Needing Help of Living.   Day 2: “The Red Room” (1896) by H. G. Wells Ahh, to be eight-and-twenty years again! At that age, even I might have stayed the night in the haunted room of Lorraine Castle. Lots of shadows, lots of blown-out candles, and weird creepy old people in this one. Wells’ description of the three elderly castle custodians and the meeting they have with the young, fearless man at the...

  Charlotte Tierney, "A Woman's Place Is in the Haunted Home" in  The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Vol. 1 , ed. Michael Kelly (Undertow Publications: 2025). Ghost stories are often stories about underlying anxiety, but Charlotte Tierney’s “A Woman’s Place Is in the Haunted Home” gives vision to devastating threads of anxiety in a most revealing way. The constant worry that something terrible is about to happen and the never-ending rumination, planning, and strategizing to avoid catastrophe is given form in the ghost itself: the ghost as the manifestation of that dreaded consequence. We hold tight to our worries because they seem to have served us so well in the past, after all, they represent strategies for avoiding bad outcomes; we keep them close. This experience becomes an overwhelming burden that is not only exhausting but isolating. Only the anxious can feel the weight of their own dread, while to other people, those worries are nothing, and they can nudge them ...

  Sebastian Gray, "Lustre" in Cosmic Horror Monthly, Issue #64, October 2025. Just outside of Hell stands the city of Lustre—a city where a strange kind of consumerism of hedonism and soul-trade thrives. Ligotti’s pessimism meets Ballingrud’s hellscapes in this wonderfully weird short story by Sebastian Gray. The limping, bleeding, injured demons make an offer, but you are literally damned if you do, damned if you don’t. There is no escape; there is no way to make the hurt stop.

Oscar Wilde, "The Sphinx Without a Secret" (1887) Read the story free on Gutenberg Sometimes, fans of weird fiction fall into the trap of thinking that for a given work, there is some secret to uncover—an interpretation of the story that will unlock its meaning. This scientific-like model treats fiction as something where textual evidence is used to uncover the answer to its interpretation. But that approach comes under fire in Wilde’s work. “My dear Gerald . . . women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.” Good speculative fiction gives form to the unanswerable, and the wonder comes from the questions raised. The best ghost stories don’t have ghosts, the most interesting Sphinx has no secrets. “The Sphinx Without a Secret” is a story without a mystery; there is nothing to figure out. “’I wonder?’” he said at last.” And that, my friend, is the key to unlocking the interpretation of this story.

  Hiron Ennes, The Works of Vermin  (Tor Publishing Group: 2025). Ennes creates wonderfully weird worlds, always described at just the right level of detail. They know what to explain in depth and what to leave for the reader to fill in. The Works of Vermin is a story of a world, its people, and its vermin shaped by art, war, and decadence. Set in a weird Gormenghast-like city of impossible architecture, built on and within a tree over a poisonous river, it is a novel about revolution, remaking the self, and constructing reality. Saturated with heavy ideas dripping like ecdytoxin from teratopods,  this novel respects the intelligence of the reader and leaves space for reflection. Reminiscent of China Miéville’s  The Last Days of New Paris , art itself takes on physical powers of destruction and construction. The city’s opera, statuary, and embroidery not only record history but they make historical facts true.   Open alchemical street warfare between pest ext...