Weird Murmur

  Arthur Machen, "N" in The Cosy Room and Other Stories (Rich & Cowan, 1936). Sitting over drinks, Arnold, Harliss, and Perrott reminisce about the London neighborhoods, streets, and architecture that have changed for the worse over time. The old, narrow, and crooked streets, the charming jumble of different shapes, styles, and building designs, the enchanted mix of architectural eras, all now flattened to practical, uniform, and straight lines in a modern age that erases the spirit of a place to replace it with the concrete, the functional, and the mundane. Through memory and imagination, these men peel back that modern facade and recall the old days and the old ways. Without moving from their chairs, they mentally walk the streets of London and its suburbs as the city once stood. There is something eidetic about the tour. As the men talk, they can see the old Strand as it once was. In a telling moment, Arnold even gives directions to the now non-existent St. James’s M...

  Mark Samuels, "The White Hands" from  The White Hands and Other Weird Tales (Tartarus Press: 2003). The work of Mark Samuels is compelling. Like other writers with a strong voice, all of his short stories feel connected, each thematically supporting the others. Samuels often riffs on provocative themes and ideas about weird horror fiction itself, and it is to those ideas that I briefly turn, with a focus on “The White Hands,” all the while recognizing that other stories by Samuels support his ideas. Two principles emerge (these are often put in the mouth of Alfred Muswell or other disciples of Lilith Blake, all fictional characters in Samuels’ stories): 1. The Isolation Principle: Isolation, particularly in the face of death, disease, or madness, is the essence of weird horror fiction. As Muswell tells John Harrington, “Mental isolation is the essence of weird fiction. Isolation when confronted with disease, with madness, with horror and with death. These are the re...

Jon Padgett, "Organ Void" in The Secret of Ventriloquism  (Dunhams Manor Press: 2016). "Organ Void" brings together philosophical pessimism, gross body horror, Padgett's notion of borrowed realities, and a symbol that triggers gnosis reminiscent of Robert W. Chambers' Yellow Sign. Padgett’s story packs a heavy punch and is ripe for giving a reader’s subconscious free rein.   The story starts with Rose, driving her VW Bug on an interstate exit while listening to a recording of a self-help guru. She stops to help a presumably homeless person who is carrying a cardboard sign that reads " ORGAN  -VOID ." But the narrative facts are constantly shifting, and what is really going on is far from being that straightforward. Throughout, Rose's reality morphs seamlessly between her being a kind and compassionate commuter, to being a homeless person herself living under a freeway, to being a confused patient in a hospital treated by a Dr. Gord Onavi (an an...

Thomas Ligotti, My Work is Not Yet Done , (Mythos Books: 2002) Interpretations of Ligotti’s so-called “corporate horror” that treat it primarily as a critique of consumerism or the corporate workplace can feel much too narrow in scope. Ligotti’s vision is larger than that, and My Work is Not Yet Done is a prime example of a novella that exceeds the label of “corporate horror.” I recommend readers turn to Moreau Vazh’s excellent analysis of the novella on the blog Taskerland (link below). The Taskerland insights reveal a profound depth to the story that goes unnoticed. Vazh is always a great source for penetrating elucidations of Ligotti's work, and I strongly encourage anyone interested to explore Taskerland. I won't be offering anything like the depth and breadth of criticism that you will find there. Instead, this murmur focuses on one specific idea: there is a tight analogy between "being a corporation" and "being corporeal," and that a category mistak...

  Álvares de Azevedo, Noite na Taverna [ A Night in the Tavern ] (1855). Translated by Maurício Búrigo for Universitas Press (2025). Published posthumously in 1855, Álvares de Azevedo's novella drips with soul-crushing perdition, moral depravity, and the kind of deep-seated pessimism that Ligotti will systematize some 150 years later in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race . The novella is a series of tales swapped among five men in a tavern. The stories they share are filled with vile debauchery and romantic excess; it is a wild little book. I will focus on Bertram's story, an adventure tale of sorts that stands as an illustration of key Ligottian themes including the absurdity of our survival drive, the detestable nature of Hope, and consciousness as a cruel trap that brings with it the awareness of the horror of existence while at the same time compelling our continued participation in it. The raft scene of Bertram's tale finds the storyteller, the captain, and the c...

  Clark Ashton Smith, "The Last Incantation" in  Weird Tales , June 1930. Read the story here at The Internet Archive Readers of genre fiction are used to encountering the dangers of necromancy. Time and time again, protagonists give in to the strong temptation to bring back a long-dead loved one, only to find “they’ve come back wrong.” From Stephen King’s Pet Sematary , and W. W. Jacobs' “The Monkey’s Paw” to John Langan’s The Fisherman , grief brings out some of the most powerful human emotions. The fantasy/horror fiction of Clark Ashton Smith is filled with necromancers, diabolists, and all types that are into raising the dead. Smith’s short story “The Last Incantation” features an aging sorcerer thinking back to a long-lost love of his youth, but Smith flips the script. The change, the off-ness that is sensed, not only comes from the object of the raising. Particularly if the long years of time and experience have passed, the mourner too has changed, and that change c...

  Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams , (1907).  Lucien Taylor, the main character of Arthur Machen's novel T he Hill of Dreams , takes himself to have solved the mystery of the alchemists when he hits upon the primacy of the imagination and language over physical reality. The historical, popular focus on the alchemical transformation of lead to gold is myopic and that change is usually understood in a way that largely misses the point. For Lucien, the change is a matter of a shift of mind, imagination, and conceptualization. Finding the base world appallingly cruel and miserable, Lucien changes it. For him, things start with language, with words; words to generate images in the mind. Finding the right words, the right poetry, the right prose--this is the magic. The magic is powerful and all too effective. Lucien ends up transforming himself into something non-human and that comes with a cost. The default interpretive view is that the price Lucien pays is much too high, but it i...

Christopher Slatsky, "Professor Cognoscente's Caliginous Charms Carnival" in  The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature  (Grimscribe Press, 2020). Cosmic horror often features sorcerers in possession of powerful, dangerous, cursed, and ancient texts that reveal our lives to be shams and that what we believe to be important is not really important. Those who have glimpsed the secrets discover that we live in a world of shadows, that the real world sits behind our illusions of reality. Such forbidden knowledge, such truths, often drives such a seeker to madness. Sometimes images of stage magic, ventriloquism, and puppetry are invoked to suggest that our sense of reality is just a kind of trick. The subtext is that we live in a world of illusion. We go on with our lives, just playing a role and taking it to be all-so-important, when really it amounts to nothing—a mere shadow of what is truly real. This familiar line of thought expresses a kind of philosophical pessimism that evokes ...

  Stanislaw Lem, Solaris,  1961, translated from Polish by Bill Johnston (2017). Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris is a deeply profound reflection on human psychology, moral obligation to non-human persons, and our naivete concerning the search for alien intelligence. The novel also challenges the very possibility of contact with any alien intelligence that engages the world with a vastly different non-human conceptual scheme and paradigm. It is a fifteen-year-old girl on a tour of the Solaris Institute that sums up the challenge and the failure of the scientific approach to contact. After seeing a film reel of the formation of one of the baffling, beautiful, and complicated structures created by Solaris, she asks, “What’s it all for?”   The question gets to the heart of the problem. The scientists who are so interested in intelligent contact have no answer because their empirical methods and their language of description are not equipped to answer questions of purposiveness and...

Junji Ito, Remina  (Shogakukan and VIZ Media: 2005, 2020). Ito’s work surgically draws a sharp contrast between human-caused horror and cosmic horror. The cosmic horror of this story hits on a grand scale, highlighting our insignificance in terms of time, speed, size, and causal impact. As Remina nears Earth, it remains totally indifferent, utterly destructive, but morally neutral and uncriticizable. But, despite our insignificance, humans cause an immense amount of suffering. Even our loving connections turn poisonous and lead to disaster. This book is horror through and through. It manages to show how vulnerable and insignificant we are and, at the same time, how much terror and pain we have the power to cause. We are immensely horrible, pathetic and feeble. 

  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...