Weird Murmur

  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...

H. G. Wells,  The Island of Dr. Moreau  (1896). "Poor brutes! I began to see the viler aspect of Moreau’s cruelty. I had  not thought before of the pain and trouble that came to these poor victims after they had passed from Moreau’s hands. I had shivered only at the days of actual torment in the enclosure. But now that seemed to me the lesser part. Before, they had been beasts, their instincts fitly adapted to their surroundings, and happy as living things may be. Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence, begun in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau — and for what? It was the wantonness of it that stirred me. The Things were thrown out to live a year or so, to struggle and blunder and suffer, and at last to die painfully. " It may come as a surprise but the above was not written by Thomas Ligotti! It is H.G. Wells from The Island of ...

  H. G. Wells, "The Door in the Wall" in The Door in the Wall and Other Stories  (1911). Read the story here on Gutenburg Raised on Thomas Ligotti’s brand of horror has taught the eye to spot the miserable paradoxes of being this thing we call human. H. G. Wells’ "The Door in the Wall" is, in part, a study on the paradoxes associated with desire . In the story, Wallace, like a Lovecraftian character, is both drawn to and repulsed by the weird, in this case, an enchanted garden behind a green door discovered as a child. Now 40, Wallace has had this strongest of desires his whole life to find and re-visit the garden, but, at the same time, when confronted with the opportunity, he chooses the mundane over the fantastic time-and-time again. The paradox that begins to take shape: what he most desires is not really what he desires most! Desire is a strange thing. By their very definition, we want our desires satisfied, but at the same time, we would not desire a life with...