I am pleased and honored to have this interview at Teri Polen’s BAD MOON RISING at her blog Books and Such. It is always a treat to be featured at Halloween time for my supernatural fiction. Teri writes a weekly blog, introducing authors and new writers to readers, featuring some of the best books and talent in the industry.
You can read my interview about my fiction at Bad Moon Rising,
Teri Polen reads and watches horror, sci-fi, and fantasy. The Walking Dead, Harry Potter, and anything Marvel-related are likely to cause fangirl delirium. She lives in Bowling Green, KY with her husband, sons, and black cat. Sarah, her debut novel, was named a horror finalist in the 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Awards.
October’s Short Story for Halloween, October 21, 2021
What could be more satisfying than to read a classic haunted house mystery during Halloween season? Especially a gabled house surrounded by dark gardens that cry out and air fragrant with ruin. Inside lurking staircases flicker shadows, and a faceless clock ticks away on the threshold of midnight.
Dean Koontz says of haunted houses: “We are haunted and regardless of the architecture with which we surround ourselves, our ghosts stay with us until we ourselves are ghosts.” How utterly delightful to be a ghost! Maybe our DNAs truly are blueprints of the past.
One of the absolute finest writers of ghost stories is Algernon Blackwood. Here at Reading Fiction Blog, you will find six of his stories to read for free—because Blackwood is a master at ghosts, psychological chills, and performing the highest atmospherics. He has been considered the foremost British supernaturalist. His skills lie in drawing upon Oriental thought, psychology and philosophy, which bring an intelligence to his stories.
The Empty House is a simple story, a fiction over 100 years old. There was a murder in this house that is now empty and shunned by the village folk. Aunt Julia and her nephew Jim Shorthouse spend a night in The Empty House.
We walk through this house with Aunt Julia and Jim, not as observers, but as participants in seeking the ghost. The atmospherics do it all to illicit fear and trembling as the characters engage in the supernatural events. Pay close attention to the narrative closure. It sneaks up on the reader, leaving you breathless in the sea air.
The original chatter about this story was that Blackwood personally experienced some of these ghostly events during his ghost hunting work at the Society of Psychical Research in London. We are in a well-written “quiet horror” of supernatural literature.
Don’t forget to view the INDEX OF AUTHORS’ TALES above of more free reading at Reading Fiction Blog. This is a compendium of over 200 short stories by more than 100 famous storytellers of mystery, suspense, supernatural, ghost stories, crime, sci-fi, romance, ‘quiet horror,’ and mainstream fiction.
Follow or sign up to join me in reading one short story every month.
(Scholar and Novelist: Historical Fiction, Magical Realism, Mythology, Paranormal, Supernatural)
“I definitely see my historical work as a process of detection. Historians fit pieces of evidence together and hope that they eventually form a coherent picture. Often, a historian’s most compelling questions—and the most difficult to answer—concern personal motivations and why something happened the way it did. These are questions we have in common with detectives.”
“Fiction is more like alchemy, though. You take a little of this, a little of that, combine it, and hope that something wonderful occurs so that your creation is greater than the sum of its individual parts.”
“We make our own monsters.”
“I’m a storyteller, and I have really good material to work with: I’ve been studying magic and the occult since about 1983.”
“A lot of our assumptions of the world are fairly cynical, fairly negative, and assume the worst. What our reading tastes show – in this rush to fantasy, romance, whatever – is that we actually still want to believe in a world of possibility, in a world of mystery.”
Deborah Harkness is an American scholar and novelist. She is best known as the author of best selling novels A Discovery of Witches, Shadow of Night, and The Book of Life. Before becoming a best selling author, she spent more than a quarter of a century as a student and scholar of history, with degrees from Mount Holyoke College, Northwestern University, and the University of California at Davis. She has researched the history of magic and science in Europe, especially during the period from 1500 to 1700. Harkness’s scholarly work can be found in John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (Yale University Press, 2007). She has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the National Humanities Center.
Interview with Deborah Harkness, AuthorMagazine.org (10 minutes):
“A wonderfully imaginative grown-up fantasy with all the magic of Harry Potter and Twilight” (People Magazine).
“Romantic, erudite, suspenseful.” (The Oprah Magazine)
Trailer for original series Discovery of Witches, Season One:
Please join me in my reading nook and discover an author on Mondays at Reading Fiction Blog!
Browse the Index of Authors’ Tales above to find over 200 free short stories by over 100 famous authors. Once a month I feature a FREE short story by contemporary and classic authors.
Paula Cappa 