ParABnormal Magazine Publishes “Wild Darkness”

Wild Darkness by Paula Cappa

March 24, 2020

Why do we read short stories?  Because we can explore a variety of different authors and  experience a wide range of genres without the full-time commitment of a novel. Short fiction is a way to bring back daily or weekly reading time in small bites of pleasure. And with flash fiction, you can read a full story in the time it takes to eat your lunch. This blog has been devoted to short fiction for over seven years with over 250 stories by over 100 contemporary and classic authors.

Today I am proud to announce that ParABnormal Magazine has published my short fiction Wild Darkness.

Here’s a peek …

The ghost beneath the hickory trees is a women. She appears as a shivering presence among the leaves drowning in the summer sun. Her name is Falling Water.

Why do we love ghost stories? I read them because there is usually a truth creeping inside the story, an other-worldly element that suggests we are more than what we see or hear.  Or maybe because ghost stories cannot be absolutely proven and who doesn’t love a mystery? Or, maybe ghosts have something important to tell us.

Come meet Falling Water at Hickory House in the deep woods.

 

From Editor H. Blalock,  ParAbnormal Magazine

“The world is filled with strange and wondrous things; things beyond explanation, beyond imagination. Step into the world of the strange, the mystic, and the Beyond in parABnormal Magazine and find that which shouldn’t exist, but lurks just outside of that we can see.

“As the editor of the magazine, I believe it contains work from some of the most talented writers and artists. I recommend their work to anyone interested in paranormal fiction, non-fiction, and art.”

You can purchase a copy of ParAbnormal Magazine on Amazon.com

https://www.amazon.com/parABnormal-March-2020-David-Blalock/dp/1951384253

 

Don’t forget to view the INDEX 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, ‘quiet horror,’ crime, sci-fi, and mainstream fiction.

 

Follow or sign up to join me in reading one short story every month. Comments are welcome! Feel free to click “LIKE.”

 

 

Other Reading Web Sites to Visit

Kirkus Mystery & Thrillers Reviews

Books & Such    Bibliophilica   NewYorkerFictionOnline

 Lovecraft Ezine    HorrorNews.net   Fangoria.com   

Slattery’s Art of Horror Magazine   Chuck Windig’s Terrible Minds

   Horror Novel Reviews    HorrorSociety.com     

Monster Librarian       The Story Reading Ape Blog

For Authors/Writers:  The Writer Unboxed

Literature Blog Directory   

Blog Collection

Blog Top Sites

 

Becoming a Woman

March 10, 2020

Girl by Jamaica Kincaid (1978)

Let’s go video today.  Girl by Jamaica Kincaid is an unusual story with two characters in a conversation, a mother and a daughter. While most moms are ready and able to give their daughters advice about becoming a woman, this mother in the story focuses on the practical side of life. And then some. The ending has a zinger, and I dare you not to smile. Listen to the author read her story here at Chicago Humanities Festival. This is a 5-minute story (flash fiction at its finest), extraordinary writing, with a theme that is meaty for debate. I loved it!

 

 

 

The short story is available at The New Yorker but not all can access it online as a free read:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1978/06/26/girl

Jamaica Kincaid is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener. Born in St John’s, Antigua, she lives in North Bennington, Vermont during the summers and is Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence at Harvard University during the academic year. At the Bottom of the River was her first collection of short stories and reflections. Her novels See Now Then (2013) chronicles the late-life dissolution of a marriage by way of the jilted wife’s acerbic ruminations.

If you have any thoughts or comments about this story, do post your opinion.

 

 

Don’t forget to view the INDEX 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, ‘quiet horror,’ crime, sci-fi, and mainstream fiction.

 

 Follow or sign up to join me in reading one short story every month.

Comments are welcome! Feel free to click “LIKE.”

 

 Other Reading Web Sites to Visit

Kirkus Mystery & Thrillers Reviews

Books & Such    Bibliophilica   NewYorkerFictionOnline

 Lovecraft Ezine    HorrorNews.net   Fangoria.com   

Slattery’s Art of Horror Magazine   Chuck Windig’s Terrible Minds

   Horror Novel Reviews    HorrorSociety.com     

Monster Librarian       The Story Reading Ape Blog

For Authors/Writers:  The Writer Unboxed

Literature Blog Directory   

Blog Collection

Blog Top Sites

Read an E-Book Week, March 2 to March 7, 2020

March 2, 2020

If you are reading this post, you are fond of books and love to spend your time reading. This is National Read an E-Book Week, an annual celebration of reading e-books. Thousands of readers and authors join this literary event to load up their Kindles, download ebooks from their local library, and support reading events, friends, authors, storytellers, and indie publishers.

All my short stories at the right margin are in ebook format,  free on Amazon for Kindle, on Smashwords (Apple ibooks, Kobo, and more).

Between the Darkness and the Dawn   Does the ghost of Nathaniel Hawthorne stalk the front parlor of the Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts? Historical ghost story.

 Magic of the Loons   What mysteries can you imagine reside in loon magic? Jackson has a secret rendezvous with Kai, his Loon Woman. A short story of passion, mystery, and the power of love.

 The Haunting of Jezebeth   When Deborah goes home to her family farm house by the Dunwich River, she confronts ghostly powers who demand her surrender. Witchcraft is not the only power.

Hildie at the Ghost Shore  Hildie the lace maker, Mistress of Runecraft, knows the secret spells of the runes from the wind-god Odin in a land of Loki the trickster and flame-eyed ravens. Who will survive beyond the ghost shore? Historical fiction.

I have four more stories published in magazines that will be available in ebook format this year. Coming soon!

 

Where is your most comfortable place to read? In bed? Cozy chair? Park bench? Coffee shop? Mine is at the kitchen table in the mornings and also to snuggle into my sofa at night.

 

Got a favorite quote? Please post in the comments.

 

Happy Reading to All!

 

Baba-Yaga and Vasilisa: Creative Fires

Vasilisa the Beautiful, Russian folktale (1860s)

Tuesday’s Fairy Tale      January 14, 2020

 

Baba-Yaga lives in a hut made of chicken legs with a fence of skulls on sticks.  Magical words can make the hut turn. There are variations of this fairy tale over the years (Vasilisa the Wise, Vasilisa the Brave, Vasilisa the Beautiful, Vasilisa the Fair), but  in most versions Baba-Yaga is known to eat people, especially children who smell of Russian flesh.  Some versions have Baba-Yaga as benevolent, in others, she is wicked. This is a story about fear, strength in adversity, wit, wisdom, and what we commonly define as witches. The word baba refers to babushka, or grandmother.

Vasilisa is a child who lives with her nasty stepmother and stepsisters. The ugly stepsisters send Vasilisa to the visit the witch Baba-Yaga, so she can fetch her magical fire and bring it back to light their house. But the sisters are hoping Baba-Yaga will devour Vasilisa the beautiful.

The frightened little girl spends days walking through the dark woods to Baba-Yaga’s hut.

 

Once Vasilisa meets Baba-Yaga, she discovers this crone is a wild and untamed woman. She is cruel to Vasilisa and forces her to perform unending tasks every day, promising no firelight to bring home. In desperation, Vasilisa calls upon her secret doll that her mother had given her before she died.

“Please help me. Baba-Yaga has given me an impossible task to do and if I fail she will eat me.”

What happens? Vasilisa defeats her opponent with truth, integrity, and a secret power.

This story is actually a reflection of maternal wisdom and feminine intuition, full of symbolism of light, darkness, and the feminine face of power. One might call it a dark goddess story because it identifies the blessings of all mothers (including Baba-Yaga archetypes) who came before us to achieve our strength, liberation, and independence. Sophia Wisdom is here too. We fear aging and death. The interaction of Sophia Wisdom (within Vasilisa) with Baba-Yaga is a force that assists Vasilisa in confronting her highest fear, death.

 

Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés interprets the story of Baba-Yaga in her seminal work on fairy-tales, Women who Run with the Wolves. Estés writes:

“To my mind, the old Russian tale “Vasalisa” is a woman’s initiation story with few essential bones astray. It is about the realization that most things are not as they seem. As women we call upon our intuition and instincts in order to sniff things out. We use all our senses to wring the truth from things, to extract nourishment from our own ideas, to see what there is to see to know what there is to know, to be the keepers of our own creative fires, and to have intimate knowing about the Life/Death/ Life cycles of all nature – that is an initiated woman.”

“Within every woman there lives a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing. She is the Wild Woman, who represents the instinctual nature of women.  The Wild Woman is both magic and medicine.  Fertile and life-giving, it is a psychology of women in the truest sense, a knowing of the soul.”

From Caitlin Matthews author of Sophia Goddess of Wisdom,  “Sophia, Holy Wisdom, came into the Russian soul never to leave it. She is deeply associated with the native images of Vasilisa and others.”

If you are tempted to read this 10-minute story, take the path through the woods with the little girl Vasilisa and meet Baba-Yaga. Read it here at SurLaLunefairytales.com :

http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/babayaga/index.html

 

Another version is here: Listen to the YouTube.com audio of A Story of Baba-Yaga

 

Don’t forget to view the INDEX 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, ‘quiet horror,’ crime, sci-fi, and mainstream fiction.

 

Follow or sign up to join me in reading two short stories every month.

Comments are welcome! Feel free to click “LIKE.”

  

Other Reading Web Sites to Visit

Kirkus Mystery & Thrillers Reviews

Books & Such    Bibliophilica   NewYorkerFictionOnline

 Lovecraft Ezine    HorrorNews.net   Fangoria.com   

Slattery’s Art of Horror Magazine   Chuck Windig’s Terrible Minds

   Horror Novel Reviews    HorrorSociety.com     

Monster Librarian       The Story Reading Ape Blog

For Authors/Writers:  The Writer Unboxed

Literature Blog Directory   

Blog Collection

Blog Top Sites

Dashiell Hammett’s Brave Earl Parish

An Inch And a Half of Glory  by Dashiell Hammett

READING FICTION BLOG

 Tuesday’s Mystery Tale    May 28, 2019

Mystery writer Dashiell Hammett said “What I try to do is to write a story about a detective rather than a detective story.”

Oh that Dashiell, he’s a a good one. This week, May 27 is the anniversary date of Hammett’s birth. He is most famous for The Thin Man and Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, so let’s remember this talented writer by reading his An Inch and a Half of Glory.

Hammett wrote a good number of short stories; this is the only one I could find free to read online. Not a detective story, but certainly a suspenseful psychological yarn about a man named Earl Parish who saves a little boy from an apparent house fire. What is really intriguing is the personality portrait of Earl and the sense of irony in the story. Good suspense and a fascinating quick read.

Read the short story here at the New Yorker magazine:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/06/10/an-inch-and-a-half-of-glory

 

 

Did you know that Hammett spent his early twenties as a detective in San Francisco? His first story was published in a society magazine The Smart Set. But everyone knows he got his real literary start in the magazine Black Mask when they published his crime story Arson Plus. He wrote five novels, but many remember him as a devoted left-wing activist. In his later years he settled in Katonah, NY, in a small rural cottage, before passing away in New York City. He remains one of the most influential writers of our time. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

 

 

And didn’t we all romanticize his 30-year love affair with Lillian Hellman (in the 1977  film Julia with Jason Robards and Jane Fonda).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Don’t forget to view the INDEX 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, ‘quiet horror,’ crime, sci-fi, and mainstream fiction.

Follow or sign up to join me in reading two short stories every month. Comments are welcome! Feel free to click “LIKE.”

 

Other Reading Web Sites to Visit

Kirkus Mystery & Thrillers Reviews

Books & Such    Bibliophilica   NewYorkerFictionOnline

 Lovecraft Ezine   Parlor of Horror

HorrorNews.net   Fangoria.com   

Slattery’s Art of Horror Magazine   Chuck Windig’s Terrible Minds

HorrorAddicts.net     Horror Novel Reviews    HorrorSociety.com     

Monster Librarian      HorrorTalk.com 

 Rob Around Books      The Story Reading Ape Blog

For Authors/Writers:  The Writer Unboxed

 

A Kingdom of Spirits

Napoleon and the Spectre by Charlotte Brontë (written in 1833, published in 1925)

[From the manuscript the “Green Dwarf”]

 

Tuesday’s Tale   April 30 2019

“Besides this earth, and besides the race of men, there is an invisible world and a kingdom of spirits; that world is round us, for it is everywhere.”  From Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Did you know that a fragment of Napoleon’s coffin was given to  author Charlotte Brontë?

[Napoleon’s coffin aboard La Belle Poule. The coffin was covered by a black velvet drape decorated with golden bees, eagles, and silver cross. At 8am on Sunday 18 October la Belle Poule set sail.]

Lots of legends are out there about Napoleon’s ghost haunting people. The Museum of The Black Watch has a letter describing a British soldier’s encounter with Napoleon’s ghost during the removal of Napoleon’s remains from St. Helena to France in 1840. Napoleon was said to be highly superstitious: lucky starts, omens, lucky dates, and he frequently saw a phantom he called the Red Man who appeared at the Battle of the Pyraminds, at Wagram, at his coronation, and on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo.

Perhaps because Charlotte possessed a part of Napoleon’s coffin, she was inspired to write a short story about Napoleon, not as a gallant emperor, but as a haunted emperor.

The story opens with Napoleon ready for sleep when …

‘A deep groan burst from a kind of closet in one corner of the apartment.

“Who’s there?” cried the Emperor, seizing his pistols. “Speak, or I’ll blow your brains out.”

This threat produced no other effect than a short, sharp laugh, and a dead silence followed.’

 

This ghost story has a bit of verbal irony, ghostly setting and mood, and the atmospherics are amusing. Not Charlotte’s best work but an enjoyable 10-minute read by one of our most beloved authors. If you are a Charlotte Brontë fan, you really must read this one.

Read the short story (10 minutes) at Gutenberg Australia

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0602171h.html

Listen to the audio on YouTube.com (8 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuJ6QCdTwtQ

 

Charlotte Brontë was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters Emily and Anne. Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre under the pen name Currer Bell. She began writing poems and ghost stories at the age of twelve. Raised in the village of Haworth in Yorkshire, the sisters were dreamy if not lonely children. Their brother Branwell made up stories of an unreal world, writing them in tiny handwriting on small sheets of paper, which they stitched together to look like real books. The image below is by Branwell, with himself painted out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bronte Parsonage Museum

 

 

Don’t forget to view the INDEX 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, ‘quiet horror,’ crime, sci-fi, and mainstream fiction.

Follow or sign up to join me in reading two short stories every month. Comments are welcome! Feel free to click “LIKE.”

 

Other Reading Web Sites to Visit

Kirkus Mystery & Thrillers Reviews

Books & Such    Bibliophilica   NewYorkerFictionOnline

 Lovecraft Ezine   Parlor of Horror

HorrorNews.net   Fangoria.com   

Slattery’s Art of Horror Magazine   Chuck Windig’s Terrible Minds

HorrorAddicts.net     Horror Novel Reviews    HorrorSociety.com     

Monster Librarian      HorrorTalk.com 

 Rob Around Books      The Story Reading Ape Blog

For Authors/Writers:  The Writer Unboxed

Click-Clack the Rattlebag, Neil Gaiman

Perfect Darkness

Click-Clack the Rattlebag  by Neil Gaiman (2014)

Tuesday’s Tale of Terror    March 12, 2019

Are you afraid of the dark? Are you afraid of where creaking attic steps might lead you? Or what you’ll find up there? Do you like bedtime stories? An old house, a little boy, and the sister’s boyfriend. Do you believe in monsters?

 

Come along with Neil Gaiman and discover Click-Clack the Rattlebag.  Deep, dark, and delicious! A quick read at 15 minutes, flash fiction, you won’t forget.

Turn out the lights and read it here:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-festival/11603446/Neil-Gaiman-Click-clack-the-Rattlebag.html

Listen to the audio (12 minutes) by Neil Gaiman at NPR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imLja6Emezo  

 

NEIL GAIMAN is the bestselling author of books for adults and children, winner of Newbery and Carnegie medals and Book of the Year by British National Book Awards. You may know his novels Coraline, American Gods, or The Graveyard Book.  Born in the UK, he now lives in the US and is Professor in the Arts at Bard College. Visit his website: http://www.neilgaiman.com/

 

If you are interested in Neil Gaiman’s creative process as a writer, here is an interview that is well worth the time: http://www.theliteraryreview.org/interview/neil-gaiman-the-creative-press/

Here’s a snippet:

“Do you start with a theme that you then want to find characters for? Or do you start with the character?”

NG: “Both of those things, and sometimes more. What I start with is enough, enough to get going. With American Gods, I had an idea about characters. Somewhere in my head, I had the idea about a couple of people meeting on a plane. One of them seemed to be an old drifter, and the other one had just gotten out of prison, and that was all I knew about them.”

 

Don’t forget to view the INDEX 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, ‘quiet horror,’ crime, sci-fi, and mainstream fiction.

 Follow or sign up to join me in reading two short stories every month.

Comments are welcome! Feel free to click “LIKE.”

Other Reading Web Sites to Visit

Kirkus Mystery & Thrillers Reviews

Books & Such    Bibliophilica   NewYorkerFictionOnline

 Lovecraft Ezine   Parlor of Horror

HorrorNews.net   Fangoria.com   

Slattery’s Art of Horror Magazine   Chuck Windig’s Terrible Minds

HorrorAddicts.net     Horror Novel Reviews    HorrorSociety.com     

Monster Librarian      HorrorTalk.com 

 Rob Around Books      The Story Reading Ape Blog

For Authors/Writers:  The Writer Unboxed