Category Archives: Halloween stories

Gothic Lovecraft’s Brooding Fear

The Outsider  by H.P. Lovecraft  (1926)

Tuesday’s Gothic Short Story,   February 14, 2023 Valentine’s Day

In this story, we are in the subterranean world of Lovecraft, written in a 19th-century style that is so very Poe-esque.  Alone in a decaying castle, ‘chambers with maddening rows of antique books … twilight groves of grotesque and vine-encumbered trees, full of dark passages and  high ceilings where the eye could find only cobwebs and shadows …’ our lonely Outsider chooses to venture out into the real world.

There is no measure of time here and no light in this castle. He is forced to light candles and stare at them for relief. Finally he feels compelled to climb out of the castle and into the endless forest beyond. What do you think he finds beneath a golden arch?

Lovely, dark, and deep, this is an exceptional story to read for Valentine’s Day because it is so sensuous and bohemian. The psychological here is brilliant. Ghostly and baroque desires drive the Outsider into a beguiling romance with his darkness. Bittersweet and delicious as dark chocolate.

Lovecraft is a master at leaving the reader with heavy subtext. And although I don’t read him regularly, The Outsider is likely to become a favorite because it is so bewitching.

Read the short story here at HPLovecraft.com

https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/o.aspx

 

Listen to the audio here:

 

Watch the modern film adaptation here (10 minutes). Hmmm, not what I expected:

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1880-1937), an American writer of weird, science, fantasy, and horror fiction was known to rarely go out in daylight, became best friends with Houdini, and suffered night terrors. He corresponded with fellow writers Robert Bloch (author of Psycho), Henry Kuttner (The Dark World), Robert E Howard (Conan the Barbarian) and the poet Samuel Loveman. It is estimated that he wrote 100,000 letters.

“Mystery attracts mystery.”

“Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.”

“I couldn’t live a week without a private library – indeed, I’d part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I’d let go of the 1,500 or so books I possess.”

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Don’t forget to view the INDEX OF AUTHORS’ TALES above for more free reading at Reading Fiction Blog. This is a compendium of over 250 short stories by more than 150 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 by a famous author every month. 

Comments are welcome!

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© 2012 Paula Cappa Reading Fiction Blog

 

Discover Author of the Week posted on Mondays!

 

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Dead Still Here on All Hallows Eve

All Hallows      Walter de la Mare (1926)

Sunday’s Gothic Short Story, October 30, 2022

READING FICTION BLOG

Here is a perfect story to read aloud for Halloween.  Walter de la Mare is a dazzling author famous for his ghost stories and psychological drama. This is a fast short story and absolutely classic. We have a traveler visiting a deserted cathedral. The cathedral is not just haunted.

Devils are creatures made by God, and that for vengeance.

Why would devils haunt a deserted cathedral?

We then turned inward once more, ascending yet another spiral staircase. And now the intense darkness had thinned  a little, the groined roof above us becoming faintly discernible. A fresher air softly fanned my cheek; and then trembling fingers groped over my breast, and, cold and bony, clutched my own.”

 

You got to read this one. Author de la Mare is one of the finest writers of the supernatural.

 

 

Walter de la Mare  (1873 – 1956) was an English poet, short story writer, and novelist. He is probably best remembered for his works for children, for his poem “The Listeners”, and for a highly acclaimed selection of subtle psychological horror stories, amongst them Seaton’s Aunt and The Return. He was considered one of modern literature’s chief exemplars of the romantic imagination.

 

Read All Hallows  at Gutenberg.ca (page 288 in Table of Contents):

https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/delamarew-beststories/delamarew-beststories-00-h.html#Page_288

 

Listen to the audio at BBC Radio:

 

Don’t forget to view the INDEX OF AUTHORS’ TALES above for more free reading at Reading Fiction Blog. This is a compendium of over 250 short stories by more than 150 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. 

 

Comments are welcome!

Feel free to click “LIKE.”

 

 Other Reading Web Sites to Visit

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      Monster Librarian     

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Discover Author of the Week posted on Mondays!

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Bad Moon Rising Interview for Halloween

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,

October 30, 2021.

https://teripolen.com/2021/10/30/badmoonrising-wild-darkness-by-paula-cappa-shortstory-thriller-mystery/ 

 

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.

Visit her author page on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Teri-Polen/e/B01MYOUA6V 

Happy Halloween!

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The Haunted House in the Square, for Halloween

The Empty House  by Algernon Blackwood  (1906)

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.

 

Read it here at Gutenberg.org

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14471/14471-h/14471-h.htm

 

Listen to the audio on YouTube.com:

 

More of Algernon Blackwood’s free short stories here at Reading Fiction Blog:

Blackwood, Algernon  Ancient Sorceries, February 5, 2013

Blackwood, Algernon  Wood of the Dead, September 9, 2014

Blackwood, Algernon  House of the Past, November 9, 2015

Blackwood, Algernon  The Glamour of Snow,  March 1, 2016

Blackwood, Algernon A Psychological Invasion, Case 1,  June 28, 2016

Blackwood, Algernon  The Willows, October 16, 2018

 

Have a Happy Halloween!

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. 

Comments are welcome!

Feel free to click “LIKE.”

 

 Other Reading Web Sites to Visit

Kirkus Mystery & Thrillers Reviews

Books & Such    Bibliophilica   NewYorkerFictionOnline

      Monster Librarian     

For Authors/Writers:  The Writer Unboxed

Literature Blog Directory   

Blog Collection

Blog Top Sites

Discover Author of the Week posted on Mondays!

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Author of the Week Deborah Harkness, October 11

AUTHOR OF THE WEEK   October 11

Deborah Harkness

(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:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Visit Deborah Harkness’s Amazon Page: https://www.amazon.com/Deborah-Harkness/e/B001IO8EOQ

 

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.

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Ghost at the Threshold

Sir Edmund Orne  by Henry James (1891)

Tuesday’s Ghost Story for Halloween   October 27, 2020

Reading a ghost story during Halloween week is always a good idea. Sometimes it’s fascinating to go back to the classic authors who are so different from, and I dare say refreshing, our modern ghost writers. And who better to read than author Henry James. He’s known for his psychological realism and emotionally powerful ghost stories. Reading his novels and short stories is often an experience as in the famous Turn of the Screw. In 1903, James gave advice on how to read his work. He suggested you read a few pages a day and not break the thread  “The thread is really stretched quite scientifically tight. Keep along with it step by step — & the full charm will come out.”

There is literary magic in his stories. Reading his work slowly so the imagination can peak and run is a worthwhile effort.

In Sir Edmund Orne, we have a lovely coquette named Charlotte Marden and her mysterious mother Mrs. Marden who has “intuitions.” The story opens on a quiet sunny Sunday in Brighton, is full of romance, intrigue, and of course a ghost on a mission. The story is more quiet mystery than horror but unsettling and holds the suspense all the way through.

From our determined and charming narrator …

“I felt beneath my feet the threshold of the strange door, in my life, which had suddenly been thrown open and out of which unspeakable vibrations played up through me like a fountain. I had heard all my days of apparitions, but it was a different thing to have seen one and to know that I should in all probability see it familiarly, as it were, again.”

 

Read the story at East of the Web:

http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/EdmuOrme.shtml

Listen to audio at Librivox Recordings:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43FaG7G5Rj0

 

Henry James was an American novelist and critic.  He wrote 20 novels, 112 tales, and 12 plays  and volumes of travel writing and criticism.  He is best remembered for his The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and the novella The Turn of the Screw (1898).

 

 

The Haunting of Bly Manor, a Netflix anthology series is a twist on Turn of the Screw. 

 

 

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

 

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, romance, 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

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Mr. Moundshroud and A Thousand Pumpkins

The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury  (1967)

Tuesday’s Tale for Halloween    September 29, 2020

Halloween is one month away. If you’ve not read Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree, it’s a MUST READ for Halloween fans. This is an adventure story about a group of boys on Halloween night. Tom and his mates must search the Halloween world to find their missing friend Pip, who has been abducted into the Land of the Dead.

 

At some 160 pages, longer than a typical short story but not quite a novella, you can settle in for a spooky and nostalgic ride. What is so wonderful about this story, aside from all the little horrors along the way, is that we discover some of the oldest Halloween traditions from Egypt, Greece, Rome, Mexico, Irish Druids, and much more about the Land of the Dead. Here’s a peek as the boys come upon a haunted house.

“Then the darkness within the house inhaled. A wind sucked through the gaping door. It pulled at the boys, dragging them across the porch. They had to lean back so as not to be snatched into the deep dark hall. They struggled, shouted, clutched the porch rails. But then the wind ceased. Darkness moved within darkness. Inside the house, a long way off, someone was walking toward the door. Whoever it was must have been dressed all in black for they could see nothing but a pale white face drifting on the air.”

 

At this house they come upon the Halloween Tree …

The pumpkins on the Tree were not mere pumpkins. Each had a face sliced in it. Each face was different. Every eye was a stranger eye. Every nose was a weirder nose. Every mouth smiled hideously in some new way. There must have been a thousand pumpkins on this tree, hung high and on every branch. A thousand smiles. A thousand grimaces. And twice-times-a thousand glares and winks and blinks and leerings of fresh-cut eyes. And as the boys watched, a new thing happened. The pumpkins began to come alive.

 

Ray Bradbury at his best! Rich language, vivid imagery, and so eerie on our most famous dark autumn night of the year. I loved the mysterious Mr. Moundshroud.

Read the story free at the EnglishOnlineClub.com (Illustrated by Joseph Mugnaini):

http://englishonlineclub.com/pdf/Ray%20Bradbury%20-%20The%20Halloween%20Tree%20%5BEnglishOnlineClub.com%5D.pdf

 

Listen to the audio by Ray Bradbury on YouTube.com

 

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, romance, 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

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Frankenstein and Beyond for Halloween

Beyond Castle Frankenstein

Short story by Paula Cappa

published in Journals of Horror, Found Fiction, anthology edited by Terry M. West

October 31, Halloween, 2019

 

Journals of Horror, an anthology with 29 stories, is written by some of the hottest talent in the supernatural, ghost, and horror genre.  I am proud to be among them with my story Beyond Castle Frankenstein.

If you’ve not read Journals of Horror, Found Fiction, you can take advantage of the Halloween sale going on at Ereader News Today at .99 cents. This sale will run until November 2nd.

Click  to purchase at .99 cents via Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MTB67GY?tag=enttodaysdls-20

Review of Journals of Horror from Tracy Crockett at Halloweenforevermore.com “Easily in my top 5 best anthologies in the horror genre. This anthology has a little bit of everything going on …  amazingly well-written and the stories are very vivid. The aspect of this read that impressed me the most was that it was as if all of the stories seemed to be conjoined yet were their own little devilish tales. I highly recommend this work to any horror reader. It’s top notch.”

My followers and readers here know that sometimes my supernatural short stories are historical (Between the Darkness and the Dawn takes place at Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Old Manse; Hildie at the Ghost Shore is the Mistress of Runecraft in Old Belgium.) Beyond Castle Frankenstein is about Mary Shelley and the secret inside Castle Frankenstein, which is a ‘rough-hewn rock mansion of turrets and towers perched on a craggy hilltop over the Rhine in Darmstadt, Germany.’

 

The secret I speak of  is in a letter that Mary Shelley hid behind an oil painting, entitled Casa Magni, that was housed inside the chapel adjacent to Castle Frankenstein. Below is the Shelley’s home Casa Magni in Lerici, Italy.

Casa Magni, the Shelleys’ home in Lerici

Read about Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley and their home Casa Magni:

https://wordsworth.org.uk/blog/2016/05/27/the-shelleys-in-italy/

 

Know this: there are such things as phantoms of paintings. Art is a powerful entity. Paintings can often possess a spirituality that lingers in our world wherever they have taken residence. Beyond Castle Frankenstein is such a story.

Mary Shelley was an extraordinary writer and her novel Frankenstein will never die. We remember Mary Shelley  now because every Halloween Frankenstein comes alive again.

 

 

 

Listen to the audio of Frankenstein at YouTube.com 

 

HAPPY HALLOWEEN TO ALL MY FELLOW GHOST STORY LOVERS!

 

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

Literature Blog Directory

Blog Collection

Blog Top Sites

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Forbidden Pleasures of the Vampiress

The Lady of the House of Love by Angela Carter (1979)

Tuesday’s Tale for Halloween  October 22, 2019

 

How about a haunting fairy tale for Halloween? Come meet the Countess. Let’s go Gothic in a decaying castle with “shadows that have no source in anything visible.” Who lives in the castle? A beautiful somnambulist who helplessly perpetuates her ancestral crimes. Think Sleeping Beauty but as a vampiress who lives in a tower in Transylvania. A bridal gown, blood red roses, Tarot cards, forbidden pleasures, claw-tipped hands, and  fatal embraces—”her claws and teeth have been sharpened on centuries of corpses.”

 

The story is written with such beauty and horror, it’s perfect for Halloween. I won’t spend time on the plot (a young officer in the British army comes to her castle, lured by the Countess’s mute old maid), because the following tasty quotations from the text are just too delicious.  What a master of language and style Angela Carter is! You will be transported.

“Too many roses bloomed on enormous thickets that lined the path, thickets bristling with thorns, and the flowers themselves were almost too luxuriant, their huge congregations of plush petals somehow obscene in their excess, their whorled, tightly budded cores outrageous in their implications. The mansion emerged grudgingly out of this jungle.”

“She offered him a sugar biscuit from a Limoges plate; her fingernails struck carillons from the antique china. Her voice, issuing from those red lips like the obese roses in her garden, lips that do not move–her voice is curiously disembodied; she is like a doll, he thought, a ventriloquist’s doll, or, more, like a great, ingenious piece of clockwork.”

 

“She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening. She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man’s land between life and death, sleeping and waking …”

 

Are you anxious for more pleasures of the senses? This story is 5 stars. I loved it.

 

Read the short story here at Short Story Project:

https://www.shortstoryproject.com/story/lady-house-love/

Listen to the audio here at YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6qrwIE4jNE

 

Author Angela Carter was named one of the “50 greatest British writers since 1945” by the London Times. A prolific writer of fiction, Carter is best remembered for her collection of short fiction The Bloody Chamber, in which this story was published. Angela died in 1992.

 

Want to read about some of the most famous female vampires?

Click here:

Top 10 Female Vampires

 

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

Literature Blog Directory

Blog Collection

Blog Top Sites

 

Leave a comment

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Black Cat

The Price by Neil Gaiman

 READING FICTION BLOG  Tuesday’s Tale of Terror   September 24, 2019

 

 

Is quiet horror in your reading genre? The Price by Neil Gaiman is a fast read at 2400 words and is the kind of mysterious soft horror that I love. This is a story about a man who takes in a stray black cat. As with so much of Gaiman’s work, this story has high suspense and a mesmerizing effect.

As legends go, cats are said to be magical, ghostly, sinister, mystical, bewitching, and known to haunt Ireland and Scotland. Calico cats are considered to be lucky. In the Middle Ages black cats were thought to be the cause of the black death.  Or my favorite, cats are living urns of human souls.

Whatever your fascination is with cats, especially black cats (I had black cat with a white patch like an X under his chin who we called Jazzbow), The Price is a cat story that’ll become your favorite. The read is great in itself, but the animatic with Gaiman narrating is chilling. This is a dark glossy cat story that does more than haunt.

Read the short story here at Bitchwick: http://www.bitchwick.com/amacker/bean/price.html

Watch the animatic by Silver Fish Creative on YouTube (16 minutes), available for only a short time:

 

 

Neil Gaiman is an English author of short fiction, novels, and comic books and more. His works include the comic book series The Sandman, novels Stardust, American Gods, and The Graveyard Book. He is the recipient of the Hugo Award, the Nebula, Bram Stoker Award, the Newbery and Carnegie medals.

 

“Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over.”

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.

 

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 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

Literature Blog Directory

Blog Collection

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Filed under classic horror stories, dark fantasy, dark literature, fiction, fiction bloggers, free horror short stories online, free short stories, free short stories online, ghost story blogs, Halloween, Halloween stories, Hauntings, horror, horror blogs, literary horror, occult, paranormal, pulp fiction, quiet horror, READING FICTION BLOG Paula Cappa, short stories, short stories online, short story blogs, soft horror, supernatural fiction, supernatural tales, tales of terror