My review of the highly enjoyable portmanteau horror collection "Studio of Screams" by the formidable line-up of Stephen R. Bissette, Mark Morris, Christopher Golden, Tim Lebbon & Stephen Volk, is now at Horrified Magazine, your new home for everything to do with British Horror.
Here's a book I misjudged by its cover. I bought it in the expectation of something enjoyably trashy: maybe a family pet gone psycho, like Cujo? Or at least animals on the rampage like The Rats, Crabs, Slugs, etc.? Not quite. It's the story of Don Boyd, seventeen and trapped in a house with parents … Continue reading Horror Rewind #5 – “The Pet” by Charles L. Grant (1986)
Or should that be "Anti-Horror Rewind"? American lawyer Douglas E. Winter made his literary name with one of the first book-length studies of Stephen King's work (The Art of Darkness), and in 2001 wrote the authorised biography of Clive Barker (The Dark Fantastic). In between, he edited (although curated may be a more appropriate term) … Continue reading Horror Rewind #4 – “Prime Evil” (ed. Douglas E. Winter) (1988)
I'm cheating on two counts here. I'd intended 'Horror Rewind' to be a look back at works of fiction from the Horror Boom of the late 70s to early 90s, and in their original (or at least a contemporary) edition. Cold Hand In Mine is a 2014 reissue from Faber (a lovely thing, as all … Continue reading Horror Rewind #3 – Robert Aickman’s “Cold Hand In Mine” (1975)
Earlier this year I looked at how Detroit electro outfit Drexciya (perhaps inadvertently) reconfigured the poisonous racism of H.P. Lovecraft's legacy. That legacy is a complex and problematic one, but one that we're unlikely to have at all were it not for the heroic efforts of August Derleth. Derleth (with Donald Wandrei) founded Arkham House … Continue reading August Derleth: Cthulhu re-myth
Welcome to the second in my occasional trip back to the 80s Horror Boom. Having looked at Mark Morris's excellent Toady, we're now going a little further back in time - and a little further north - to look at three books from 1986-7, all of them set around Tyneside and Northumberland: Stephen Laws's The … Continue reading Horror Rewind #2 – Wyrms, Fire Worms & Spectres
The Folk Horror Chain is a framework devised by writer and film-maker Adam Scovell in his essential study of the genre, Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. For Scovell, Folk Horror can - among other things - be categorised as "a work that uses folklore…to imbue itself with a sense of the arcane for … Continue reading The Folk Horror Chain in Clive Barker’s “Books of Blood”
Welcome to the first in an occasional series of retrospective looks at 80s & early 90s horror. There are, I know, loads of excellent websites covering this area. Will Errickson's Too Much Horror Fiction is the Daddy, and of course Grady Hendrix's essential Paperbacks from Hell is your print companion. Elsewhere in the Gyre I've … Continue reading Horror Rewind #1 – Mark Morris’s “Toady” (1989)
Is The Droving Folk Horror? I was asking myself this more and more the longer this (admittedly short¹) film went on. It certainly uses some familiar tropes: an outsider comes to a "remote" location; there are people wearing animal masks, and there are rumours of magic & ritual. Some moderate spoilers follow. Martin (a superb, … Continue reading …but is it Folk Horror? “The Droving” (2020)
I recently reviewed Dan Coxon's great little horror micro-anthology from Black Shuck books, Green Fingers. Impressed, I took a punt on another from their "Shadows" series. There are 21 at time of writing, but there's little information on their website to allow you to choose one over another, other than cover art (their jacket design … Continue reading Review – “Winter Freits” by Andrew David Barker (2019)
Into the Gyre 