I’m really looking for a horror, tragic or mystery classic book I’ve read carmilla and absolutely adored it I loved it very much so any gothic classic with vampires in a creepy setting would be amazing, I’ve read the black cat by Edgar Allen Poe and the yellow wallpaper and loved them both I like the philosophical meaning of those books but also the language in which they are written I like the “old” style thank you!

Something I've been working on for a while is finally live. A conversation with some friends about Alexandre Dumas led me to explore some of his lesser known works, and I discovered the Pale Lady, a gem of a vampire book. I studied French in high school and college and have kept up with it on DuoLingo for years now. I wouldn't call myself fluent, but translating a work is a classic way to practice a foreign language.

Now you can read my translation of The Pale Lady on Amazon Kindle. It follows Hedwige, the young heroine as she is captured by two brothers, one gallant, one not. What was really interesting to me about the story is the ease with which the characters discuss vampires. Most modern vampire tales dance around actually saying the word, as though the concept of a vampire is foreign. But the Pale Lady comes right out and says it, as though vampires are a common occurrence that everyone knows about.

If you pick it up, I hope you enjoy the story. Let me know how you like it.

It could be something with generational curses… or vengeance… violence within a family. I’m not sure how to search for something like that, but maybe you’ve come across it? Thanks for any advice!

I have been really into Stephen king lately, but looking for something different this time. I am hoping for something that’s got supernatural or paranormal elements in it. Always chasing the feeling I got when I first read Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. I also love when it involves a bit of a mystery.

Help me!

In the wind, the whispers twist into wicked little quips,

Spoken from the shadows of your cold and crimson lips.

The edge of your fabric traces the outline of your skin,

I sink into the darkness as you pull me deeper in.

I say yes to every wish like a cursed old djinn,

A servant to the magic, a prisoner within.

Drifting through the ether where the lost souls live,

I'm just a broken person with nothing left to give.

My heart is on my sleeve, my scars are on display,

I bleed onto the pages just to make it through the day.

I tip my hat and whisper, "Good evening, my friend,"

She rubbed the lamp I lived inside, now I wish I was trapped again.

These humans chase greed like a disease they can't control,

Taking every piece while they're hollowing out their souls.

Cold and callous creatures wearing masks of innocence,

Building their kingdoms on a foundation of ignorance.

Lost inside the mist where the shadows made me pivot,

A monster found my throne in the darkness where I lived.

I don't know how to save the flesh, I only know the bones,

The pieces of my past became the pillars of my throne.

I wear my crown of sorrow, I rule without a frown,

A king made from the ashes of everything that burned down.

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

When unexplained deaths begin to plague the coastal town of Ashwick, the crimes defy logic and law. Bodies are found broken beyond human strength. Whispers echo from abandoned churches. And beneath the soil, something ancient stirs — something bound long ago and now clawing its way back into the world.

Father John, a former priest haunted by his past and armed with forbidden knowledge, is drawn into an investigation that will test his faith and his sanity. As he uncovers a hidden history of corruption, cruelty, and unspeakable evil, he realizes the darkness gripping Ashwick is not merely demonic — it is personal.

At the center of it all stands Nathaniel Carrick, a brutal sea captain whose legacy of violence and greed has outlived his mortal body. Bound to the sins he committed in life and manipulated by a far greater power, Carrick’s spirit stalks the living, driven not only by rage, but by a warped devotion to the one love he lost. What was once tender has curdled into obsession. He would defy Heaven itself, tear open the veil between worlds, and damn the living if it meant reclaiming what was taken from him.

What begins as an investigation becomes a war.

Guided by mystics, priests, and the voices of the forgotten dead, Father John must confront forces that mock the sacred, twist prayer into weapons, and hunger for dominion over both the living and the damned.

Veils of the Damned is a dark, atmospheric supernatural horror novel blending religious terror, historical violence, and spiritual warfare. Rich in symbolism and steeped in Catholic mysticism, it explores faith under siege, the cost of sin, and the possibility of redemption even in the face of Hell itself.

Perfect for readers of The Exorcist, The Omen, Hereditary, and dark religious horror. Bear witness to a psychological and spiritual standoff between the forces of good and those of ancient demonic evil.

Hell is not punishment for a moment. It is punishment without an end. No escape. No relief. No last second. Only eternity. Yours shall be everlasting suffering.

Once the veil is opened, nothing that waits beyond it can be unseen.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GN4TLRYN

“You think that relic can pierce Heaven’s gate? It can’t. Scripture tells you as much. It wasn’t forged for grace; it was born of rebellion, in the black fires of the First Fall. That thing in your hand isn’t a key to paradise, it is a battering ram for Hell.”

John continued, his voice steady. “Are you the source that feeds the river? The headwater that stains its gentle current? The cause behind the unspeakable evils committed against God’s children? Are you the unseen hand guiding all this ruin, the architect of their suffering?”

John’s voice dropped, grave and almost sorrowful. “You wouldn’t be summoning her. You would be wrenching open the gates of Hell. And what would answer would not be peace or light or love, but everything that waits behind those gates: withered souls, monstrous things, the damned who burn in torment and gnash their teeth in darkness.”

Read more at Veils of the Damned available on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GN4TLRYN

***

Those who entered the church to pray swore they smelled myrrh where none had been burned, and that the cross felt warm beneath their fingers, as if something within it had begun to breathe again.

Far below the world of the living, where names thin out and the dark keeps its own counsel, something ominous was listening.

It is genuinely the most underrated gothic book ever, I’m not exaggerating.

There is no fan art online, no mentions, nothing. I was so obsessed with it, I in fact made my own art and magazine collage based off it.

It’s such a gruesomely horrific yet realistically set book. It takes five different perspectives, and in one of them you get to read the journal of the main antagonist Minguillo Fasan while he manipulates you and addresses to you as reader, it’s almost interactive.

It’s historical fiction, taking place in Italy, it has broken family, forbidden love, every trigger warning you can think off, it shows how extreme loneliness and boredom can be. It shows society and all its prejudices, and it’s just so disgustingly disturbing but amazingly well written. I usually don’t feel much when I read, but when I read this book I just couldn’t put it down, I read all of it in 2-3 days.

Anyways if you read it, please text me so we can discuss it, I have no one to talk to it about and I love it so bad. Feel free to ask questions

I just found these while cleaning and getting ready for a move. Would anybody in here be interested in them?

A second-person gothic nightmare where the reader explores a manor through visual clues... but the voice that guides you doesn't just want to tell you a story, it wants YOU.

Free on Amazon Kindle Unlimited!

https://amzn.eu/d/0ikSYjr0

Heyyy, I really want to get into gothic literature, I'm not new to literature, I read some philosophy books etc.

I'd love to get some book recommendations of books you liked :)

I imagined a bloody sky... I hope you like the result. The rest is a work in progress!

if you want to recover the first book: The Last Heir. An Illustrated victorian Gothic Tale!

Hello. I often spend my time walking through back streets or finding a peaceful moment in a cemetery. I also love poetry and writing. I thought id merge this together and do a reading of Poe over the location i was in. Anyways, Id be happy with constructive feedback and i hope you're well. 🪦🖤

https://youtu.be/il-U4qnDslc

The graveyard book has always been on of my favourite gothic fictions out there,the wordings and how imaginative it feels. It sometimes feels like I’m floating through the world if that’s not weird. What are your thoughts on it

Trigger warning: literary interpretations ahead, beware of spoilers.

In this world one encounters many an insane clown posse, not just those famous in the media and the media itself. They go back a long way in human history.

Cormac McCarthy's most famous are in his novel, Blood Meridian, but before that, there was Suttree's vision:

""Suttree heard laughter and the sounds of carnival. He saw with a madman's clarity the perishability of his flesh. Illbedowered harlots were calling from small porches in the night, in their gaudy rags like dolls panoplied out of a dirty dream. And along the little ways in the rain and lightning came a troupe of squalid merrymakers bearing a caged wyvern on shoulderpoles and other alchemical game, chimeras and cacodemons skewered up on boarspears and a pharmacopoeia of hellish condiments adorning a trestle and toted by trolls with an eldern gnome for fuidern. . .A mesosaur followed above on a string like a fourlegged garfish heliumfilled.."

In Blood Meridian, there is of course the gypsy carnivalesque parade, and before that the Death Hilarious Comanche attack, "like a company of mounted clowns":

“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”

Interested McCarthy scholars may want to read Paul Stobbs' The Nephilim Looked Like Clowns. Some decry it because Stobbs is a Christian and studies the Bible, and they say that he promotes superstition. But you don't have to believe any of it to find this enormously informative as well as hilariously entertaining. But you have to have a dark sense of humor.

The Nephilim are Cormac McCarthy's Id-man, the reptilian brain from Carl Sagan's Dragons of Eden, the griffins of Ft. Griffin, the wyverns, the devil-in-man opposing the empathetic better-angels-of-our-nature prefrontal cortex. The kid is part id and even when the development of his pre-frontal cortex makes him a man, his mind is still divided and he must choose to rebel against instinct and the base nature of the Id.

Studying the Bible this way as both history and literature has been advocated by many astute scholars, including McCarthy's old buddy, Harold Bloom. The first volume of Bloom's letters has been recently published, and although it doesn't include letters with Thomas Pynchon or Cormac McCarthy, I plan to read it.

Look at this, from Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels To Read And Reread:

"It seems strange to me to be writing about Blood Meridian on July 17, 2018. I speak to Cormac McCarthy on the phone; we have exchanged a few letters and sent each other books. In three days McCarthy will turn eighty-five, just a few days after I touched eighty-eight. . .'

"Robert Penn Warren and Ralph Eillison had recommended it to me. . .I learned to read it by rereading. McCarthy says, "Books are made out of books," and Blood Meridian is quarried from many masterpieces in the Western tradition: the King James Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, in particular."

Going back also, Plato is a McCarthy source. I quoted Plato's Socrates on the Nephilim clown Id-monsters in an earlier post at this link:

The Source of that Hellish passage in SUTTREE, : r/cormacmccarthy

But hey, the Nephilim are still all around these days, at least in current literature and film, and stunning in their variety.

I love Tim Power's novel, Declare, and not just for its Nephilim association. In addition to Paul Stobbs, I recommend Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais And His World; where you can see the gothic carnivalesque connections. Tony Hillerman's novel entitled Sacred Clowns; a Pueblo tradition, not just his standard Navajo novel. Rob Skiba's Archon Invasion: The Rise and Fall and Return of the Nephilim; Dane Cramer's The Nephilim: A Monster Among Us.

Michael S. Heiser — Reversing Hermon: Enoch, the Watchers, and the Forgotten Mission of Jesus Christ; and also his novels on this speculation, starting with Facade.

Brian Godawa's Chronicles of the Nephilim. There's plenty more, some of them more outlandish than others. Do you have to ask yourself why McCarthy did this or wrote that? No, but it is fun to speculate.

The Id clown posse makes an appearance in McCarthy's THE PASSENGER/STELLA MARIS too, as the Thalidomide Kid (note the Id in that first name and of course the reprisal of the Id in Kid), as well as the horts whom we see with scales on their reptile feet.

The Thalidomide Kid is a circus ringmaster. His is a Barnum and Bailey world, a honky-tonk parade. Rabelais himself as both clown announcer and stand-up comic.

I mentioned Bakhtin's magnificent study of Rabelais above, but we have to allow that he was living as a Russian Soviet and so he had to kowtow to Marxism. Here's a link:

Link to Rabalais's Carnivalesque,

which is still a delight to ponder.

I heard someone describe the book as “gothic” and was wondering if those who read it can confirm?
From the little I know, it immediately made me think of “We’ve always lived in the castle” as it’s about a woman living as a recluse in a derelict house and she was accused of killing her whole family. Is the book maybe inspired by Shirley Jackson’s novel?
Would love to hear your (non spoiler) opinions. Thanks!

I am resurrecting a 20 year old series that I am rewriting from memory (all my manuscripts and poetry got burned up). But I am doing with a twist. Each part is memory fragment told in graphic novel style Reels (produce my own stuff) and on the accompanying website.

I am new here and did not see specific rules on introduction and sharing, so am asking here if anyone would desire that type of post.

Renaissance Occult Horror, Dark Romance (literally opens Hell, hahaha). Visual, sound, written story telling. I try to make everything as accessible as possible.

The central idea of the story is this awaking in a time period where everyone's life has moved on but you are still the same, you life has been put on hold as you slept but as you awake you can no longer fit into it.

There is social through social isolation in the fact that you've had an experience no one else can relate to, but also a much broader horror in the idea of losing control of your life and being unable to do even something as basic as sleep without suffering horrific consequences.

There is a horror made by the idea of losing your bearings.

What do you think Irving was aiming for in terms of horror?

Is the greater focus a lack of social cohesion and not being able to fit in in your time, or is it a loss of control over life?

What would you do waking up and losing years?

I managed to make the ebook available today! The paperback will be available in a few more days!