Hearts & Wallpaper: Writing Short-Form Madness & Horror

Click the image or watch this video here. “Hearts & Wallpaper: Writing Short-Form Madness & Horror” brings together moderator L. E. Daniels with Lee Murray, Emily Ruth Verona, Kaylee Dobbs (Happy Goat Horror), and Stephanie M. Wytovich for intimate readings and a craft conversation on how short stories and poems hold lived experience. The panel explores using metaphor, humor, voice, and white space to approach topics like postpartum depression, OCD, body dysmorphia, rejection sensitivity, and stuttering while touching on Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Tied to the Flame Tree Press anthology This Way Lies Madness and the…

In Dreams: A Tribute To David Lynch

Written by Jonathan Lees “This whole world is wild at heart and weird on top.” -- Barry Gifford Echoing from the smokestacks of an industrial plant, crawling in a severed ear on a freshly cut, watered lawn, or scrawled within the torn diary pages of a troubled teenager, David Lynch sought out the inexplicable side of human nature, not to understand it, but to reinterpret its absurdity and beauty with the same fiery passion of two forbidden lovers escaping down the dividing lines of a dark highway. “I don’t know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the…

In Memoriam: Bruce Boston

Bruce Boston: an Appreciation by Mary A. Turzillo Bruce David Boston, emperor of the weird, the esoteric, the absurd.  Once a year at least, my husband Geoffrey Landis and I would sit around the table in his and Marge Simon's house in Ocala, drinking wine and eating cheesecake or dried fruit.  The conversations were esoteric, comical, scandalous, divine.  There were other meetings, although as years went by, Bruce became more retiring and skipped Conference on the Fantastic, where he'd been a Creative, and other conferences where he would have been lionized, and even StokerCon.             There was no one like Bruce.  His work was galactic and…

The Bloodless Birth of Blood & Spades: In the Words of Marge Simon

Being invited to Marge Simon's Blood & Spades column in the monthly newsletter is, for many of us, a goal to aspire to. I've found many of the poets I love in her column and feel privileged to have been a guest once or twice. Here, in Marge's own words, is how this dark poetry staple came about. This will also be my last poetry blog post. From here, Sumiko Saulson will be taking over the Dark Poetry Blog. We are in good hands. --aySmith Marge: First off, Kathy Ptacek is to thank for my Dark Poets column. She is…

REVIEW: “Through the Looking Glass and Straight into Hell” by Christa Carmen

Short-Story Review by Lee Murray “Through the Looking Glass and Straight into Hell” (a short story by Christa Carmen, published in In Orphans of Bliss: Tales of Addiction Horror, edited by Mark Matthews Plot Summary: In Christa Carmen’s weird science through-the-looking-glass tale, a braided story juxtaposing two timelines, Allie/Alice is back at the detox centre for the 13th time and bunking with the irrepressible Judy, when she is offered a virtual reality simulation recovery, a programme which offers addicts a glimpse at their future without drugs. There is no doubt that the author knows this horror. In fact, Carmen has been refreshingly…

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: “No Flesh over Our Bones” by Mariana Enríquez

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: “No Flesh over Our Bones” by Mariana Enríquez Reviewed by Belicia Rhea Short story in Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enríquez. Hoggarth, 2017. Trigger Warning: This review addresses eating disorders and mental health. Synopsis “No Flesh over Our Bones” by Mariana Enríquez follows a narrator obsessed with a human skull she finds in the street. She then isolates with it in her room, fantasizing about becoming a skeleton. “A week after giving up food, my body changes. If I raise my arms my ribs show through, although not much. I dream: someday, when I…

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: “Know Your Code” by Ramsey Campbell

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: “Know Your Code” by Ramsey Campbell Reviewed by Penny Jones. Short story published in Chiral Mad 3: An anthology of psychological horror, edited by Michael Bailey, published by Written Backwards. Trigger Warning: This article addresses mental health. Synopsis: A retired teacher encounters a down-on-his-luck former student at the cash dispenser, prompting him to change his security numbers in a tale of spiralling paranoia and memory loss. The horror you feel reading Ramsey Campbell’s story “Know Your Code” may be a quiet, creeping horror, but it is one that we all feel. In the story, as in our…

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: “Moira” by Jamie Flanagan

While mental illness is conventionally seen as emanating from the mind—the brain malfunctioning— and expressed through the body—physical responses such as insomnia or nausea, Jaimie Flanagan’s short story “Moira” identifies the true locus of mental illness—the soul—and names this state “soul-sick,” emphasizing how mental illness affects the very core of our being, our identity and sense of self. Review written by E.S. Magill.

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: We Have Always Lived in the Castle, novel by Shirley Jackson

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: We Have Always Lived in the Castle, novel by Shirley Jackson First published by Viking Press, 1962. Reviewed by Rosemary Thorne TRIGGER WARNING: This review addresses mental health. Synopsis: Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate. My beloved Shirley Jackson passed away when she was 48 years old. It means I am currently six years her senior, which shocks me weirdly as an…

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reviewed by Brooklyn Ann Butler. New England Magazine, National Library of Medicine, and now public domain. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/theliteratureofprescription/exhibitionAssets/digitalDocs/The-Yellow-Wall-Paper.pdf Trigger Warning: This review addresses mental health. Synopsis: A woman with postpartum depression is diagnosed with hysteria by her physician husband. He takes her to a house in the country and locks her in the attic as part of “the rest cure" a popular, traumatic treatment for women in the late 19th and early 20th century. Having no other stimulus, the author tries to “read” the wallpaper in the room and spirals into…

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: EV Knight’s “The Flannigan Cure” from American Cannibal

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: EV Knight’s “The Flannigan Cure” from American Cannibal Reviewed by L. E. Daniels Disclaimer: An author and editor, I am not a mental health professional. Trigger warning: Addiction, grief, loss, animal death. Just before the COVID-19 pandemic, alcohol-related cirrhosis claimed a member of my family in Australia. Johnny was so deep in the trenches in his final years, that when he stopped drinking, he experienced seizures, so he didn’t stop anymore. No conversations or bargaining or pleading altered the pattern bleeding the life from him and the slow, torturous death by cirrhosis was something I never wanted…

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: “Dream’s End” by Henry Kuttner and Catherine Moore

NOTABLE WORKS  REVIEW: “Dream’s End” by Henry Kuttner and Catherine Moore Reviewed by Kyla Lee Ward Short story first published in Startling Stories magazine, July 1947. Variously anthologised. Story link: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/68170/pg68170-images.html TRIGGER WARNING: This review addresses mental health.  In this collaboration by two of the 1940’s most notable weird writers, Dr Robert Bruno is connected by wires to his patient and sedated, offering himself as an “empathy surrogate” in an experimental treatment for psychiatric disorders (in this case, severe, clinical manic depression) that have not responded to other therapies. He awakens to accolades, his patient already showing signs of improvement…

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: The Grief Hole by Kaaron Warren

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: The Grief Hole by Kaaron Warren Reviewed bv E.F. Schraeder Trigger Warning: This review addresses grief and trauma. A universal of all life, death touches everyone sooner or later. With inevitable losses follow forms of grief and depression that can range from manageable to complicated, and in Kaaron Warren’s The Grief Hole we find a mesmerizing supernatural lens to consider how loss, even the deepest pain, connects us all. In The Grief Hole readers meet Theresa, a woman who has an unusual gift for seeing people’s clinging ghosts, each hinting at how they will die. This ability…

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: Shards: A Mental Health Charity Anthology edited by Kara Hawkers and Emery Blake

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: Shards: A Mental Health Charity Anthology edited by Kara Hawkers and Emery Blake, RavensQuoth Press 2024. Reviewed by Stevie Morley Trigger Warning: This review addresses mental health. Edited by Kara Hawkers and Emery Blake with poetry by Dale Parnell, Marie C Lecrivain, Michele Mikel, Alison Bainbridge, Catherine A. Mackenzie, Rebecca Kolodziej, Lisa Reynolds, Shikhandin, Jose Ángel Conde, Jodi Jensen, Engelbert Egill Stefánsson, B.A. O’Connell, Nerisha Kemraj, Francis H. Powell, Courtney Glover, Maggie D. Brace, Christine Fowler, Henry Corrigan, Pauline Yates, Gabriella Balcom, Sharmon Gazaway, Dawn Debraal, Brianna Malotke, Renee Cronley, Max Bindi, Kay Hanifen, Norbert Góra, Gerald…

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: “I’ll Be Gone By Then” by Eric LaRocca

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: “I’ll Be Gone By Then” by Eric LaRocca  Iin The Strange Thing We Become and Other Dark Tales, published by Off Limits Press; also reprinted in The Trees Grew Because I Bled There: Collected Stories, published by Titan Books Reviewed by Geneve Flynn Trigger Warning: This review addresses mental health. After leaving behind her home and identity to seek a new life in America, a woman is plunged back into a difficult relationship when her aging, ailing mother arrives from Italy and she must become her carer. As the failed Miss Vecoli settles her mother into her…

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: “Survival Ritual” by John Edward Lawson

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: “Survival Ritual” by John Edward Lawson In SuiPsalms, Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2012 Reviewed by E.F. Schraeder Trigger Warning: This review addresses mental health and grief.   At the midsection and heart of John Edward Lawson’s provocative poetry collection SuiPsalms, readers find a potent two-page poem called “Survival Ritual.” With a striking concise narrative repetition of the anchoring end of stanza lines, “This is life, and you survive / You survive” the poem constructs a poignant portrait of the insidious and incapacitating nature of grief and yes how to survive it. Lawson moves readers through experiences and…

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: Welcome to the Black Parade

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: Welcome to the Black Parade Song/Poem by My Chemical Romance (musical group) Reviewed by Kevin Kennel Trigger Warning: This review addresses mental illness and trauma.  “Welcome to the Black Parade” is about death, memory, and transcendence as one grieves his life in a hospital. It’s about a character known as “The Patient” who is dying and, as he does, remembers his most precious memory of his father and how his father asked him to defeat his demons. As The Patient descends into the afterlife, shadowy figures of “The Black Parade” come for him. The Patient is a…

Holistic Horrors: EV Knight’s “The Flannigan Cure” from American Cannibal by L. E. Daniels

Disclaimer: An author and editor, I am not a mental health professional. Trigger warning: Addiction, grief, loss, animal death. Holistic Horrors: EV Knight’s “The Flannigan Cure” from American Cannibal by L. E. Daniels Just before the COVID-19 pandemic, alcohol-related cirrhosis claimed a member of my family in Australia. Johnny was so deep in the trenches in his final years, that when he stopped drinking, he experienced seizures, so he didn’t stop anymore. No conversations or bargaining or pleading altered the pattern bleeding the life from him and the slow, torturous death by cirrhosis was something I never wanted to witness…

Interview with Pete Kelly, Poet-in-residence for the Dracula Society

Pete Kelly is a poet and one time voice of the band Gothamistic. He has been a horror fan since birth, so he says. He works as a shipwright when not puddle watching. A Pushcart nominee for his poem "Walk in the woods," published in Space and Time Spring #140 and an Elgin award nominee for his first collection, What Appears In The Dark. Find him on Instagram as splatz007. Can you tell us about the Dracula Society and what your responsibilities as a poet-in-residence will be like? Pete Kelly: The Society was founded in October 1973 by two London-based…

THE INTERSECTION OF MENTAL HEALTH AND HORROR, Panel Report, StokerCon 2024, Saturday 1 June

By Lee Murray Trigger Warning: This article addresses issues mental illness. Trauma. Anxiety. Depression. Psychosis—the Venn diagram where horror and mental illness meet at times seems a perfect circle. This panel will examine the role that horror can play, both in its consumption and creation, in providing a relief from mental health stressors and the implications for writers. Moderated by Mark Matthews, with panellists Justin C. Key, L.E. (Lauren Elise) Daniels, Mo Moshaty, and Mercedes Yardley.  Matthews introduced the topic stating that while the work of the HWA has concentrated on writing techniques for reducing stigma around mental illness, he…