I’m having a lot of fun these days catching up on all of Valancourt Books’ impressive recent releases, which includes stuff never before released and reprints of rare and classic tomes of horror. On a short trip to Chicago to visit family, I read Karl Edward Wagner’s In a Lonely Place (1983), which has been out of print and hard to obtain for a long time.
This edition includes a new introduction by my horror fave Ramsey Campbell, which made it truly irresistible to me.
Continue readingIn the midst of work and travel, I happened to see that fantastic horror authors and amazing people Brian Keene and Mary SanGiovanni are raising funds to open a bookstore specializing in horror, sci-fi, and basically everything weird! They wanted to give back to the horror community and also prepare a second revenue stream for the future so that they can keep writing as long as they can (you may know that most authors don’t really make enough on their books to live on as sole income).
I’ve written about Brian Keene and Mary SanGiovanni‘s works before, and they are both extremely talented and knowledgeable. I consider both of them friends, though we only know each other through the internet, and they are both lovely people and well-prepared to run such a venture.
The bookstore is called Vortex Books & Comics, and will be opening in Spring of 2024 in the historic district of Columbia, Pennsylvania. They’ve invested a lot of their own money in the venture, but could use any help they can get to get things off to a great start. You can check out their fundraiser on GoFundMe, if you’re inclined to help out!
Looking forward to making a pilgrimage to Vortex once it opens!
Thanks to Valancourt Books, I’ve been on a world horror kick lately, aided by their recent slew of foreign language horror collections translated into English, most of the stories translated for the first time. Quite recently, I read A Different Darkness by Italian author Luigi Musolino, and last year I read The Black Maybe by Hungarian author Atilla Veres, and both collections were fantastic. Both authors were featured in The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories volume 1, and this past week I picked up and read another collection by one of those authors, The Secret Life of Insects, by Bernardo Esquinca.
At first glance, the title of this post probably appears quite paradoxical. After all, the very definition of an object being visible is seeing light coming off of the object! At second glance, you might think the title is referring to infrared radiation or ultraviolet radiation, both of which were discovered in the early 1800s and which lie outside of the visible spectrum of light. But this is also not the case: the tenebroscope is a device that was introduced to demonstrate that visible light is, in a sense, invisible!
I was recently asked to write a retrospective on invisibility for a scientific journal, and I did a search for “invisibility” in the scientific literature in the 19th century to see how that word was used then. I already knew that it was used to describe infrared radiation and ultraviolet radiation, and also to describe particles that are too small to see with the naked eye; this time, however, my search turned up the curious reference to the “Tenebroscope.”
Continue readingOne bonus post for Blogtober: an old post where I look back at Poe’s surprisingly inspirational story and the now-obscure books that he references in it.
For my final day of Blogtober, I look back at another fascinating novel of horror that most people have never heard of! Richard Le Gallienne’s “The Worshipper of the Image” is a short 1899 novel that is about a man’s growing obsession with… a death mask! But not just any death mask: L’Inconnue de la Seine, the famed death mask of an anonymous beautiful woman who allegedly drowned in the Seine. The mask became the face of Resusci Anne, the CPR dummy, and is thus often referred to as “the most kissed face of all time!”
Happy Halloween, and I hope you’ve enjoyed this look at horror fiction and blog posts, old and new!
Doing my best to finish Blogtober, in spite of how rough things have been lately! Today I look back on Lucy Snyder’s 2015 collection While the Black Stars Burn, an excellent and haunting collection of cosmic horror that to me seem to explore vulnerability and betrayal. This was the collection that introduced me to Snyder’s work, and we became Twitter friends after that and I’ve been delighted to see her work reach an increasingly greater audience, as her recent novel Sister, Maiden, Monster has.
For day 29 of Blogtober, I thought I would look back at the stories of John the Balladeer by Manly Wade Wellman, especially since they’ve come out in a new edition by Valancourt Books!
The stories are a testament to Wellman’s love of Appalachia, and have a man known as John the Balladeer, Silver John, or simply John as their protagonist. John is a wandering mountain man who faces off against the creatures and villains of Southern folklore using his wits, his brawn, and his music!
My original post has much more of my thoughts on Silver John, and let me just note that the Valancourt edition is gorgeous, especially the limited edition hardcover, which is still available!
For day 28 of Blogtober, I look back at a fun and surprisingly clever book about a Japanese kaiju-hunting organization: Hiroshi Yamamoto’s MM9.
My apologies to all, but I’ll be taking a brief hiatus from the blog. My kitty Zoe went in for a broken leg four weeks ago, and today we learned that the surgery wasn’t successful, and she’ll need to have the leg removed. I’m quite the wreck, and have updated my GoFundMe with details of the new operation that will happen next week, if anyone wants more information.
Things are just so hard these days.
The author of Skulls in the Stars is a professor of physics, specializing in optical science, at UNC Charlotte. The blog covers topics in physics and optics, the history of science, classic pulp fantasy and horror fiction, and the surprising intersections between these areas. 
Skulls in the Stars 