Skulls in the Stars

As readers of the blog know, I’ve been on a Valancourt Books world horror kick recently (see here, here and here), as they’ve been releasing English translations of world horror authors, many of the stories and collections appearing in English for the first time. I recently picked up and read Orchard of the Dead, by Stefan Grabinski.

Unlike the other world horror collections I’ve looked at, this one is much older: Polish author Stefan Grabinski was born in 1887 and died in 1936, so his work was written in the same era as Lovecraft. He has in fact been referred to as the “Polish Lovecraft” or “Polish Poe,” though my reading of the stories suggests that the latter characterization is more accurate (and more complimentary).

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.

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.

One 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.