“So your favorite social media site has been taken over by a bumbling fascist-friendly narcissist.”
Mine, too. With Twitter under new management that leaves me very pessimistic about its future as a viable communications site, I’ve been taking a look at some other options again. Two of these are Mastodon and Counter Social, both of which have a posting and following structure similar to Twitter (and are kinda related, but I’ll get to that).
I actually joined both a few years back, sometime around 2017, when Twitter was already making some dubious and infuriating decisions in how it runs things. I haven’t spent much time on either, until recently, but having the accounts set up made it easy for me to jump back in.
There’s a lot of concern and confusion about the sites, particularly about Mastodon, and its at-first-glance strange home server system. Now that I’ve gotten a bit oriented, I thought I’d write a post trying to explain things as I understand them, from the perspective of a relative newcomer myself. I actually enjoy both, so hopefully I can help others to get a bit comfortable, too! I will update and correct this post if I learn that I’ve gotten anything wrong.
Ramsey Campbell remains my favorite horror author and, in my opinion, one of the greatest writers of all time, period. So any time a new Campbell novel appears, I snap it up without hesitation. The most recent is Fellstones, which just came out in September of this year.
Not much of a spoiler to say that I really enjoyed the book! Campbell typically writes in two categories of horror: supernatural horror and psychological (serial killer) horror. I read all of his work, but am particularly drawn to his supernatural works, and Fellstones is one of them.
Ever since I started my blog back in 2007, I’ve been doing a yearly compilation of classic horror stories that can be freely read on the internet! (Search “Halloween Treats” on my blog to see earlier editions!) I see no need to stop the tradition, though in recent years I decided to start doing a theme every year.
The theme this year is “bodies.” Every story features the horrors of the recently dead, who are a very strong reminder that all of us will end up dead and decaying one day. I’ve tried to add vintage illustrations of stories whenever possible. Now without further ado, let’s look at some stories…
The Body Snatcher, Robert Louis Stevenson (1884). A chance encounter between two men late in life soon reveals their shocking history as body snatchers in their medical school days, and the evolution of their work from the removal of fresh corpses from graves to the creation of new corpses. Eventually, though, macabre justice comes to find them.
“He took two steps nearer, with the candle raised.” From an illustrated 1895 edition of The Body Snatchers.
In the Vault, H.P. Lovecraft (1925). One of Lovecraft’s early non-cosmic horror stories! An undertaker finds himself accidentally trapped in a winter vault for coffins that are to be buried in the spring, and he takes desperate actions to free himself, with unexpected and horrific consequences.
From a 1932 reprint of the story in Weird Tales.
The Striding Place, Gertrude Atherton (1905). When Weigall’s lifelong friend goes missing on the moors, he goes out at night in search of him. What he finds is not at all what he expected. Thanks to Trevor Henderson for pointing out this story to me in a twitter thread this month!
Berenice, Edgar Allan Poe (1835). One of Poe’s lesser known stories, I think, about a young man, Egaeus, who becomes obsessed by a particular feature of his cousin Berenice. But Berenice is sick, and dying, and Egaeus is known to have cataleptic spells…
Lukundoo, Edward Lucas White (1925). One of my favorite horror stories of all time! Singleton, an explorer of Africa, recounts the time he went to the aid of one of his colleagues, Stone, in the depths of the jungle. He finds Stone stricken by a particularly horrific curse, and this curse has sprouted from a hatred both surprising and almost unfathomable.
From the original 1925 printing of the story in Weird Tales.
The Stolen Body, H.G. Wells (1898). Here we have a story from the Victorian spiritualism era, a rare supernatural story by a famous science fiction author! When a paranormal researcher succeeds in performing astral projection, he finds that in his absence his body is taken over by a less-than-friendly entity.
The Loved Dead, C.M. Eddy (1919). This story of madness and death sparked outrage, and caused Weird Tales to avoid similar stories for quite some time! In the story, a nameless narrator describes how he learned as a child that he found… pleasure… in the company of the dead, and this ever-growing lust led to increasingly extreme measures!
His Face All Red, Emily Carroll (2010). We wrap up with an illustrated story, and perhaps one of the most brilliant horror stories I’ve ever read. It begins with “this man is not my brother,” and spirals into strangeness from there…
Hope you find a few stories to give you chills! Happy Halloween!
Hunter Shea’s novel Ghost Mine came out in 2019, but somehow it only came to my attention recently, when he posted about it on Twitter.
My immediate reaction? “You had me at ‘ghost mine.'”
Really, what else do you need for a spooky story? An abandoned mine and some ghosts, set in the Wild West, is pretty much perfection as a setting as far as I’m concerned. And the novel is delightful, what I would classify as “fun horror.”
The existence of game distributors like Steam and the Epic Store have led to a bit of a Renaissance in short form horror video games. Small teams of developers, even single people, have crafted a variety of games that make up for their lack of big studio polish with a lot of creepy creativity. As a treat this Halloween, I thought I would share a list of some of these games. This list is not complete, as I wasn’t able to finish all the games I wanted to in time, but it gives you an idea of what’s out there!
Iron Lung (2022). This game is the one that inspired me to write this post in the first place, and it became an instant favorite of mine!
In this science fiction horror game, you play as a convict, sentenced to perform a deep submarine expedition to explore a literal ocean of blood on a remote moon. (There is much more to the story, which is revealed in computer logs and I won’t share here.) You are welded into the submarine, and given coordinates of sites to visit; with a single external still camera, you must photograph the strange objects at each location.
Iron Lung is a game of claustrophobia and paranoia. You have first-person control of your character, but the only places you can go are the three stations in the sub: the controls, the camera, and the computer. Your only view of the outside comes from the still camera, which takes single photographs very slowly. You navigate using a map and a set of coordinates; get too close to a wall or hit it hard and your sub can collapse. As your expedition continues, the objects you photograph become increasingly strange, and you start to hear things outside the sub that suggest you are not alone…
Iron Lung takes a little over an hour to complete, and it is a great, haunting game that stuck with me. It is from the maker of Dusk, the popular retro 90s shooter and shares the same sort of graphical style.
This week, I attended my first in-person scientific conference since 2019. I went to Optica’s Frontiers in Optics in Rochester, NY, a city near and dear to my heart, since I did my PhD there, as well. I had a lovely time catching up with both friends and colleagues at the meeting, and came up with lots of interesting ideas for future research projects.
I also made a quick stop at Mount Hope Cemetery, an absolutely lovely retreat founded in 1838 and containing the final resting places of a number of important figures, such as Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass. It is especially beautiful during the autumn, when the vibrant fall colors provide a magnificent contrast to the pale monument. I last had the opportunity to visit in 2010, and wrote a lengthy blog post at that time. My trip this week was shorter, but I thought I would share some photos that I took, which give another look at some of the sights.
The photos are a mixture of camera phone images and digital camera images.
Of course, my publisher never tells me these things, but the cover for my next popular science book, on the history and physics of invisibility, has been made public and the book has a release date!
It was a challenge to come up with a cover for a book on things that are literally not to be seen, but the art department at Yale University Press did a great job, I think! (I suggested a little revision to the cover to make it more appealing, so of course I think it looks great.)
The book is already available for pre-order at Amazon, and has a release date of April 11, 2023. When it comes closer to that date, I’ll encourage (pester) people to pre-order to see if we can get some buzz going about this fun topic!
Incidentally, the original title was going to simply be “How Not To Be Seen,” which I thought would be fun, but the marketing department felt that people might miss the whole point of the book, so “Invisibility” became the main title, and “how not to be seen” became part of the subtitle.
Very excited about this! This book will not only tell the history of invisibility, but will explain the history of optical science along the way. The history of invisibility is tied up intimately with light itself.
It’s time for me to get back into blogging about weird fiction! I really fell off in my reading over the past few years, due to the stress of political turmoil, the pandemic, and life in general. Fortunately, I’ve been feeling a bit better lately and have been able to delve back into the weird stuff that I love, reading before bed.
The first thing to talk about is Lake of the Dead, by Andre Bjerke (1942).
This book by Norwegian author Bjerke is a mixture of murder mystery and supernatural thriller, and the second to feature his psychoanalyst character Kai Bugge thrust into a deadly puzzle. The first was Nattmennesket, published in 1941, followed by De dødes tjern (Lake of the Dead) in 1942. The latter book was a hit, and was made into a film in 1958. This Valancourt edition is a new English translation, and the first ever American publication of the book. I was immediately hooked, as I often am, by the book’s spooky cover!
This past Monday turned out to be a rather rare event for skywatchers: the planet Jupiter’s closest point of approach to the Earth since 1963! This was the coincidence of two situations. The first is the planet being in opposition to the Earth: the Earth was directly between the Sun and Jupiter, which not only makes it relatively close to us, but also results in the strongest illumination of the planet from our view. The second situation is perigee — the planet is as close to us as it ever gets. (I believe this coincides with the perihelion of the planet, i.e. its closest point of approach to the Sun in its elliptical orbit.)
I’ve been trying to get out more at night to appreciate these special events, and I went out late on Monday to try and snap a few photos with my 50x Canon digital camera. I in fact almost missed the event, as I had forgotten about it, but when I took out the trash late at night, Jupiter was unmissable in the sky! I ran in for my tripod and camera to try and get a few photos.
The last time I tried to photograph Jupiter was during the 2020 planetary conjunction, when Jupiter and Saturn were close together in the sky. The planets were much dimmer, and I failed to capture the moons of Jupiter in my photos, though I could see them clearly in the camera viewfinder. This time, I was much more successful!
The bright spot in the center is, of course, Jupiter, and the four dimmer dots around it are its four Galilean moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. They are of course given the name “Galilean moons” because they were first observed by Galileo Galilei on January 7, 1610. They received their individual names from the German astronomer Simon Marius, who remarkably discovered the moons one day after Galileo, on January 8, 1610.
I endeavored to get a more detailed photo, and used the digital zoom on my camera to bring things a little closer.
I am not sure which moon is which, because I have no idea at which point any of them are in their orbits. Incidentally, the eclipses of these moons by Jupiter resulted in the first quantitative measurement of the speed of light, by Ole Christensen Römer and published in 1672. Römer had noticed that the eclipses of Jupiter’s moon Io happened more frequently when Earth is moving towards Jupiter, and less frequently when Earth is moving away from Jupiter. Römer correctly concluded that these changes arose because light takes a finite amount of time to reach us from Jupiter, and therefore the relative motion of the Earth and Jupiter changes the observed time of the eclipses.
A reproduction of an illustration from a 1676 news report about his discovery is shown below. I have always liked the smiley sun!
I am not a particularly good photographer, and my images are not particularly good when compared with what amateur astronomers have taken. But I love the fact that one can see, and photograph, another planet and its moons even with very little experience and a relatively inexpensive camera!
To close, let me note that as I write this, NASA’s Juno spacecraft is less than six hours away from its closest point of approach to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, and it will come within 222 miles of the surface! Expect to see lots of remarkable images from NASA in the near future!
PS: I recently got my old telescope out of storage from Chicago. Assuming it isn’t damaged, I’ll hopefully have more detailed astronomy photos in the future.
Keeping up my epic long-running series looking at classic Dungeons and Dragons of the TSR era!
The Complete Book of Necromancers (1995), by Steve Kurtz. This one is a rarity, and relatively pricey! I finally sucked it up and ordered myself a copy.
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 