Weird Murmur

  Álvares de Azevedo, Noite na Taverna [ A Night in the Tavern ] (1855). Translated by Maurício Búrigo for Universitas Press (2025). Published posthumously in 1855, Álvares de Azevedo's novella drips with soul-crushing perdition, moral depravity, and the kind of deep-seated pessimism that Ligotti will systematize some 150 years later in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race . The novella is a series of tales swapped among five men in a tavern. The stories they share are filled with vile debauchery and romantic excess; it is a wild little book. I will focus on Bertram's story, an adventure tale of sorts that stands as an illustration of key Ligottian themes including the absurdity of our survival drive, the detestable nature of Hope, and consciousness as a cruel trap that brings with it the awareness of the horror of existence while at the same time compelling our continued participation in it. The raft scene of Bertram's tale finds the storyteller, the captain, and the c...

  Clark Ashton Smith, "The Last Incantation" in  Weird Tales , June 1930. Read the story here at The Internet Archive Readers of genre fiction are used to encountering the dangers of necromancy. Time and time again, protagonists give in to the strong temptation to bring back a long-dead loved one, only to find “they’ve come back wrong.” From Stephen King’s Pet Sematary , and W. W. Jacobs' “The Monkey’s Paw” to John Langan’s The Fisherman , grief brings out some of the most powerful human emotions. The fantasy/horror fiction of Clark Ashton Smith is filled with necromancers, diabolists, and all types that are into raising the dead. Smith’s short story “The Last Incantation” features an aging sorcerer thinking back to a long-lost love of his youth, but Smith flips the script. The change, the off-ness that is sensed, not only comes from the object of the raising. Particularly if the long years of time and experience have passed, the mourner too has changed, and that change c...

  Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams , (1907).  Lucien Taylor, the main character of Arthur Machen's novel T he Hill of Dreams , takes himself to have solved the mystery of the alchemists when he hits upon the primacy of the imagination and language over physical reality. The historical, popular focus on the alchemical transformation of lead to gold is myopic and that change is usually understood in a way that largely misses the point. For Lucien, the change is a matter of a shift of mind, imagination, and conceptualization. Finding the base world appallingly cruel and miserable, Lucien changes it. For him, things start with language, with words; words to generate images in the mind. Finding the right words, the right poetry, the right prose--this is the magic. The magic is powerful and all too effective. Lucien ends up transforming himself into something non-human and that comes with a cost. The default interpretive view is that the price Lucien pays is much too high, but it i...

Christopher Slatsky, "Professor Cognoscente's Caliginous Charms Carnival" in  The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature  (Grimscribe Press, 2020). Cosmic horror often features sorcerers in possession of powerful, dangerous, cursed, and ancient texts that reveal our lives to be shams and that what we believe to be important is not really important. Those who have glimpsed the secrets discover that we live in a world of shadows, that the real world sits behind our illusions of reality. Such forbidden knowledge, such truths, often drives such a seeker to madness. Sometimes images of stage magic, ventriloquism, and puppetry are invoked to suggest that our sense of reality is just a kind of trick. The subtext is that we live in a world of illusion. We go on with our lives, just playing a role and taking it to be all-so-important, when really it amounts to nothing—a mere shadow of what is truly real. This familiar line of thought expresses a kind of philosophical pessimism that evokes ...

  Stanislaw Lem, Solaris,  1961, translated from Polish by Bill Johnston (2017). Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris is a deeply profound reflection on human psychology, moral obligation to non-human persons, and our naivete concerning the search for alien intelligence. The novel also challenges the very possibility of contact with any alien intelligence that engages the world with a vastly different non-human conceptual scheme and paradigm. It is a fifteen-year-old girl on a tour of the Solaris Institute that sums up the challenge and the failure of the scientific approach to contact. After seeing a film reel of the formation of one of the baffling, beautiful, and complicated structures created by Solaris, she asks, “What’s it all for?”   The question gets to the heart of the problem. The scientists who are so interested in intelligent contact have no answer because their empirical methods and their language of description are not equipped to answer questions of purposiveness and...

Junji Ito, Remina  (Shogakukan and VIZ Media: 2005, 2020). Ito’s work surgically draws a sharp contrast between human-caused horror and cosmic horror. The cosmic horror of this story hits on a grand scale, highlighting our insignificance in terms of time, speed, size, and causal impact. As Remina nears Earth, it remains totally indifferent, utterly destructive, but morally neutral and uncriticizable. But, despite our insignificance, humans cause an immense amount of suffering. Even our loving connections turn poisonous and lead to disaster. This book is horror through and through. It manages to show how vulnerable and insignificant we are and, at the same time, how much terror and pain we have the power to cause. We are immensely horrible, pathetic and feeble. 

  Mark Samuels, "Apartment 205" in The White Hands and Other Weird Tales  (Tartarus Press, 2003). Stories of cosmic horror are often most effective when the specifics of the terrifying discovery (or the collation of the facts) are ambiguous. The reader is typically left in the dark with only a vague hint of what drove a protagonist to lose their mind. We don’t see the horrifying passages in the Necronomicon. We don’t peek behind the veil and see the Great God Pan. We don’t get to read Act II of the “King in Yellow.” There is a good reason for this, as readers, we would almost certainly be disappointed. It is much better to leave the details vague because anything that can be said will undermine the great mystery and the horror the reader injects. These are usually truths that we aren’t supposed to be able to handle anyway! With that said, Mark Samuels pulls off the impossible. He reveals the mind-blowing discovery made by the protagonist in “Apartment 205” and still preserves...

Looking back over what I have read in 2025 (you can see the entire reading list HERE ), the following are some favorites (in no particular order). Novels  (favorite 7 of 30) The Mysteries of Udolpho, Ann Radcliffe (1794) Titus Groan, Mervyn Peake (1946) The Ghost Pirates, William Hope Hodgson (1909) Conquer, Edward Erdelac (2020) The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty (1971) The Charwoman's Shadow, Lord Dunsany (1926) The Three Imposters, Arthur Machen (1895) Short Stories  (favorite 46 of 393) Walking Aunt Daid, Zenna Henderson Spettrini, Matthew Bartlett No Abiding Place on Earth, Matthew Bartlett Window, Bob Leman Loyalty, Matthew M. Bartlett Bellow of the Steamship Cow, Aaron Dries The Death of Odjigh, Marcel Schwob My Sad Dead, Mariana Enriquez The Happy Children, Arthur Machen Frontier Death Song, Laird Barron The Tower, Marghatina Laski New England Gothic Part 2, Matthew M. Bartlett It Doesn't Do What You Think It Does, Brian Evenson The Strange Design of Master Rignolo, Th...

For the month of December I have been reading a short ghost story everyday as a kind of Ghost Story Advent Challenge. Here are the final five stories!   Day 20: The Family Night Watchman (2024) by Can Xue This story is set in the south of China during the hot summers when the children sleep on water-cooled bamboo beds in the middle of the road. Cars don’t usually drive through overnight, so they don’t worry about that. Most of the kids fear the corpse drivers that make shrieking noises and wander the night on foot. Little Fly isn’t as scared as most, and he wants to meet one. Something about this story captures the way children remember and navigate the world.   Themes : Ghosts of Family, Past/Present/Future, A Child’s Perspective.   Day 21: An Incident in Monte Carlo (2024) by Peter Straub I was saddened when Peter Straub, author of one of the best ghost story novels of all time, Ghost Story , died in 2022. I suppose this story works as a ghost tale on a meta-...

  For the month of December I am reading a ghost story everyday as a kind of Ghost Story Advent Challenge. I’ll post about the stories that I read at the end of each week. I’m discovery some wonderfully weird tales. Day 14: "Those I Have Never Known" (2024) by Katherine Cart   If you feel a little tickle in your throat and then something hairy brushing your back molars, it might be a ghost coming up headfirst. Just reach in there and pull the bugger out! Sometimes ghosts live inside of us and only reveal themselves after we give up all the things we use to cover ourselves. Then repeat, to cover them all up again.  Themes: Ancestral Influence, Commercialism, Haves and Have-Nots, Shame.   Day 15: " Lady Ferry" (1879) by Sarah Orne Jewett A child is sent to a colonial estate, where she befriends an impossibly old woman who lives in the tower.  The relationship between Lady Ferry and the child is a sweet one, and the story, as a recounting of a childhood experience,...