The Inn of the Fates


Sarah Read, "The Inn of the Fates" in Under Twin Suns: Alternate Histories of the Yellow Sign, ed. James Chambers (Hippocampus Press: 2021). 

Sarah Read's story captures the imagination in a similar way that Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow does. In the same way that Chambers doesn't give us all the answers and leaves things mysterious, this one is weird in all the right places! It is a King in Yellow story in the tradition of Bierce, Chambers, and Wagner with no Lovecraftian detours—an absolute delight.   

This one has a lot of "oh, that was cool" moments. Which one grabbed you?


Comments

Post a Comment

What did you think about this story?

Popular posts from this blog

Noise

Image
Jack Vance, "Noise" in Startling Stories , August 1952. Read the story here at Internet Archive The planet on which the narrator is stranded is quite strange to him: celestial bodies with unfamiliar orbits, long days and nights, dead suns, and alien species that barely register at the edges of perception due to their almost unfathomable otherness. The story blurs the line between the contribution of the perceiver and what is perceived, suggesting that there may not be any fact of the matter about where that line is drawn. The world offers up something raw to the marooned narrator’s senses, and his mind imposes a pattern onto it, counting some things as mere noise and some things as meaningful. This doesn’t make the world any less real; rather, it elucidates what the objective world consists of. Given the different colors of the heavenly bodies that provide illumination to the world, Vance draws our attention to the idea that color isn’t something that inheres in the objects t...
Read more

The Dancing Partner

Image
  Jerome K. Jerome, "The Dancing Partner" in  The Fifth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories , ed. Robert Aickman (Fontana Paperbacks: 1969). One important pillar of cosmic horror is the existence of entities that are indifferent to our goals, projects, values, and lives. Even if they take notice of us, which is unlikely, whether we continue to exist or not is none of their concern. This absolute lack of interest in us makes them something to fear. It isn’t that these alien gods show malice toward us or wish us ill; we don’t even register as the least bit interesting or significant. We see something like that indifference at work in the Jerome K. Jerome, first published in 1893. Here, the detachment isn’t found in anything cosmic but rather in something mechanical. The dancing partner’s total dispassion and indifference intensify the horror much more than if the partner showed outright disdain toward Annette. Such coldness adds insult to injury, but, in addition, the fact that...
Read more

The Island of Dr. Moreau

Image
H. G. Wells,  The Island of Dr. Moreau  (1896). "Poor brutes! I began to see the viler aspect of Moreau’s cruelty. I had  not thought before of the pain and trouble that came to these poor victims after they had passed from Moreau’s hands. I had shivered only at the days of actual torment in the enclosure. But now that seemed to me the lesser part. Before, they had been beasts, their instincts fitly adapted to their surroundings, and happy as living things may be. Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence, begun in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau — and for what? It was the wantonness of it that stirred me. The Things were thrown out to live a year or so, to struggle and blunder and suffer, and at last to die painfully. " It may come as a surprise but the above was not written by Thomas Ligotti! It is H.G. Wells from The Island of ...
Read more