The Scary Short Stories Blog by award-winning author Andrew Barger where I discuss the scariest stories in the various supernatural genres. I emphasize classic scary short stories and provide insight into the origins of the stories and the authors behind them. Visit AndrewBarger.com to check out my books and to be scared.
Every so often a review of one of my books is so well-reasoned that I share with my friends. This week was no exception when Denise Longrie of the Examiner posted a review of Phantasmal: The Best Ghost Stories 1800-1849.
Ms. Longrie did a nice job in pointing out the scope of the anthology: story backgrounds, list of the scary ghost stories considered, preface (though not mentioning annotations and author photos). She goes on to review each story in the collection and concludes by giving it 5 out of 5 stars.
The review was a positive light on a very hard day for me. Thanks, Ms. Longrie, for caring about the early machinations of ghost short stories.
Barnes & Noble takes 20% off Any one item via coupon code "BNLOVEDAD". Plus, the same coupon bags free express shipping for all orders. A great deal if want scary short stories for dad or the Poe lover on your list is Edgar Allan Poe Annotated and Illustrated Entire Stories and Poems.
Kristina Killgrove, a contributor to Forbes magazine, reported this week that "healthy vampires emerge from graves in medieval Polish cemetery. Fourteen corpses were found with anti-vampire devices such as being placed face down, decapitated and weighted down by stones. This gives an excellent glimpse into vampire burials. Read and see the photos here:
The Cure is currently touring the United States to wide acclaim given their amazing back catalogue of fantastic music. What's more, each concert has had a different playlist with some reaching five encores of artistic glory.
One classic Cure song that has been played at every concert so far is "Charlotte Sometimes," which Robert Smith wrote about the English time travel story. It's scary in a few places in the way children get scared. The video by The Cure is great, too.
Below is a repost of my blog and my impressions after reading the novel. Enjoy and go see The Cure if you are able!
I’ve recently read “Charlotte Sometimes” if for no other reason than to compare The Cure lyrics of their classic song Charlotte Sometimes to parts of the children’s fantasy. This is what I learned and it’s very interesting. ***Spoiler Alter***
All the faces, All the voices blur
Change to one face, Change to one voice
First sentence: By bedtime all the faces, the voices, had blurred for Charlotte to one face, one voice.
Prepare yourself for bed
Second sentence: She prepared herself for bed . . . .
The light seems bright, And glares on white walls
Book 2nd paragraph, 6th sentence: The light seemed to bright for them, glaring on white walls . . . .
All the sounds of
Book 4th paragraph, 4th sentence: All the sounds about her . . . .
Charlotte sometimes
Into the night with
Charlotte sometimes
Book 5th paragraph, 1st sentence: She must have slept at last . . . .
Night after night she lay alone in bed
Her eyes so open to the dark
Part II, chapter 4, 1st sentence: Night after night, Charlotte lay in bed with her eyes open to the dark . . . .
The streets all looked so strange
They seemed so far away
But Charlotte did not cry
Part II, chapter 4, paragraph 15, 1st sentence: The streets looked strange . . . .
The people seemed so close
Playing expressionless games
Part II, chapter 2, paragraph 24, 3rd sentence: Charlotte, on the other hand, became absorbed, concentrating wholly on her fingers’ easing . . . .
The people seemed so close
So many other names
Part II, chapter 2, paragraph 37: “Good night, Mr. Chisel Brown,” she said with almost a curtsy. “Good night, Mrs. Chisel Brown. Good night, Miss Agnes Chisel Brown. Good night, cat. Good night, dog . . ..”
When all the other people dance - Reference to school dance
So many different names - Reference to names of Brown family
The sounds all stay the same - Reference to airplane sounds overhead
On a different world - Past that Charlotte travels to
On that bleak track
(See the sun is gone again)
The tears were pouring down her face
She was crying and crying for a girl
Who died so many years before
Part III, chapter 2, paragraph 53, 1st sentence: On that bleak track, the sun almost gone again, tears were pouring down her face. She was crying and crying for a girl for a girl who had died more than 40 years before.
Charlotte sometimes crying for herself
Part III, chapter 7, paragraph 13, last sentence: She began crying bitterly, could not stop . . . .
Charlotte sometimes dreams a wall around herself
Part III, chapter 7, paragraph 10, 1st sentence: She dreamed she stood below the picture, The Mark of the Beast, and there were soldiers all around her in red uniforms, stiff as toys but tall as men. There were dolls, too, like Miss Agnes’s doll, as tall as the soldiers . . .
Glass sealed and pretty
Part III, chapter 7, paragraph 15, 4th sentence: And when she looked at the wall at the picture glass, it looked quite empty, as if a mirror hung there, not a picture at all.
As a writer I have been fortunate in that the majority of people who review my books give positive reviews. Every now and then I get a negative one. This, in itself, does not bother me. Negative reviews are the price of art. Good art should come from an unfamiliar place and when it does it has the ability to exhilarate and shock the eye of the beholder. Because of this authors who are only getting positive reviews are doing something wrong, as strange as that may sound. Take any great book of literature and you will find many horrible reviews. "The Catcher in the Rye," one of my favorite little jewels of literature, has many one star reviews.
So not only do I expect the occasional bad review, but they are necessary if I am being true to my art form. The kind of review I hate the most--yes, even more than the "this was the worst book ever written"--are those that say "this is not what I expected." Read another way, the reviewer means this is not the book they wanted me to write.
I need to write the book that's inside of me begging to get out; the one that nags at me while I'm sitting at the table having a holiday meal with my family while I stuff another piece of broccoli in my mouth; the one that talks to me at two in the morning when I'm having trouble sleeping.
I have no way of knowing what a random person I have never met will need to me write for them. Even if I had such a blueprint, I would not do it. I simply write the books I want to read and that will push the art form forward. I am not trying to sound cruel or be calloused. I can accept bad reviews. Ii really can. Please, try not to judge my books because they fail to be the book you wanted me to write.
“[A] lively and good-natured work with a great deal of humor . . ..”
Publisher’s Weekly Reviewer
“[R]eminds me a little of the fun I find in Carl Hiaasen or Christopher Moore, but he definitely has his own vibe . . ..”
Breakthrough Novel Award Expert Reviewer
A Best Second Novel award finalist in the Indie Book Awards, "The Divine Dantes: Squirt Guns in Hades" is the first in a trilogy of laugh-out-loud books paralleling Dante Alighieri's classic poem, The Divine Comedy, where the characters of The Inferno are encountered in modern times with surprising results. The novel also has it own scary story moments. At the center is Eddie, a young rocker who is heartbroken after his girlfriend, Beatrice, leaves for Venice. This not only ends their relationship, but also the world's greatest two-person rock band. At Beatrice's request, Virgil-their erstwhile manager-cum-travel-agent guides Eddie to Europe to meet her without Eddie being in on the secret. Will Eddie want to see Beatrice? Will the band get back together? And if it does, can Eddie settle on a name for it? Read the first novel in this literary, rock, love story today!
Book 2 of The Divine Dantes's Infernal Trilogy finds Eddie and Virgil in Barcelona, Spain. Eddie, the young rocker with an active mind, thinks they are there to get on a cruise. Virgil, however, has tricked Eddie and arranged for Bea to secretly meet them. Meantime, Virg and Eddie visit famous Barcelona landmarks (La Sagrada Familia, Park Guell, La Rambla Street, etc) as Eddie adds his trademark commentary. Will Eddie speak to Bea when she arrives? And if he will, does their two-person band get back together?
In this final volume of The Divine Dantes trilogy series, Eddie finds himself on a cruise with his beloved Beatrice. There will be mayhem, love and of course rock-n-roll.
Buy the trilogy today and get ready to rock on in a Divine Comedy way.
In a play on the popular TV horror show "Tales from the Crypt" that aired in the 1990s, Butcher Billy has combined his love for The Cure and Robert Smith with his talents as an illustrator to launch an illustrated (and scary) book series. It employs creative use of Cure lyrics into the title. Check it out!
The cover above is The Cure's most claustrophobic song and could very well be the cover song for The Iron Shroud by William Mudford, the tightest science fiction story you will ever read.
The basic questioned posited as the title of this article may seem rudimentary to some, but to those new to Edgar Allan Poe it is not. The short (story) answer is that Edgar Allan Poe wrote many scary short stories. It's debatable which is his most popular, but surely these are in the Top Ten Poe short stories: "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Black Cat," "The Gold-Bug," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and "The Cask of Amontillado."
"A Tale of Jerusalem" (1832)
"Bon-Bon" (1832)
"Loss of Breath" (1832)
"Metzengerstein" (1832)
"The Duc de L'Omelette" (1832)
"Four Beasts in One" (1833)
"MS. Found in a Bottle" (1833)
"The Assignation" (1834)
"Berenice" (1835)
"King Pest" (1835)
"Lionizing" (1835)
"Morella" (1835)
"Shadow" (1835)
"Mystification" (1837)
"A Predicament" (1838)
"How to Write a Blackwood Article" (1838)
"Ligeia" (1838)
"Silence - A Fable" (1838)
"The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" (1839)
"The Devil in the Belfry" (1839)
"The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839)
"The Man That Was Used Up" (1839)
"Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling" (1839)
"William Wilson" (1839)
"[The Bloodhounds]" (1840)
"The Business Man" (1840)
"The Man of the Crowd" (1840)
"A Descent into the Maelström" (1841)
"Eleonora" (1841)
"Never Bet the Devil Your Head" (1841)
"The Colloquy of Monos and Una" (1841)
"The Island of the Fay" (1841)
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841)
"Three Sundays in a Week" (1841)
"The Gold-Bug" (1842)
"The Masque of the Red Death" (1842)
"The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" (1842)
"The Oval Portrait" (1842)
"The Pit and the Pendulum" (1842)
"A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" (1843)
"Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences" (1843)
"The Black Cat" (1843)
"The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843)
"Mesmeric Revelation" (1844)
"Thou Art the Man" (1844)
"The Angel of the Odd" (1844)
"The Balloon-Hoax" (1844)
"The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq." (1844)
"The Oblong Box" (1844)
"The Premature Burial" (1844)
"The Purloined Letter" (1844)
"The Spectacles" (1844)
"The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" (1844)
"Some Words with a Mummy" (1845)
"The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845)
"The Imp of the Perverse" (1845)
"The Magazine Prison House" (1845)
"The Power of Words" (1845)
"[The Rats of Park Theatre]" (1845)
"The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade" (1845)
"The Cask of Amontillado" (1846)
"The Domain of Arnheim" (1846)
"The Sphinx" (1846)"Hop-Frog" (1849)
"Landor's Cottage" (1849)
"Mellonta Tauta" (1849)
"Von Kempelen and His Discovery" (1849)
"X-ing a Paragrab" (1849)
One of my favorite Poe poems is "Ulalume" published in 1848. It is his only poem centered around October--a month Poe owns like no other. Read Edgar Allan Poe's annotated poems.
Check out this haunting reading by Jeff Buckley. It has a Jim Morrison feel.
Recently I posted Edgar Allan Poe's haunting short story "The Black Cat" along with a photo of the house in Philadelphia where he wrote it. One of the best songs ever written about the scary short story is:
Song: Black Cat
Band: Broadcast
I'm sure Poe would have loved this song. Check it out on SoundCloud!
