Lee Rozelle's Blog: THE STORY

Robert Bloch’s “The Hungry House” offers domestic cosmic horror in a house of mirrors that triggers both denial and murder in the home. Anxiety over gender roles bleeds over into a tale of ego, sentient materiality, and bad plumbing.

Richard Matheson’s “Dress of White Silk” stuns readers with broken missives from a neglected, illiterate, possibly cannibalistic child. Mindboggling perspective, syntax, and mood in this tale about a mother’s forbidden room. A perfect enigma.

If you were sleeping in high school when you should have been reading Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” you might want to give this story another try. More than a Southern Gothic about cultural decay and small-town groupthink, “A Rose for Emily” reeks with rotten corpses, necrophilia, arsenic, and murder. Emily is tough, too, and stands tall despite her diminutive height as a woman not to be toyed with. Worth the re-read!

E.F. Benson’s “Mrs. Amworth” is cozy horror at its finest. Set in a charming English village, this cheeky domestic vampire tale plots a pair of stuffy retirees against an undead widow. Interesting astral body bloodsucker concept, and the ending is bloody good!

H.P. Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model” turns dark arts into shock art in this story that inverts ideas found in Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” and Wilde’s DORIAN GRAY. An outcast painter creates monsters in his gallery that are all-too-real.

Alexei Tolstoy’s “Count Cagliostro” masterfully strikes every note as decadent Gothic, class satire, and romantic pastiche. A bad wizard uses elemental forces and physical mediumship to draw a life-sized simulacrum from an oil portrait. So funny!

In Hugh Walpole’s queer chimera tale “Tarnhelm,” a young nerd visits his uncles in Faildyke Hall where a malicious monster dog creeps. With his boy-crush, the narrator must bear witness to a yellow-fanged caraway-scented beast. Charmed storytelling from Valancourt!

Tamika Thompson’s “She By the Sea” magnificently blends nightmarish images of the Black Lagoon’s Gill-Man, a dead basketball star, and an unhinged, unhoused woman in a stabbing on the Pacific Coast Highway. As the police make a dragnet for Colleen, the ocean and narrative tension rise to a bloody good finish. A standout among standouts in this brilliant dark carnival of a collection!

In Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s “Hell Screen,” a sociopathic painter creates an all-too-real artwork for his psychopathic Lord. Takes Poe’s “The Oval Portrait," Wilde’s DORIAN GRAY, and Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model” in diabolical new directions.

With deft and bitter genius, Shirley Jackson’s “The Summer People" teases layers of privilege from an unwitting wealthy couple. When the snobby Allisons stay at the lake house longer than expected, relations with the rural folk get ominous.