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‘“None have understood it, not even those who experience the like. It is a chillness, a want of earnestness, a feeling as if what should be my heart were a thing of vapor, a haunting perception of unreality! Thus seeming to possess all that other men have, all that men aim at, I have really possessed nothing, neither joy nor griefs. All things, all persons,—as was truly said to me at this table long and long ago,—have been like shadows flickering on the wall. It was so with my wife and children, with those who seemed my friends: it is so with yourselves, whom I see now before one. Neither have I myself any real existence, but am a shadow like the rest.’
–Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Christmas Banquet)

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To feel alive with your terrified pulse pounding, to feel the warm embrace of love, to have your teeth chatter with fear, the stomach quivering nausea of dread, or the blinding throes of rage, is what I offer with this collection. These horror poems I share with you have blazed the flames brightly to inspire me to create the most ghastly of horror tales and the most powerful of rock songs to date. You’re going to know my soul crushing angst in ‘Blood in the Pouring Rain’ as I saved my father’s life. You’ll look over your shoulder a glance or two maybe with a tear hearing the haunting ‘Sarah the Eternal’. And maybe you will laugh and howl along with ‘Ghost on Christmas Mountain’ to lift your spirits.

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‘It’s not the kind of story that the columnists like to print; it’s not the yarn press-agents love to tell. When I was still in the Public Relations Department at the studio, they wouldn’t let me break it. I knew better than to try, for no paper would print such a tale. We publicity men must present Hollywood as a gay place; a world of glamor and star-dust. We capture only the light, but underneath the light there must always be shadows. I’ve always known that—it’s been my job to gloss over those shadows for years—but the events of which I speak from a disturbing pattern too strange to be withheld. The shadow of these incidents is not human.’

—Robert Bloch (Return to the Sabbath)

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#vampires #pirates #horrorstories #shorts #books #youtube #horrorshorts #horrorstories #thedevilofblackbayou #NewOrleans #neworleans #swamphorror #jeffreyleblanc #horrorstory #vampirehorror #books ‘It’s a nightmarish image Antoine that awakens me with the coldest of chills. I don’t know why I’m having this recurring nightmare, my love, when such a thing should never occur. But at any rate I have this persistent […]

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“The man repeated the names slowly and distinctly, as if to fix them in the memories of his audience, every member of which was now attentively observing him, but with a slackened apprehension regarding his possible companions somewhere in the darkness that seemed to enclose us like a black wall; in the manner of this volunteer historian was no suggestion of an unfriendly purpose.”—Ambrose Bierce (The Stranger)