“Then down from the great red stars above, each like a misty plume,
There fell on my face long drops of blood and I knew at last my doom.”–Robert E. Howard (The Fear That Follows)
“Couldn’t eat or drink a thing,” cried the other. ” Good Lord, don’t you see, man, I want to talk to someone first? I want to get it out of me to someone who can answer—answer. I’ve had nothing but trees to talk with for three days, and I can’t carry it alone any longer. Those cursed, silent trees—I’ve told it ’em a thousand times. Now, just see here, it was this way. When we started out from camp——”(Algernon Blackwood “Skeleton Lake: An Episode in Camp”
Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell.–Edgar Allan Poe
The creeping introduction of “Fane of the Black Pharaoh” as stated by Weird Tales says:
“Those eyes shone through the shadows; unwinking, unchanging, omniscient in this little world of the dead.”
But…Robert Bloch’s introduction brought more blood and fang:
“Terrible was the fame of Nephren-Ka, and more terrible still was the destiny that Captain Cartaret read on the walls of the red-litten underground corridors.”
I had faced death and weighed my chances in many a desperate venture, but never in one of this nature. I can swear I am no coward, yet this proposition of journeying back and forth across the borderland of death put the yellow fear upon me. –Jack London
A shuddery story of a ghastly charnel crypt in a weird cave in the hills of Cornwall!–Weird Tales
But it’s the eyes of the man I’ll remember to my last days. Wide, fixed in shock, they hide some terrifying secret only the mutilated corpse may know.–JL
Darkness came on; the wind moaned; the tide rose even higher, Round and round among the piles, swirling and gliding, went two grotesque shapes, two old friends, bobbing and nodding together at the bottom of the tomb-black pavilion,–Joseph Payne Brennan
A ripping yarn sure to cut deep by the master of mystery and horror–Robert Bloch!
A legend haunts the town of Grand Isle. Aged mariners proclaim by roaring bonfires along the coast, “And on the first winter breaker…of Grand Isle’s coldest winter, Pierre Santiny plunged into the sea and was seen no more.”
Then, the teller of the tale may pause with haunting eyes as the fires crack in the bonfire, the sea roars, and the wind howls with possibly an ancient chime. With a whispering voice on the third crash of a wave they may even say, “But none on the island will ever say he died.”
Will Marty Santiny—son of Pierre Santiny, discover what really happened to his father? Or will the town continue to fear the legend of “The Mariner of Caminada Pass”?
MISERY is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues of that arch, –as distinct too, yet as intimately blended. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow! How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness? –from the covenant of peace a simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.
The master of terror and the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe was a writer, editor, and literary critic. He’s best known for his poetry and short stories. Poe is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and of American literature, and he was one of the country’s earliest practitioners of the […]
Jeffrey LeBlanc 