Author: Isabelle Ryan
Sorority sisters have been staples of the horror genre for almost half a century. Between Black Christmas in 1974 and 2020’s Sorority Secrets, we have enjoyed countless peculiar pledges, salacious secrets, and scores of gorgeous girls meeting gruesome ends. In 1978, we received The Initiation of Sarah: sorority horror by way of Stephen King’s Carrie.
Corfu, 2002. Janine Pipe and her then-boyfriend sat in a bar whose staff had set up an illegal feed of a football match. Later, they screened an obvious pirate copy of a horror film. Despite the poor quality, Pipe was captivated. As soon as she was able, she tracked down a legitimate copy based on
Like all genres, horror owes much of its success to a handful of tropes that can be worked and reworked time and again. Two popular examples are the slasher archetype as well as the found footage film. The former dates to the early 1960s, but John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) kicked off the craze. Friday the
Created as a response to criticism levied at queer writers – often by queer readers – The Book of Queer Saints comprises 13 gorgeous, gruesome tales of queer victims and villains. The Kickstarter-funded effort brings together some of the best new voices in horror, with a view to “ embrace every kind of queer person
In 1980, Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder published Michelle Remembers. Based on sessions with his patient (and later wife) Michelle Smith, the book documents Smith’s uncovering of repressed abuse with the aid of recovered-memory therapy. This book has since been debunked, the style of therapy discredited, but according to Pazder and Smith, she had suffered ritualistic
In the summer of 2009, a Korean blogger claimed to have seen a strange creature near Jangsan, a mountain in Busan. The following year, the creature was spotted again. As of March 2013, there had been 14 recorded sightings, six of which put the creature at Jangsan. Described as having a sloth-like shape and long
Beneath its table of contents, Revenant’s Hymn offers a comprehensive list of content warnings. From violence and suicide to eye trauma and Nazism, Elliott Dunstan’s third collection of short stories runs the gamut of traumatic themes and disturbing content. Dunstan exploits every weakness a reader might possess, inching split and bloodied fingernails into the nooks
“Capitalism is nothing before the forces of love and passion!” So declares an impossibly pregnant woman’s stalker in The Embodiment, the second story in this intricate puzzle box of a collection from Korean author Bora Chung. Cursed Bunny offers 10 stories of capitalist corruption, misogyny, and patriarchy: ghost stories, speculative fiction, and darkly comic fairy
According to her website, Pascale Potvin currently holds staff positions at eight literary magazines and journals, including the role of editor-in-chief at Wrongdoing Magazine. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best Microfiction nominee and, under the name Palaces, publishes chapbooks of poetry and creative nonfiction. She has previously worked on the award-winning short film Beat,
Founded in 2020, Tenebrous Press is an independent publisher which aims “to deliver the finest in transgressive, progressive Horror […] from diverse and unsung voices”. Their second anthology, In Somnio, features work from 25 women and non-binary creators: 18 Gothic horror stories with artwork from seven artists. Presumably a pun on ‘insomnia’ and ‘somnio’ (Latin for