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The Black Spider - Folk Horror Avant La Lettre

The Black Spider (1842) Jeremias Gotthelf I have a general rule that, once I have started to read a book, I must continue with it to the end before I can claim the right to comment on it. In the case of The Black Spider , I was beginning to get depressed by page 20 of this classic early nineteenth century Swiss horror novella. One fifth of the tale gone and I had been treated to a lengthy, rather dull and wholesome account of a christening feast for the child of a prosperous Swiss peasant in the first half of the nineteenth century. But Gotthelf knows what he is doing. He has set the reader up for a multi-layered morality tale that loosely bases itself on pre-modern folk interpretations of the causes of the plague. He weaves, from the security of the first section, a genuinely horrific and disturbing tale of a demonic black spider that punishes all those who have defied God and who have tried to short-circuit authority with an appeal to the Devil. The spider, a truly nasty
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Three Significant American Crime Novels

The Black Dahlia (1987) (L.A. Quartet #1) James Ellroy   Devil in A Blue Dress (1990) (Easy Rawlins #1) Walter Mosley   Out of Sight (1996) (Jack Foley #1) Elmore Leonard    There is a great book and a not-so-great book in Ellroy's The Black Dahlia . In fact, it seems like two successive books - the first is an atmospheric but realistic police procedural bringing to life the Los Angeles of the late 1940s and the second is a piece of 'grand guignol' in which sexual obsession and the noir morals of James M. Cain's characters surge their way through a plot out of Raymond Chandler with a dash of Hammett's political cynicism.  We will come across the legacy of Chandler again in Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress . It certainly cannot be said that the two 'books' merge perfectly seamlessly. The use of period slang at the start can confuse rather than enlighten so that we have to contend with some linguistic confusion as well as the plot confusion essentia
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Weird Fiction in Liberal London - China Mieville's Kraken

Kraken (2010) China Mieville We are definitely not into spoilers so it is hard to go too far into the story of this dark fantasy on a scientific theme. A preserved and valuable giant squid disappears from the Darwin Centre at the Natural History Musum and one of its staff, Billy Harrow, discovers a world of cults and magic that threaten apocalypse. So far, so very obviously dark fantasy, but China Mieville adds, with Kraken , a major work to a genre that owes a great deal to the psychogeographical cult of London as the world's most magical city. Its fault is that of all modern creative fantasy - far too many ideas for a basic story line that could be culled from any urban thriller. Although resolved satisfactorily, there are moments when you feel that greatness has eluded Mieville because of an inability to develop fewer ideas in more depth. In the end, despite hints of something deeper, and some remarkable invention and (in places), yes, ideas, it ends up being an ente
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On the Lovecraftian

The Alchemist (1908) The Cats of Ulthar (1920) H P Lovecraft Cthulhu's Reign (2010) Editor, Darrell Schweitzer The Lovecraft Anthology: Volume I (2011) Editor, Dan Lockwood   The Black Wings of Cthulhu (2012) Editor: S. T Joshi   I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H P  Lovecraft (2013 Edition) S T Joshi At some stage, we should review all of Lovecraft's stories but we mention two only to start the ball rolling, the first only to dispose of it as juvenilia. The Alchemist must be regarded as o ne of Lovecraft's weakest stories but then he was only 17 or 18 and it was his first. The basic story line is fairly trite (which we will not repeat for the sake of spoilers although it is barely worth the effort). However, Lovecraft is good at absorbing Gothick memes and replaying them effectively. In other words the story is worth reading for its 'atmosphere' as an antiquarian throw-back to the world of 'The Castle of Otranto' or of Ann Radcliffe over a cen
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On Bram Stoker (1847-1912)

The Lady of the Shroud (1909) Bram Stoker  Midnight Tales  Bram Stoker (Ed. Peter Haining, 1992)   Who Is Dracula's Father? And Other Puzzles in Bram Stoker's Gothic Masterpiece (2017) Jon Sutherland Dracula (1897) is a seminal cultural text - brilliantly written. There is little more to say other than to advise that you read it and enjoy its dark pleasures - but what of the later Bram Stoker? The Lady of the Shroud (1909) is a truly dreadful book in so many ways - theatrical, sentimental, nonsensical, militaristic, imperialist, patronising (to women and to the peoples of the Balkans) and often leaden. Beyond being one for Bram Stoker completists - and the early failed promise of creepy thrills - it is nothing but a fraud designed to inveigle the reader of the 1900s into a conservative political tract. So why bother reading it? Two reasons make this worth it (although only for the dedicated): the psychological insight into the fantasy world of an aging Edwardian male;
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