Book Riot senior contributor, Pushcart nominee, bookseller, and reviewer Lyndsie Manusos’s From These Dark Abodes, a gothic fantasy novella where immortals unzip from their skins and dance in their skeletons,…
Horror might not be the first genre people think of when they’re looking for comfort. By its very nature, it’s meant to evoke unease and dread, if not outright fear….
Nebula, Aurora, and World Fantasy award-winning author Premee Mohamed’s One Message Remains, a novella about one man’s mission to recover the remains and souls of enemy soldiers after the latest…
I have spent a great deal of time in the past year alternating between existing as a guest in other people’s homes and playing host to guests in my own…
Only a lucky few can say they were au courant during goth music’s initial spawning from post-punk in the late 1970s. As an 80’s kid, I was only peripherally aware of bands like The Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees. I wouldn’t “discover” the likes of Joy Division or Suicide until my teen years while playing the CD of The Crow soundtrack on repe
I have been thinking a lot about the differences between folklore and fairy tales, particularly when it comes to media presentation—of happy endings and beautiful princesses and glorious and friendly mythical creatures.
Three girls in a car are challenged to a drag race by two guys. The girls accept, and the race is on. The two vehicles speed through town, out into a rural area, and across a wooden bridge. The cars are driving side by side when the girls’ vehicle breaks through the railing and plunges into the river below, while the boys drive off unharmed.
One of the things that endlessly fascinate me—speaking as a person who was brought up femme in the rural United States of America—is how intuitive it feels for me to draw connections between women, fruit, and guilt. I wasn’t raised in a Christian household, but even so it was impossible for me to grow up free from the knowledge of Eve and original sin.
The first gothic story I remember falling in love with was The Phantom of the Opera. At the time, we lived in San Francisco. My dad was a surgical resident, my mom newly turned stay-at-home, having quit her job at an architecture firm to care for me and my younger brother. We didn’t have many indulgences, but one thing my parents did, when they could afford to, was take us to see musicals.
I am a lover of anime, as most can probably tell by my previous CT column piece on Death Note, but I also love manga; to see them adapted is always a treat. Recently, I’ve been interested in the presentation of stories through the visual art form, not only manga but graphic novels and comics as well.
