“It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it. Nothing had changed except your own attitude: the predestined thing happened in any case. He hardly knew why he had ever rebelled.” – George […]

Hopefully things will be a bit more settled by the time next Halloween rolls around, because this October was a wash. Recommended listening: One sad coda deserves another.

My childhood consumption of “spooky” lit followed a fairly predictable path for its era. There were Hitchcock and Serling branded anthologies borrowed from the public library, collections of non-gory classics purchased from school book fairs, Twilight Zone Magazine tales of varying quality, check-out aisle digests related supposedly true tales of the paranormal and squicky passages […]

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. So there’s this isolated polar research station inhabited by an extremely irritable group of military men and scientists… …which is unexpectedly infiltrated by something in a familiar form. Things get a bit dicey when members of the research team start to dig a little deeper into the […]

Ghosts as sheet-sporting shades of the dead do not exist. Ghosts as unpleasant manifestations of past trauma totally do exist. In fact, my corpus is a veritable spookhouse of such entities, and their visitations have grown more frequent in recent years. Here’s a brief rundown of some of the more malevolent ones: The Flayed Knee […]

The Seventies were a demon-haunted decade, fraught with nightmares both real and imagined. The energy crisis and socio-economic malaise competed with various paranormal phenomena for space in the anxiety cortex of the collective consciousness. Paranoia triggers lurked around every corner, and the mass media wasn’t above amplifying those fears for increased market share and profit. […]

I may not be feeling this spooky season as strongly this year, but it’s not for a lack of trying. As part of my not-quite-successful attempts to kickstart the chills and thrills, I recently purchased a pair of a seasonally appropriate soundtrack releases on glorious, overpriced vinyl. Both should be familiar to anyone who has […]

“…and?” “Sigh, fine, we’ll also sacrifice a goat in the firepit tonight, buy only if you finish your homework first.” “THANKS, MOM, YOU’RE THE GREATEST!” Recommended listening:

Creature Double Feature is one of the lowest hanging fruits on the Gen X Bostonian nostalgia tree, familiar to any child of the Seventies who lived within WLVI’s broadcast range and had access to a TV set on Saturday afternoons. Bring it up in a gathering of local forty-somethings and you’ll get a chorus of […]

I’ve recently been scanning eBay’s listings for reasonably priced copies of old Sears Wish Books. While there’s a excellent online depository of these holiday catalogs, it has a few unfortunate gaps which happen to align with areas of particular interest for me. Besides, when it comes to this type of artifact, there’s no substitute for […]