Cycles of Genre Fiction
There are people who believe in cycles of history, including American history. If there are cycles of history, then a historian might discover them. If there are not cycles of history, a historian can...
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The Gothic Romance: Mystique & Mystery
MystiqueI have been looking into the origins of the Gothic Romance girl-meets-house-type cover illustration. I didn't think there were any covers of that type in the original run of Weird Tales...
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Machines for Living, Haunts of the Dead-Part Four
"The past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity."--From Requiem...
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Machines for Living, Haunts of the Dead-Part Three
Like I said last time, I don't know when what I have called the Gothic revival began, but in the 1960s there were Hammer films from England and horror films and gialli from Italy. In 1966, Dark...
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Machines for Living, Haunts of the Dead-Part Two
In the early twentieth century, during the Machine Age, the house became "a machine for living." That was how Le Corbusier saw it anyway. There were machine-like designs for houses and other buildings...
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Machines for Living, Haunts of the Dead-Part One
A long time ago I watched the movie The Fountainhead (1949), starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal. The screenplay by Ayn Rand was based on her novel of the same name, published in 1943. It's kind of...
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A Meta-Entry
Early in the morning of Thursday, August 27, 2026, the number of visits to this blog went over 5,000,000. The rate of increase hasn't been exponential, but the number of visits is increasing very...
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Weird Fiction & Regional Fiction
Weird fiction can be seen as a type of regional fiction. Setting in weird fiction is important, as is a familial, cultural, or historical past tied to a specific place. Sometimes we don't know where a...
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Gothic Topics & Flannery O'Connor
I have next to me a collection of essays on Flannery O'Connor from a series called Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom and published by Chelsea House in 1986. I would like to write about a...
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More on Regions & Gothics
An Indiana Gothic?Even before my entry from the other day went up, I found what I think might be an Indiana Gothic. I have been doing some research on Jennings County, Indiana, the only Jennings County...
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Regional Gothic-Part Two
There is supposed to have been a Southern Gothic, but are there or have there been other regional Gothics? I don't know.What got me started down this path is finding a novel originally published in...
View ArticleRegional Gothic-Part One
In the spring of 1935, Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945), a Southern author, spoke and wrote of what she called "Southern Gothic." She may very well have been the originator of that term. It seems to me to be...
View ArticleAgon Again, or, The Bonnevilles of Literature
If you remember high school English class, you might remember the concept of conflict in fiction, and you might remember that there are four basic types of conflict:Man against manMan against natureMan...
View ArticleFour Car Stories-Part Four
In "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror" by Alex Gaby (The Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 14, 1956, reprinted ten years later in 52 Miles to Terror and Other Stories of the Road), a man named Biff, driving on a...
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Four Car Stories-Part Three
"The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson is a car and driving story that reaches its climax as a man crashes his car into an abutment along a desert highway. That man, named Felix De Groot, is not the...
View ArticleFour Car Stories-Part Two
In "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson (Weird Tales, 2023), the title character so torments his interlocutor that he drives his car--a Maserati--into an abutment along a desert highway and dies in...
View ArticleFour Car Stories-Part One
The second car and driving story in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (2023) is "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson. You can tell it's a car story from the get-go because it has the name of a...
View ArticleTelevision and the Road
"Movie Night at Phil's" by Don Webb (2012) is a story about watching TV. "A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell, from the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (2023), is also about watching TV....
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Planes, Trains, & Automobiles
I read a long time ago an essay about American literature and how many stories and novels begin with a character arriving on a train. An example given in that essay is Lie Down in Darkness by William...
View ArticleMusic, Automobiles, & Rocketships-Part Seven
Car Names & BrandnamesThere are lots of songs about cars, driving, and being on the road. Here are just a few:"Be Thankful for What You've Got" by William DeVaughn (1974):Though you may not drive a...
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