Of all our fears, there’s none so real as the terror little children feel when something from the closet peers, as darkness falls and bedtime nears. The walking dead, a chopped-off head, each one instills a special dread. But yet more frightening than these, the thing that makes your marrow freeze, and haunts adulthood like…
‘Tis hard to hang a husky lad When larks are in the sky; It hurts when daffydills are glad To wring a neck awry, When joy o’ Spring is in the sap And cheery in the sun, ‘Tis sad to string aloft a chap, No matter what he done. And sittin’ in the pub o’…
by Rainer Maria Rilke You, darkness, that I come fromI love you more than all the firesthat fence in the world,for the fire makes a circle of light for everyoneand then no one outside learns of you. But the darkness pulls in everything-shapes and fires, animals and myself,how easily it gathers them! –powers and people-…
by John Louis Koenig “Isn’t she cute?” Brenda Black held out a hideous, deranged-looking doll for Billy to admire. It was an old, victorian looking thing, in decrepit, violet silk and lace, with a dementedly frozen smile on a cracked porcelain face. The parted lips revealed tiny, little pearly teeth. They were disturbingly real looking…
BY MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY,first published in 1818 It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my…
Is all that we see or seem, but a dream within a dream?— Edgar Allan Poe
“Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a higher degree of life, the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them.” —Ann Radcliffe from On the Supernatural in Poetry, an essay