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
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 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-…
‘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’…
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…