Pigeons from Hell

[joysilence]

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY dfordoom)

I finally got around to reading Robert E. Howard’s story Pigeons from Hell. And a great story it is too. A great gothic horror story. Mind you, I love anything connected with voodoo. It has that feeling of degeneracy and decay that Lovecraft caught in so many of his stories, but with a southern rather than a New England favour. I think Howard does it extremely well in this story. It has that feel of civilisation being more precarious than we thought, of pre-civilised horrors lurking beneath the surface.

The story has a contemporary setting (contemporary to when it was written, in 1938). It’s about a man from New England on vacation, travelling through the South, who spends the night in a decaying mansion. Which turns out to be a distinctly bad idea. Very little gore, but plenty of atmosphere.

the stories of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

[joysilence]

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY dfordoom)

Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, comte de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (too many names for one person really) was born in 1838 and died in 1889. He was an aristocratic who could trace his lineage back to the 11th century. His contempt for everything democratic and materialistic was profound, even heroic. He dabbled in magic, and was a Symbolist writer whose works were often tinged with the gothic as well, and with decadence. I’ve recently been reading some of his stories, and I’m totally captivated by him. A Torture of Hope is a tale of the Inquisition, a tale of cruelty and redemption. Vera is about a man whose inexorable will refuses to accept the fact of the death of his wife. Olympe and Henriette is a wickedly cynical story of sin and redemption, of a sort. I’ve adored what little I’ve read of this writer so far.