Fear in Magazine Form

[joysilence]

Over the past year or so I've started buying various supernatural fiction magazines - Supernatural Tales, Ghosts and Scholars, Machenalia, Faunus and Wormwood. ( Some mini-reviews )

(Note to non-UK readers: £1 is about $2 at the moment.)

How about you? Do you get any supernatural/horror magazines, and if so, which ones? Any recommendations or warnings?

Mary Shelley’s other fiction

[joysilence]

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY dfordoom)

The only work of Mary Shelley’s known to most people today is her great novel Frankenstein. In fact she quite a few books, and a number of short stories, including several in the gothic and science fiction genres. Peter Haining’s Frankenstein Omnibus, which I bought yesterday in a used bookstore for $2, includes two such tales. The Reanimated Man was based on a celebrated (at the time) media hoax about a man supposedly revived after being frozen in a glacier for 200 years. Not a great story but interesting. Transformation is much better. A young man who has dissipated his inheritance meets a strange dwarf, a dwarf apparently possessing supernatural powers, and strikes a bargain with him, a bargain involving the temporary swapping of bodies. While The Reanimated Man is ostensibly scientific, Transformation involves magic. It seems that Mary Shelley wasn’t especially interested in the methods used, but she was interested in the consequences of unnatural life, of unnatural interference in the processes of life. It’s quite a neat little story.

Has anyone else read any of Mary Shelley’s short fiction?

Jane Webb’s The Mummy (1827)

[joysilence]

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY dfordoom)

The Frankenstein Omnibus also includes an except from an 1827 novel called The Mummy, another work of 19th century weird fiction written by a teenage girl. Judging by the excerpt this was one strange novel. Apparently it has something to do with an attempt by scientists in a future age to revive the Pharaoh Cheops. They have exceptionally advanced technology in the 22nd century, including balloons and locomotives capable of racing across the landscape at speeds in excess of fifteen miles per hour.

So has anyone heard of Jane Webb? Or has anyone actually read her novel?