Good evening!
I read a bunch of all new weird fiction and bizarro books and pondered what it meant to write weird fiction in the increasingly strange times we live. Next week I’ll be discussing the oldest weird fiction.
Books mentioned:
Year’s Best Weird Fiction Vol. 4 (various)
More Bizarro Than Bizarro (various)
Who Cares, Nothing Matters (Julia Platz-Halter)
Lovecraftian Micro Fiction/Challenge From Beyond (various)
Welcome To Night Vale: It Devours (Joseph Fink/Jeffrey Cranor)
Hello all! Merry day once more!
All year I’ve been on and off reading a big pile of gothic nonfiction books. A couple you might recognise but the majority will be new.
The video is prerecorded and my hair actually looks like this now: 
Such is the magic of the digital era.
Books mentioned:
Caitlin Doughty: Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
Colin Dickey: Ghostland
Charlotte Gordon: Romantic Outlaws (Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft)
Hello! May all your jolly moments come at once in an overwhelming rush.
I was interviewed by horror podcast Deadman’s Tome about my new story with the magazine, and other things as well. It was live which meant I had to crawl out of bed at twenty to four in the morning my time. At first I was quite chatty, but a muesli crash ensued. Enjoy!
First up… guess who’s novella/connected short stories were just accepted?! No, me, I meant me.
Not so long ago I posted a couple of sites where you could read Aleister Crowley for free, and threw in a UK documentary for chuckles. It’s a little over the top and sensationalised but still interesting.
Well, it seems it was part of a series called Masters of Darkness, and I’ll share the others with you now on the equally bizarre alchemist and mathematician John Dee, sadistic Marquis De Sade and ‘mad monk’ Rasputin (not an author, you got me, but come on, he’s fascinating). There’s a book about him I’d really like to read which apparently cuts through the myth, which I’m endlessly in favour of.
I’ve also added a documentary about Issei Sagawa, the student of avant-garde literature who murdered and cannibalised his girlfriend and, due to a technicality, served only fifteen months. Yep… He now makes his living writing and talking publicly about being a cannibal.
I missed an exhibition in London of John Dee’s library a year or two ago, I’m still annoyed about it.
John Dee
The Marquis De Sade (disclaimer: Andrea Dworkin talks a lot of tripe)
Rasputin
Issei Sagawa
Good day and a merry afternoon. You can purchase my Victorian set weird fiction horror type story here. There are weird drugs, cults and spooky things so enjoy!
Merry afternoon to you, or whatever time you exist in. I continued my experiment with mouth noises by talking about weird and interesting books I’ve read.
Everything mentioned:
Laura Lee Bahr, Angel Meat
Matt Payne, Robot God/Hybrid Brain
Andrew J Lambie, Carnival Of The Flesh
Junji Ito, Snow White
Bonjour! Here are a couple of videos I worked my little socks off for. The first is an expedition to find the places in A Curious Guide To London by Simon Leyland, including the possible real life inspiration for Miss Havisham.
The next is a reading of my bizarro fiction novella at the Big Green Book Shop with Chris Meekings hosted by award winning author Laura Lee Bahr. It was amazing and I hope you like it too.
I have returned!
I’ll just give a little personal update before looking up weird arty things to share. The first video is a vlog of my two weeks spent at home with Bill in Southend, Essex. The second is a reading (not live) of my occult science fiction horror short story.
If you ever wanted to learn how to make a Sidecar cocktail…ask Bill, not me. I’m also still reading my favourite stories each week here.
Our podcast, Bizart, is back. We discuss odd things, art things and anything else.
And we are back! I (Madeleine Swann) chat with fellow weirdo arty type Stephen Waring about odd stuff, art stuff and anything else.
Timeline:
0.23 – Twin Peaks Season 3
3.00 – The Brighton Fringe Festival
22.55 – Religious cults and social media hang ups
Good morning my little cups of fiery chai, I’ve been reading some very interesting books lately.
I’m drawn to the myths of ghosts, black magic, the Devil and other spooky things, but what I really love is clearing the fog of legend and finding what’s really underneath. To me the truth behind a haunting is infinitely more interesting than the initial stories, though I respect believers of the paranormal and would never make fun of them. Each to their own.
All three of these books take incidents or places that have been imbued with supernatural meaning and show us the ‘truth.’
1. Witchfinders by Malcolm Gaskill
The story of Matthew Hopkins, the self-titled ‘Witchfinder General,’ is quite close to my
heart as I live in Essex and his numerous victims were held in a castle not far from me. Witchfinders painstakingly recounts the journey he took through Essex and Suffolk, whipping the people into a frenzy of blame and fear, and on through the trials and executions themselves.
The concept of witch-hunting in the magical sense seems alien to us now but Malcolm Gaskill does a great job of explaining the world of magic people lived in and how the uncertainty of the Civil War affected them. The thorough research helped me to better understand what might have been going through the minds of each player, even Matthew Hopkins himself.
This is a fascinating tour through the most mythologised houses, hotels, hospitals and
even cities of America. Drawn to the ghosts, he strips back the stories and locates the factual accounts. If it sounds like he’s made them boring, trust me, he hasn’t.
One example is the famous Winchester Mystery House, long believed to have been created by a widow half mad with loss and guilt over the deaths of her husband and the victims of the gun he created, building endlessly to confuse any spirits seeking revenge. But, fantastically, the tale everyone including myself assumed to be fact isn’t, and this is only one of the little surprises in its pages.
This quote sums it up very well: “More than just simple urban legends and campfire tales, ghost stories reveal the contours of our anxieties, the nature of our collective fears and desires, the things we can’t talk about in any other way. The past we’re most afraid to speak aloud of in the bright light of day is the same past that tends to linger in the ghost stories we whisper in the dark.”
3. The Devils Of Loudun by Aldous Huxley
You might recognise the story of Grandier, the French priest whom women loved, 
men hated and burned as a witch after nuns became hysterical, from the Ken Russell film The Devils (1971). You may also recognise it’s author as the infamous psychonaut and writer of The Doors of Perception.
Where the two previous books are distantly fascinated and relatively dispassionate, Aldous Huxley’s philosophy and personality runs strongly throughout. Normally I wouldn’t like this, but he’s so well read and intelligent that it doesn’t matter.
Madeleine Swann 