Search Results for: josh reynolds nightmare men

The Nightmare Men: “The Ghost-Seer”

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Aylmer Vance, agent of the enigmatic Ghost Circle, made his first appearance on the nightmare stage in 1914. The creation of husband-and-wife writing team Alice and Claude Askew, Vance appeared in eight consecutive issues of The Weekly Tale-Teller between July and August. The stories-“The Invader”, “The Stranger”, “Lady Green-Sleeves”, “The Fire Unquenchable”, “The Vampire”, “The Boy of Blackstock”, “The Indissoluble Bond” and “The Fear”-ranged from grotesque to gentle, and are, by and large, of a slower pace than those featuring…

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The Nightmare Men: “The Ghost-Finder”

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William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki outlived his creator with a tenacity that Hodgson, a bantam rooster of a man, would have appreciated. Thomas Carnacki, resident of 472 Cheyne Walk, London, first appeared in a series of five stories (“Gateway of the Monster”, “The House Among the Laurels”, “The Whistling Room”, “The Horse of the Invisible”, and “The Searcher of the End House”) in The Idler Magazine in the January through April, as well as June, issues of 1910. But despite Hodgson’s…

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The Nightmare Men: “The Diehard”

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Shiela Crerar, psychic investigator and adventuress, first burst into public view in the pages of The Blue Magazine in 1920 with “The Eyes of Doom”. The obscure creation of the intriguingly enigmatic Ella Scrymsour, Crerar battled ghosts, werewolves and gibbering ghouls of all types from May of 1920 to October of that same year, appearing in a grand total of six stories which vanished into the literary ether when The Blue Magazine folded not long after. Luckily for aficionados of…

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The Nightmare Men: “Physician Extraordinary”

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‘Rich by accident and a doctor by choice, John Silence took only those cases which interested him.’ The above is from “A Psychical Invasion” (1908), the first of Algernon Blackwood’s stories to feature Dr. John Silence, the ‘psychic doctor’.  Blackwood chronicled six of Silence’s cases, though only five appear in the initial collection, John Silence (containing “A Psychical Invasion”, “Ancient Sorceries”, “The Nemesis of Fire”, “Secret Worship”, and “The Camp of the Dog”; “A Victim of Higher Space”, the sixth…

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The Nightmare Men: “A Doctor, Darkly”

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It’s always best to begin at the start, to quote no one in particular. We’ll start with the introductions: my name is Josh Reynolds and I wanted to be a detective when I grew up…no, not just a detective. I wanted to be an occult detective. I wanted to be Donald Pleasance hunting down the Horse of the Invisible, or Peter Cushing making a cross out of candlesticks and shoving them right all up in Christopher Lee’s fang-y mug. I…

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The Ash-Tree Anthologies, edited by Barbara Roden and Christopher Roden

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Covers by Jason Van Hollander Ash-Tree Press was a highly respected small press publisher of ghostly fiction. It was founded in Ashcroft, British Columbia, in 1994 by Christopher and Barbara Roden, and over the next 20 years produced 160+ collections, anthologies and novels of supernatural fiction, mostly reprints. They published volumes by M. R. James, H. R. Wakefield, A. M. Burrage, David G. Rowlands, Richard Marsh, Robert W. Chambers, E. F. Benson, Margery Lawrence, Marjorie Bowen, Alice Askew and Claude…

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John DeNardo on the Best Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Books for December

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The Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, one of my favorite genre websites, essentially shut down on December 16th of this year, firing all freelancers and halting production of new content. They’ve left older content up, thankfully, so our many links to articles by Jeff Somers, Joel Cunningham, and others still work (for now). Like Penguin’s much-missed Unbound Worlds (formerly Suvudu), the B&N Sci-Fi Blog was an inventive and far-ranging publisher-funded genre site that never found a business model, or managed to consistently…

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The Stark House Algernon Blackwood, edited by Mike Ashley

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I’ve been enjoying the attractive and affordable Stark House reprints of the work of Algernon Blackwood, much of which has been out of print for many decades. If I’ve counted correctly (and no guarantee of that) there have been ten volumes so far, collecting some dozen novels and six collections, all released under their Supernatural Classics banner in handsome trade paperbacks. Two more have arrived recently(ish), a slender collection titled The Face of the Earth and Other Imaginings, and an omnibus…

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A Spooky Trip Back to the Golden Age of Weird: The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, by Seabury Quinn

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Seabury Quinn’s occult detective Jules de Grandin first appeared in Weird Tales in 1925 and, in over 90 stories published over the next 26 years, he squared off against ghosts, werewolves, satanists, serial killers, and more sinister things. His adventures were among the most popular ever published in that venerable old pulp, surpassing even the legendary exploits of Robert E. Howard’s Conan and H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Publishers’s Weekly had this to say about the first installment of The Complete…

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The Late October Fantasy Magazine Rack

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There’s a new face in the crowd this week — Luna Station Quarterly, a speculative fiction journal that showcases emerging women authors. I’ve included issue #31 in the mix above; the magazine is now in its 8th year, so it’s high time we paid attention. Here’s the complete list of magazines that won my attention in late October (links will bring you to magazine websites). Analog Science Fiction & Fact — fiction by BG writer Bill Johnson (“Mama Told Me Not to Come,” BG4),…

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