The Undead | 
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🧟♀️🧟🧟♂️
@Blueberry
pickStill working through these stories, not that it's a chore, and finished E. F. Benson's "The Room in the Tower".
I had actual goosebumps and chills reading this story! Prophetic dreams of nightmare shades, prefiguring the final horror! Brrr! ? Edward Gorey could've had a field day illustrating this one! Benson was such a versatile writer. To have created both the light comedy of the Lucia books and his genuinely scary ghost tales is remarkable.
I'm a little under half way through through this book of vampire short stories, and noticing that books themselves play a prominent part in several of the tales. Clark Ashton Smith's "The End of the Story" has a beautifully described medieval monastic library containing a tantalisingly unfinished book which lures the protagonist into the coils of the undead. "The Tomb of Sarah" by F. G. Loring is drawn from ??
As I'm taking photos of pages, here's a library I'd like to visit! Mind you, Smith's shade-haunted French province of Averoigne may not be the safest place to linger with your nose in a book, unless it's a manual on exorcism! 🧟♀️
pickThe collection opens with Stoker's much-anthologised "Dracula's Guest", of which little need be said. It's a 'deleted scene', doesn't work in isolation, but that doesn't matter due to the novel being part of the English-speaking cultural psyche. 4?
Next up is Crawford's "For the Blood is the Life", a tale of avarice, murder, ghosts and sensually-charged blood-sucking. I liked the atmosphere of the framing narrative more than the main plot. 4?
Dead Can Dance's album "Within the Realm of a Dying Sun" seems to be an appropriate accompaniment to a reading of "The Undead". ☠?♂️??♀️
#booksandmusic
"You are afraid, Johann - you are afraid. Go home, Johann - Walpugis Nacht doesn't concern Englishmen."
- Bram Stoker, 'Dracula's Guest'
Jonathan "Pub Landlord" Harker ?
Funny thing - when I entered the ISBN for this book, my phone suggested a couple of words I possibly meant to type instead: precarious; perpituity. It struck me as peculiarly apposite that an existence of precarious perpituity should be associated with the undead, hovering, as they are, between immortality and the danger of a stake-and-garlic induced oblivion. What does it mean that I'm receiving such messages via my phone's software?
