Sinister Horror Quotes

And do I look like the kind of man that can be intimidated?" barked Uncle Vernon. "Well..." said Moody, pushing back his bowler hat to reveal his sinisterly revolving eye. Uncle Vernon lept backward in horror and collided painfully with a luggage trolley. "Yes, I'd have to say you do, Dursley.

The sinister, the terrible never deceive: the state in which they leave us is always one of enlightenment. And only this condition of vicious insight allows us a full grasp of the world, all things considered, just as a frigid melancholy grants us full possession of ourselves. We may hide from horror only in the heart of horror. (“The Medusa”)

Have a look around, my pretty, we are surrounded by Death in all forms – just the two of us are still alive –

Are you threatening me, sir?” he said, so loudly that passersby actually turned to stare. “Yes, I am,” said Mad-Eye, who seemed rather pleased that Uncle Vernon had grasped this fact so quickly. “And do I look like the kind of man who can be intimidated?” barked Uncle Vernon. “Well...” said Moody, pushing back his bowler hat to reveal his sinisterly revolving magical eye. Uncle Vernon leapt backward in horror and collided painfully with a luggage trolley. “Yes, I’d have to say you do, Dursley.

There's a queer streak in human natures. Men come back to places for secret reasons, for feelings they cannot resist.' More than men come back,” I said.

Rubber burned. Something sinister bore down on them. Darkness encircled the light thrown by the streetlamp. An engine roared. Tires squealed. Black metal jumped the curb.

I'll let you in on a secret. I don't drink coffee." I genuinely gasped in horror. "The devil you say. Java is the nectar of the gods. I don't know if I can be with a man who doesn't drink coffee." I knew there was something sinister about him. I had no idea it would be that bad.

I'm trained as an architect; writing is like architecture. In buildings, there are design motifs that occur again and again, that repeat -- patterns, curves. These motifs help us feel comfortable in a physical space. And the same works in writing, I've found. For me, the way words, punctuation and paragraphs fall on the page is important as well -- the graphic design of the language. That was why the words and thoughts of Estha and Rahel, the twins, were so playful on the page ... I was being creative with their design. Words were broken apart, and then sometimes fused together. "Later" became "Lay. Ter." "An owl" became "A Nowl." "Sour metal smell" became "sourmetal smell." Repetition I love, and used because it made me feel safe. Repeated words and phrases have a rocking feeling, like a lullaby. They help take away the shock of the plot -- death, lives destroyed or the horror of the settings -- a crazy, chaotic, emotional house, the sinister movie theater.

For all of us who love a lil’ horror with our smut.

Automatically, like all healthy, normal beings, I deny the existence of horror...

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.

True horror, you see, comes not from the savagery of the unexpected but from the corruption of everyday objects, spaces. To take a thing we see every day a thing we take for granted as normal, a child’s bedroom and transform it into something sinister untrustworthy is to undermine the very fabric of life.

great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror.

And as I walked by the shallow crystal stream I saw unwonted ripples tipped with yellow light, as if those placid waters were drawn on in resistless currents to strange oceans that are not in the world. Silent and sparkling, bright and baleful, those moon-cursed waters hurried I knew not whither; whilst from the embowered banks white lotos-blossoms fluttered one by one in the opiate night-wind and dropped despairingly into the stream, swirling away horribly under the arched, carven bridge, and staring back with the sinister resignation of calm, dead faces.

And while people claimed to be creeped out, their smiles suggested that none of this was truly scary. It was like going to see a horror movie with a big group of friends: it was fun to be frightened, but when you were part of a large, noisy group, you knew nothing sinister was going to happen.

I now saw plainly that this foul emanation could have no admixture or connection whatsoever with the clean air of the Libyan Desert, but must be essentially a thing vomited from sinister gulfs still lower down.

Let’s go back to Mr. Hernandez’s film literature class, back to Jaws. Mr. Hernandez pointed out that we never actually saw the shark until about eighty minutes into the film. Instead we heard horror stories, glimpsed its sinister fin; primed to be scared, so that when the shark made its grand debut, we saw everything we’d been taught to see, the merciless, blood-seeking Jaws. Before the cop pulled Philando over, he’d reported the man resembled a robbery suspect, commenting on his wide-set nose. By the time the cop stepped up to the window, he didn’t see Philando, he saw everything he thought he knew about wide noses, blackness, guns, added it all up to threat in his head. The problem is not who we are, the problem is what you think we are. The realities you cast on us; that Philando would be violent, that I’d ask for sex behind a dumpster.

Orin's special conscious horror, besides heights and the early morning, is roaches. There'd been parts of metro Boston near the Bay he'd refused to go to, as a child. Roaches give him the howling fantods. The parishes around N.O. had been having a spate or outbreak of a certain Latin-origin breed of sinister tropical flying roaches, that were small and timid but could fucking fly, and that kept being found swarming on New Orleans infants, at night, in their cribs, especially infants in like tenements or squalor, and that reportedly fed on the mucus in the babies' eyes, some special sort of optical-mucus — the stuff of fucking nightmares, mobile flying roaches that wanted to get at your eyes, as an infant — and were reportedly blinding them; parents'd come in in the ghastly A.M.-tenement light and find their infants blind, like a dozen blinded infants that last summer; and it was during this spate or nightmarish outbreak, plus July flooding that sent over a dozen nightmarish dead bodies from a hilltop graveyard sliding all gray-blue down the incline Orin and two teammates had their townhouse on, in suburban Chalmette, shedding limbs and innards all the way down the hillside's mud and one even one morning coming to rest against the post of their roadside mailbox, when Orin came out for the morning paper, that Orin had had his agent put out the trade feelers.

In the heart of our deepest fears and the shadowed corners of our darkest nightmares, there I weave my tales. Embracing the chill of horror, the whisper of the paranormal, and the dread of the dystopian, I create worlds where the sinister reigns supreme, where not every ending is happy, and yet, hope persists, a defiant ember in the engulfing darkness.

This, Vincent, is the culmination of your ambitions," Alvaro Ortega, Eternal Tides

Then, idly scratching his nose, he walks to the bookcase in the living room and stoops before a set of drab brown Victorian volumes gathering dust on the second shelf from the bottom. How amusing, he thinks, as he withdraws one of them-amusing that a key to dark and ancient rites should survive in such innocuous-looking form. A young fool like Freirs would probably refuse to believe it. Like the rest of his doomed kind, he'd probably expect such lore to be found only in ancient leather-bound tomes with gothic lettering and portentously sinister titles. He'd search for it in mysterious old trunks and private vaults, in the "restricted" sections of libraries, in intricately carved wood chests with secret compartments. But there are no real secrets, the Old One knows. Secrets are ultimately too hard to conceal. The keys to the rites that will transform the world are neither hidden nor rare nor expensive. They are available to anyone. You can find them on the paperback racks or in any second-hand bookshop.

Apropos of sleep, that sinister adventure of all our nights, we may say that men go to bed daily with an audacity that would be incomprehensible if we did not know that it is the result of ignorance of the danger." -Baudelairei

I can still see Herbert West under the sinister electric light as he injected his reanimating solution into the arm of the headless body. The scene I cannot describe--I should faint if I tried it, for there is madness in a room full of classified charnel things, with blood and lesser human debris almost ankle-deep on the slimy floor, and with hideous reptilian abnormalities sprouting, bubbling, and baking over a winking bluish-green spectre of dim flame in a far corner of black shadows. The

Ninety aeons ago, before even the gods had danced upon its pointed peak, that mountain had spoken with fire and roared with the voices of the inner thunders. Now it towered all silent and sinister, bearing on the hidden side that secret titan image whereof rumour told. And there were caves in that mountain, which might be empty and alone with elder darkness, or might—if legend spoke truly—hold horrors of a form not to be surmised.

When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. I was travelling in a parched and terrible valley under the moon, and afar I saw it protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may protrude from an ill-made grave. Fear spoke from the age-worn stones of this hoary survivor of the deluge, this great-grandmother of the eldest pyramid; and a viewless aura repelled me and bade me retreat from antique and sinister secrets that no man should see, and no man else had ever dared to see.

Stupendous carnage was painted on the canvas, A depiction of repulsion was executed around the structure. It revealed its dark emblem by painting its sinister Red. Three intertwined bloated eyes are encrusted together, awfully deformed - the horrendous stench of decay can be smelt from it, for it exudes a sulfurous aroma of rotting animals. A torn torso of a butchered rabbit laid on the eye sockets, with all its arms, legs, and head severed off. A sludge-like, bubbling, dripping fluid oozed from the abnormally large eyes, leaving the ground deserted to rust and becoming the midst of a terrible famine. Blood Gushes from the slashes of each hideous eye, gouging out gore from the torn skin, spluttering and erupting gasping cries as it struggles in its own twisted misery of giving birth, as it was preparing to give shape-shifting life to a black-glass body, horn-like entity, unlike any childbirth you have ever witnessed. Satanic was this creature, whose muscle mass was disintegrated. All of his blood was squeezed out, forlorn and cold to the touch. The thorns on his head were intertwined into horns. A serpent's nose and wolf-like fangs were all this child had, as he had no gift of sight or hearing, he had only the smell of terror as his power.

And is it to such insignificance, such pettiness, such vileness that a man could sink? Could a man change to such an extent? And does all this have any verisimilitude? All this has verisimilitude, all this can befall a man. The fiery youth of the present would recoil in horror were you to show him a portrait of himself in his old age. Take along with you, then, on setting out upon your way, as you emerge from the gentle years of youth into stern, coarsening manhood, take along with you all the humane impulses, abandon them not on the road; you will never retrieve them after! Sinister, fearsome is the old age that will come upon you farther along the way, and it never releases aught nor ever aught returns! The grave is more merciful than it; upon the grave will be inscribed: Here Lies a Man, but naught will you read upon the frigid, insensate features of inhuman old age.

One night, after they had made love, Pelletier got up naked and went looking among his books for a novel by Archimboldi. After hesitating for a moment he decided on The leather mask, thinking that with some luck Vanessa might read it as a horror novel, might be attracted by the sinister side of the book. She was surprised at first by the gift, then touched, since she was used to her clients giving her clothes or shoes or lingerie. Really, she was very happy with it, especially when Pelletier explained who Archimboldi was and the role the German writer played in his life. "It's as if you were giving me a part of you", said Vanessa. The remark left Pelletier a bit confused, since in a way it was perfectly true, Archimboldi was by now a part of him, the author belonged to him insofar as Pelletier had, a long with few others, instituted a new reading of the German, a reading that would endure, a reading as ambitious as Archimboldi's writing, and this reading would keep pace with Archimboldi's writing for a long time, until the reading was exhausted or until Archimboldi's writing - the capacity of Archimboldian oeuvre to spark emotions and revelations - was exhausted (but he didn't believe that would happen), though in another way it wasn't true, because sometimes, especially since he and Espinoza had given up their trips to London and stopped seeing Liz Norton, Archimboldi's work, his novels and stories, that is, seemed completely foreign, a shapeless and mysterious verbal mass, something that appeared and disappeared capriciously, literally a pretext, a false door, a murderer's alias, a hotel bathtub full of amniotic liquid, in which he, Jean-Claude Pelletier, would end up committing suicide for no reason, gratuitously, in bewilderment, just because.

It was not difficult to find. One floor down, pandemonium reigned. Somebody (and Harry had a very shrewd idea who) had set off what seemed to be an enormous crate of enchanted fireworks. Dragons comprised entirely of green and gold sparks were soaring up and down the corridors, emitting loud fiery blasts and bangs as they went; shocking-pink Catherine wheels five feet in diameter were whizzing lethally through the air like so many flying saucers; rockets with long tails of brilliant silver stars were ricocheting off the walls; sparklers were writing swear words in midair of their own accord; firecrackers were exploding like mines everywhere Harry looked, and instead of burning themselves out, fading from sight or fizzling to a halt, these pyrotechnical miracles seemed to be gaining in energy and momentum the longer he watched. Filch and Umbridge were standing, apparently transfixed in horror, halfway down the stairs. As Harry watched, one of the larger Catherine wheels seemed to decide that what it needed was more room to manoeuvre; it whirled towards Umbridge and Filch with a sinister ‘wheeeeeeeeee’. They both yelled with fright and ducked, and it soared straight out of the window behind them and off across the grounds. Meanwhile, several of the dragons and a large purple bat that was smoking ominously took advantage of the open door at the end of the corridor to escape towards the second floor. ‘Hurry, Filch, hurry!’ shrieked Umbridge, ‘they’ll be all over the school unless we do something – Stupefy!’ A jet of red light shot out of the end of her wand and hit one of the rockets. Instead of freezing in midair, it exploded with such force that it blasted a hole in a painting of a soppy-looking witch in the middle of a meadow; she ran for it just in time, reappearing seconds

But the bed I made up for myself was sufficiently uncomfortable to give me a wakeful night, and I thought a good deal of what the unlucky Dutchman had told me.I was not so much puzzled by Blanche Stroeve’s action, for I saw in that merely the result of a physical appeal. I do not suppose she had ever really cared for her husband, and what I had taken for love was no more than the feminine response to caresses and comfort which in the minds of most women passes for it. It is a passive feeling capable of being roused for any object, as the vine can grow on any tree; and the wisdom of the world recognizes its strength when it urges a girl to marry the man who wants her with the assurance that love will follow. It is an emotion made up of the satisfaction in security, pride of property, the pleasure of being desired, the gratification of a household, and it is only by an amiable vanity that women ascribe to its spiritual value. It is an emotion which is defenceless against passion. I suspected that Blanche Stroeve's violent dislike of Strickland had in it from the beginning a vague element of sexual attraction. Who am I that I should seek to unravel the mysterious intricacies of sex? Perhaps Stroeve's passion excited without satisfying that part of her nature, and she hated Strickland because she felt in him the power to give her what she needed.I think she was quite sincere when she struggled against her husband's desire to bring him into the studio; I think she was frightened of him, though she knew not why; and I remembered how she had foreseen disaster. I think in some curious way the horror which she felt for him was a transference of the horror which she felt for herself because he so strangely troubled her. His appearance was wild and uncouth; there was aloofiness in his eyes and sensuality in his mouth; he was big and strong; he gave the impression of untamed passion; and perhaps she felt in him, too, that sinister element which had made me think of those wild beings of the world's early history when matter, retaining its early connection with the earth, seemed to possess yet a spirit of its own. lf he affected her at all. it was inevitable that she should love or hate him. She hated him. And then I fancy that the daily intimacy with the sick man moved her strangely. She raised his head to give him food, and it was heavy against her hand; when she had fed him she wiped his sensual mouth and his red beard.She washed his limbs; they were covered with thick hair; and when she dried his hands, even in his weakness they were strong and sinewy. His fingers were long; they were the capable, fashioning fingers of the artist; and I know not what troubling thoughts they excited in her. He slept very quietly, without movement, so that he might have been dead, and he was like some wild creature of the woods, resting after a long chase; and she wondered what fancies passed through his dreams. Did he dream of the nymph flying through the woods of Greece with the satyr in hot pursuit? She fled, swift of foot and desperate, but he gained on her step by step, till she felt his hot breath on her neck; and still she fled silently. and silently he pursued, and when at last he seized her was it terror that thrilled her heart or was it ecstasy? Blanche Stroeve was in the cruel grip of appetite. Perhaps she hated Strickland still, but she hungered for him, and everything that had made up her life till then became of no account. She ceased to be a woman, complex, kind, and petulant, considerate and thoughtless; she was a Maenad. She was desire.

Built from the local blackwood, it had a sinister, dark appearance. Its windows were tall and narrow and set with coal-coloured glass that all but shut out the light.

There is no curse hanging over you. You may be a monster, but not a monster of the lower world. You do not need to writhe in agony or cry out in pain. There is no tribulation in store for you, no rock of Sisyphus, no one is going to offer you a chalice only to snatch it from your lips at the last moment, there is no crow with sinister designs on your eyeballs, no vulture has been assigned the indigestible chore of tucking into your liver morning, noon, and night. You do not have to grovel before your judges, begging for mercy, imploring their pity. No one is condemning you, and you have committed no offense. No one looks at you and then averts their gaze in horror.

Hobtala Echbasaca! Misery’s Personal Entertainer! The Bringer of Chaos and Sorrow! The Director of Torment! Hated by Heaven. Traitor to Allmanity. Wanted dead by Hell! Sought by all, caught by none! [laughs sinisterly] I had to turn back to my true form before I lost my commonsense. If only they knew the truth. If only their eyes could see through the veil of lies: ME, haha!

Daniel wanted to laugh. They all looked both sinister and ridiculous, like a horror-film family of vampires waiting for prey.

Through my departed spirituality that once enlightened me, I pour out the forbidden magic that the Divine has prohibited. I, lonesome and inky with disfigured knowledge, hold firmly to the influence of Lovecraft & Poe. I abide for the blackness, for I am the rabbit's disciple of sinister terror, beautiful dreamscapes, and bizarre phenomena.

Let’s go back to Mr. Hernandez’s film literature class, back to Jaws. Mr. Hernandez pointed out that we never actually saw the shark until about eighty minutes into the film. Instead we heard horror stories, glimpsed its sinister fin; primed to be scared, so that when the shark made its grand debut, we saw everything we’d been taught to see, the merciless, blood-seeking Jaws. Before the cop pulled Philando over, he’d reported the man resembled a robbery suspect, commenting on his wide-set nose. By the time the cop stepped up to the window, he didn’t see Philando, he saw everything he thought he knew about wide noses, blackness, guns, added it all up to threat in his head. The problem is not who we are, the problem is what you think we are.

The similarities in the physiological characteristics of Leopardi and Nietzsche are especially remarkable. The same sensitivity toward weather and seasons, toward place and environment, are found in both. Leopardi feels the slightest change in the thermometer and barometer. He could create only during the summer; he traveled about, always looking for the most suitable location for his creative activity. Nietzsche expresses himself about such peculiarities of his nature in the following manner: “Now after long practice, when I observe the effects of climatic and meteorological nature upon myself, as upon a very delicate and reliable instrument, and after a short journey, perhaps from Turin to Milan, calculate the change in the degree of humidity calculated physiologically in myself, then I look with horror at the sinister fact that my life until the last ten years, the most dangerous years, has always been spent in locations treacherous and absolutely forbidden to me. Naumburg, Schulpforta, Thuringia, in fact, Bonn, Liepzig, Basel, Venice, — all of them places of misfortune for my physiology. ...” Connected with this unusual sensitivity in Leopardi as well as in Nietzsche, is a contempt for all altruistic feelings. Both of them had to overcome this in order to be able to tolerate mankind. From Nietzsche's own words one can see that his shyness in presence of strong impressions, of attractions which demand too much of his sensitivity, fill him with suspicion toward selfless impulses.

In 1948, the New Yorker published a short story by a then-unknown writer. The tale, about an ordinary town with a sinister secret, so outraged readers that the magazine reported receiving more negative mail than ever before, including many subscription cancellations. That story was “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, which went on to become one of the most famous short stories in American literature.

Terror can be more horrible in calm than in storm. Stillness can be much more sinister than noise.

The very pits of hell couldn’t ever exhibit the horror that greeted me. Rivers of blood couldn’t ever replicate such a gory scene. And never in my own nightmares could I imagine something so sinister. Kloe

When James Wan is out there the horror is real, no doubt about that Check out for own proof if you have guts Sinister 1,2... Insidious 1,2...

We all have some idiot ancestor. All of us, at some point in our lives, discover the trace, the flickering vestige of our dimmest ancestor, and upon gazing at the elusive visage we realize, with astonishment, incredulity, horror, that we’re staring at our own face winking and grinning at us from the bottom of a pit. This exercise tends to be depressing and wounding to our self-esteem, but it can also be extremely salutary. My idiot ancestor was called Bolano (Bolanus) and he appears in the first book of Horace’s Satires, IX, in which Bolano accosts the poet as he walks along the Via Sacra. Says Horace: “Suddenly a fellow whom I knew only by name dashed up and seized me by the hand. ‘My dear chap,’ he said ‘how are things?’ ‘Quite nicely at the moment thanks,’ I said. ‘Well, all the best!’ He remained in pursuit, so I nipped in quickly: ‘Was there something else?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You should get to know me. I’m an intellectual.’ ‘Good for you!’ I said.” What follows is a tiresome stroll for Horace, since he can’t shake Bolano, who ceaselessly offers advice, praising his own work and even his talent for singing. When Horace asks if he has a mother or family to care for him, Bolano answers that he’s buried them all and he’s alone in the world. Lucky for them, thinks Horace. And he says: “That leaves me. So finish me off! A sinister doom is approaching which an old Sabine fortune-teller foresaw when I was a boy.” The walk, nevertheless, continues. Bolano then confesses that’s he’s out on bail and must appear in court, and he asks Horace to lend him a hand. Horace, of course, refuses. Then a third person appears and Horace tries in vain to slip away. It must be added, in Bolano’s defense, that this new character, Aristius Fuscus, a dandy of the era, is just as much an idiot as Bolano and actually is Horace’s friend. In the end, it’s Aristius Fuscus who accompanies Bolano to his appointment with the law. There’s no moral to this story. We all have an idiot ancestor. He’s a specter, but he’s also our brother, and he lives deep inside each of us under different names that express our degree of implication in the crime: fear, ridicule, indifference, blindness, cruelty.

Mr. Hernandez pointed out that we never actually saw the shark until about eighty minutes into the film. Instead we heard horror stories, glimpsed its sinister fin; primed to be scared, so that when the shark made its grand debut, we saw everything we’d been taught to see, the merciless, blood-seeking Jaws. Before the cop pulled Philando over, he’d reported the man resembled a robbery suspect, commenting on his wide-set nose. By the time the cop stepped up to the window, he didn’t see Philando, he saw everything he thought he knew about wide noses, blackness, guns, added it all up to threat in his head. The problem is not who we are, the problem is what you think we are.

Horseman is the haunting sequel to the 1820 novel The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving and takes place two decades after the events that unfolded in the original. We are introduced to 14-year-old trans boy Bente “Ben” Van Brunt, who has been raised by his idiosyncratic grandparents - lively Brom “Bones” Van Brunt and prim Kristina Van Tassel - in the small town of Sleepy Hollow, New York, where gossip and rumour run rife and people are exceedingly closed-minded. He has lived with them on their farm ever since he was orphaned when his parents, Bendix and Fenna, died in suspicious and enigmatic circumstances. Ben and his only friend, Sander, head into the woodland one Autumn day to play a game known as Sleepy Hollow Boys, but they are both a little startled when they witness a group of men they recognise from the village discussing the headless, handless body of a local boy that has just been found. But this isn't the end; it is only the beginning. From that moment on, Ben feels an otherworldly presence following him wherever he ventures, and one day while scanning his grandfather’s fields he catches a fleeting glimpse of a weird creature seemingly sucking blood from a victim. An evil of an altogether different nature. But Ben knows this is not the elusive Horseman who has been the primary focus of folkloric tales in the area for many years because he can both feel and hear his presence. However, unlike others who fear the Headless Horseman, Ben can hear whispers in the woods at the end of a forbidden path, and he has visions of the Horseman who says he is there to protect him. Ben soon discovers connections between the recent murders and the death of his parents and realises he has been shaded from the truth about them his whole life. Thus begins a journey to unravel the mystery and establish his identity in the process. This is an enthralling and compulsively readable piece of horror fiction building on Irvings’ solid ground. Evoking such feelings as horror, terror, dread and claustrophobic oppressiveness, this tale invites you to immerse yourself in its sinister, creepy and disturbing narrative. The staggering beauty of the remote village location is juxtaposed with the darkness of the demons and devilish spirits that lurk there, and the village residents aren't exactly welcoming to outsiders or accepting of anyone different from their norm. What I love the most is that it is subtle and full of nuance, instead of the usual cheap thrills with which the genre is often pervaded, meaning the feeling of sheer panic creeps up on you when you least expect, and you come to the sudden realisation that the story has managed to get under your skin, into your psyche and even into your dreams (or should that be nightmares?) Published at a time when the nights are closing in and the light diminishes ever more rapidly, not to mention with Halloween around the corner, this is the perfect autumnal read for the spooky season full of both supernatural and real-world horrors. It begins innocuously enough to lull you into a false sense of security but soon becomes bleak and hauntingly atmospheric as well as frightening before descending into true nightmare-inducing territory. A chilling and eerie romp, and a story full of superstition, secrets, folklore and old wives’ tales and with messages about love, loss, belonging, family, grief, being unapologetically you and becoming more accepting and tolerant of those who are different. Highly recommended.

Few buildings evoke the sinister horror of 1950s municipal architecture more strikingly than the flat roof pub. Thrown up in their thousands wherever the working class were being rehoused, it’s hard to imagine that the architects were not secret teetotallers looking to make the whole pub experience as grim as possible. How else do you explain the cheap portal frame construction, the equally cheap uninsulated concrete slabs, and the flat roof with just enough parapet to ensure that damaging puddles formed with the lightest drizzle.

The Stormcrow City is just a big meat grinder; People get in on one end, and comes out on another. We're just turning the handle.