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The Mystery Writers of America have revealed the nominees for the 2016 Edgar Awards. The annual prize, named after horror writer Edgar Allan Poe, awarded to the best authors in the mystery genre since 1945.
According to the press release, the winners will be announced at the 70th gala which will be held in New York City on Apr. 28. We’ve posted the full list of nominated titles below.
BEST NOVEL
The Strangler Vine by M.J. Carter
The Lady From Zagreb by Philip Kerr
Life or Death by Michael Robotham
Let Me Die in His Footsteps by Lori Roy
Canary by Duane Swierczynski
Night Life by David C. Taylor
BEST FIRST NOVEL BY AN AMERICAN AUTHOR
Past Crimes by Glen Erik Hamilton
Where All Light Tends to Go by David Joy
Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Unbecoming by Rebecca Scherm
BEST PAPERBACK ORIGINAL
The Long and Faraway Gone by Lou Berney
The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter by Malcolm Mackay
What She Knew by Gilly Macmillan
Woman with a Blue Pencil by Gordon McAlpine
Gun Street Girl by Adrian McKinty
The Daughter by Jane Shemilt
BEST FACT CRIME
Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot that Avenged the American Genocide by Eric Bogosian
Where The Bodies Were Buried: Whitey Bulger and the World That Made Him by T.J. English
Whipping Boy: The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year-Old Bully by Allen Kurzweil
Forensics: What Bugs, Burns, Prints, DNA and More Tell Us About Crime by Val McDermid
American Pain: How a Young Felon and his Ring of Doctors Unleashed America’s Deadliest Drug Epidemic by John Temple
BEST CRITICAL/BIOGRAPHICAL
The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards
The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue by Frederick Forsyth
Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald by Suzanne Marrs and Tom Nolan
Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming’sJamaica by Matthew Parker
The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett by Nathan Ward
BEST SHORT STORY
“The Little Men” – Mysterious Bookshop by Megan Abbott
“On Borrowed Time” – Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine by Mat Coward
“The Saturday Night Before Easter Sunday” – Providence Noir by Peter Farrelly
“Family Treasures” – Let Me Tell You by Shirley Jackson
“Obits” – Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King
“Every Seven Years” – Mysterious Bookshop by Denise Mina
BEST JUVENILE
Catch You Later, Traitor by Avi
If You Find This by Matthew Baker
Curiosity House: The Shrunken Head by Lauren Oliver & H.C.Chester
Blackthorn Key by Kevin Sands
Footer Davis Probably is Crazy by Susan Vaught
BEST YOUNG ADULT
Endangered by Lamar Giles
A Madness So Discreet by Mindy McGinnis
The Sin Eater’s Daughter by Melinda Salisbury
The Walls Around Us by Nova Ren Suma
Ask the Dark by Henry Turner
BEST TELEVISION EPISODE TELEPLAY
“Episode 7,” – Broadchurch, Teleplay by Chris Chibnall
“Gently with the Women” – George Gently, Teleplay by Peter Flannery
“Elise – The Final Mystery” – Foyle’s War, Teleplay by Anthony Horowitz
“Terra Incognita” – Person of Interest, Teleplay by Erik Mountain and Melissa Scrivner Love
“The Beating of her Wings” – Ripper Street, Teleplay by Richard Warlow
ROBERT L. FISH MEMORIAL AWARD
“Chung Ling Soo’s Greatest Trick” – Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine by Russell W. Johnson (Dell Magazines)
GRAND MASTER
Walter Mosley
RAVEN AWARDS
Margaret Kinsman
Sisters in Crime
ELLERY QUEEN AWARD
Janet Rudolph, Founder of Mystery Readers International
THE SIMON & SCHUSTER – MARY HIGGINS CLARK AWARD
A Woman Unknown by Frances Brody
Masque of a Murderer by Suzanne Calkins
Night Night, Sleep Tight by Hallie Ephron
The Child Garden by Catriona McPherson
Little Pretty Things by Lori Rader-Day
The Mystery Writers of America have revealed the 2015 Edgar Award winners. According to the press release, the announcements were made at the organization’s 69th gala banquet.
This annual prize, named after beloved writer Edgar Allan Poe, was established in 1945 to honor the best authors within the mystery genre. Below, we’ve posted the full list of winners.
2015 Edgar Award Winners
Best Novel: Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King
Best First Novel by an American Author: Dry Bones in the Valley by Tom Bouman
Best Paperback Original: The Secret History of Las Vegas by Chris Abani
Best Fact Crime: Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood by William Mann
Best Critical/Biographical: Poe-Land: The Hallowed Haunts of Edgar Allan Poe by J.W. Ocker
Best Short Story: “What Do You Do?” (from The Rogues Short Story Collection) by Gillian Flynn
Best Juvenile: Greenglass House by Kate Milford
Best Young Adult: The Art of Secrets by James Klise
Best Television Episode Teleplay: “Episode 1″ (from the Happy Valley teleplay) by Sally Wainwright
Simon & Schuster-Mary Higgins Clark Award: The Stranger You Know by Jane Casey
Vintage Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, announced plans for a Short Story Month celebration.
For every day throughout May, the team will digitally release a new Vintage Short fiction piece. These eBooks will be priced at $0.99 each.
According to the press release, the 31 stories come from a wide array of authors including Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edgar Allan Poe, and Langston Hughes. The roster also includes five original pieces from writers “Alexander McCall Smith, Carrie Brown, Hari Kunzru, Patricio Pron, and the first-time U.S. publication of an original Maeve Binchy story.” Follow this link to see the full Vintage Shorts calendar.
The Hobbit actorRichard Armitage serves as the narrator for the Classic Love Poems audiobook. BuzzFeed reports that this 22-minute long compilation features 15 different pieces written by William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and more.
Francesco Francavilla is an Italian comic-book artist who’s fame has skyrocketed the last 5 years. He’d been working in the independent comics scene since the mid-2000’s on projects like The Black Coat, and Sorrow. Francavilla’s first high-profile project came in 2008 when he collaborated with Matt Wagner on a new Zorro series for Dynamite Entertainment. From there he got to infuse his classic pulp style art on Marvel’s Black Panther, and Scott Snyder’s first Batman story arc in Detective Comics.
In 2012 Francavilla introduced his own noir vigilante, The Black Beetle, to the world in the pages of Dark Horse Presents. Since then, 2 volumes of the critically acclaimed series have been published(No Way Out, 2013 & Necrologue, 2014).
Most of Francesco Francavilla’s recent work has been focused on the mega-hit Afterlife with Archie, which gives readers a more mature, horror take on those classic Riverdale characters. He also continues to work on various personal, and professional illustration projects, including some exclusive movie posters for Mondo.
Francavilla is frequently updating his blog with new art, so if you like what you see click here for more!
For more comics related art, you can follow me on my websitecomicstavern.com- Andy Yates
The executives behind the Scribando website supports this global men’s health movement by encouraging writers to take part. The company has created a special sheet of cut-out moustaches.
The authors who inspired this project include The Jungle Book novelist Rudyard Kipling, The Glass Menagerie playwright Tennessee Williams, Ripostes poet Ezra Pound, Sherlock Holmes series author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and The Raven writer Edgar Allan Poe. Follow this link to download the sheet and pose as the writer of your choice.
The Grolier Club is hosting an exhibit focused on Edgar Allan Poe called “Evermore: The Persistence of Poe.” Susan Jaffe Tane and Gabriel Mckee served as the curators.
Visitors will see manuscripts, letters, first-edition books, and other items. The closing date has been scheduled for November 22nd.
Here’s more about this display: “Highlights of the exhibit include several recently discovered items never before shown in a public exhibition. Most notable is the only known manuscript copy of The Conqueror Worm, generally regarded as one of Poe’s best and bleakest poems. This copy was thought lost until its rediscovery in 2013.”
Edgar Allan Poe died 165 years ago today in the early morning of 7 October 1849. Only a few details of the illness that extinguished his “bright but unsteady light” are known because his physician, Dr. John Joseph Moran, used the illness to promote his own celebrity and in the process denied posterity an accurate clinical description. One of his later accounts, one summarized by Charles Scarlett, Jr. in the Maryland Historical Magazine (1978; 73: 360-75) came to my attention shortly after returning to Baltimore after 14 years at the Dallas VA Hospital in 1988. I was so taken by Moran’s fascinating and detailed description of Poe’s final days, I decided to use it as the subject of a clinical conference that has long been my favorite – the Clinical Pathologic Case Conference (CPC) Conference. This would prove to be the first of an ongoing series of historical CPCs devoted to the likes of Alexander, Columbus, Mozart and Lenin, stretching over two decades and spawning too-numerous-to-count articles in the international press, scores of manuscripts published in medical journals, and two books.
The clinicopathological conference is a standard medical conference designed to teach physicians and physicians-in-training basic medical concepts and clinical problem-solving techniques. It is a case-based exercise, in which the featured speaker and the audience struggle together to diagnose a particularly challenging illness of some patient using only the information included in a clinical summary prepared especially for the conference. That clinical summary, distributed well in advance of the conference, typically contains all of the medical information pertaining to the case in question, except for the definitive, diagnostic test result. That result, known only to the conference organizers, is revealed at the very end of the conference as a validation or repudiation of the presenter’s conclusions. To my knowledge, our “Poe Historical CPC” was the first to use an historical, rather than a current, patient as the subject of the conference.
Illustration for Edgar Allan Poe’s story “Descent into the Maelstrom” by Harry Clarke (1889-1931), published in 1919. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
In 1995, during this first Historical CPC at the University of Maryland, Dr. R. Michael Benitez concluded that Poe died of rabies resulting from an unrecorded and most likely unrecognized animal exposure prior to his hospitalization in Baltimore. His diagnosis became a media sensation covered in venues as diverse as Science magazine and the answer to the final Jeopardy question of the TV show of the same name. Benitez based his diagnosis on evidence of autonomic instability (dilating and contracting pupils and an irregular pulse which alternated between rapid and slow), fluctuating delirium, and hydrophobia (suggested by Poe’s adamant refusal of alcohol and difficulty swallowing water) included in Moran’s later descriptions of the terminal illness.
Rabies, in fact, has much in common with Moran’s later description of Poe’s final illness. It is a viral encephalitis (i.e., an infection of the brain) marked by acute onset of confusion, hallucinations, combativeness, muscle spasms and seizures, all of which tend to wax and wane during the course of the illness. Autonomic instability marked by alternating tachycardia (racing pulse) and bradycardia (slow pulse), profuse sweating, lacrymation, and salivation are also characteristic. The infection is virtually always fatal, with a median survival time after the onset of symptoms of four days. Poe died four days after being admitted to the hospital.
Moran gave no such indication of autonomic instability or hydrophobia in the letter he wrote to Mrs. Clemm a month after her son-in-law’s death. Only decades later, most likely relying on memory alone, does he mention a “very low pulse” and that his famous patient’s “pulse which had been as low as fifty was rising rapidly, though still feeble and variable.”
Many diagnoses have since been offered to explain Poe’s death. The earliest and most persistent has been that of alcohol-induced delirium tremens. Moran’s later case summary, one almost certainly written to satisfy his public’s appetite for ever more moving and ironic details of his patient’s final hours, has generated several more. These include homicide, carbon monoxide poisoning, suicide, syphilis, and mercury intoxication, reflecting more an unwillingness on the part of the proposers to accept an ordinary disease as the cause of Poe’s death than any convincing clinical evidence of such disorders.
Given numerous well-documented instances of Poe’s refractory alcohol abuse and its adverse effects on his physical and mental health prior to his departure from Richmond in late September of 1849, and the nature of the illness described by Moran in his letter of 15 November 1849 to Poe’s mother-in-law, one need look no further than delirium tremens as an explanation for his death. Whether his last bout with alcohol was the result of “cooping,” his own inability to control the craving that had for so many years driven him to drink, or a second (successful) attempt at suicide will never be known. However, if one ignores Moran’s later expanded description of Poe’s final illness, which deviates so spectacularly from his initial description in his letter to Maria Clemm a month after his patient’s death, neither rabies, homicide, mercury intoxication, nor, for that matter, any of the myriad other explanations proposed in the century and a half since Poe’s death, offers a better fit than delirium tremens.
Headline image credit: A photograph (taken by C.T. Tatman in 1904) of a daguerreotype (taken by Edwin H. Manchester in 1848) of Edgar Allan Poe. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
A new video on the “Epic Rap Battles of History” YouTube channel pits two horror masters against one another: The Shining author Stephen King vs. The Raven poet Edgar Allan Poe. In your opinion, who’s the winner?
ComedianZach Sherwin plays King and writerGeorge Watsky plays Poe. Both Sherwin and Watsky contributed to writing the rap song itself along with two of the web series creators, Nice Peter and epicLLOYD. Which authors would you nominate to appear in future rap battles?
The Edgar Allan Poe Foundation of Boston plans to reveal a statue of Poe in the city on October 05, 2014. This Stefanie Rocknak statue, made of clay and cast in bronze, will be installed at the intersection of Boylston Street and Charles Street South in what’s known as “Poe Square.”
According to Boston Magazine, Rocknak “beat out a pool of hundreds of other interested artists that were vying for the chance to create a memorial for the author.” Poe fans can see photos of the work-in-progress piece on the foundation’s Facebook page.
Here’s more from The Huffington Post: “The piece features the writer holding an open briefcase with a large raven beside him. A rear view reveals papers and a heart spilling out of the case. Poe, perhaps best known for his poem ‘The Raven,’ was born in Boston and later published his first book of poems and most famous short story, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ there, according to the foundation.”
The Poe Museum hopes to raise $60,000 to preserve a collection of illustrations inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s beloved poem, “The Raven.” The money will also be used to create and publish a coffee table-style book.
According to The Huffington Post, artist James Carling created these art pieces 130 years ago. We’ve embedded a video about the project above. Here’s more from the Kickstarter page:
“The amount of conservation will vary from piece to piece. They will be professionally photographed and placed into a gallery frame for inclusion in a traveling exhibition. A large part of the money will be used to prepare and publish the book which will contain all 43 original illustrations. The small staff of the museum will also be working on writing all 43 catalog entries for inclusion in the book.”
Between Edgar Allan Poe’s invention of the detective story with The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841 and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes story A Study in Scarlet in 1887, chance and coincidence played a large part in crime fiction. Nevertheless, Conan Doyle resolved that his detective would solve his cases using reason. He modeled Holmes on Poe’s Dupin and made Sherlock Holmes a man of science and an innovator of forensic methods. Holmes is so much at the forefront of detection that he has authored several monographs on crime-solving techniques. In most cases the well-read Conan Doyle has Holmes use methods years before the official police forces in both Britain and America get around to them. The result was 60 stories in which logic, deduction, and science dominate the scene.
FINGERPRINTS
Sherlock Holmes was quick to realize the value of fingerprint evidence. The first case in which fingerprints are mentioned is The Sign of Four, published in 1890, and he’s still using them 36 years later in the 55th story, The Three Gables (1926). Scotland Yard did not begin to use fingerprints until 1901.
It is interesting to note that Conan Doyle chose to have Holmes use fingerprints but not bertillonage (also called anthropometry), the system of identification by measuring twelve characteristics of the body. That system was originated by Alphonse Bertillon in Paris. The two methods competed for forensic ascendancy for many years. The astute Conan Doyle picked the eventual winner.
TYPEWRITTEN DOCUMENTS
As the author of a monograph entitled “The Typewriter and its Relation to Crime,” Holmes was of course an innovator in the analysis of typewritten documents. In the one case involving a typewriter, A Case of Identity (1891), only Holmes realized the importance of the fact that all the letters received by Mary Sutherland from Hosmer Angel were typewritten — even his name is typed and no signature is applied. This observation leads Holmes to the culprit. By obtaining a typewritten note from his suspect, Holmes brilliantly analyses the idiosyncrasies of the man’s typewriter. In the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) started a Document Section soon after its crime lab opened in 1932. Holmes’s work preceded this by forty years.
HANDWRITING
Conan Doyle, a true believer in handwriting analysis, exaggerates Holmes’s abilities to interpret documents. Holmes is able to tell gender, make deductions about the character of the writer, and even compare two samples of writing and deduce whether the persons are related. This is another area where Holmes has written a monograph (on the dating of documents). Handwritten documents figure in nine stories. In The Reigate Squires, Holmes observes that two related people wrote the incriminating note jointly. This allows him to quickly deduce that the Cunninghams, father and son, are the guilty parties. In The Norwood Builder, Holmes can tell that Jonas Oldacre has written his will while riding on a train. Reasoning that no one would write such an important document on a train, Holmes is persuaded that the will is fraudulent. So immediately at the beginning of the case he is hot on the trail of the culprit.
FOOTPRINTS
Holmes also uses footprint analysis to identify culprits throughout his fictional career, from the very first story to the 57th story (The Lion’s Mane published in 1926). Fully 29 of the 60 stories include footprint evidence. The Boscombe Valley Mystery is solved almost entirely by footprint analysis. Holmes analyses footprints on quite a variety of surfaces: clay soil, snow, carpet, dust, mud, blood, ashes, and even a curtain. Yet another one of Sherlock Holmes’s monographs is on the topic (“The tracing of footsteps, with some remarks upon the uses of Plaster of Paris as a preserver of impresses”).
CIPHERS
Sherlock Holmes solves a variety of ciphers. In The “Gloria Scott” he deduces that in the message that frightens Old Trevor every third word is to be read. A similar system was used in the American Civil War. It was also how young listeners of the Captain Midnight radio show in the 1940s used their decoder rings to get information about upcoming programs. In The Valley of Fear Holmes has a man planted inside Professor Moriarty’s organization. When he receives an encoded message Holmes must first realize that the cipher uses a book. After deducing which book he is able to retrieve the message. This is exactly how Benedict Arnold sent information to the British about General George Washington’s troop movements. Holmes’s most successful use of cryptology occurs in The Dancing Men. His analysis of the stick figure men left as messages is done by frequency analysis, starting with “e” as the most common letter. Conan Doyle is again following Poe who earlier used the same idea in The Gold Bug (1843). Holmes’s monograph on cryptology analyses 160 separate ciphers.
DOGS
Conan Doyle provides us with an interesting array of dog stories and analyses. The most famous line in all the sixty stories, spoken by Inspector Gregory in Silver Blaze, is “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” When Holmes directs Gregory’s attention to “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time,” Gregory is puzzled by this enigmatic clue. Only Holmes seems to realize that the dog should have done something. Why did the dog make no noise when the horse, Silver Blaze, was led out of the stable in the dead of night? Inspector Gregory may be slow to catch on, but Sherlock Holmes is immediately suspicious of the horse’s trainer, John Straker. In Shoscombe Old Place we find exactly the opposite behavior by a dog. Lady Beatrice Falder’s dog snarled when he should not have. This time the dog doing something was the key to the solution. When Holmes took the dog near his mistress’s carriage, the dog knew that someone was impersonating his mistress. In two other cases Holmes employs dogs to follow the movements of people. In The Sign of Four, Toby initially fails to follow the odor of creosote to find Tonga, the pygmy from the Andaman Islands. In The Missing Three Quarter the dog Pompey successfully tracks Godfrey Staunton by the smell of aniseed. And of course, Holmes mentions yet another monograph on the use of dogs in detective work.
James O’Brien is the author of The Scientific Sherlock Holmes. He will be signing books at the OUP booth 524 at the American Chemical Society conference in Indiana on 9 September 2013 at 2:00 p.m. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Missouri State University. A lifelong fan of Holmes, O’Brien presented his paper “What Kind of Chemist Was Sherlock Holmes” at the 1992 national American Chemical Society meeting, which resulted in an invitation to write a chapter on Holmes the chemist in the book Chemistry and Science Fiction. He has since given over 120 lectures on Holmes and science. Read his previous blog post “Sherlock Holmes knew chemistry.”
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Image credit: (1) From “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” Sherlock Holmes story. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. (2) Sherlock Holmes in “The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter.” Illustration by Sidney Paget. Strand Magazine, 1904. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
In a special Google Docs demonstration online, you can collaborate on a story with Charles Dickens, Friedrich Nietzsche, William Shakespeare, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe.
As you type your text into the demo box, these writers will add little flourishes and quotes to your story.
We created a short story with the help of Dickens and Nietzsche, click on the image embedded above to see the collaboration in action. Who will you write with?
Readers around the globe have unwrapped new tablets and eReaders this holiday season. Below, we’ve included a long, long, long list of free and legal eBooks you can download right now for any device.
Explore our Project Gutenberg lists and click “read this eBook online” to sample the book without downloading anything.
If you have an iPad, iPad Mini, iPhone or iPod Touch, you can download the ePub edition. If you have a Kindle or a Kindle Fire, you need to download the Kindle edition. If you have a Nook, Sony eReader or a Kobo, you should download the ePub edition.
To celebrate Halloween and All Hallow’s Read, we’ve rounded up 25 free horror books that you can download right now for your eReader, smartphone or tablet. Follow the links below to read…
In 2010, novelist Neil Gaiman created the “All Hallow’s Read,” literary holiday, a night to give someone you love a scary book. The writer explained the new tradition in the video embedded above–here’s more from the official site:
Obviously, we support bookshops and authors, but more than that, this is about making a holiday tradition of book-giving. So feel free to give second-hand books or books from your own shelves. And feel just as free to buy a beautiful new book from a small independent bookseller, or from online or… look, there’s no wrong way to buy a book. You can even gift it to their Kindle … If you do not know what scary book to give someone, talk to a bookseller or a librarian. They like to help. Librarians will not mind even if you admit that you are not planning to take out a book, but instead you are going to buy one and give it to someone.
In a Baltimore Post Examiner article, librarian Meredith Myers says she created literary parody song "The Raven Is Hard To Handle" to honor Edgar Allan Poe as well as promote libraries. Fun video with a great message at the end!
Halloween is almost here, and all GalleyCat readers should be planning their literary costume ideas. Below, we’ve collected five obsessive and brilliant costumes based on books or comic books.
What’s the best literary Halloween costume you’ve ever seen? Share all your ideas at the handy #literarycostumes hastag created by Random House last year. On Flickr, you can explore the Literary Halloween Costumes group to find costumes ranging from Edgar Allan Poe to Alice in Wonderland.
1. Make a wolf suit like Max from Where the Wild Things Are. For the child in your life, you can honor the legacy of the great Maurice Sendak with a homemade kid’s costume from Running With Scissors (photo embedded above).
In honor of Lovecraft’s 122nd birthday, this GalleyCat editor collected some practical writing advice from the prolific author, all published in a 1920 essay called “Literary Composition.”
Here’s an excerpt; it still works after all these years: “All attempts at gaining literary polish must begin with judicious reading, and the learner must never cease to hold this phase uppermost. In many cases, the usage of good authors will be found a more effective guide than any amount of precept. A page of [Joseph Addison] or of [Washington Irving] will teach more of style than a whole manual of rules, whilst a story of [Edgar Allan Poe]‘s will impress upon the mind a more vivid notion of powerful and correct description and narration than will ten dry chapters of a bulky textbook. Let every student read unceasingly the best writers.”
I love to be scared. It’s why I love Halloween and walking late at night. When other people want to unwind with a good book, they choose something light and funny. I go for straight-up horror—the creepier, the better—which is why I recently looked up what are broadly considered the scariest books of all time. There are tons of lists, but here is a pretty accurate accumulation of books that were mentioned repeatedly:
The Shining by Stephen King (and several other books of his. The movie is one of my all-time favorites, and his short story collection, Everything’s Eventual, is still the best collection of all time.) Hannibal Lecter by Thomas Harris (Silence of the Lambs made the cut, as well. Also a great flick.) The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty (Also a great flick.) American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (ALSO a great flick.) The Road to Madness by H.P. Lovecraft (anything by him, generally) Ghost Story by Peter Straub (I remember this one scared the crap out of me in college. Movie was so-so.) The Works of Edgar Allan Poe (Duh. Goes without saying.) Turn of the Screw by Henry James (The Others with Nicole Kidman was an adaptation of this story.)
I could go on for a while here, but you get the idea.
I went to the library and picked up The Exorcist, a book of Poe stuff, Turn of the Screw, and The Road to Madness. I felt it important that I read some of the “great horror authors” in order to become a better horror author myself. The Exorcist, as expected, was creepy. I adore Poe—always have, always will. Turn of the Screw was terribly boring and not scary in any way. Lovecraft may be over my head a little, but I haven’t passed judgment on him … yet.
The point of all this? I think something’s wrong with me. Because I wasn’t scared at all.
The same goes for movies. I adore horror movies. I watch them all the time. I think I remember that they used to scare me, but they don’t anymore. Now, I watch them for the cinematic value and because I just, well, like ‘em. But I’m not necessarily scared of horror films, especially when you consider I have to walk our dog at 3 AM, by myself, and all I do is yawn. After watching Halloween or The Shining, any normal person would probably look over her shoulder at least a little bit and wonder if someone’s there.
Our country as a whole has a similar problem, I think, and it has never been more apparent to me than right now. Yesterday, the White House announced they would not be releasing photos of Bin Laden’s shattered, bloody forehead, and everyone started to complain. What the hell is the matter with us? Have we watched too many episodes of CSI? Why on earth do we want to see a picture of some dead guy, even if he was a terrorist? It’s because we’re not afraid anymore of what we should humanely be afraid of. We’re not scared of gore, which is why we watch terrible, grotesque torture films like Saw, Saw II, Saw III … you get the
2 Comments on Why Aren’t We Scared Anymore?, last added: 5/8/2011
Just to let you know, I hate horror movies. Always have. I have not read, nor do I ever plan to read a Stephen King novel.
I have read some of Poe’s stories, they are more mystery to me than horror, there is a touch of self-fear in them. I have not read all of his stories.
I watch CSI, NYCSI, NCIS and sometimes the First 48. I do tend to avert my eyes when they are doing the autopsy thing, but then again not so much. Probably because I have had so much surgery myself.
I do not watch hospital shows, even the real ER shows. The fictionalized stories are bogus, the real one is too traumatic.
I hate the whole vampire, zombie, ax murder type of stories.
bwack bwack, bwack.
saradobie said, on 5/8/2011 12:45:00 PM
Horror is definitely an acquired taste. There is no “kind of” liking it. Either you love it or you hate it. Much of it can be traumatic, for sure, but as a fan of Halloween, I can’t help but love it!
Can a headless horseman read poetry? Actor Christopher Walken once played Ichabod Crane‘s nemesis in Tim Burton‘s adaptation of Sleepy Hollow. The video embedded above features Walken reading Edgar Allan Poe‘s The Raven.
Poe fans will see the poet on the big screen in January 2012. The Raven, starring John Cusack, just finished shooting and is currently in post-production.
*Fiction picture book for preschool to third graders
*3 boys as main characters
*Rating: Edgar, Allan, and Poe and the Tell-Tale Beets is a cute take on Edgar Allan Poe’s scary story, “Tell-Tale Heart.”
Short, short summary:
Edgar, Allan, and Poe are brothers who aren’t crazy about their mom’s cooking. Well, who would be when she serves things like beets and liver? But they do love her dessert. The problem is they can’t get any dessert until they finish all their dinner, and that’s impossible until. . .they discover the loose floorboard. The brothers decide to cause a distraction and then put the disgusting food in the floorboard. The plan works perfectly, and they get to eat all kinds of delicious dessert until . . .they start hearing Beet. Beet. Liver. Liver. And the smell! The food stinks under the floor board, and finally, they confess everything they’ve been doing right before a huge explosion occurs.
So, what do I do with this book?
1. You can use this book when also studying nutrition. Talk to students and children about why the boys’ mother was making and serving this food. Discuss alternative healthy foods she could serve. For example, what could she serve instead of liver or beets that have the same vitamins but are tastier? Ask students to write a letter to the mother and suggest these alternative foods.
2. Natalie Rompella does a great job with word choice in this book. There are tons of description words and strong action verbs. Make a list of the strong word choices in this book and post it on the wall. Point it out to students when they are busy writing.
3. Older primary students would be able to learn about Edgar Allan Poe and some of his work. Then talk to students about how this version is similar and different from “Tell-Tale Heart.”
The Mystery Writers of America have revealed the nominees for the 2016 Edgar Awards. The annual prize, named after horror writer Edgar Allan Poe, awarded to the best authors in the mystery genre since 1945.
The Grolier Club is hosting an exhibit focused on Edgar Allan Poe called “Evermore: The Persistence of Poe.” Susan Jaffe Tane and Gabriel Mckee served as the curators.
The Edgar Allan Poe Foundation of Boston plans to reveal a statue of Poe in the city on October 05, 2014. This Stefanie Rocknak statue, made of clay and cast in bronze, will be installed at the intersection of Boylston Street and Charles Street South in what’s known as “Poe Square.”
Out of Print, 
Conan Doyle provides us with an interesting array of dog stories and analyses. The most famous line in all the sixty stories, spoken by Inspector Gregory in Silver Blaze, is “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” When Holmes directs Gregory’s attention to “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time,” Gregory is puzzled by this enigmatic clue. Only Holmes seems to realize that the dog should have done something. Why did the dog make no noise when the horse, Silver Blaze, was led out of the stable in the dead of night? Inspector Gregory may be slow to catch on, but Sherlock Holmes is immediately suspicious of the horse’s trainer, John Straker. In Shoscombe Old Place we find exactly the opposite behavior by a dog. Lady Beatrice Falder’s dog snarled when he should not have. This time the dog doing something was the key to the solution. When Holmes took the dog near his mistress’s carriage, the dog knew that someone was impersonating his mistress. In two other cases Holmes employs dogs to follow the movements of people. In The Sign of Four, Toby initially fails to follow the odor of creosote to find Tonga, the pygmy from the Andaman Islands. In The Missing Three Quarter the dog Pompey successfully tracks Godfrey Staunton by the smell of aniseed. And of course, Holmes mentions yet another monograph on the use of dogs in detective work.
Readers around the globe have unwrapped new tablets and eReaders this holiday season. Below, we’ve included a long, long, long list of free and legal eBooks you can download right now for any device.
Halloween is almost here, and all GalleyCat readers should be planning their literary costume ideas. Below, we’ve collected five obsessive and brilliant costumes based on books or comic books.
Today is the birthday of the late horror novelist H. P. Lovecraft. You can explore his life and work at 
Just to let you know, I hate horror movies. Always have. I have not read, nor do I ever plan to read a Stephen King novel.
I have read some of Poe’s stories, they are more mystery to me than horror, there is a touch of self-fear in them. I have not read all of his stories.
I watch CSI, NYCSI, NCIS and sometimes the First 48. I do tend to avert my eyes when they are doing the autopsy thing, but then again not so much. Probably because I have had so much surgery myself.
I do not watch hospital shows, even the real ER shows. The fictionalized stories are bogus, the real one is too traumatic.
I hate the whole vampire, zombie, ax murder type of stories.
bwack bwack, bwack.
Horror is definitely an acquired taste. There is no “kind of” liking it. Either you love it or you hate it. Much of it can be traumatic, for sure, but as a fan of Halloween, I can’t help but love it!