The Haunting Season: Eight Ghostly Tails for Long Winter Nights (And Days)
The Haunting Season is an anthology of eight short stories that range from mildly spooky to genuinely disturbing. They range in themes and subject matter (although all of them seem to sit firmly in an ostensibly western horror tradition) and employ a range of techniques from isolationism to The Weird to the pure horror of mundanity. Overall, I’d recommend the collection if you’re looking for some light spooky reading, but I wouldn’t necessarily encourage one to go out of their way to procure a copy unless, like me, you get a real thrill from adding to an ever-growing collection of horror literature that threatens the structural integrity of your thrifted (and possibly haunted) nightstand.
Mexican Gothic: A Mixed Review
I must (and, of course, will) tread carefully here, particularly as last week’s post was on the importance of highlighting and consuming Gothic media by non-white authors and creators, but it would be disingenuous of me to sing the praises of Mexican Gothic without cautioning against some of the glaring issues with the function (not the form) of the text.
Eurocentrism in The Gothic: Preliminary Threads
This was probably the right post to have formulated while on holiday in Ottawa, as although the city is beautiful, it is an absolute theme park of colonialism, and being surrounded by statues of European white men and buildings that emanated this fallacy of superiority was good motivation to tackle this topic.