Tag: ghosts

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle speaks to us from the spirit world.

This week Steve reviews three newer books: one is outstanding and the other two are worth reading. What’re the odds on that?

Eye to the Telescope is the online journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. A different person edits each issue (being published quarterly) and...

Why do the short story and the movie get adjectives in the title, but not the book? Steve tells why.

An inside look at the process of developing a cover for a self-published book

a review of comics writer Mike Baron's Skorpio

In Japan, Halloween is pumpkins and ghosts, just as Christmas is Santas and reindeer.

Every culture has its ghost stories. Here in the West, ours tend toward narratives depicting souls who died violent deaths and have returned to take revenge. Or perhaps we tell tales of those who have died too soon and only wish for eternal playmates. As I briefly mentioned in my post last week, the Japanese have a very rich and far-reaching pantheon of spooks. The majority of these ghosts and their stories grew out of the Edo period (1603-1867; thus why a show like Mononoke asserts itself as particularly Japanese horror), and ghost stories with a certain antiquated style to them, or an air of the past, are usually referred to as kaiden (mysterious or strange recited narrative), whereas more modern horror stories would simply be called hora (a Japanization of "horror").

The Conjuring may be the single most frightening movie I've ever seen. It's the perfect balance between Classicism and Modernism.

The formative American experience was the conquest of the western frontier. Would science fiction and fantasy exist without the frontier model? What does Japan's parallel conquest of Hokkaido tell us about the legacy of colonial expansion?