A Far Out Fantastic Site

Credit: Pixabay.com This is supposed to be the happiest time of the year. But, in some cases, it can be the scariest. A year is ending and so that may bring anxiety over the year to come since we don't know what it will bring. It almost feels a bit apocalyptic, doesn’t it? But with the end of the year comes end of the year sales and so you'll find my books at some super discounts at Smashwords which I'll explain more about later. But let’s start off something that goes with the dark winter nights that the Holiday Season, or maybe I should say, the Hallowday Season brings: scary stories. Yes scary, stories of the supernatural. What we call holiday horror stories today, what the Victorian English called Christmas Ghost Stories in the 19th century! And so I have a list of Holiday ghost stories for you below. 5 Ghost Stories for Winter Holiday Reading In general, ghost stories aren't associated with Christmas like they are with Halloween. But because this has been a time of...

Credit: Pixabay.com I've moved our fourth Monday Book-To-Movie (BTM) again, this time to this 5th Monday of October due to the overloaded schedule of the Halloween season. But, so you can get a groovy Halloween post, I made sure to give it to you before October passes us unlike I did with September’s BTM )! A story by the early 20th century British author, M.R. James, such as "Casting the Runes" probably won't ring a death toll bell as does Edgar Allan Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher”. And unless you’re a big watcher of b-rated movies like me, not even the 1957 movie adaptation of “Casting”, "Curse of the Demon", will even ring much of a bell. Yet both short story and movie are made really good. One of the biggest changes made to the story for the movie is that the monster is actually shown while, yet, not taking too much away from the suspense of the original short story.  The Short Story: 'Casting the Runes' "Casting the Runes" is abou...

Credit: Wikimedia Commons A couple weeks ago on a Saturday evening a strange coincidence happened to me while riding the bus back home. I had just purchased the October 2019 issue of “Famous Monsters of Filmland”. For those of you who aren’t horror or sci fi movie cinephiles, “Famous Monsters” is a horror and sci fi news magazine started by the late Forrest (Forry) Ackerman. Anyway, in that magazine I was reading an article about the 1957 movie, “Curse of the Demon”. It said that the movie was actually based on a short story by M.R. James. That name struck me as strangely familiar. I thought I remembered seeing the name in a story by Ramsey Campbell that I was reading only that morning while riding the bus to east Sacramento. So I checked the story in my copy of “Post Mortem: New Tales of Ghostly Horror”, the tales no longer being new because the book was published in the late 1980s. Sure enough M.R. James’ name was in Campbell’s story, “The Guide”. Because of this coincidence...