October has arrived! The dark nights are growing ever longer and the wind is starting to chill our spines, which makes this the perfect month to cozy up with ghost stories and weird tales. This year I’m devoting spooky month to tales with a supernatural bent, featuring folklore, ghosts, and the occasional monster.
I’ll start with a book I actually bought last October. I was all the way down in Tucson tending to some ghosts of my own when I walked into Antigone Books. This is a feminist and political bookstore and their horror section was tiny, even around Halloween, but I still found a couple of interesting titles and this was one of them.
Queens of the Abyss is a collection focused on stories from the 1800s and early 1900s, featuring a number of women who are either less well known or better known for something besides weird tales. It features a few big names, like M. E. Braddon and Leonora Carrington, along with a host of writers largely forgotten by now. All we tend to remember about the ‘weird tales’ era of horror is H. P. Lovecraft and, if you’re lucky, Algernon Blackwood or M. R. James; I love books that get beyond the biggest names and this book really delivers on that.
The editor, Mike Ashley, gives a tiny introduction of each selected author and a couple of suggestions for further reading, which makes this a decent jumping off point for finding further weird tales if you’re interested. There’s a varied selection of ghosts, demons, and general weirdness included and I enjoyed the sampling. A few of my favorite stories were The Haunted Flat by Mary Belloc Lowndes, The Nature of the Evidence by May Sinclair, and The Bishop of Hell by Marjorie Bowen. If you’re looking to cozy up under a blanket or by the fire with a good book, you could do a lot worse than Queens of the Abyss.
