Archive for Fiction

DOWNTON ABBEY MEETS LOVECRAFT MEETS NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD in Deadtown Abbey.

It is a world few of us have ever known. A world of masters and servants, where everyone knows one’s place. A world of newfangled technology like telephones and motorcars. A world of vampires, werewolves, zombies, and monsters of the deep. At the center of his necropolis estate lives the Earl of Monroe, who must hold the family he loves and the servants he trusts together against the eldritch onslaught of this rapidly changing world.

Penny Dreadful Entertainment as related to his scrivener, Sean Hoade.

PART 2

A TRAGEDY IS REPORTED.

It was Boxing Day, 1904. I had just enjoyed the holiday previous with my friends the poet Robert Underwood Johnson and his wife, who had come up to Long Island from Washington, D.C. for the holiday. (I secured my own room next to theirs at the Hotel Astor to spend the night, on trustworthy bedding I had brought from home.) I felt refreshed and eager to return to work that crisp Monday morning.

A Penny Dreadful Entertainment as related to his scrivener, Sean Hoade.

Part 4

A Penny Dreadful Entertainment as related to his scrivener, Sean Hoade.

Part 3

A Penny Dreadful Entertainment

as related to his scrivener, Sean Hoade.

I assume that those young readers who follow my popular column in the Electrical Experimenter magazine are familiar with the Vampire (or wampir, as my Croatian grandparents called it in stories to keep us children from roaming outside at night). In fact, now that motion pictures feature sound However, I also am aware that for most adult Americans of late 1897, the plasticity of their brains hardening into rigidity of “everyday” behavior and thought meant that they were not conversant with the ancient legends of undead, blood-hungry ghouls who rise and feed on the living once the sun goes down. These creatures, formerly human, may transmogrify into wolves, or bats, or even mist; or so the Old World legends say.

Hank doesn’t know how he knows it, but in the fifth or sixth year of shuffling and shuffling and shuffling–into insanity, if only his brain could please break down, but it ain’t doing that because he’s just mind, no brain to break no more–he knows that some Polack scientist type name of Czepiel figured out how many shuffles there really were in real-life terms.

Figured out. Or will figure out. Or will have figured. Or something.

As the seconds and minutes and hours and days pass, zip-zip-zip-zip-zip of the tabled riffle shuffle keeps time better than any clock Hank ever saw in his life. And that was good, because there is no day or night here, no sleep or waking or chowtime or … anything, really. No sky, no earth, no sun, so moon, no stars. Just the chair that didn’t hurt his ass or feel particularly comfortable; the table of smooth and shiny wood, like something out of a fancy parlor; other than there’s just whiteness, just nothing blankness without horizon or shadow or any feature at all. 

As the seconds and minutes and hours and days pass, zip-zip-zip-zip-zip of the tabled riffle shuffle keeps time better than any clock Hank ever saw in his life. And that was good, because there is no day or night here, no sleep or waking or chowtime or … anything, really. No sky, no earth, no sun, so moon, no stars. Just the chair that didn’t hurt his ass or feel particularly comfortable; the table of smooth and shiny wood, like something out of a fancy parlor; other than there’s just whiteness, just nothing blankness without horizon or shadow or any feature at all.