If you would like to submit an article or book/movie review on the art of writing horror fiction or just on the art of writing, please send it to horror@philslattery.com. Everything must be submitted by e-mail either in the
With Iced Tea, Farmington, New Mexico, March 20, 2015
body of the e-mail or a Word document (.doc or .docx). There is no pay for any submission at this time (maybe after I win the Pulitzer or Nobel, but probably not before then).
I am seeking:
Articles under 1,000 words on the art of writing horror (fiction of any length, poetry, screenplays, etc.) or on writing in general, but material along the lines of horror is preferred. Articles on foreign horror are encouraged.
Book and movie reviews, the more recently published or distributed the better, but I will consider reviews of classics works such as those of Poe, Lovecraft, Blackwood, etc. all the way back to Walpole (and before if sufficiently interesting). These must be under 1,000 words also.
Articles on horror in other countries are encouraged. These must also be under 1,000 words.
Translations of articles, stories, or poems from French, German, or Spanish are considered, but the original article/story/poem and its translation must not exceed 2,000 words.
Horror poetry (under 32 lines) or articles on horror in poetry.
Flash horror fiction (i.e. under 1,000 words).
Guidelines
Be professional.
Use standard manuscript format. The easier it is for me to simply copy and paste into the website, the more likely you are to be published.
With submissions include your website, twitter handle, or any other social media identification you like. A short bio of 100 words or less (including a list of previous publications) is nice, but not required. Knowing your publication history won’t influence whether or not you are accepted, but it might be nice for the readership to know. If you don’t want to include any social media contact info, don’t include it. Pseudonyms are fine, but please state them as the byline and include your actual name and contact info in the top left of the first page of the submission per standard manuscript format.
In the subject line of your e-mail state whether this is an article or review or poetry of fiction submission, your name, and the work’s title. For example: Article by Phil Slattery “Poe’s Raven: an Analysis”
No hardcopy submissions. Everything must be submitted by e-mail either in the body of the e-mail or attached as a Word document (.doc or .docx).
I would like to reach as large an audience as possible, so please keep profanity to an absolute minimum.
I will try to respond to submissions as quickly as possible, but please allow at least a couple of weeks before querying about your article/story.
There is no pay other than the honor of being published on this website.
I am not taking multiple submissions or simultaneous submissions. Once you have submitted one article/story, please wait about a week before submitting another.
You may submit on piece of artwork or a photo to accompany your article/story. I will edit it (mainly re-sizing) as needed to fit the space available. I will not publish any form of what I deem pornography or in bad taste. If you do not submit artwork or a photo, I may select something appropriate. JPEGs, TIFs and other formats accepted by WordPress are okay, but keep the number of bytes to a minimum. I have only a limited amount of space available.
Artwork and photos may be submitted on their own and you must own the copyright to them. There is no pay for these either. If I do not use these right away, I may keep them until a use arises, but please let me know if this is okay. If you no longer wish me to use them, please let me know as soon as possible.
Do not send advertising (no matter how cleverly veiled it is). It won’t be published.
Gratuitous sex, extreme violence, violence to children, rape and anything else that offends my personal sensibilities will not be published. Anything that seems to reflect an actual crime (past, present, or future) will be immediately turned over to the proper authorities.
If I like your submission, I will publish it as soon as possible, probably within a week. This will depend on the backlog of submissions and other factors. Don’t ask for a timeframe.
Reprints are okay, but you must tell me when and where the article/story/poem was first published.
I do not want fan fiction.
Always re-check the guidelines before submitting. I may change them at any moment without prior notice.
I will update these guidelines as time allows and events warrant. This page was last updated on October 15, 2015.
Please contact me via horror@philslattery.com with any questions.
I was surfing the Internet just now, looking for websites where I can comment, and came across The Guardian’s “Comment is Free” section filtered down to their comments on horror movies (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/commentisfree+film/horror). They seem to produce an article on horror films about every 5-10 months, but the articles are interesting and are worth checking out for a different perspective than what one usually encounters (at least in the articles I read). The two articles I read today from The Guardian are “Why Zombies are the Coldest Comfort” by Catherine Shoard and “Why the Human Centipede II bugs me” by Sarah Ditum. Unfortunately, the replies for both were closed, so I will state my opinions here.
As a novice writer of horror and as someone who has read a considerable amount of what might be termed “classic horror tales” back to its beginnings as a genre, Shoard’s article puzzles me. She seems to take the viewpoint that what makes a horror movie enjoyable is that we can feel safe while watching it. She states near the beginning of her article:
Zombies are a threat it’s easy to rationalise. They are unlikely. For this reason, plus issues with speed and intelligence, they are not especially scary. They are essentially a pest control problem with metaphor potential. Even squirrels run quicker… So their presence as a backdrop in a soap such as The Walking Dead provides just the right boost in tension for viewers to convince themselves they’re a long way from Emmerdale (or whatever the Mexican equivalent might be). The Walking Dead is a show that – like Pret a Manger – innovates exactly the right amount within a set formula.
Later, she adds:
More even than with comedy, the director encourages the audience into a specific response; if they don’t elicit it, they have failed. So those who are best at scaring us also make us feel we’re in a safe pair of hands.
And then there’s her conclusion:
Life is frightening. Horror works because it gives us something quantifiable to battle: you know where you are with a zombie.
It seems that Ms. Shoard is saying that the reason we can enjoy zombie movies is because we can feel safe in watching them, because zombies obviously don’t exist and are therefore not a threat and because we are so far removed from them. The second statement is perplexing as well when she states “that those who are best at scaring us also make us feel we’re in a safe pair of hands.”
Ms. Shoard doesn’t seem to understand that one of the basic principles of horror according to H.P. Lovecraft, a universally recognized master of horror of the last 200 years is “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” This is a consistent theme in the horror genre since the days Horace Walpole and the beginnings of the gothic novel. What makes for great horror is a blending of suspense and fear. A writer of horror, be it short story or novel or a movie, does not want his audience to feel safe. He wants them to feel that if they put down the book and walk out of the building, they may be snatched up by Cthulhu or encounter their former neighbors rising from their graves with a ravenous hunger for the living. It’s been a long time since I have read an article this inane. I hope it is a long time before I read another.
I will agree with her on one point: more than with comedy, the director does encourage the audience into a specific response and if they don’t elicit it, they have failed. However, Ms. Shoard doesn’t seem to know what that response is or how to go about achieving it.
I could go on deconstructing this article ad nauseum and reducing it ad absurdam, but I have better things to do with my morning than to antagonize Ms. Shoard. I have nothing against her personally; I just find her opinion in this instance to be off-base and out of touch with the basics of the horror genre.
The second article I read was Sarah Ditum’s “Why the Human Centipede II bugs me”. The teaser to this article sums up the paradox Ms. Ditums explores nicely:
The horror-porn sequel dampens my anti-censorship urges, but banning such films risks losing more intelligent offerings.
I could go into an extensive examination of this article line by line, but, as much as I would love to do that, as I said earlier I have other things I have to accomplish today. However, I encourage everyone with an interest in or an opinion on the extremes of gore and bad taste in horror films today to read this article. It is quite well-written and it does a good job of getting to the essence of the problem: yes, there are films out there today that are so vile and repulsive that we would be better off to ban them for the good of society, but by limiting what is available to the public, we run the risk of losing more intelligent fare that has to deal with these issues.
Personally, I have never seen any of the human centipede films, because the concept is so obscene that I cannot bring myself to watch them and I cannot see any reward or point in forcing myself to do so. As anyone who reads my blog with any regularity knows, I am not a fan of gore for its own sake and I am not a fan of anything tasteless. A lot of people would probably see a vague hypocrisy in this, but those people are ones who perceive horror only as sensationalist, teenage slasher films and do not have a profound knowledge of its history and of its breadth or of the underlying, eternal principles of great horror as in the quotation above from Lovecraft. But that is my taste in what I feed to my mind via my eyes. I will not apologize for it, because I have nothing for which to apologize.
Contemplating what I said in the previous paragraph brings me to another interesting perspective. Perhaps examining the wide range of opinions and viewpoints on this controversial topic reveals something about human psychology. I am not sure of what that would be, but I am sure it would make for an interesting thesis for someone’s Master’s degree. A line and motif from one of my favorite TV shows of all time, “Millennium” (starring Lance Henriksen, ran from about 1998-2000) is “This is who we are.” Somehow, thinking about the ongoing discussion on this controversial topic, I get a subjective feeling that, for better or worse, this is who we are.
The bottom line for this portion of today’s blog is that I find myself of the same viewpoint as Ms. Ditum and I encourage everyone to read her article, whatever your viewpoint on gore in modern cinema (whether of the horror genre or not). It may just broaden your perspective.
The Quick 10: 10 Unexpected Horror Writers. Here is an interesting article I ran across at Mentalfloss.com. I would never have suspected most of these of ever having even an interest in horror. Stacey Conradt wrote the article in 2009.
Herman Webster Mudgett a.k.a. H.H. Holmes. From Wikipedia.
I am having troubling sleeping tonight and thought I would continue with our tour of the world’s horror locales. [I am not having nightmares about H.H. Holmes, if that is what you are thinking or even about any other horror topic.]
One of America’s first and most prolific serial killers was Herman Webster Mudgett, who went by his now better known alias of H.H. Holmes (1861-1896). Although his life has been recently documented in a few films and books, Holmes is still perhaps one of America’s lesser known serial killers. Most of the following information is taken from the Wikipedia article on Holmes, which supports my previous readings on Holmes in several sources. Please go to Wikipedia for more details than my brief synopsis provides. It is a well-written article and I rely on it here, only because I wish to provide a brief introduction to Holmes to support the photos and visual record I am providing.
Holmes started his criminal career while attending the University of Michigan Medical School, where he would steal cadavers from the laboratory, disfigure them, and then try to collect on insurance policies he had taken out on them after claiming they had been killed in accidents. After graduation, Mudgett moved to Chicago to pursue a career in pharmaceuticals, but also began conducting many shady business deals while being a bigamist and philanderer in his private life.
After moving to Chicago in 1886, Holmes took a job at Dr. Elizabeth Holton’s drugstore. After her husband’s death, Holmes
Holmes’s Castle from Wikipedia
bought the business and the lot across the street at 601-603 West 63rd Street. [I had not noticed this before, but if one takes the first digit in each number of the address and combines them, the result is 666.] In the lot he built what would become known as his murder castle.
Wikipedia provides a nice synopsis of what happened there:
“Holmes purchased a lot across from the drugstore where he built his three-story, block-long “castle” as it was dubbed by those in the neighborhood. The address of the Castle was 601-603 W. 63rd St.[16] It was called the World’s Fair Hotel and opened as a hostelry for the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, with part of the structure devoted to commercial space. The ground floor of the Castle contained Holmes’ own relocated drugstore and various shops, while the upper two floors contained his personal office and a maze of over 100 windowless rooms with doorways opening to brick walls, oddly-angled hallways, stairways to nowhere, doors openable only from the outside, and a host of other strange and labyrinthine constructions. Holmes repeatedly changed builders during the construction of the Castle, so only he fully understood the design of the house.[3]
A diagram of Holmes’s Castle from weirdchicago.com (originally from the Chicago Tribune)
“During the period of building construction in 1889, Holmes met Benjamin Pitezel, a carpenter with a past of lawbreaking, whom Holmes exploited as a stooge for his criminal schemes. A district attorney later described Pitezel as Holmes’ “tool… his creature.”[17]
“After the completion of the hotel, Holmes selected mostly female victims from among his employees (many of whom were required as a condition of employment to take out life insurance policies, for which Holmes would pay the premiums but was also the beneficiary), as well as his lovers and hotel guests, whom he would later kill.[14] Some were locked in soundproof bedrooms fitted with gas lines that let him asphyxiate them at any time. Other victims were locked in a huge soundproof bank vault near his office, where they were left to suffocate.[8] The victims’ bodies were dropped by secret chute to the basement,[3] where some were meticulously dissected, stripped of flesh, crafted into skeleton models, and then sold to medical schools. Holmes also cremated some of the bodies or placed them in lime pits for destruction. Holmes had two giant furnaces as well as pits of acid, bottles of various poisons, and even a stretching rack.[3] Through the connections he had gained in medical school, he sold skeletons and organs with little difficulty.”
After the World’s Columbian Exposition ended, Holmes moved out of Chicago to evade creditors and continued pursuing his
Plans of Floors 2 and 3 from steampunkchicago.com
various nefarious trades throughout the country. Eventually, he was arrested by the Pinkertons for an insurance scam. While Holmes was in prison awaiting trial, authorities interviewed the former janitor at Holmes’s castle and found out that he had never been allowed entry to the upper floors. Upon further investigation, the real purpose behind Holmes’s castle was discovered.
Estimates of the number of Holmes’s victims range from 20-200, with 27 being the only number verified by any means. Most of his victims were women, though a few were men and children. Holmes confessed to murdering thirty people in Chicago, Indianapolis, and Toronto, though some of the people he claimed to have killed were later found to still be alive.
Holmes was put on trial for the murder of his partner-in-crime, Benjamin Pitezel, in October, 1895. He was hanged in Philadelphia’s Moyamensing Prison on May 7, 1896, for Pitezel’s murder. Holmes’s castle was mysteriously gutted by fire in August, 1895, two months before his trial began. The building was finally razed in 1938.
Holmes being executed. From jesslb6.blogspot,com
The site is now the location of the US Post Office’s Englewood Branch.
I have included a few photos of the castle and the Englewood Post Office for your viewing pleasure.
By coincidence, while gathering photos for this article, I found a statement on Cragin Spring’s Flickr page that a movie on Holmes called “Devil in the White City” was due out in 2013 and was to star Leonardo DiCaprio. A Wikipedia article on it states that it is based on a 2003 book by Erik Larson and Leonardo DiCaprio bought the film rights in 2010. Imdb states only that it is in development.
The Englewood post office now at the site of Holmes’s Castle, November 5, 2011. Photo by Malcolm Logan from myamericanodyssey.com
I finished reading The Hellbound Heart several weeks ago. As noted previously, it is a truly terrific read. I suggest reading it after seeing the movie (if you have somehow repeatedly missed your chances of seeing “Hellraiser” over the last twenty or so years). Reading it beforehand will just spoil the movie, whereas reading it afterwards may enlighten parts of the movie.
I don’t have much to add to what I have previously stated, except that, if you are a student of storytelling, the book warrants a detailed examination for narrative technique as it exhibits some basic techniques of storytelling that Mr. Barker carries out very well. I could go through the book page by page and expound on each ad nauseam, but instead I will focus now on one that sticks in my mind.
I do not recall if this is in the movie, but toward the end where Kirsty is trapped in the “damp room” by Frank, she slips on a bit of preserved ginger lying on the floor enabling Frank to catch her. The method by which Barker establishes why that ginger is on the floor fascinates me.
Although I have one or two dictionaries of literary terms, I do not recall the name for this technique and I think of it as simply setting the stage for a future scene. It shows the foresight, planning, and attention to detail that must go into any good story.
Earlier in the story, after Julia has released Frank from the Cenobite hell and he has regained enough flesh that he can once again eat, he asks Julia for a few of his favorite victuals, including preserved ginger. At the moment I read this, I thought it was simply a natural but insignificant detail. Of course, I could not know then that that bit of ginger would skyrocket the dramatic tension later on in one of the novel’s most important scenes.
Anyway, that’s my post for the day.
I have been very negligent in posting anything over the last months, my daytime job and personal matters consuming much more of my time than usual. I have recently come to find out though, that many more people in my home town of Frankfort, KY, were enjoying my postings than I had known or even believed possible and sorely missed it during this hiatus. For them and all the others who silently enjoy my works, I shall endeavor to pick up the thread.
I have not lost my desire to write fiction, however, and I am currently trying to finish a sci-fi/horror novella that I started sometime back. The work is going well, but I am having to change some of my original concept to make it more exciting. I would like to make it as gripping as some have found my “Murder by Plastic” (published at www.everydayfiction.com), but that will be quite difficult for something as long as a novella. The part I find most challenging is to coordinate the details much as Barker did in the example I give above. I would expound on the subject, but I do not want to give away the plot or run the risk of some unscrupulous cur stealing my idea and publishing it before I do–particularly as I am so close to finishing it. After this I have another three or four unfinished works to bring to a close. I could probably write eight hours a day like Thomas Mann and still not be finished by spring.
The first thing you learn about the historical Castle Dracula is that it is a fictional location from Bram Stoker’s imagination. The Wikipedia article does a nice job of summarizing the history of the fictional abode and of analyzing the novel for clues to its supposed locale. The most precise it comes to identifying the spot of Dracula’s Castle is:
“The site of the Vampire’s home has always been one of the greatest mysteries of the novel. The route descriptions hardly mention any recognisable landmarks, but focus on evocations of a wild and snow-covered landscape, haunted by howling wolves and lit by supernatural blue flames at night. Because of this conspicuous vagueness, the annotated Dracula editions by Leonard Wolf,[6] Clive Leatherdale[7] and Leslie Klinger[8] simply assume Bram Stoker had no specific location in mind and place the Castle in or immediately next to the Borgo Pass. As a consequence, these editions take for granted that the Count’s men, pursued by Harker, Holmwood, Morris and Seward, follow the Bistrița River all the way up to Vatra Dornei and then travel the route through the Borgo Pass already taken by Van Helsing and Mina. The same view is adopted by Andrew Connell in his Google Map mark-ups.[9] These theories ignore or misinterpret Stoker’s hint that around the 47th Parallel, the Count’s men are supposed to leave the river and cross-over to Transylvanian territory:
We took it, that somewhere about the 47th degree, north latitude, would be the place chosen for crossing the country between the river and the Carpathians. (Chapter 26, Jonathan Harker’s Journal, Entry for 30 October)[10]
“Only recently, the Dutch author Hans Corneel de Roos discovered the site the Irish novelist really had in mind while shaping his narrative: an empty mountain top in the Transylvanian Kelemen Alps near the former border with Moldavia, ca. 20 miles south-east of the Borgo Pass.[11] De Roos also explains why Stoker chose to obscure this location in his novel and compares the vampire’s fortress to the Grail Castle as its anti-Christian antipole: It cannot be found on purpose, only by guidance. Harker is brought there by the Count himself, while Van Helsing and Mina – equally nodding off – rely on the instinct of their horses and the mounted men arrive there by following the Gypsies.”
If you have read the book and have seen at least the original film version of Dracula with Bela Lugosi, you know at least one place they have in common is Borgo Pass. This is where Jonathan Harker disembarks from a coach to wait in an inn for the Count’s own carriage to come and fetch him and the village people try unsuccessfully to warn him away.
Aerial view of the Hotel Castel Dracula in the Borgo Pass from Google Earth
What you will learn from a few places on the Internet is that a hotel has been built on the spot in the Borgo Pass where Harker is supposed to have changed rides. Romanian Tourism describes it so:
Borgo Pass
(Pasul Tihuta) Where: 277 miles northwest of Bucharest / 12 miles northeast of Bistrita Note: Access by car only
Borgo Pass (Bargau in Romanian), made famous in the opening chapter of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, is an oft-trod passageway through the Carpathian Mountains in northern Transylvania. Located near the small township of Tihuta, the pass peaks at 3,840 feet.
The Bargau Valley encompasses some of the most beautiful unspoiled mountain scenery in the Carpathians with picturesque traditional villages located in valleys and on hillsides, ideal bases for hiking, riding or discovering their vivid tapestry of old customs, handicrafts and folklore.
Here, you will step into a realm that the fictional Mina Harker described in her diary as “a lovely county; full of beauties of all imaginable kinds, and the people are brave, and strong, and simple, and seem full of nice qualities.”
If you travel via Google Earth, if you search for “Borgo Pass”, you will find the location, but the name for it on Google Earth is “Pasul Tihuta”, the Romanian name, not the Hungarian “Borgo Pass” that Bram Stoker used. Once in Pasul Tihuta, search for Hotel Castel Dracula. That’s the spot where Harker is supposed to have changed carriages. Don’t be surprised that the modern hotel looks nothing like the quaint hamlet of the movie. The Wikipedia article on Tihuta Pass states:
The pass was made famous by Bram Stoker‘s novel Dracula, where, termed as “the Borgo Pass”, it was the gateway to the realm of Count Dracula. Stoker most likely found the name on a contemporary map. He never actually visited the area.
Today the pass is home to Hotel “Castel Dracula”. The hotel was built in 1974 and is located at an altitude of
Hotel Castel Dracula Borgo Pass, Romania
1,116 m (3,661 ft). The hotel has become quite an attraction due to its architectural style of a medieval villa, as well as the sheer beauty of the location.
That being said, the next question that arises is if there is no Castle Dracula, but there was a historical figure on which was based, where did the historical figure, Vlad the Impaler, actually live?
A woodcut of the historical Vlad Tepes from about the sixteenth century
If you read any summary of his life, you will find that Vlad the Impaler was constantly on the move, either attacking his enemies or running from them. Pinning down his abode to a single spot is difficult. A good, brief summary of the most famous can be found at Romania Tourism. You will note that most of the popular tourist sites have at best a tenuous connection to Vlad Tepes. This is probably similar to the number of places along the US east coast that claim to be where George Washington slept during his campaigns in the American Revolution.
From what I have found during my Internet searches one of the best and probably most reliable articles on the places associated with Vlad Tepes is this one entitled “Dracula’s Homepage” written by a man who has apparently conducted extensive research into Vlad Tepes and the places associated with him. The author describes for us which spots were locations where Vlad Tepes actually lived as opposed to ones that the tourism industry identifies with him, but which in fact may have little, if anything at all, to do with the bloodthirsty ruler. The two locations described in this article as where Vlad Tepes spent a significant amount of time are Tirgoviste Palace and Cetatea Poenari.
The Tirgoviste palace is actually called “Curtea Palace”, where Vlad Tepes built the Chindia Tower. If you search for “Chindia Tower” on Google Earth, you can hover just over Vlad Tepes’s Tirgoviste Palace and even go to street level to view the tower as if you were walking past it.
Tirgoviste Palace today (from Google Earth)
Chindia Tower from the street (from Google Earth)
Search Google Earth for “Cetatea Poenari” and you will be taken to a secluded mountaintop over a narrow pass. This place probably captures the eerie spirit of the novel more than any other place you will find. If you have the Google Earth 3D buildings feature on (as I do in the photo below), you will see a 3D virtual representation of the castle, though the best views of it are from the dozens of photos tourists have attached to the location via Panaramio.
Cetatea Poenari (from Google Earth)
The website “Dracula’s Homepage” mentioned previously has a beautiful description of what it must be like to travel to the castle along with some of its historically horrific background:
“If there is an edifice that can be labelled Vlad Dracula’s castle, it is the ruins of Poenari. Actually, this is a fortress (“cetate” in Romanian) rather than a castle, located at the entrance to the gorge of the Arges River, north of the town of Curtea de Arges. As you leave Curtea de Arges (itself an interesting town with fortifications dating back to the 13th century and Basarab 1), you drive over a secondary road through several little villages, proceeding up the Arges valley towards the base of the Carpathian range.The road reaches the base of a group of high, heavily wooded mountains and there on the rocky top of one of them is Cetatea Poenari – Dracula’s Castle. Even from the road below it is a forbidding sight. What strikes one is its inaccessibility, high on a mountain top and the entrance to the gorges of the river (the river, by the way, has been diverted by a hydro-electric project). Poenari was the castle fortification that Vlad Tepes forced the nobles of Tirgoviste to build. The nobles were forced to walk the distance from Tirgoviste to the Arges (quite considerable by road – probably about 60 km overland) and then drag the material up that mountain to build the castle.
“To get to the top, one has to walk up almost 1500 steps. But the effort is certainly worth it. As you approach the magnificent ruin (last 50 steps or so) the scene is totally Gothic. There is the outline of the castle perched on the top of this rock, seeming to grow out of the very mountain itself. It covers the full space at the top, has a sheer drop on three sides, and is barely accessible by a small bridge near the top of the steps.
“I have returned to this site three times, as it is one of my favorite places in Romania: not only because of the sense of history but the magnificent scenery. One particular view (looking northwest) is spectacular – just the way you might picture the landscape around Dracula’s Castle in Stoker’s novel (though Stoker knew nothing about this place).
“This is the route that, according to local legend, Vlad took in order to escape into Transylvania from the Turks in 1462. He was assisted in his efforts by the villagers of nearby Arefu, where many narratives about Vlad still live in their oral culture.
“Then there is the southern wall of the castle – a sheer drop!
“This is where, according to another local legend, Vlad Tepes’ first wife flung herself, committing suicide rather than being taken captive by the advancing Turks. This castle is where Vlad would go for refuge in the face of advancing enemies. And from its towers he had a commanding view of anyone approaching from any direction. It was practically impenetrable.”
If you like horror, I highly recommend reading up on the historical Vlad Tepes and his reign. You will find actual terrors that would make any of the ficitional Draculas look like TV’s Mr. Rogers in comparison.
If, during your virtual journeys through the worlds of the fictional Count Dracula and his historical counterpart, Vlad Tepes, encounter any fascinating places or adventures, please feel free to share them via the comments section below.
Hopefully, I will find the time to sit down and write another extensive post, but unfortunately, these days I seem inundated with personal and professional tasks. I try to read when I have the opportunity. When I do have some time free, I have been watching horror films and I have several which I recommend and on which I hope to be writing posts before long. I also hope to establish a webpage for a nascent lexicon of horror.
On a side note, I find werewolves a fascinating fictional creature with a lot of as yet unexplored literary possibilities. I love them as a symbol of the dual nature of humanity: civilized person under most circumstances, but with the possibility of releasing, whether willingly or not, a dark, inner animalistic nature and suddenly converting into a horrific, bloodthirsty monster. I started a werewolf/lycanthrope novel of my own many years ago, and perhaps one day I will complete it.
Those of you unfamiliar with the distinction between a werewolf and a lycanthrope please note the following. A werewolf is a man (or woman) that actually changes into a wolf. Werewolves exist only in fiction. A lycanthrope is a person who believes that he or she changes into a wolf. These do exist, but are rare. For more information on this condition, please visit the Wikipedia article on Clinical Lycanthropy.
Here is an interesting bit of trivia: “8 Monsters of Literature and Folklore” at Dictionary.com – Free Online English Dictionary. You may have to wait a second or two for the slide show to pop up.
To get to the top, one has to walk up almost 1500 steps. But the effort is certainly worth it. As you approach the magnificent ruin (last 50 steps or so) the scene is totally Gothic. There is the outline of the castle perched on the top of this rock, seeming to grow out of the very mountain itself. It covers the full space at the top, has a sheer drop on three sides, and is barely accessible by a small bridge near the top of the steps.
Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher 