Told y’all we’d be talking about some Oddtober-related ‘zines! I know we just got finished with ‘Zine September but the first few Oddtober 2024 entries have been a bit heavy. I need something lighter to end the week and Haunted Houses by Kathryn Hemmann fits the bill. It’s got a creepy bite to it, but if a ten-year-old kid picked it up, they could flip through it without ruining their childhood.
Haunted Houses is an extremely pretty ‘zine, with drawings and seventeen pieces of flash fiction. The inside cover says:
The seventeen short stories in this collection dwell in haunted places. If you get lost in the words, you might be alarmed at first, but you’ll get used to it.
You live here now.
Kathryn Hemmann wrote the stories and created the drawings and through them explores different ways places can be haunted. She explores how people can be haunted, too. Though this is pretty and all together less horrifying than the two books that started Oddtober 2024, there is some very creepy darkness in it as well. An endless hallway that rivals the five and a half minute hallway in Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, decaying neighborhoods that swallow people, a person who creeps through houses at night so he or she can smell people when they are sleeping, and more. My favorite is the extraordinarily effective and creepy “Final Project Proposal.” The story is very short, micro-fiction actually, coming in at under 200 words. In that short piece, Hemmann incorporated the trope of the mad scientist, the evil dungeon master, and the miserable experiment forced to live penned up. So effective and so horrible. It’s perfect.
Because this ‘zine is flash fiction, I cannot engage in the in-depth dissection approach I prefer to take when discussing works here. But if you are a fan of the deceptively creepy, always wondering what unnerving things lurk in offices and old homes, you’ll like this little ‘zine. I wish I had not ordered this specifically for Oddtober because I would have loved to give Mr. OTC a copy for Halloween and since he proofreads my entries here, it would have ruined the surprise. If you’re interested in a copy, you can get one here.
Hemmann also continues with the goodwill I’ve come to expect from ‘zine makers, and included a couple of gratis items, including a lovely bookmark. Said it before and I’ll say it again: ‘zine makers are some of the most generous people with their work.
Be sure to keep an eye out for next week because I think I may actually have a book or two even the most ardent horror fans may not have seen. Bug chasers. A Komsomol girl versus a serial killer. Folk horror. And more! See you Monday.
When I was a little girl, maybe seven or eight years old, I watched a movie on television that affected me deeply. I’ve discussed some of my very specific fears before on this site and interestingly all of them were provoked by media and not some innate fear common to children. For example, I get very antsy around people wearing full-face masks or too much makeup, and that was the result of being terrified by an Alice Cooper tour commercial I saw when I was very young.
The fear I want to discuss here developed after I watched the film Bad Ronald. Have you seen it? It’s a made for TV film adapted from a novel by author Jack Vance and it absolutely messed me up. The plot of the film is that a divorced mother who suffers from mental and physical illness, has raised her with the hopes that he could become a doctor so he can cure her sickness. Her teen son, Ronald, is awkward and an outsider at school – kind of like a male Carrie but without telekinesis – and one day he decides to ask a girl out on a date. She declines and laughs him down. Later her younger sister mocks Ronald, who pushes her so hard on the ground that she suffers a fatal head injury. After racing home and telling his mother what happened, she decides to cover a door with wallpaper and essentially walls Ronald up in the house so the police can never find him. Seclusion causes Ronald to descend into a fantasy world where he is a prince who is going to protect his princess from an evil intruder. Then his mother dies and the house is sold, unaware that Ronald was living in a hidden room. The new owners have three teen daughters and Ronald decides one of them is his princess and that an older boyfriend is the evil intruder and things go bad but ultimately the only other death is a nosy neighbor who is literally scared to death.
For the record, it is not a good movie. Not the worst movie made in 1974 but arguments could be made that it belongs on some sort of “worst of” top ten list. It also stars Scott Jacoby, who was also in The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, an early Jodie Foster/Martin Sheen film that also involves a hidden cellar entrance and a creepy man who accesses the house.
Ronald becomes filthy and creeps around the house at night, eating food, stealing family items, watching the family sleep, all while still living in his dream world of himself as a prince trying to protect a princess from harm. The images of him emerging from the dark, dirty and deranged, spying, stealing and moving things around, affected me and eventually every time I heard something creak in the house, I would freeze in fear like a squirrel who sighted a hawk. I began to develop the idea that someone was creeping around in the house between the walls, which would be impossible with the crappy little 1950s house we lived in. I even intuitively understood that we did not have the sort of house that could provide enough room for an intruder to skulk between the walls, but I still could not shake the fear that every time I heard something or felt like something had been moved without me touching it that someone was in the house, stalking me.
This specific fear was cemented during a two month period when both of my parents were working night shift. I was in the third grade and had to be alone in the house from the time I got home from school until my father arrived home after midnight (my parents were broke and had interesting perspectives on child rearing plus we had no family in the area, so don’t think too badly of them). Add to it that at the time we didn’t have phone service, and I spent a nice chunk of time absolutely terrified.
It faded over time, but the fear of someone being in the house would remain a thought in the back of my head until my mother and her new husband moved into a far less ramshackle home. However, even living in a place that made far less noise didn’t eliminate the fear entirely. When Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs came out, it revived the fear and twisted it into a generic fear of someone being in the house. Given who I am, when the movie cycled over onto cable, I watched it every time I could. The titular people under the stairs were portrayed as monsters, but they were made into monsters by their captors and ultimately were forces of good, but the idea of ragged, abused people living under my nose without me knowing, was just another wrinkle in the same “someone’s here and watching” cloth.
Then, god help me, I read about the Lalaurie case. Whether or not the details are all true, the accepted story is that Delphine Lalaurie, a demented slave owner in New Orleans, was experimenting on her slaves, chaining them throughout the mansion and performing ghoulish experiments on them that sound as if they were straight out of Nazi research or Unit 731. A fire broke out in the house in 1834, allegedly started by a slave who was chained in the kitchen and was hoping to draw attention to her plight, and the fire brigade discovered the horrific torture chambers. The abuse was so egregious that even during Plantation era slavery in Louisiana, people were appalled and stormed the house, but Madame Lalaurie was able to escape and is believed to have fled to France. No one had any idea she was doing this, torturing, maiming and killing slaves right under the noses of her neighbors. I’ve often wondered if the Lalaurie case was partial inspiration for The People Under the Stairs.
I did not develop a phobia or fear from the Lalaurie case and a Wes Craven film, but the essential premises linked my brain back to Bad Ronald: there may be a hidden place in homes where deranged people are living, or, worse, being harmed. But mostly I forgot about it because I had student loans and the Internet had not been invented yet.
Enter Reddit.
I cannot recallhow many timespeople have founda hidden space in their homes that someone had been living in, or found evidence of someone living in an attic or cellar. Sometimes families lived in those homes for years before discovering someone had been creeping into their house without them knowing, doing god knows what while they were sleeping. When we bought our house, luckily we purchased a more modern built home that is essentially cardboard held together with wall putty but lacks a basement and the only place someone could hide is, interestingly, under the stairs, but we’ve been in and out of that space making repairs over the years, so I know no one is there. Plus an adult male who seldom leaves me alone at night lives here so when the cats do something that produces creepy sounds, he can go and check on it. Also I’m sort of an adult now, and can permit the adult part of my brain to drive me around these days. I still am extremely uneasy when people wear scary masks or wear corpse paint apropos of nothing but I’m not afraid of them. I just wish they wouldn’t. And this is similar. It was never as closely as held a fear as my mask/makeup issues – it’s just something I remember viscerally when “triggered.”
But every now and then, I see something like this and I feel that same sort of chilly creepiness that I experienced the first time I saw Bad Ronald.
Even though this video is fake, it’s still so horrifying I have to include it here. An aspiring actor hoping to go viral concocted this video of a woman living in the crawlspace over his apartment. The premise: he set up the camera because he’d noticed food and things going missing. This woman was descending into his apartment at night, eating food, watching television, and even urinating in his kitchen sink. Because I also have a germ aversion (caused by the same house I lived in when Bad Ronald warped me, a shit heap if there ever was one), the idea that someone could creep around at night and pee in my sink is just too much to think about.
There are a shocking number of videos about this sort of thing happening on YouTube and I am unsure how many have been debunked. It almost veers into the supernatural, thinking about how someone can creep around your home, creating their own home while you sleep or are away, and you never know it until you set up a camera after noticing things going missing, or remodel the house and break through a suspiciously thin wall, or get norovirus repeatedly because a stray human keeps urinating in your sink.
All in all, I have remarkably few genuine fears for someone this neurotic but this was one of those times when the fear that plagued me as a kid actually manifested for other people in real life. But I’m also proud to announce that I watched The People Under the Stairs on Shudder last week and was able to reminisce about my weird childhood rather than force Mr. OTC to search the house top to bottom when our stupidest cat fell off a shelf into the laundry bucket at three A.M.
Tell me about the weird thing that scared you when you were young. Was it the result of unmonitored television time? Did you grow out of it or did it get worse as you got older? Let me know!
Type of Book: Fiction, novel, horror, extreme horror
Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Extreme horror is odd by default, and the odd was strong in this book. This book also demonstrated to me that I really need to organize my book shopping habits.
Comments: I saw the movie We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (and will be discussing it this month), which I liked quite a bit. I did my usual rabbit hole routine of researching the film, the director, the guy who performed the music and the cast. I found out that a YouTuber called NyxFears had a small role in the film and as I looked into her career, saw she had written this book, which I ordered (probably off Bandcamp, but I may be wrong). Then the book got placed in my to-be-read pile that by now has hundreds of books waiting for me to get my ass in gear.
A year passed and a casual stroll on the Goodreads tag for “extreme horror” showed me a book called Fluids by May Leitz. I went on Amazon, got the ebook, and read it. I was not blogging regularly at the time, but I figured at some point I would discuss it here. As I was looking through my to-be-read pile, I found the hard copy for Fluids and had one of those moments wherein I understood I had yet again purchased the same book twice but it took me reading the first three pages to jog my memory. I wish I could say this was the first time I have done this. Hell, I wish I could say that this was only the twentieth time I’ve done this.
All of the above is by way of saying that I have an extra copy of this book that is pristine despite me having read the first few pages and the first person who guesses who was president of the United States when I was born will win it. Just leave me a comment on this entry with your guess. People who are related to me by blood or marriage or went to high school with me are excluded from guessing.
Back to the book.
I entered into reading this book knowing little more than that someone who appeared in a film I liked wrote it and that the cover said it was an extreme horror novel. It is indeed extreme, but stands out from the crowd for being so extremely well-written. Extreme horror as a genre produces chaotic text, but within the chaos, you seldom find the attention to characterization and psychological motivation that you see in this novel. For a self-published book, it is well-edited and the writing overall is very strong. It’s not for the faint of heart, however, so if discussions of violence upset you, consider giving this discussion a miss.
Type of Book: Short story collection, horror, extreme horror
Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It’s hard to take me by literary surprise. I absolutely was not expecting what this book delivered.
Availability: Published in 2022 by Nictitating Books, you can get copies here. For the record, I read the Kindle version.
Comments: This book is perfect to start off with for Oddtober 2024. I’ve been on a horror kick lately, and luckily most types of extreme horror lend themselves well to oddness. This book is not in-your-face weird, but rather is weird in that creepy, unsettling way that is often hard to explain. Paula Ashe is a rare writer in her willingness to explore the minds of both the victim and the assailant without sentimentality or a pious morality. Rather, she looks at the human condition with a sharp, focused eye, showing us the will of the victim and the will of the abuser, sometimes blurring the lines between the two without pandering.
Ashe had to defend this approach in her own epilogue. She explains that people actually do take value in the way she presents abuse, saying, “…there are other people who read my work for solace. For understanding. For a bizarre and bitter reprieve.” I am one of those people. As long-time readers of this site may recall, the gut punch from fiction like this was better for me in the end than years of therapy wherein all I was permitted to do was navigate my own suffering rather than build a foundation of knowledge about the human condition. It’s heartbreaking to realize we live in a culture wherein a woman who has written some of the best horror fiction to come across my radar has to apologize for daring to explore the depths and motives behind human evil. Wonderful…
This is a relatively short collection – eleven stories in 133 pages – and you can easily read it in one sitting. I’ve reread the whole of it a couple of times now, and have read two of the stories several times as I attempted to run to ground some of the names and spells mentioned in them. Ashe merges the ancient into the modern and mixes her own horrors with established devils with such skill that I still am unsure if some of her stories are wholly of her own creation or if my research skills have failed me. She inspired me to dig deeper, and even if her prose had fallen short, spurring curiosity beyond the book itself is often worth the price of admission. Luckily, her prose was on the mark, visceral and beautiful. Absolutely savage in some places. She keeps a steady balance between the gloriously cruel and the bitterly hopeful.
One of the many charms of this collection is that Ashe experiments in style and method of story-telling. The story “Grave Miracles” will remind younger readers of “ritual” creepy pastas, wherein an authoritative, omniscient voice gives instructions so the reader can perform a specific series of steps to succeed in paranormal games or endeavors. Ashe constructs her story “Grave Miracles” using such a framework, outlining the startling steps one would take to bring a dead wife back to life and the things that will have to happen to keep her “alive” and flourishing. This story is immediately followed by “Exile in Extremis,” an email exchange between an investigative reporter and her contacts at a magazine. The magazine has published her story about grave robbing, young women coming back from the dead, and an entity known as the Priest of Breathing, and the editor and the magazine CEO need her to reveal her sources. A police investigation was launched as a result of the story and the journalist, Elle, sharp and nearly-unshakeable, does all she can to protect the editor from probing into the story any further. The story manages to be horrifying yet amusing, as Elle deftly uses illegal tactics and the threat of social embarrassment to protect innocent but annoying people from themselves.
Another surprise for me was Jacqueline Laughs Last in the Gaslight. I’m no “Ripperologist,” in that I can’t recite every little bit about the Jack the Ripper killings, but I’ve swam in that true crime lake, reading a lot of non-fiction as well as fictionalized accounts of the Whitechapel murders. I’ve come across a lot of “Jill the Ripper” theories, asserting that Jack was really a woman. This is the best Jill the Ripper story I’ve come across, assigning the protagonist a believable motive and bestowing her with the skills to commit believable violence. I can’t discuss it in any depth without potentially ruining the story, but Ashe both adapts her style to fit what one imagines an omniscient narrator’s voice would sound like as she narrates in 1888, while simultaneously holding on to the earthy, erotic tone the story demands. It’s a delicate balance, and one that Ashe manages marvelously. Describing Jacqueline and her minister husband, she says:
In Whitechapel’s rookery of wastrel the fine pair is as prominent as a hanged man’s prick.
I dare you to write a line more provocative and perfect than this. You can’t do it. You’ll cramp up. If you do try, be sure to stretch out first.
Ashe’s focus ranges from folklore to true crime, ancient history to inter-dimensional time travel. She tackles the horror of what happens when filial evil destroys maternal love and how one woman’s reaction to terrible abuse destroyed the sister she wanted to save. She picks out little, terrible details that, to the right reader, marry together reality and her fiction. A single line from “Carry On, Carrion,” brought to mind one of the more unique details from the miserable story of Tristan Bruebach.* Each story has little details like that, little pieces of horror from real life that make her stories all the creepier because, as we know, the truth is always far more fucked up than fiction.
The final story in the collection, “Telesignatures from a Future Corpse” is likely the piece that is the “price of admission” story for many, and indeed it is a great story. However, I want to discuss the two stories that caused me to spend hours researching old cults and folklore recitations of protection. In discussing these two stories I will likely spoil them some so read on with this in mind.