Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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A tour guide to strange, (not so) far places

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands.
(H.P. Lovecraft)

Selection_897I’m taking a moment to plug a book that’s been a great resource for my stories and a great read altogether.
I’ve been checking it out again during the Halloween season, because there is an increase in the request for ghost stories and supernatural horror, and before that it provided me with one of the two ideas on which I built my story in the Zappa & Spada anthology.

The book is called The Lore of the Land and it is a massive tone by Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson. Continue reading


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Wilhelm Grimm’s Birthday

Today is the birthday of Wilhelm Grimm, half of the Grimm Brothers folklorist outfit that compiled a wonderful (and pretty… ah, grim) collection of legend and folktales, and later suffered the double posthumous indignity of having their “fairy tales” sweetened and disneyfied, and of becoming silly characters in a not-so-great fantasy action movie.

Karavansara salutes Wilhelm Grimm with a pretty grim black cat, by the great Arthur Rackham, from his illustrated edition of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

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