I think that’s exactly the impression I’ve gotten!

Their eps are keeping me going through grad school at the moment (lol). Also a host recommended Robert Hugh Benson a few eps back and his work has been my obsession the last couple weeks. Really, really, consistently solid recs. Anyways, check 'em out! Enjoyment of Whiskey not required.

So glad you’re enjoying RH Benson!! Thanks for listening and for the shoutout.

I wish some enterprising and visionary director would turn this into a feature film - it would almost certainly be successful. One of my favorite John Langan tales.

I think it has to do with the many layers of verisimilitude Langan works in to the stratified narrative, plus it’s (at least partly) religious horror, and that works well on me. I love the “found footage” aspects of the story, too.

This is my 2nd time reading this (the first was in Datlow’s BEST HORROR OF THE YEAR, VOL. 10) and it’s just as powerful. I read a lot of horror & like other avid readers of the genre am somewhat inured to its effects. This story scares me. It did the first time I read it and no less the second time.

I read this for the podcast (Whiskey and the Weird), so don’t want to say too much here, but what I will say is this story smacks of being written by a P.K.!

Naturally, he saves the day in grandiloquent style. Fun, but in the Scooby Doo sense, and not as entertaining as the more ghostly and ghastly tales.

The unique thing about it was that deGrandin was not engaged to solve the mystery, but stumbled upon it himself: a creepy dude keeping young girls in a coven-like atmosphere, trying to cheat them out of their inheritances and their lives.

I love the Jules deGrandin stories, faults and all. They almost never fail to bring a smile to my face, and I have fun every time I read one. That said, I enjoy the supernatural tales more and this one had a mundane solution.

This was a good story, a bit creepy, a bit fun, & kind of a soft intro to Langan for new readers. It’s a cursed object story that places the reader in the captain’s chair - how you respond is up to you, but I came away from it feeling a bit guilty. I’ll read this collection in order, & I can’t wait!

The opening salvo in the newest John Langan collection is short, punchy, not as funny as Victor Lavalle let on and his great introduction, and written in a guilt-inducing second person. Langan is likely my favorite contemporary horror author, so a new collection is caused for rejoicing.

I wish the ending was a bit more grim though. It was all rather too neatly tied up for my liking.

This one, though, is a banger of a story. A student at “Old College,” Oxford uses a mummy to commit foul deeds. Great academic atmosphere, charming banter, which is now sometimes unintentionally humorous, and lots of pipe smoking.

(though “Lost in a Pyramid” was published in 1869 by Louisa, May Alcott, & before that “The Mummy’s Soul” by an anonymous writer in 1862, & in 1868 “After Three Thousand Years” by Jane G. Austin) so whoever claimed that was likely ignorant, but perhaps just discounted stories authored by women.

Here’s one that’s been on my list for a while – argued by some as perhaps the first English language mummy story…

“You are in a small pool of muddy grey light at the bottom of the stairs from the painting, and you think to yourself, either I am in the painting, or the painting has escaped its canvas and become part of the real world, or I have somehow been transported to the place the artist used as his model.”