Hawthorne as Horror & the Monstrous Woman

By Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

Before I read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” I didn’t understand that women in fiction could be monstrous. Or that “monstrous” didn’t always mean a stalker in the night.  

Beatrice, the daughter of a botanist who breeds poisonous plants, is herself poison. You may argue that she cannot be monstrous because she means no ill will to the man who tries to love her, but villains maintain their own sense of logic. Beatrice...

 

Tropes Aren’t Bad. They’re everything.

by Brandon Applegate

It’s funny, the way this whole thing got started. I have a Discord chat with a few other writers, and we were goofing around, and someone suggested we come up with the worst anthology ideas we could. We tossed a bunch of them around, some pretty horrible, before I blurted out “It Was All a Dream: An Anthology of Bad Tropes.” But within the space of a few chat lines, we had already switched from making fun of...

 

THE SURVIVAL OF MARGARET THOMAS

 

 

...

MY DARK LIBRARY NOVELLA SERIES

 

BOOK !:

Night Worms has been given the special honor of revealing two book covers for you exclusively by Perpetual Motion Machine's & Ghoulish Books senior editor, Max Booth III.

Rabbits in the Garden and Hares in the Hedgerow

the first two installments of Jessica McHugh’s Gardening Guidebooks Trilogy, to be published later this year by Ghoulish Books.

Artist credit for both covers: Don Noble

 

Rabbits in the Garden

Pre-order: Read the article

---