The darkening land

A poem today to summon the spirit of Halloween. This is by Thomas Hardy:

Tree-leaves labour up and down,
And through them the fainting light
Succumbs to the crawl of night.
Outside in the road the telegraph wire
To the town from the darkening land
Intones to travellers like a spectral lyre
Swept by a spectral hand.

A car comes up, with lamps full-glare,
That flash upon a tree:
It has nothing to do with me,
And whangs along in a world of its own,
Leaving a blacker air;
And mute by the gate I stand again alone,

And nobody pulls up there.

"Nobody Comes" was written in October 1924, and it makes me wonder if Hardy ever visited Binscombe...

I always say that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is not a horror story in the way that Dracula is, for instance. But I also love James Whale's movies and, even more so, the Hammer series with Peter Cushing as an ennobled and deliriously driven Victor Frankenstein -- and Hieronymus J. Doom shares my geeky obsessions, as you'll see from this characteristically discerning, witty and well-argued review of my interactive take on Frankenstein:

As if that's not enough of a Samhain fix, Frankenstein was recently featured on the blog here.

Other sources of delectable chills for the time of year are:

• The Collected Short Stories of Saki by H H Munro
• Fancies & Goodnights by John Collier
• Japanese Ghost Stories by Yakumo Koizumi (aka Lafcadio Hearn)
• "A Wrong Turning" by Martin McKenna and Dave Morris
• "Waiting for a Bus" by John Whitbourn (from The Binscombe Tales)
• Headcases:  A Bestiary of Flying Nightmares from World Folklore

And true connoisseurs of contemporary fantasy will be pleased to find an all-new weird tale by John Whitbourn, Britain's peerless modern master of the genre, in Wrong magazine from November 5th onwards.

Sleep tight!