Litro Magazine #127: Victoriana

Publication news: My short story "The Legacy of Steeple Hill" is featured in Litro Magazine's Victoriana issue (July #127).

It's a curious story. It definitely has a feel of Edgar Allan Poe/Wilkie Collins about it, and a sinister atmosphere throughout. A Crimean war veteran, Thomas Barrington, visits the ancestral home of the Walsinghams, the mansion on Steeple Hill. It's a suitably gloomy and labyrinthine building overlooking a rugged, ominous coastline. Barrington is calling on his old friend, and the present incumbent and aristocrat owner of the mansion, Lord John Walsingham. Barrington unwittingly stumbles upon a sequence of planned occult rituals orchestrated by Walsingham, which have already resulted in mysterious supernatural events taking place at the forbidding gothic mansion...

Please read and enjoy, and I hope you will take the time to read the entire issue as well (Victoriana being a theme close to my heart!) The link is here: Litro Magazine #127



ADDENDUM: Litro described my story as a tale of "spectral presences and sleepless nights", which I quite liked!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Small World

Image
About three weeks ago, I accepted an invitation from a volunteer who helps me with Italian football research to join a website called 'A Small World'. ASW is a social networking website, very similar to Facebook with one major difference - it's invitation only. Once you join, you have access to all features of the site. However, despite gaining access you don't immediately have the means to send out invitations to others. ASW say that "Trusted and loyal ASW members who meet certain criteria have the privilege of inviting a limited number of their friends." As yet, I do not have the power to invite others to join. It's the highbrow Facebook, basically. Tiger Woods is a member, along with numerous other celebrities. However there are strict controls on who you can contact and what kind of things you can post in discussion forums and the 'events' areas of the website. ASW also has this to say about itself to potential advertisers: "An inte
Read more

The Mothers of Darkness Castle

Image
Some intrepid and courageous explorers posted their visit to the infamous "Mothers of Darkness" castle on Youtube. More information about this site, which may be of interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chateau_des_Amerois https://fourhorsemen66.com/2018/12/16/chateau-des-amerois-mothers-of-darkness-castle-most-evil-place-in-the-world/ It's no surprise to me that a place like this would be in a sorry country like Belgium. I have personally met and had dealings with one or two extremely unpleasant people from Belgium. However, I digress. The story of this place helped inspire some of my ideas for my novel Staccato House.
Read more

One Thousand and One Nights; or, The Arabian Nights

Image
The One Thousand and One Nights , popularly known as The Arabian Nights , is a composite work compiled from Middle Eastern and Indian folklore during the first millennium AD. In its earliest form, its origin was in tales from India and Persia, and then Arab tales were added to it- most of them dating from the period of the  Umayyad and  Abbasid Caliphates. Many of these stories are based around the adventures of the Caliph of Baghdad, Harun al-Rashid and his vizier (advisor) Ja'far the Barmecide . ( Harun al-Rashid was an actual historic figure, although his real-life vizier was Ja'far's father, Yahya . The  real Ja'far was mysteriously executed, although it was possibly for an affair with the caliph's sister.) Then later, more folk tales from Syria and Egypt have been added to create as many stories in the Arabian Nights to fill up over a thousand nights. I've read the Penguin Classics English Translation by Malcolm C.Lyons and Ursula Lyons, with a
Read more