for thinking people
December 12, 2017
Literature – and the Gothic in particular – is my field of expertise. Facebook and social media might be yours. But to the question “what is common between a Gothic double and Facebook”, you might think: “Nothing”. Then, you might start wondering whether I’m referring to some cat photo. After all, doesn’t that account for probably half of all Facebook photos posted?
In actual fact, I’m having something far more intricate in mind.
October 28, 2024
A Less Disturbing Form of Reality is a short story collection themed around the uncanny and the unexplained. However, there’s something you need to know: It’s not new.
In fact, it’s anything but new. The stories were written between 2008 and 2014, though a handful of them are adaptations of even older stuff I’ve written.
In other words, these are really, really raw. They’re also very unlike my usual literary-fiction style, and even different from my recent short fiction, such as A Summer Evening in Another World and Tell Me, Mariner.
So, why now?
The cover art of A Less Disturbing Form of Reality is something that won’t win any awards. It’s made with Canva and an AI-slapped image…
(more…)October 21, 2024
It’s been a while since I shared something from my academic vault of uselessness… Well, alright; knowledge and thought are never useless; academia (the way it’s run nowadays) might be. But I digress. The following post on death in A Christmas Carol is a modified excerpt (pp. 148-149) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press.
Also take a look at my posts on religion in A Christmas Carol and, especially, Gothic Immortality in Dickens’s work – the present post forms a nice pair with the latter.
