Merry Christmas!

I hope you're having a lovely day where ever you are!

literary conspriracy theory countdown

I won't say I'm a proponent of all of the theories I will post in the days running up to Halloween but this first one has always been a mystery and a bit horrifying considering who the victim was...

So, let’s just look at the facts shall we?

On October 3, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe was wandering the streets of Baltimore delirious, he was later described as being "in great distress, and... in need of immediate assistance", according to the man who found him, Joseph W. Walker. Rushed by carriage to the Washington Medical College, he died alone that hospital on Sunday, October 7, 1849, at 5:00 in the morning.  Odd enough that Poe was in Baltimore (he was headed for Philadelphia) but the author of the macabre was never coherent long enough to explain how he came to be in his dire condition or... why he was wearing clothes that were not his own? According to witnesses, Poe is said to have repeatedly called out the name "Reynolds" on the night before his death although it was not clear to whom he was referring.  Newspapers at the time reported the author's death as "congestion of the brain" or "cerebral inflammation", common euphemisms for deaths from disreputable causes such as alcoholism. Though Poe was known to drink to excess he was not a hopeless alcoholic[1], it is unlikely that his drinking him brought him to a strange city in strange clothes where he would die for unknown reasons. 

I have always thought, since I wrote a paper on Poe in high school, that there was foul play but since all medical records, including his death certificate, have been lost since that time and Poe’s death remains shrouded in mystery.

image: ChicagoPublicLibrary.tumblr.com

What do you think?  

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[1] http://www.eapoe.org/geninfo/poealchl.htm

I feel crippled

I’ve misplaced the chord to hook my camera up to my computer and can’t download any pictures- plus we haven’t done much hiking due to an ongoing health issue (long story). And I have so many pretty pictures of Autumns past that I've never touched up (my camera really isn’t capable of capturing the glories of a fall day without a little help) that I thought I might do a bit of that now.

This is a picture of a Cooper’s Hawk that was hunting small birds in an area I was walking one day a few years back. I was shocked to be as close as I was as it was a heavily populated area and there were quite a few people just a few feet away, but it seems that he was on the immature side and hadn’t learned the finer points of discretion.  

What I should have done is make a video of his behavior because the Cooper’s Hawk is really quite amazing to watch. But we’ll just enjoy his pose for today.

scariest books for halloween

Flavorwire put out their 50 scariest books of all time list. It by Stephen King; Piercing by Ryu Murakami; The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty; Ghost Story, Peter Straub; American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis; Hell House, Richard Matheson; Bram Stoker’s Dracula; The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood; H.P. Lovecraft’s The Best of H.P. Lovecraft; The Turn of the Screw by Henry James are the top ten! 

I have to admit that I haven’t read any of the top 10- I loved Poe (he is 22) in high school and I think all his stories are pretty scary: Tale Tell Heart, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum and The Cask of Amontillado.

I also read The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski but don’t remember it being THAT scary and it came in 25. Maybe I need to reread it? I also read #45 In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. I found it more gory than scary which is often the case for me where American “horror” is concerned. 

The scariest thing I ever read was the first scary adult book I remember. It was called Stories that Scared Even Me, ed. Alfred Hitchcock; the first among many of Hitchcock’s works (love his movies!) that I would come to love. Stories selected by Mr. Hitchcock include: Casablanca by Thomas M. Disch, Fishhead by Irvin S. Cobb, Camera Obscura by Basil Copper, A Death in the Family by Miriam Allen deFord, Men Without Bones by Gerald Kersh, Not With a Bang by Damon Knight, Party Games by John Burke, X Marks the Pedwalk by Fritz Leiber, Curious Adventure of Mr. Bond by Nugent Barker, Two Spinsters by E. Phillips Oppenheim, The Knife by Robert Arthur, The Cage by Ray Russell, It by Theodore Sturgeon, The Road to Mictlantecutli by Adobe James, Guide to Doom by Ellis Peters, The Estuary by Margaret St. Clair, Tough Town by William Sambrot, The Troll by T. H. White, Evening at the Black House by Robert Somerlott, One of the Dead by William Wood, The Real Thing by Robert Specht, Journey to Death by Donald E. Westlake, Master of the Hounds by Algis Budrys, The Candidate by Henry Slesar, and Out of the Deeps by John Wyndham.

All I remember is that I was up at night, staring into the dark, hoping no murderers were lurking behind closed doors.

What scary books are still lurking in your memory?