Varla’s Valentine
Dear Readers!
As a delightful Valentine to you, for a limited time you can get a FREE downloadable PDF of The Haunted Orchard, part of the Paranormal Parlor digital book collection curated by me. This horror-story-romp in the countryside was a deviation from author Richard le Gallienne’s usual poetry and romantic stories, but it has plenty of romance. It just so happens that the object of his affections is no longer living.
Read it yourself here:
With love,
Varla
Charles Dickens, Ghostbuster
Today is Charles Dickens’ birthday and it seems that the world has caught a new batch of Dickensian Fever with the publication of Claire Tomalin’s biography and a fantastic article in the latest issue of Smithsonian Magazine. I’m not going to attempt to give you the greater details of Dickens’ life or his life’s work but instead I’m going to talk to you about my personal favorite Dickens’ collection: The Haunted House.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the Charles Dickens I know and love is Charles Dickens, Ghostbuster!!
The Haunted House was published in an 1894 collection of three short stories by Dickens, under the title Christmas Stories, which is where I stumbled upon it. But as I researched further, I found that it was first published in 1859 in All Year Round, a publication for which Dickens served as editor. This contained a unique collection of stories under the same title, with Dickens writing the introductory story and the closing story. The other stories were written by writers of the time who Dickens invited to contribute a tale of their own set in one of the many haunted rooms of The Haunted House.
In his story, Dickens sets the stage for the paranormal parlor games that the protagonist invites his friends to join in. The abandoned house with rooms featuring names such as The Picture Room and The Clock Room is inhabited by a skeptical man who invites each of his dearest friends and relatives to arrive on the magical Twelfth Night of Christmas. It was often believed that the Twelfth Night of Christmas had a supernatural power—not unlike our current belief in Halloween as being a good time to communicate with those that have shuffled off this mortal coil.
He writes:
The understanding was established, that anyone who heard unusual noises in the night, and who wished to trace them, should knock at my door; lastly, that on Twelfth Night, the last night of holy Christmas, all our individual experiences since that then present hour of our coming together in the haunted house, should be brought to light for the good of all; and that we would hold our peace on the subject till then, unless on some remarkable provocation to break silence.
Each invited author then takes up residence in one of the particular rooms and writes from the point-of-view fo the ghost.
Thus far we’ve published the first two and the third is coming soon. You can find them here as digital books. Check out the paranormal games of Dickens!
The Haunted House eBook
The Ghost in the Clock Room eBook
Happy Birthday Charles!!
Beware the Scandanavian Christmas Troll!!!
Lock up your daughters. And your sons! No child, strike that, no mortal is safe in the dark hours of Christmas Eve. For there lurks the Christmas troll, drunk on spirits and cavorting with the witches, waiting to trick you into a midnight ride.
Early 20th century author Clement A. Miles was a historian and an amateur anthropologist of sorts. His 1912 collection of Christmas traditions he deemed “both Pagan and Christian” is not just a cross-cultural look at the origins of Santa Claus. Here you will find werewolves, bogeys, and trolls. You will find curses and hexes and imminent death, rituals of the dead and goblin offerings. You will be warned of The Devil and cautioned against laziness. If you are in Bavaria, take heed of the Berchte—a wretched bogey who cuts the stomachs open of naughty children. And at all costs, do not walk outside alone should you ever find yourself in Greece during the Twelve Days of Christmas. For there lurks the most horrid beast of all: the Kallikantzaroi or Karkantzaroi, a horrid half-human, half-animal monstrosity that plays tricks and ravages households, often leaving the occupants dead. Some say it is a mortal man transformed into a beastly creature, others say it is manifested from the supernatural beyond.
If you want to learn more about these horrifying hellhounds of Yule, join me on Friday the 23rd of December, at 10pm PST on Coast to Coast where George Noory and I will speak of things evil and strange, quirky and creepy, funny and festive!
Coast to Coast is a live show that you can listen to via your local AM radio station. Visit their website for a list of stations and times. And don’t forget, you can call in with your own tales of terror!! Open lines in the second hour.
L. Frank Baum Was a Woman
And other weird things I’ve learned just in time for the holidays!
Seriously, though…I was reading A Kidnapped Santa Claus, this fantastic short story written by beloved Oz author L. Frank Baum way back in 1904. It takes place in Laughing Valley–Baum’s alternative to The North Pole–which happens to be surrounded by mountains where there happen to be cave dwelling demons, lurking and sulking and plotting to ruin Christmas. It is like How the Grinch Stole Christmas meets The Nightmare Before Christmas with a dose of The Wizard of Oz!
I was researching Baum to get handle on the many not-Oz books he wrote when I discovered that he was not only prolific, but he also had multiple prolific pseudonyms. Of seven known pen names, three of them were female. Edith Van Dyne wrote an entire series of Aunt Jane books. He also authored under the amazingly common names Laura Bancroff and Suzanne Metcalf. In addition to these feminine non de plumes he wrote under the far more manly names of Captain Hugh Fitzgerald, Floyd Akers, Schuyler Stunton, and John Estes Cooke.
If you’d like to read A Kidnapped Santa Claus, you can get it for free on my publishers website by following this link:
Free Download of A Kidnapped Santa Claus
You will also find there a free download of The Christmas Troll
, a collection of creepy Yuletide beasts that lurk in the night around this time of year…and I’ll be discussing this folkloric freakery on Coast to Coast with George Noory, this Friday the 23rd at 10pm PST. More on that later!
The Occult Power of Goats
One of the books from the Magical Creatures collection I have been curating for Weiser Books shares this wonderful title: The Occult Power of Goats (And Other Welsh Tales of Goblins, Fairies, Gnomes and Elves). A wonderful collection of stories from the fairy kingdom by a collector himself: William Wirt Sikes
An American journalist, born in the 1830s, William Wirt Sikes lived in Wales at the end of his life (and died there). I like to picture him sharing a spot of tea with an old grandmother who shares with him a tale from her mother’s mother. Or perhaps smoking a pipe with an old farmer who’s seen with his own eyes some of the creatures who inhabit these pages and knows “for a fact” that the stories are true.
Remember too that in the rural parts of England and Wales, as well as Ireland, the people were not so removed from what now are thought to be mere stories. Though cynicism was setting in (you can detect notes of it throughout these works with the more clinical approach to “first-hand accounts”) many people lived their daily lives with a certain understanding and appreciation of the other realms. So these stories straddle the world of the invisible and the visible, the known and the unknown. Here you will find changelings, hobgoblins, pookas, dwarves, and fairies: night fairies, mountain fairies, water fairies… What’s a pooka, you say? You’ll have to buy the book to find out!
Available at Amazon and B&N and Sony and anywhere else you can get e-books for your silly little devices!
Another Feast for the Freaks
As we all roll out of bed on this post-Thanksgiving Monday morning, possibly still clutching our guts in regret of the pie-we-ate-that-lasted-too-long, we can have a nice snack from an entirely different table. Dive into the juicy tidbits on this wonderful site The Magical Buffet. Lots of fun things, but of course you know I am shamelessly linking directly to my interview with the founder Rebecca Elson.
http://themagicalbuffet.com/blog1/2011/11/27/10-questions-with-varla-ventura/
Varla
Ray Bradbury Is So Cool
I was settling into my annual reading of The Halloween Tree, which is a ritual I have invoked and maintained for the last few post-Halloweens–a great way to come down from the witches’ high of the Big Night and prepare for Dia de los Muertos or Day of the Dead. I was savoring my copy of the book–pilfered from my Grandma’s basement when I was but a teen–and I noticed something for the first time in several years. The words on the dedication page read thus:
With love for
MADAM MAN’HA GAREEAU-DOMBASLE
met twenty-seven years ago in the graveyard at midnight on the Island of Janitzio at Lake Patzcuaro, Mexico, and rememebered on each anniversary of The Day of the Dead
Oh now, I have read these words before. But I hadn’t noticed them of late and this is significant because I actually visited that island! I guess Ray Bradbury was in my subconcious because two years ago on The Day of the Dead I was crouching behind mourners and candlelight vigils, taking orb-ladened photos and sips from a flask as the icy chill of midnight and the mountain lake’s waters settled all around us. I was in the same cemetery as Bradbury, doing the same thing. Only he is way cooler because he did it back before it was really something tourist did. The influence of the Mexican culture, specifically their Day of the Dead tratiitons are all over Bradbury’s books.
In honor of his friend, and in honor of a few of mine who have gone to the great beyond, tonight I burn the candle I bought on Isla Janitzio those moons ago. And I think of those who have passed, the loved ones, the family and friends, and even the forgotten souls who wander. Tonight is the celebration of life in honor of the dead. And if you are lucky enough to live somewhere with a celebration, its time to paint your face like a skeleton and join the parade!!
Hallowpost
For those of you who missed my Halloween musings on The Huffington Post’ Weird News, you can read about kitchen ghosts, Halloween cookies, a dark and stormy night, and what this all has to do with Scooby Doo here:
Vampire Meets Frankenstein
Or maybe, in this case, it is the other way around. You fans of horror (you are fans of horror, right?!?) may recall the story of the birth of one of the best horror novels of all time–Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft (Shelley) were reading ghost stories aloud to one another one stormy night at Byron’s lake house in Geneva, Switzerland. Byron prompted his partygoers to write a ghostly tale of their own. Out of this came the beginnings of Frankenstein, a Modern Prometheus. As it happened, John William Polidori was also there that fated night. Personal physician to Lord Byron and a writer as a past time, Polidori crafted The Vampyre, A Tale from a sketch of a story that Byron composed that same evening. Often wrongly advertised as a story by Byron himself, The Vampyre has remained a relatively obscure tale of terror. The first vampire story published in English, Polidori’s work predates the seminal Bram Stoker’s Dracula by more than seventy years.
Check it out here, at the Amazon kindle store. Available soon in multiple formats for any digital reader of your choosing.
Available also for your Nook:
This book is part of the Magical Creatures, A Weiser Books Collection that I am delighted to be curating. There are four more available now as well as five titles in the Paranormal Parlor collection! All curated by me, Varla. That’s right, I’ve been combing through the cobwebs to find you volumes of forgotten lore!
John Polidori, Lord Byron's doc!
The Ghost of Mark Twain
The latest Huffington Post blog gets into some details about a lone grave, the Ouija board, and the ghost of Samuel L. Clemens!!
Read it here:
