Fangs, Fur, and Fey Giveaway WINNER!!!

 

A coffin bag full of books and zombie bags full of fun!

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and ghouls…

The winner of the Fangs, Fur, and Fey Giveaway is…..

Zara Alexis.

Zara, you can expect a package of creepy fun coming your way soon. Included are copies of my book, The Book of the Bizarre, and Reginald Bakeley’s Goblinproofing One’s Chicken Coop. Also a zombie-grab bag of fun!!!

See the pictures of your spoils below…

And if you didn’t win take heart! There are three more giveaways happening this month, so watch here for more details. I’ll be giving away more spooky swag and copies of both of my books.
Congrats Zara!!

(Check out Zara’s cool blog here: http://zaraalexis.wordpress.com/)

Happy Halloween!

To the victor go the spoils!

Interview with Dark Harvest Radio

Hello Pumpkins and Pumpkin Eaters!

It’s been ages since you’ve heard the sweet (or should I say scratchy? It’s been Dark and Stormy night…) sound of my voice. Well, the agonizing wait is over. Listen to me live Monday the 24th, at 7pm EST where I’ll be chatting with host Dan Marro on his show The Dark Harvest Radio Show. 

We’ll be talking about all that is creepy, freaky, fun, and paranormal. Listen live!!!

 Dan Marro as the Dark Harvest Radio Program broadcasts live Monday nights from 7pm-9pm(EST) on Global Radio Alliance The Dark Harvest Radio Program is designed to be a forum for those who have a curiosity for the unknown. From conspiracies and cover-ups to ghosts and other dimensions, The Dark Harvest Radio Program will address all topics that fascinate us about this mysterious universe of ours. You can even talk LIVE during the show by joining us at the GRA Live Interactive Chat

Tune in!

Who’s That Knocking on my Coffin Lid? Vampires, Magical Creatures Part Three

Lovers of True Blood, Dracula devotees, and Twilight tweens: I offer you the ancient vamps of my Magical Creatures series!

These are the stories that Stephenie Meyer and Anne Rice read when they were but wee babes, suckling on their mothers (or the  neck of their mother). These are the groundwork stories about vampirism, both horrific, romantic, and psychic.

Currently available exclusively as e-books, these are found volumes of forgotten lore (many a quaint and curious tale!) and cover the realm of such creepy and cool beings as goblins, werewolves, vampires, banshees, mermaids, and phookas, to name but a few.

(If the response is positive on these little e-beasts, I’ll be expanding them into book form!!)

Horror devotees will recall the story of the infamous gathering at a lake house outside of Geneva, Switzerland in the summer of 1816 where a small party celebrated the settling darkness by reading ghost stories aloud to one another. Present were the host, Lord Byron, and his guests: Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (Shelley) and her sister, and Lord Byron’s physician—John William Polidori. At the prompting of Byron, pens were set to paper to write ghost stories of their own. Here the groundwork was laid for what would become Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a Modern Prometheus. Shelley himself wrote Fragments of a Ghost Story, and Byron wrote something called Fragment of a Novel. This “fragment” became the basis for Polidori’s The Vampyre, A Tale—the first vampire novel published in English, some seventy years before Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Also in the vampire collection, are two lesser known tales by Bram Stoker: Burial of the Rats and Dracula’s Guest. Both were part of a collection of stories that Stoker had been working on but never published. After his death, his widow decided they were fit for print and submitted them to his publisher in 1914. And Théophile Gautier’s Clarimonde is by far one of the most controversial vampire stories from the early 19th Century. A would-be priest begins to doubt his path and his God when he meets (by chance?) fair Clarimonde. I won’t give it all away but this is some necromantic romance at its best! And finally, George Sylvester Viereck’s 1907 short story The House of the Vampire was the first novel to introduce psychic vampires.

You can purchase these little digital gems following the links below:

The Vampyre: A Tale by Varla Ventura and John William Polidori (Amazon) (B&N)

The Burial of the Rats by Varla Ventura and Bram Stoker (Amazon) (B&N)

Dracula’s Guest by Varla Ventura and Bram Stoker (Amazon) (B&N)

Clarimonde by Varla Ventura and Théophile Gautier (Amazon)

The House of the Vampire by Varla Ventura and George Sylvester Viereck (Amazon) (B&N)

Review - The Book of the Bizarre - Freaky Facts and Strange Stories

Reblogged from Bonnie Cehovet:

The Book of the Bizarre
Freaky Facts & Strange Stories

Author: Varla Ventura
Weiser Books
2008
ISBN #978-1-97863-437-8

The inside cover states that this book was designed for the depraved, outlandish enough for the eccentric, and freaky enough for even the hardest trivia nut. I might amend that to add writers who are looking for tid bits to add some zest to their work, someone setting up a trivia party (you don’t have to be a trivia nut to set up a trivia party), or someone who is looking for a book they can read for five or ten minutes, put down, and come back to at a later date.

Read more… 348 more words

Here is a fun review of The Book of the Bizarre!

Coffin Box

Hello fabulous friends of the freakery that abounds!!

I wanted to share with you what the lucky winner of the Bizarre Giveaway contest is receiving. (If this is you, don’t look!) I was meant to send this out last week BUT I KNEW I had to find this hard-to-find box for the goodies. I finally managed to scare it up and I think it is well worth the wait.

The spoils include a mini pine cofffin packed with skeletal goodness.

THE BIZARRE BOOK GIVEAWAY WINNER ANNOUNCEMENT!

Okay fellow connoisseurs of the curious and fans of the freaktacular, the winner for the Bizarre Giveaway has been chosen (at random using a very complicated system of bibliomancy that my niece, Vivienne, imposed upon me).

So drum roll please…

And the winner of my BIZARRE GIVEAWAY is…

Aphrodisiastes Le Fay!!! Please e-mail varlaventura@gmail.com with your mailing address and indicating how you would like me to sign your copies of THE BOOK OF THE BIZARRE and BEYOND BIZARRE so I can send you your prize!

Aphrodisiastes Le Fay was actually one of the last few entrants in the contest, I’m so glad she decided to sneak in there before the deadline and am very excited to be sending along her BIZARRE giveaway prize. Thanks everyone for participating, all your comments about Magical Creatures were wonderful, creative, and might inspire another book in the near future… Stay tuned for a photo of the winner’s prize before I mail it and of course: MORE GIVEAWAYS TO COME!

Varla Ventura

May Day! May Day!

Happy May Day!

Often associated with the distress when a vessel or vehicle is in trouble, the call “mayday! mayday! mayday!” derives from the French word m’aider which means “come help me.” Lesser known is the call “pan-pan, pan-pan, pan-pan!” which means there is an urgent situation on board. Though one may think it is a derivation of the word panic it actually comes from the French word panne which refers to mechanical failure or breakdown of any kind.

But May Day is so much more than a distress call. May Day celebrations exist throughout the world, but are especially prominent in the U.K. and Western Europe. In England and Scotland the celebrations around or near May 1^st relate directly to the pagan Beltane (in Ireland Bealtaine) and are associated with the Rites of Spring—specifically fertility. The celebration of new life and birth at the time of year when the land is waking up, flowers pushing through the sodden hills, still takes place today with the crowning of the May Queen and the erecting of the may pole. (You don’t have to be a genius to figure out what a giant pole in the middle of a lush field wrapped in beautiful ribbons represents.) Bonfires are lit, merry is made.

Prominent also in Germany, Walpurgisnacht (Witches Night!) celebrations are usually held on the Eve O’ May: bonfires and the wrapping of the Maibaum—the may pole—are included along with dancing, drinking and general MAYHEM! Finns make special donuts and lemonade to mark the occasion.

Many early immigrants from Germany and England as well as other parts of Europe such as France and the Netherlands continued their traditional celebrations in the settlements of Early America. Without the community and established towns of Old Europe their traditions were often more family based and including the weaving of May Baskets and the giving of flowers. If you read this collection of short stories by Charles Montgomery Skinner, which includes the title work The May-Pole of Merrymount, you will gain a bit more insight into how some of these wild nights of fun and mayhem were translated into Puritan settlements of America. A downer? Yeah, a little. But worthy of a May Day read. Plus there are freaky stories of witches and old creepy men in caves that you probably shouldn’t think about, but can’t help yourself.

Charles Montgomery Skinner (1852-1907) was a native New Yorker with a literary palate as diverse as the community I grew up in. Perhaps best remembered for his work on Walt Whitman, “Whitman as Editor” which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1903, his works ranged from urbanization, gardening, the economy, communism, natural history, and folklore. This excerpt from his first collection of folk tales is from the greater work Myths and Legends of Our Own Land which was first published in 1897– a massive volume of stories from across the settled cities and wild plains of America. I have selected a few of my favorites for this collection, stories that I think represent the varied tastes of our author. The legend of a witch in the Catskills to the Maypole of Merrymount, we find a unique view on the lore that founded the United States. Skinner also wrote Myths and Legends Beyond Our Borders and Myths and Legends of Our New Possessions and Protectorate (lands we had pillaged) both of which were published in 1899.

By the Ghost Light

It has been awhile since my last post, still recovering from Halloween mayhem I suppose. I have been enjoying the autumnal crispness settling into my bones, gladly awaiting the darkness of winter and the time of candlelight and ghosts. But what about the daylight hours?

I had an interesting radio interview the other morning during which the host, Cleveland Rippons, asked me if I had any recent paranormal encounters, and if they were a regular thing for me. In all honesty the most vivid ones I have had I had as a child, before logic or cynicism set in. Still, I have had a few in my adult years. My answer to him was just that–my adult apparition sitings paled in comparison to  those experienced by some of my more psychic and gifted friends, and were certainly not as clear as those I had as a child. Shortly after I hung up the phone with him, I heard a series of odd noises coming from my kitchen. Pings and taps. Distinct. Strange.

I felt a little ripple of a chill down my spine. Ghosts come in unlikely forms, not always under cover of night. Sometimes they come to remind you that you aren’t as far away from them as you’d think. At 10 in the morning, on a bright sunny day.

Here is a story submitted to me for my first book. The Book of the Bizarre by a friend of my editor’s who heard I was looking for paranormal stories and asked if she could share it. It reminded me of something that had happened to me as a young child, and remains one of my favorite ghost stories from the book. And it is a ghost story from the light of day.

A FOND FAREWELL

Dana was the youngest of four kids, living in an old Victorian house in the Minnesota suburbs. Her grand-father, who lived in the same town was sick in the hospital, but Dana was too young to really know what was going on or that he was dying. One day while her mother was at the hospital, Dana came walking down the grand staircase in her house. To her surprise, she saw her grandfather walking up toward her, looking healthy and happy. “I wanted to say good-bye, Dana, and I love you very much,” he said  and continued up the stairs. Delighted, the child raced into the kitchen to tell her mother that Grandpa was all better and that he’d come over for a visit. But her mother had just returned home from the hospital with some bad news–her grandfather had passed away earlier that afternoon.

Straight Talk on WCEM http://www.ontheradio.net/WCEM

Three Times Six

I was putting away some of the books I used to research my most recent book Beyond Bizarre when I came upon this article neatly folded among the pages of Troy Taylor’s Haunted Graveyards. I had included this story in The Book of the Bizarre, but it is certainly worthy of repeating.

From an AP Press story from 2007, comes this 1600′s tale of premature burial . Francis de Civille was buried alive not once, not twice, but THREE times! First he was buried when still in utero when his mother died while pregnant. His father had the mother’s body exhumed and Francis was delivered via cesarean. The second time Civille was wounded in battle in the siege of Rouen in 1563. He was tossed into a common grave where he remained for seven hours until a loyal servant dug him up to move him to a more fitting grave. He was still breathing and was slowly being nursed back to health when his house was raided by the enemy. His body was thrown upon a dung heap becoming partially buried for three days!! He somehow survived and was again nursed back to health after the enemy siege had passed. When he finally did die, at a ripe old age of 105, his family waited more than three days to bury him, just to be sure.