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Anne Sexton is sadly, cruelly underrated. She was friends with Sylvia Plath and also chose to end her own life, so she often gets lumped into a kind of 'also ran' category of modern poetry. Like I said: a sad, cruel kind of underrated. Her 'Transformations' collection is a re-telling of classic and lesser known fairy tales with extra visceral spurts of blood, gutsy grins and verbally sweetened trauma. It's horrifying and tender, like a stranger offering you a damaged limb on the subway. (See image: a snippet from "The Maiden Without Hands".) There's an edition with a foreword by Kurt Vonnegut, but I haven't found that yet.
Feb 1, 2024
Related Recs
The Doll-Maker and Other Tales of Horror, Black Dahlia and White Rose: Stories, The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares. But my favorite which I’ve rec-ed before is Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque the titular story Haunted is so sick and twisted and I cry tears of fear every time I go back to read it (which I have multiple times). She has the most viscerally disturbing and discomfiting style and a unique ability to crawl under your skin, more so than any other horror author I’ve read and horror is not even typically her primary genre!!
Apr 20, 2024
Love her novels though they are lengthy but Joyce Carol Oates has a gift for writing disturbing short stories. Pictured are a few of her horror themed compilations and I would also recommend the classic story Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been, which was loosely adapted into the 1985 film Smooth Talk starring Laura Dern!
Sep 29, 2024
My favourite short stories tend to be creepy or magical. I think due to the necessary open-endedness of short stories, it lends itself most to mystery and magic.
Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber is a great classic creepy feminist story to start with.
Carmen Maria Machado’s The Husband Stitch continued Carter’s legacy
I’m a HUGE Kelly Link fan, but her stuff is very strange so might not be for everyone, but my favourite of hers is probably The Specialist’s hat or Skinder’s Veil
Shirley Jackson‘s The Lottery is also a classic, and if you like creepy stories and want a good overview of writers in that genre, I recommend the collection “When Things Get Dark”, a collection inspired by the tone of Jackson’s work; it features Kelly link, Carmen Maria Machado, Joyce Carol Oates, and loads of contemporary short story writers. I discovered the story Tiptoe by Laird Barron through this and its possibly my favourite creepy short story, it sent full shivers down my spine in a way no other story had.
May 22, 2024
Top Recs from @spkn
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Perfect for small, off-beat breaks in whatever playlist mood you're going for. The added bonus of eerie-sounding posh accents by older poets is always a treat. I recommend W.H. Auden's "The More Loving One" and anything by Virgina Woolf (OK, not a poet technically, but have you read The Waves? It's better than 80% of 'actual' poetry, really.)
Jan 22, 2024
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It just rewires your brain to be a bit removed from the machine, a bit silly, taking a side-eye view of the world and your place at the fringe of productivity. I like this one from DJ Food with spliced-in bit of interviews with James.
Jan 22, 2024
A collection of essays about legends, real or fiction, who just couldn't be bothered to live within the matrix of their contemporary culture, actually written by someone who isn't secretly an agent for the status quo.
Jan 22, 2024