New Horror 2023 – Day 20

“My clothes have but to fall and you will see before you a succession of mysteries.”

“The Lady of the House of Love” by Angela Carter (1979)

This can only be described as deliciously decadent decay. Carter does a magnificent job of just painting the most awful, crusty, gothic place you can imagine.

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“Can’t tell if the embers are dying or my eyes are.”

“Smoke and Cedar” by Abby Howard & Alina Pete (2016)

I was loving this but it ends so suddenly. Sometimes you want to leave them wanting more, but not starving for narrative.

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“You’re the bitch that brought our misfortune!”

Exposed to Danger dir. Yang Chia-yun (Karen Yang) (1982)

This one’s kind of a slow build-up, and not much mystery, but the tension does eventually hit along with a neat twist. The final confrontation is a great sequence.

con-alas-de-angeles:

She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening. She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man’s land between life and death, sleeping and waking, behind the hedge of spiked flowers, Nosferatu’s sanguinary rosebud.

Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber & Other Stories: The Lady of the House of Love