Some stories don’t so much frighten as warn. They creep into the mind like a chill beneath the door, whispering that intellect is no armour against the irrational. M. R. James’s Casting the Runes is one of these — a genteel little ghost story that begins with a letter of complaint and ends with damnation … Continue reading Casting the Runes: The Polite Horror of the Learned Damned
Tag: fiction
The Room in the Tower: A Dream with Teeth
For years I dreamt of a house that hated me. It wasn’t merely haunted — it was hostile. Its walls bowed with resentment, its staircase groaned in complaint, and the air inside was the colour of rot. Every visit was the same: I would wander through its ruined corridors, knowing instinctively that one door was … Continue reading The Room in the Tower: A Dream with Teeth
A Nightmare Before Christmas: The Gospel According to the Pumpkin King
Following on from yesterday’s reflection on Corpse Bride, I found myself still wandering through Tim Burton’s haunted imagination — that candlelit corridor where love, death, and longing share the same heartbeat. If Corpse Bride was his requiem for romance, A Nightmare Before Christmas is his hymn to the restless artist — the skeleton who, having … Continue reading A Nightmare Before Christmas: The Gospel According to the Pumpkin King
The Corpse Bride and the Living Dead
Illustration inspired by Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride. Original concept and rendering © Wordinguk, 2025. I’ve been working on my book again — circling the same themes of death, memory, and the strange comedy of human attachment — when Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride came to mind. It often does, that little animated elegy; the film has … Continue reading The Corpse Bride and the Living Dead
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
Frankenstein bites, and it gnaws politely. It sinks its teeth into your conscience while pretending to nibble at your imagination — a genteel vampire in paper form. It’s a novel born of storms, both meteorological and moral: thunder crashing over Lake Geneva and lightning striking through the skull of Western hubris. Mary Shelley, barely out … Continue reading Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
Wording 