Entries from January 2013 ↓

Public Domain Online Text: The House of Silence by E. Nesbit

The thief stood close under the high wall, and looked to right and left. To the right the road wound white and sinuous, lying like a twisted ribbon over the broad grey shoulder of the hill; to the left the road turned sharply down towards the river; beyond the ford the road went...

Public Domain Online Text: The Haunted Inheritance by E. Nesbit

The most extraordinary thing that ever happened to me was my going back to town on that day. I am a reasonable being; I do not do such things. I was on a bicycling tour with another man. We were far from the mean cares of an unremunerative profession; we were men not fettered by any given address...

Public Domain Online Text: The Power of Darkness by E. Nesbit

It was an enthusiastic send-off. Half the students from her Atelier were there, and twice as many more from other studios. She had been the belle of the Artists' Quarter in Montparnasse for three golden months. Now she was off to the Riviera to...

Public Domain Online Text: Crooken Sands by Bram Stoker

Mr. Arthur Fernlee Markam, who took what was known as the Red House above the Mains of Crooken, was a London merchant, and being essentially a cockney, thought it necessary...

Public Domain Online Text: A Dream of Red Hands by Bram Stoker

The first opinion given to me regarding Jacob Settle was a simple descriptive statement. 'He's a down-in-the-mouth chap': but I found that it embodied the thoughts and ideas of all his fellow-workmen. There was in the phrase a certain easy tolerance, an absence of positive feeling of any kind, rather than any...

Public Domain Online Text: From the Dead by E. Nesbit

'But true or not true, your brother is a scoundrel. No man--no decent man--tells such things.' 'He did not tell me. How dare you suppose it? I found the letter in his desk; and she being my friend and you being her lover, I never thought there could be any harm in my reading her letter to...

Public Domain Online Text: The Mass for the Dead by E. Nesbit

I was awake--widely, cruelly awake. I had been awake all night; what sleep could there be for me when the woman I loved was to be married next morning--married, and not to...

Public Domain Online Text: The Vampire by Jan Neruda

The excursion steamer brought us from Constantinople to the shore of the island of Prinkipo and we disembarked. The number of passengers was not large. There was one Polish family, a father, a mother, a daughter and her bridegroom, and then we two...

Old Radio Show: The Sealed Book – Till Death Do Us Part

Till Death Do Us Part Is the strange tale of a man who hates his wife because she loves him too much. The man's name is Chris Worthy and the story begins late on a moonlit night. Chris is tossing and turning in his...

The Following


FOX was Fringeless last Friday -- gonna take a while to get used that -- so I took the opportunity to check out the encore premiere of The Following. Aside from Silence of the Lambs, Se7en, Scream, and Luther on the BBC, I’ve never been especially interested in shows/films dealing with serial killers. The deal-breaker for me is that too many of them focus on being gruesome rather than suspenseful. I don’t mind gore, as long as it goes hand in hand with good storytelling. The Following’s promos seemed interesting enough, and the involvement of Kevin Bacon and Kevin Williamson were a definite plus to get me on board.

A brilliant and charismatic, yet psychotic serial killer communicates with other active serial killers and activates a cult of believers following his every command. 

A couple of well-worn tropes are front and center: the burnt out (ex) FBI agent (Kevin Bacon) who got way too close to his quarry, the brilliant professor-turned-serial killer (James Purefoy), his obsession with a Edgar Allan Poe, the love triangle, a paternity question -- I’m probably missing a few, but you get the idea. Bacon helps. A lot.

Maybe there’s more to come, but I don’t think the pilot illustrated how social media helps these twisted followers come together. Nobody wants to watch people pointing and clicking for 45 minutes, but viewers should get a sense of how they communicate. Note to self: start working on a Techno-thriller.

The other thing that caught my attention: the Hero’s Journey stuff. Joe Carroll (Purefoy) fancies himself an author, and Ryan Hardy (Bacon) is his protagonist. He actually explains to Hardy that a killing was necessary so he would have a call to action. I’m curious to see how much The Following adheres to the stages of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth.


The ratings were pretty solid, around 10 million viewers, so there’s a pretty good chance we’ll get to see all 14 episodes.

Monday, you and me? We’re all right.

Monday 1/28/2013 Phew, Today was a weird Monday for me. I’ve been having troubles settling down and falling sleep on Monday nights, but last night I was prepared. I downed 2 tylenol pm’s around 10pm to combat this problem and it worked like a charm. Today, I hit the gym well rested and I could [...]

The Following


FOX was Fringeless last Friday -- gonna take a while to get used that -- so I took the opportunity to check out the encore premiere of The Following. Aside from Silence of the Lambs, Se7en, Scream, and Luther on the BBC, I’ve never been especially interested in shows/films dealing with serial killers. The deal-breaker for me is that too many of them focus on being gruesome rather than suspenseful. I don’t mind gore, as long as it goes hand in hand with good storytelling. The Following’s promos seemed interesting enough, and the involvement of Kevin Bacon and Kevin Williamson were a definite plus to get me on board.

A brilliant and charismatic, yet psychotic serial killer communicates with other active serial killers and activates a cult of believers following his every command. 

A couple of well-worn tropes are front and center: the burnt out (ex) FBI agent (Kevin Bacon) who got way too close to his quarry, the brilliant professor-turned-serial killer (James Purefoy), his obsession with a Edgar Allan Poe, the love triangle, a paternity question -- I’m probably missing a few, but you get the idea. Bacon helps. A lot.

Maybe there’s more to come, but I don’t think the pilot illustrated how social media helps these twisted followers come together. Nobody wants to watch people pointing and clicking for 45 minutes, but viewers should get a sense of how they communicate. Note to self: start working on a Techno-thriller.

The other thing that caught my attention: the Hero’s Journey stuff. Joe Carroll (Purefoy) fancies himself an author, and Ryan Hardy (Bacon) is his protagonist. He actually explains to Hardy that a killing was necessary so he would have a call to action. I’m curious to see how much The Following adheres to the stages of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth.


The ratings were pretty solid, around 10 million viewers, so there’s a pretty good chance we’ll get to see all 14 episodes.

Public Domain Online Text: Outside the Door by E. F. Benson

The rest of the small party staying with my friend Geoffrey Aldwych in the charming old house which he had lately bought at a little village north of Sheringham on the Norfolk coast had drifted away soon after dinner to bridge and billiards, and Mrs. Aldwych and myself had for the time been left alone in the drawing-room, seated one on each side of a small round table which we had very patiently and unsuccessfully been trying to...

Public Domain Online Text: The Shootings of Achnaleish by E. F. Benson

The dining-room windows, both front and back, the one looking into Oakley Street, the other into a small back-yard with three sooty shrubs in it (known as the garden), were all open, so that the table stood in mid-stream of such air as there was. But in spite of this the heat was stifling...

Public Domain Online Text: The Terror by Night by E. F. Benson

The transference of emotion is a phenomenon so common, so constantly witnessed, that mankind in general have long ceased to be conscious of its existence, as a thing worth our wonder or consideration, regarding it as being as natural and commonplace as the transference of things that act by the ascertained laws of matter...