Tag Archive for 'fairy tales'

Vintage Photo Album: Mysterious Bruise Edition

If you wake up in a strange place, can’t remember how you got there, and have mysterious bruises in unusual spots, you may need to make sure that your maid hasn’t been trying to poison you. (How perceptive of you. Yes that is Pola Negri in the chair.) – Action Here. – Ends When it Ends.

If you wake up chained to a table in a cell, can’t remember how you got there, and have mysterious bruises in alarming places, it may be that you forgot to pay your guild dues to that hashish-using band of murderous thugs you belong to. – Action Here. – Ends 1/18/2012

If you wake up hanging in a tree, can’t remember how you got there, and have mysterious bruises all over your body, it may be that you chose to collect butterflies on the wrong planet. – Action Here. – Ends 1/11/2012

If you wake up huddled in your closet, can’t remember how you got there, and have mysterious bruises all over your head, it may be that you lost control to the voices that you hear between stations on your radio set. – Action Here. – Ends When it Ends

If you wake up in the parlor, can’t remember the last few hours, have mysterious bruises on your arms and legs, and every window and mirror in the room is shattered, you may want to stop entertaining that mysteriously charismatic little girl who claims she can speak to the spirit world. – Action Here. – Ends 12/24/2011


If you wake up on the floor, can’t remember how you fell out of bed, and your neck is covered with mysterious bruises, that dimly remembered vision you had of a giant cat creeping into your room and looming over the end of your bed might not have been a dream. – Action Here. – Ends When it Ends

Epilogue

I don’t have a story for these. I just wanted to post them because they’re really remarkable. Photos from an opera house in Chicago from 1891. The photos say W.V. PENNINGTON CHICAGO E.R. WALKER across the bottom.


Action Here.


Action Here.


Action Here.


Action Here.

And Finally

If I don’t post before then, I want to wish everyone out there on the internets a dark and short Darkest Day.

See more Vintage Photos here on Dark in the Dark.

Check this space for more weird photos on eBay.

*Best Search Ever*


darkinthedark does not claim copyright on these images. If you are the copyright holder and object to their presence here, please contact me and I will remove them.
Posted December 20, 2011 at 6:27 pm in Photo Album with Tags: , , , , , , , . See 0 Comments

Vintage Photo Album: Fairy Tale Edition Two

As if time had stopped. That was the way they all described the apparition in the garden. All had noted a crushing sense of unease in the moments before realizing that there was another presence there between the pear tree and the fence. She screamed, it was plain. But the scream was frozen, as if time had stopped. – Auction Here – Ends 11/20

Dire Race

A member of this dire race emerged from a cave one day to see a man on a landing strip using semaphore flags. Perhaps realizing this was a form of communication, but not grasping the mundane nature of the exchange he was witnessing, this vile and addled creature inoculated the practice into his own people. His ultimate reward was far from his own choosing, and his efforts could only be blamed for pushing its dying culture into the abyss it was already teetering over. – Auction Here – Ends 11/15

Looking at her skirts, you might guess that they really conceal thin, folded legs the length of a giraffe’s neck. Looking at her headpiece, you might guess that her delicate skull is crowned with knobby horns. Auction Here – Ends 12/3

If you catch sight of Letizia hiding behind some bushes, you should run. Run as if you life depended on it, but do not run home. To do so would only doom your family as well as you. Your sisters will be yoked like water buffalo and forced to till endless acres of crushed granite, and your brothers will be ground up and fed to a stable of greyhound dogs. Instead, if you catch sight of Letizia, run to a well and heave the largest stone you can find into its maw. If the splash is big enough, Letizia’s father might be fooled. Even if you suspect success, it is best to sleep in the woods at least one night before returning home. Letizia’s name means “joy.” – Auction ended, alas.

We see here The Unfortunate End of Elizabeth Woodman as reenacted by the fugitive members of the corrupt and criminal Historical Society of Glen Creek, MA. This secret annual practice was usually fatal to the victim selected to play Elizabeth. Eventually, the club was disbanded and their charismatic leader was hunted down and hanged by an enraged lynch mob. Auction Here – Ends 11/17

The three Shreeve sisters spoke a language that only they knew. The sisters claimed their doll taught them the unknown language. When questioned, they professed confusion as to why the doll would not speak when adults were present, but at least one neighborhood child claimed to had heard a voice come out of the painted porcelain lips. Auction Here – Ends 11/12

See more Vintage Photos here on Dark in the Dark.

Check this space for more weird photos on eBay.

*Best Search Ever*


darkinthedark does not claim copyright on these images. If you are the copyright holder and object to their presence here, please contact me and I will remove them.
Posted November 11, 2011 at 6:37 am in Photo Album with Tags: , . See 0 Comments

Young Adult Double Feature

Feed by M.T. Anderson

(Five bucks says this is the back of China Miéville’s head.) While it was sold to me as a dystopian dark science fiction novel, Feed is more accurately a retelling of that classic tale Romeo and Juliet. Except that in this case, Romeo is from the vapid consumerist future and Juliet is from the intellectual alt-culture past.

In this future world, most people have direct Internet feeds implanted into their brains soon after they are born. The plus side of this is that everyone is a walking encyclopedia as long as they have the patience to use Wikipedia. The bad news is that banner ads have followed the Internet into our brains, and instant access to everything, everywhere, at any time has inculcated a deep laziness into the masses. Nobody has to learn anything, fashionable hairstyles change by the minute, and mankind has lost the patience to use Wikipedia (hmmm. This last part sounds familiar.)

Our star-crossed lovers meet in a restaurant on the Moon, and later that evening are dancing at a night club when their feeds are hacked by a member of dissident organization of some sort. The details of this dissident organization aren’t explored fully because the protagonist (our lethargic representative of the vapid consumerist future) doesn’t really care about anything other than his next meal or pair of jeans, so he never investigates.

Some YA books are gratifying to adults. If you get annoyed easily at young adult books, you may wish to skip this one.

Oh Juliet (or in this case, Violet), how unlucky you are to have fallen for this oaf. Halfway through the book we wonder, “when does the adventure start?” You must have wondered that, too. Luckily for us, you and your lover’s stars are crossed, and so the tragedy in this young adult dystopian broth is rich and thick.

Feed by M.T. Anderson – 2004 – Candlewick
Buy Feed at Amazon, now!

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

The plot of this book is Neil Gaiman’s standard: Protagonist discovers a secret world where he/she is important. As a child, our protagonist Jacob was told lots of strange and yet borderline-believable stories by his grandfather. Now that he’s 16, it’s become clear to Jacob maybe his grandfather might need a little more medication than the average bear.

After his grandfather is killed in suspicious circumstances, however, Jacob finds himself compelled to investigate, and of course it was all true. All of it! The levitating girl, the invisible boy, the ridiculously strong girl, the bird, the horrible monsters. Everything and more. The good news is that everybody at the Home likes Jacob, and he likes them. The bad news is that Jacob has unwittingly led the horrible monsters to Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. Adventure ensues.

The book itself is well-written and suspenseful. Despite the World War II setting, the period flavor at the Home is decidedly Victorian. It’s a little on the YA borderline, but if the premise sounds interesting and you are attracted to the odd vintage photos that pepper the inside, you should give it a read.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs – 2011 – Quirk Books

Buy Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children now on Amazon

Posted August 31, 2011 at 10:26 pm in Book Reviews with Tags: , , , , , , , , . See 0 Comments

Book Review: The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart by Jesse Bullington

the sad tale of the brothers grossbart by jesse bullingtonThe title reads “The Sad Tale of Brothers Grossbart” but the book reveals itself to be half comedy, half tragedy. You can discern as much by reading the headline on the back: “We ain’t thieves and we ain’t killers, we’s just good men been done wrong.”

And so goes the malevolent stupidity of the grave robbing pair. See: grave robbing isn’t wrong if it’s your family trade. Right? The brothers would agree. They would also add that they only throttled your ma because she was making too much noise (and she started it first). Although the tongue is placed firmly in cheek, it should be noted that this book is probably not for everyone. It even has the courtesy to provide a gatekeeper in the form of an atrocity, five pages in, where the brothers carelessly slaughter the wife and children of a turnip farmer. “Abandon all Hope Ye Who Enter Here.” Setting the tone for the rest of the book, the violence in this scene is frank and anatomically descriptive.

The more sensitive readers may be right to put the book down. The rest of us will later begin to see slapstick in the many hyper-photographically detailed bodily insults recorded here. The brothers make enemies as naturally as we breathe air, and a large subplot of the book involves the vengeful people, witches, and supernatural beings on the trail of the Grossbarts. The Grossbarts themselves are focused on getting to Egypt, because they’ve heard many a tale of the fantastical graves there. Being grave robbers and all, they take a professional interest.

Plot-wise, the book reads very much like the adventures of Sinbad the Sailor as chronicled in the Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night. That is to say that the protagonists become tangled in machinations that are vastly greater than they are. The brothers manage to stumble through by the light of their own convictions, no matter how misplaced those convictions may be. In the Brothers Grossbart, this provides endless opportunities for dire humor. And at times these awful, stinking, disgusting, ugly, and appallingly stupid and violent men approach likability. I was also reminded of Grimm’s Fairy Tales (tragedy set in mythical surroundings), Tim Powers The Anubis Gates (historical hilarity and accretion of painful injuries), and James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen (a comedy that is not really about what it purports to contain).

I would be wrong to talk about this book without mentioning the masterful grasp that Bullington has on the English language. The language is used like a fine tool to disgust, appall, frighten, or even describe beauty. Upon entering Venice: “True to its visage, the sky let them advance only a short distance before a deluge crashed down on them.” The brothers and unfortunate henchmen are approached by three long dead, rotting men who are animated by demons: “The stench overpowered them, even the Grossbarts gagging on the suddenly wet air.”

Creepy Factor: 4 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 2 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 2 out of 5
Funny and/or Strange Factor: 5 out of 5

Final result: It is not wrong to want to murder the Brothers Grossbart. What a great book.

The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart by Jesse Bullington – 2009 – Orbit

Buy The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart now at Amazon

Posted July 7, 2011 at 2:21 pm in Book Reviews with Tags: , , , , , , , , . See 2 Comments

Ode to Princess Beatrice

Oh Princess Beatrice.
I love your hat.
Some say that it reminds them of Cthulhu.
All the better, I say, to eat them with.

Princess Beatrice in Hat, Waving

Princess Beatrice stepping out of car in hat

Princess Beatrice's Hat

Posted April 30, 2011 at 7:02 pm in Art and Stuff with Tags: , , . See 0 Comments
The flying monkeys let our technician out for a minute and he snuck away into the light of day. Thanks for your patience during this difficult transition.
I ated Tinkerbell.

Fhtagn Spoken Here.

... the attic, a vast raftered length lighted only by small blinking windows in the gable ends, and filled with a massed wreckage of chests, chairs, and spinning-wheels which infinite years of deposit had shrouded and festooned into monstrous and hellish shapes.
The Shunned House
H.P. Lovecraft
RSS Feed Google Reader or Homepage
Add to Technorati Favorites

Don’t Miss My Papercrafts!

Coraline Doll
Pyramid Head
Jerom's Proxima Centauri



© 2008-2011 Dark in the Dark * Book reviews, dark stuff * All Rights Reserved

Page optimized by WP Minify WordPress Plugin