darkling_tales's Journal

This community is the daughter of souls_adrift, joysilence's supernatural literature journal, and has been created as a place to discuss fear and the art and literature of terror. If you're sick to death of communities dealing solely with blood-and-guts US horror and mainstream slasher movies, this could be the forum for you! I have nothing against the odd debate about King, Koontz etc. but what I really enjoy are authors from the "Golden age of the ghost story", Edwardians and late Victorians such as M.R. James and E.F.Benson. That said, I also try to keep up with the latest exciting new writers of smart horror fiction...the rest is up to you :)

Contact me, joysilence, by e-mailing "joysilence @ hotmail.com" or leaving a comment on my lj.

Here are some examples of welcome topics:
- reviews of books or stories
- posts about your favourite supernatural authors, film-makers or musicians
- accounts of your own brushes with the supernatural
- your opinions on the occult, the phenomenon of fear, superstition in society etc.
If it scared you silly, darkling_tales want to hear about it! There is also an introduction form here if you'd like to say hi to us all :)

Here are some bad naughty forbidden things:
- spamming. If you have a relevant, interesting community to promote, e-mail me at the address provided above and I'll almost certainly let you pimp it here. Unsolicited promos will be deleted however.
- trolling. While I encourage people with opinions, I must ask these opinions be expressed as politely as possible!
Repeat offenders will be banned from the community.
-cocking up peoples' friends pages with gargantuan posts. Please use the lj-cut for posts longer than a monitor in length.

Here are some other communities you might like:
mondo_macabro: interesting, well-run and busy horror film community.
gothic_lit: new but bustling community for the discussion of gothic literature.
violet_whispers: my own community for womens' writing of the long Victorian era, includes a lot of gothic and supernatural stuff.
horror_novels: what it says on the tin. Definite American gore-fest flavour.
horrornovelclub: reading group for horror fans.
ghoststories: ghost story community with alarmingly similar interests to mine, though that's pure coincidence, honest :) More of a literary bent than this community, as the name implies.
fantasywithbite: Fantasy and magical realism community that provides an alternative to the usual hobbit-porn.

Members might also like to check out my old supernatural lj souls_adrift; it used to be a community itself, ages ago, and contains many posts by other people as well as my own mutterings.

Here are some links to sites you may enjoy (this section is still being updated!):
-HorrorMasters, a website with a huge and daily increasing number of horror and ghost stories, in the form of PDFs. Some contemporary stories must be paid for but everything in the main library is free of charge. Some of the stories contain typographical errors but the width of the collection and the extreme rarity of some of the material makes up for that in my opinion.
-Violet Books, a company specializing in antiquarian ghost and adventure fiction, run by the opinionated but witty and knowledgeable Jessica Salmonson. The site contains many links to essays both light-hearted and serious.
-The Ash-Tree Press: another very decent company flogging supernatural literature, which has won some awards and does publish some very prettily-bound and/or rare stuff indeed.
- The BlackMask online fiction repository has links to some interesting ghost stories, especially in it's Gothic section. You can access them in a variety of formats and some of the material is quite out-of-the-way.
- GasLight is a Canadian supernatural literature discussion group. Don't take it personally if your request to join is ignored, because mine was too...
- Ghosts and Scholars Jamesian newsletter. Interesting port of call for fans of M R James and his imitators.
- Dark Moon Rising is an online magazine featuring new fiction of variable quality, book reviews and author interviews.

Visit this post for more links suggested by community members, or to recommend an interesting link or community of your own!