There was an interview with Anne Rice in the Guardian yesterday. You can read it on line at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/24/anne-rice-catholic-church-rejection-vampire She says more here about her much publicised fall-out with the Catholic church, but the interview is also part of the build up to the release of the second novel in her Songs of the Seraphim series:   Of Love and Evil. It is due out on November 4. I'm afraid I don't keep up with Rice's novels anymore, but it is apparently about Toby O'Dare, a former assassin turned envoy for angels, who time-travels to Renaissa

The second in the Gothic Imagination Film Series: Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow this Monday 25 October, 4-6 in Pathfoot B17. Iinformal discussion afterwards. Everyone welcome.  Organiser is Sarah Anderson at saa00051@students.stir.ac.uk

The first annual Zombcon takes place in Seattle this Halloween. There's an impressive list of guests, and Chuck Palahniuk will be interviewing Max Brooks. Hoping that will get on youtube. The website is a nightmare, and I started to get motion sickness trying to read the info, but if you want to have a look, it is at http://www.zombcon.com/

Another film of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper has been made and is now in post-production stage. Directed by Logan Thomas, it stars Aric Cushing and Juliet Landau, and is due for release in 2010.

Stage adaptations of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein have circulated ever since Richard Brinsley Peake's enormously influential Presumption: or the Fate of Frankenstein (1823).  One of the more recent dramatic adaptations of Shelley's novel, Stitched Up, premiered recently at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.  A preview of the script can be viewed here: http://shop.stagescripts.com/categories/Plays/One-Act/Comedy/Stitched-Up/

Julia Kristeva’s work on abjection reminds us that horror is often keyed to things that decompose, rot, or lose their form.  This formal concern is a literary one as well: fictions of horror also revel in de-composition, that is, in significations that lose their composure, in letters that refuse to convey, or in utterances that seem to be without subject or object.  Horror Studies is seeking essays for a special issue devoted to horror and textuality that will address problems of textual decomposition.  In the twentieth century’s turn to the film image as arguably the primary vehicle f

Elizabeth Effinger, who is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Western Ontario, has recently posted on Gothic Media Objects at the International Gothic Association website's student blog. It's a really interesting piece of writing and worth checking out - particularly for her take on the  3D image of Kate Moss produced for an Alexander McQueen fashion show. See http://www.iga.stir.ac.uk/blog.php

There has been an overwhelming focus on a Southern Gothic in the key examples of post-modern American Gothic horror film and television, set as they frequently are in New Orleans (Interview with the Vampire, The Skeleton Key), South Carolina (American Gothic), Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico (Carnivàle), Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi (True Blood), and Florida (Invasion, Dexter). Heat and its attendant passions are clearly a significant aspect of these narratives, and the landscape of the southern states (be it the boyou, the everglades or the dustbowl) a key element in each text’s

I just finished Vampire City last night, Brian Stableford’s translation/adaptation(?) of Paul Féval’s La Ville Vampire. It’s the first book by Féval I’ve read, and I was prompted to buy it after learning that the heroine of this tale is Ann Radcliffe herself: the book is at least a vague precursor of the literary monster mash-ups of today: Ann Radcliffe, Vampire Hunter. Féval, a French novelist, and considered one of the fathers of modern ...

Susan Hill has recently published The Small Hand, a sequel to her highly acclaimed The Woman in Black.  Being as great a fan of Hill's chilling tales as I am, I cannot wait for a suitably inclement Autumn afternoon to devour it.