Pete Ward
@phenryward.bsky.social
Books, art, theatre, and telling people I liked the thing they made. Weird / Gothic short stories published or forthcoming in Cosmic Horror, Macabre, Frost Zone, Rat Bag and elsewhere. Editorial reader at Gavagai.
#HorrorWritersChat This is a fun one! The Pontypool virus *Either* Set in a First Nations Community in the 1960s in Canada *OR* Set it in Pontypool, Wales, in 1967
Mary Wyrd (she/her)@marywyrd.bsky.social · 14h agoMake horror history with a new setting. Q4: #HorrorWritersChat - Choose an existing horror IP or horror creation and add it to an historical period different from its origin. Share your idea. ---- Outro in 10 mins
There's no way it couldn't. My past shaped me and my obsessions and those are both on the page. Wounded children, avenging mothers, fighting back. Plus my current obsessions: polarization, rejection of the other, being a woman on the internet, AI #HorrorWritersChat
Mary Wyrd (she/her)@marywyrd.bsky.social · 14h agoMaking it personal. Q3: #HorrorWritersChat - In what ways has your own history (past) impacted or inspired your horror writing? Examples: giving a character your childhood trauma, reimagining an experience with a different ending.
My horror writing is influenced by my past and the past. My WIPs include themes of: ill-health experiences and medical gaslighting The Horrors™ getting in the way of defeating other Horrors women and femme-presenting folks who have had enough and what they do about it #HorrorWritersChat
Mary Wyrd (she/her)@marywyrd.bsky.social · 14h agoMaking it personal. Q3: #HorrorWritersChat - In what ways has your own history (past) impacted or inspired your horror writing? Examples: giving a character your childhood trauma, reimagining an experience with a different ending.
A lot in the drafting, usually gets taken out as having been useful in conception and intrusive in execution. Most often a previous relationship which creates or reveals a worldview that I better illustrate with action in the story. But useful for me to understand them with! #HorrorWritersChat
Mary Wyrd (she/her)@marywyrd.bsky.social · 14h agoEven fictional characters have a past. Q2: #HorrorWritersChat - How much history, how much of a past, do you give your horror characters? Share an example.
I'm Pete, and I mainly write what I call Brexit Gothic - tales of English Unpleasantness emphasising political and economic conditions. Last couple of historical horror fiction i read were excellent and wildly different: Due's THE REFORMATORY, Le Roux's PHANTOM OF THE OPERA #HorrorWritersChat
Mary Wyrd (she/her)@marywyrd.bsky.social · 14h agoWelcome to Horror Writers Chat. It’s time to explore the past. Q1: #HorrorWritersChat - Introduce yourself, the horror you write, and share up to three historical horror fiction stories you’ve enjoyed. (Horror set in the past.)
Book 4 of Frost Zone Stories opens and closes with urban settings. The opener is by @kristalstittle.bsky.social Riding the subway can be an ordeal at times. Add a creepy, mysterious stranger and you have one unsettling tale in "The Pink Jacket". www.frostzonestories.com/p/issuesbook...
Excited to see 'My Darling' out in the world soon! It's a sweet and sad tale of children lost and found, with an accidental seance... Thanks to @frostzonestories.bsky.social for selecting!
Frost Zone Stories@frostzonestories.bsky.social · yesterdayFrost Zone Stories book 4 officially arrives in 24 days! Follow link to see places to order: www.facebook.com/profile.php?... Check out this Table of Contents, and watch for individual story spotlights soon.
Excited to see 'My Darling' out in the world soon! It's a sweet and sad tale of children lost and found, with an accidental seance... Thanks to @frostzonestories.bsky.social for selecting!
Frost Zone Stories@frostzonestories.bsky.social · yesterdayFrost Zone Stories book 4 officially arrives in 24 days! Follow link to see places to order: www.facebook.com/profile.php?... Check out this Table of Contents, and watch for individual story spotlights soon.
Good summary here. TWMW is excellent and - for fans of that sort of thing - strikingly proto-Ballardian in its treatment of the surrealist jumble of post-war landscapes. Rich with incident and insight, the sort of novel (cf Nicola Barker) where ghosts and literary fraud are fragmentary digressions.
JacquiWine@jacquiwine.bsky.social · 5d agoFrom the archive for Rose Macaulay, #BornOnThisDay in 1881, thoughts on THE WORLD MY WILDERNESS, a haunting, evocative novel with a vivid sense of place. This was my first by Macaulay, a great entry point - striking, moving & wonderfully atmospheric. 💙📚 jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2019/03/12/t...
Found this yesterday and was hooked by its wild premise - now two-thirds through and having a great time. Always love weird, horny theory-fiction (HALLUCINATING FOUCAULT, Patricia Duncker; 69 THINGS TO DO WITH A DEAD PRINCESS, Stewart Home - similar recommendations welcome!)
Cipher Press@cipherpress.bsky.social · 8mo agoFor the modern history buff, the detective fan AND the lesbian hook-up aficionado, we proudly present the next entry in our Cipher Press Gift Guide... BONE HORN, which sees a newly registered PI attempt to track down Alice B. Toklas’s reputed horn.
Re Musk. In Deadwood, lovable, true Ellsworth meets evil oligarch Hearst and cannot forgo treating him exactly as he deserves. Amid the ostensible gentility of ‘business’, it comes across as crass, incontinent with rage: but is exactly how we should handle evil pieces of shit, whenever we can.
Strong list. THE Black Spider is great and this is a wonderful description of The Monk: "maximalist, repugnant quality that makes the whole thing feel like a shame-soaked wet dream.” READ THE MONK!
Rachel Feder@rachelfeder.bsky.social · 2w agoThank you for sharing your favorite Gothic novels with me for the @nupress.bsky.social blog! nupress.northwestern.edu/blog/2026/07...
Good summary here. TWMW is excellent and - for fans of that sort of thing - strikingly proto-Ballardian in its treatment of the surrealist jumble of post-war landscapes. Rich with incident and insight, the sort of novel (cf Nicola Barker) where ghosts and literary fraud are fragmentary digressions.
JacquiWine@jacquiwine.bsky.social · 5d agoFrom the archive for Rose Macaulay, #BornOnThisDay in 1881, thoughts on THE WORLD MY WILDERNESS, a haunting, evocative novel with a vivid sense of place. This was my first by Macaulay, a great entry point - striking, moving & wonderfully atmospheric. 💙📚 jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2019/03/12/t...
Cath Palug was a gigantic cat of Welsh folklore that is said to have terrorised King Arthur. In attempting to straddle animal folklore, political commentary and pet portraiture I've updated the fable for contemporary times where Kath Palug feasts on the nationalists with their Temu England flags...
After leaving Vienna, and long after you come to Budapest, the Danube enters a region of singular loneliness and desolation, where the water level is so low the Paks power plant suction nozzles cannot reach it. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... Apols to @megapolisomancy.bsky.social for stealing his bit
Danube's record low levels force shutdown of Hungary's only nuclear plant
Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia are also grappling with the effects of a series of prolonged heatwaves and low rainfall.
bbc.co.uk
I read this aloud to my wife as she was driving and it was nearly the last thing we ever laughed at.
New Flesh 🇵🇸 🏳️⚧️ 🏳️🌈@esedia.bsky.social · 2w agoYour food processor has a chute that fits your dick. Should you?
Best issue of any comic book, for my money. Introduced my 4 year old to Wile E Coyote just so I can give him this when he's 10.
Hagai Palevsky (he/him)@dialhforhagai.bsky.social · 2w agoWile E. Coyote, despaired, takes a bucket of paint and a brush and paints a beautiful two-bedroom house on a mountainside. He paints a beautiful coyote wife in the window, and two adorable coyote kids running around in the yard. He tries to enter this new coyote life, but it is inaccessible to him
I read this aloud to my wife as she was driving and it was nearly the last thing we ever laughed at.
New Flesh 🇵🇸 🏳️⚧️ 🏳️🌈@esedia.bsky.social · 2w agoYour food processor has a chute that fits your dick. Should you?
Best issue of any comic book, for my money. Introduced my 4 year old to Wile E Coyote just so I can give him this when he's 10.
Hagai Palevsky (he/him)@dialhforhagai.bsky.social · 2w agoWile E. Coyote, despaired, takes a bucket of paint and a brush and paints a beautiful two-bedroom house on a mountainside. He paints a beautiful coyote wife in the window, and two adorable coyote kids running around in the yard. He tries to enter this new coyote life, but it is inaccessible to him
Saw a video the other day that opened with "Without further ado", before he'd even done any ado. So I think it now means something like "Hwæt!"
Ray Newman@raynewman.bsky.social · 4mo agoYouTube people: the bit where you say “Without further ado, let's jump in” is “further ado”. What you should do, right, is actually just “jump in”.
This was very fun and more like a Sara Grann novel than I was expecting.
Pete Ward@phenryward.bsky.social · 2w agoFound this yesterday and was hooked by its wild premise - now two-thirds through and having a great time. Always love weird, horny theory-fiction (HALLUCINATING FOUCAULT, Patricia Duncker; 69 THINGS TO DO WITH A DEAD PRINCESS, Stewart Home - similar recommendations welcome!)
Re Musk. In Deadwood, lovable, true Ellsworth meets evil oligarch Hearst and cannot forgo treating him exactly as he deserves. Amid the ostensible gentility of ‘business’, it comes across as crass, incontinent with rage: but is exactly how we should handle evil pieces of shit, whenever we can.
I think of this amazing exhibit all the time www.artangel.org.uk/project/the-...
Alexander Glass@alexanderglass.bsky.social · 2w agoDustsceawung (Old English): contemplation of the fact that dust used to be other things – the walls of a city, the chief of the guards, a book, a great tree: dust is always the ultimate destination. It wasn't only the Buddhists who knew about impermanence.
Celebrating the legacy of renowned illustrator Virgil Finlay, born OTD 1914. Here’s a beautifully evocative piece (which I hadn’t come across before) representing J. G. Ballard‘s ‘The Crystal World‘, as advertised in a 1966 edition of ‘Things to Come’, the bulletin of the Science Fiction Book Club.
Strong list. THE Black Spider is great and this is a wonderful description of The Monk: "maximalist, repugnant quality that makes the whole thing feel like a shame-soaked wet dream.” READ THE MONK!
Rachel Feder@rachelfeder.bsky.social · 2w agoThank you for sharing your favorite Gothic novels with me for the @nupress.bsky.social blog! nupress.northwestern.edu/blog/2026/07...
Found this yesterday and was hooked by its wild premise - now two-thirds through and having a great time. Always love weird, horny theory-fiction (HALLUCINATING FOUCAULT, Patricia Duncker; 69 THINGS TO DO WITH A DEAD PRINCESS, Stewart Home - similar recommendations welcome!)
Cipher Press@cipherpress.bsky.social · 8mo agoFor the modern history buff, the detective fan AND the lesbian hook-up aficionado, we proudly present the next entry in our Cipher Press Gift Guide... BONE HORN, which sees a newly registered PI attempt to track down Alice B. Toklas’s reputed horn.
In today's featured Editor Pick: Some monuments are built from memory. Others demand a higher price. It's Age Cannot Wither Her by H. Marin. Read it for free at gavagai.com
#HorrorWritersChat Hello, it’s Jez ‘don’t mention gaming’ Conolly, writer of ‘domestic liminal horror’ (whatever that is) - I’m contractually obliged to pick The Thing. It is the Swiss Army knife of monsters.
Thing The Thing
Alt: Thing The Thing
static.klipy.com
Gree_@greethewriter.bsky.social · 2w agoStrings of mercury seep out of your ampoules, reconnecting the bones, alighting the faded words carved into the marrow. Tell us who you are, what do you write, and what's your favourite monster design in horror? #HorrorWritersChat
Too few people take Monkey Shines seriously enough
weird menace and excessive bloodletting@gemmafiles.bsky.social · 2w agoThat line from Monkey Shines about how instinct is sin sounds silly at the time, but it actually goes surprisingly hard in retrospect, especially if you already spend every day telling yourself that your first impulse is always the wrong one and needs to be checked at least twice before following it
Fucking estate agents not even pretending to be literate or sober any more. (And this is really from them too - scammers would have more respect.)
