Midway through the #Gothtober #AScareADay challenge and thoroughly enjoying it courtesy of @romgothsam.bsky.social

This is why, whether it's prayer or magic wishes, one should never wish to bring back the dead. It never ends well...

One expects such grotesque consequences from a creepy monkey's paw, but even heartfelt prayers aimed at the divine can be dangerous.

#AScareADay
4/4

Her friend Esther describes him as "like a house with someone dead in it."
Edward himself longs to die properly, feeling like "a vampire reversed," yearning to be buried underground.

The longer she cares for him, Alice too becomes more like the undead, looking pale and sickly.

#AScareADay
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When Alice prays for Edward to be revived, she's careful to specify that he should be brought back "as you were," hoping to avoid a Pet Sematary kind of situation. But this wording isn't enough. Edward may look exactly the same but he's missing some part of his soul or personality.

#AScareADay
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Day 15 of #AScareADay is "The Prayer" by Violet Hunt.

Ooh, this one is quite spooky!

Like the lovers in "The Cold Embrace," Alice and her husband Edward once promised to haunt each other, should one of them die early. But Alice can't abide ghosts and isn't willing to let her Edward go...

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Tagore #AScareADay
A schoolmaster, unknowingly, tells a story about the occupants of a house to the man who was its subject.
Was the teller trying to scare off Bhusan from the town & from searching for valuables?
What did Bhusan think when he & his wife were described in unflattering & sexist ways?

Hunt's "The Prayer" led me to think of "The Monkey's Paw." Not quite the same but close enough to ponder: If humans could know the consequences of the goals & objects we wish for, then we could wish w/out regret.
But omniscient we aren't.
(Tea leaves, anybody? Earl Grey, mon capitaine)?
#AScareADay

I loved today's #AScareADay story. We read Violent Hunt's 'The Prayer'. What if your prayer was answered and your just dead husband came back? There are no revenants here in the traditional sense but plenty of creeping discomfort and dread.

Well worth a read!

I forgot to post about yesterday's #AScareADay story which was W. W. Jacob's 'The Well'

I kind of love this story. We all know whatshisface is down the well but the tension really lies in the question of what is going to happen because of it.

An enjoyable read!

I hope Olive lived happily ever after with Jem's mother, they seemed to get along well. Would it be better for her to learn the truth about Jem or to just be able to grieve her false image of him?

#AScareADay
4/4

But Olive doesn't find out the dark truth about Jem by the end of the story. Instead it is Jem who ends up inside the well, confronted with the dead body of the cousin who dared to blackmail him--and then presumably sharing his fate. (Why didn't they anchor the rope to a tree?)

#AScareADay
3/

We're back on the theme of lovers: Jem Benson has a goth gf Olive, who "has a taste for the morbid and horrible" and loves to sit on the edge of a creepy well. She jokes about falling in and making the acquaintance of Truth (referencing Gerome's famous painting).

#AScareADay
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Just under the wire before midnight, it's Day 14 of #AScareADay: "The Well" by W. W. Jacobs.

This author is famous for his short story "The Monkey's Paw," which I've read many times and referenced many more. But I don't think I've read anything else by him before. This was a fun one!

1/

V. Hunt #AScareADay
Is it truly living when presence replaces passion?
The couple's plight & sorrows call to mind E.B. Browning's "Love":
"But when a soul, by choice and conscience, doth
Throw out her full force on another soul,
The conscience and the concentration both make
mere life, Love."

3/3 Jacobs #AScareADay
Some say that "All's well, that ends well". But not for Jem, Venerable Bard, not for him.
[I couldn't resist this.]

2/3 Jacobs #AScareADay
Jem hopes that the well's depths, a verticality of space, will conceal his crimes.
The well also symbolizes the immoral depths that Jem has fallen--& later will fall actually.
But Jem's plans go awry: his betrothed's bracelet falls accidently (fatefully?!) into the well.

Jacobs #AScareADay
Spatiality is no friend of secrecy. Jem tries to keep secret his covert love affair by creating a 2nd secret. The affair & body disposal involve types of proximity.
Seeking to suppress the disclosure of a lover's letters, Jem hides his 2nd secret in a nearby abandoned well.
1/3

But I’m with Adele.

“I am a woman, and I want to be loved.” Who doesnt?

#AScareADay
4/4

Surely one can still be a great artist without totally ignoring your wife all day and expecting her to be content with total isolation.

Sylvia is haunted by sympathy for the poor Adele, which is treated as a flaw she must be cured of through moral enlightenment.

#AScareADay
3/

Though their hair colors are reversed (in Poe, the dark-haired wife came first, then the blonde), we have the new wife either being possessed by or transforming into her predecessor.

But is it supernatural or just a shared despair at the same neglectful treatment?

#AScareADay
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