The iron heated quickly, and in a series of motions as artful as any he’d performed on the orchestral podium he pulled it from the fire with one hand, squeezed her forearm hard to force her fingers open with the other, and jabbed the glowing red tip of the poker into her exposed palm.
Lucy A. Snyder
Lucy A. Snyder is a five-time Bram Stoker Award-winning writer. The author of ten books and about 100 published short stories, Lucy’s fiction has been translated into French, Russian, Italian, Czech, Spanish, and Japanese editions. Her work has appeared in publications such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Nightmare Magazine, Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, Shadowed Souls, and Best Horror of the Year. She has a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Goddard College and is faculty in Seton Hill University’s MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction. You can follow her on Twitter at @LucyASnyder.
An Exploration of Racism in Heart of Darkness
In 1975, author Chinua Achebe analyzed Conrad’s portrayal of Africans in the book and accused Conrad and his novel of racism:
Unreliable Narrators in Kiernan and Chambers
Caitlín R. Kiernan’s dark fantasy novel The Drowning Girl: A Memoir and Robert W. Chambers’ supernatural story collection The King in Yellow have several themes in common—ancient malign gods, hauntings, and madness-inducing works of art, for instance—but one of the most interesting is how the two authors handle unreliable narrators.
Antumbra
I woke in the afternoon gloom to the sound of my 20–year–old stepsister Lily dragging something heavy and wet up the back patio steps through the kitchen door. The smell of blood and brine smothered me the moment I sat up.