gothic

There is love in me the likes of which you've never seen. There is rage in me the likes of which should never escape. If I am not satisfied int he one, I will indulge the other.

Listen,listen with your eyes,and your lips.Listen with your skin, and your blood.Can you hear us,at the edges?

Good and evil exist in all of us. a moment__ temptation takes us on a wrong path. On that path may lurk foul fiends,inhuman, yet feeding, needingall our weaknesses: vanity, indolence and envy,Easy fruits for evil appetites,our flesh, a tasty afterthought,our bones flung asunder.

Inside, there was a bed, and upon the bed there was a woman. More beautiful was she even than the damask rose while her scent, drifting through the open window, was that of the night dew. Her hair was silken as the raven's wing. Quite naked, she lay, so still upon the bed, her eyes closed in reverie.The young man looked first upon her breasts, where her hand rested. And upon each breast, there was a rosebud nipple. Upon each nipple there was a tip most tender. Upon each tip there was a milky drop. Chin lifted, lips parted, she milked her maiden breast.'What I would give to suckle at that teat,' thought he. from 'Against Faithlessness' in Cautionary Tales

Ha!_ cackled the fiend, __ expect you__ like revenge on that husband of yours. Murder shouldn__ go unpunished, and no creature enjoys delivering chastisement as much as I. What about giving him a taste of his own medicine? If you__ be so kind as to lend me your body, I__l set him dancing to my tune.__he wife__ spectre grimaced and nodded, at which the wicked Likho stripped off the nightgown, then the dead woman__ pliant skin, peeling back the flaccid folds. These it left in a slack heap. It gobbled her flesh and sucked the bones clean. These it hid behind the stove, before inserting itself inside the empty, wrinkled carcass, taking the former position of the corpse. Its fat tongue swiped the last juices from around its lips.When the husband returned home, all was as it had been; there was not a speck of blood to be seen, although the strangest smell of rotten eggs lingered

The cabin in the woods is to the American Gothic what the haunted castle is to the European - the seed from which everything else ultimately grows.

Here, at the edges,Whispering to you,And we__e not alone; not aloneHere, in the dark.We are behind the door, in the corners,In the room where you__e just extinguished the light.We flicker in the shadow you cast on the wall.We are the prickle on the back of your neck.Curled, in words unspoken,We are the shiver on your uneasy flesh,The creep of the unknown on your skin.Can you feel us?Here, at the edges.From the Foreword of Cautionary Tales - by Emmanuelle de Maupassant

It isn't fair, it isn't right," Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

This apartment, which you no doubt profanely suppose to be the shop of Will Wimble the undertaker --a man whom we know not, and whose plebeian appellation has never before this night thwarted our royal ears --this apartment, I say, is the Dais-Chamber of our Palace, devoted to the councils of our kingdom, and to other sacred and lofty purposes.

If on thoughts of death we are fed,Thus, a coffin, became my bed.

These streets belong to us because we decided not to punch the time clock. We decided to see what and f*ck is going on out here when all those other people are going to sleep. So we walk from dusk until dawn and we rule.

Our fiction is not merely in flight from the physical data of the actual world_it is, bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction, nonrealistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic _ a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation_our classic [American] literature is a literature of horror for boys

There was something awesome in the thought of the solitary mortal standing by the open window and summoning in from the gloom outside the spirits of the nether world.

I have learned one lesson in all this and I will share it knowing it will do no one any good. The lesson is this: "There are none more complicit in one's undoing than one's own heart".

They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements, of howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains, of hooded monks and headless horseman, swirling mists and sudden winds, insubstantial specters and sheeted creatures, vampires and bloodhounds, bats and rats and spiders, of men found at dawn and women turned white-haired and raving lunatic, and of vanished corpses and curses upon heirs.

Walk with this tomorrow night. If nothing happens, thendon__ come back. Forget about us, this place, but if you feel theNightwalker in you awaken, then return to where you belong.Return to me, and the streets will run red with blood.

But to die as lovers may - to die together, so that they may live together.

There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.