“Labyrinthine complexity, involving curiously irregular differences in floor levels, characterised the entire arrangement; and we should certainly have been lost at the very outset but for the trail of torn paper left behind us.” — At the Mountains of Madness You may have heard whispers in the aether, or seen faint shimmerings on the tablets […]
“The last conscious effort which imagination made was to show me a livid white face bending over me out of the mist. I must be careful of such dreams, for they would unseat one’s reason if there were too much of them.” — Mina Harker’s journal, 1 October (26 July 1894) Dracula isn’t the only […]
“Surrealism is meant for me, because I am a pretty realistic person but don’t like all I see. So I dream that it is changed. Then I change it to the way I want it. It is almost always pretty real. Only mystery and fantasy have been added. All foolishness has been taken out. It […]
“As he replied to my mocking allusion to the beetle by echoing my own words, he vanished, — or, rather, I saw him taking a different shape before my eyes. His loose draperies all fell off him, and, as they were in the very act of falling, there issued, or there seemed to issue out […]
“While America needs you, my son, you shall not die!” — Bruce Carter I, to the Fighting Yank (Bruce Carter III), in Startling Comics #35 (Sep 1945) The Shield was the first, and Captain America was the greatest, but lots and lots of heroes donned the red-white-and-blue and punched Nazis in the 1940s. Many of […]
“I told you to keep to the paths. You wandered into the Yellow Zone.” — No. 6 to Nadia, “The Chimes of Big Ben,” The Prisoner Robert W. Chambers may have invented reality horror, combining Poe’s fragility of self with Bierce’s arbitrary universe and his own artistic flair, but it arguably reached its peak, ironically […]
“Man should not know the future. Such knowledge can be fatal.” — attributed to Wolf Messing In 1977, researchers Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks uncovered evidence in the accidentally unshredded MK-ULTRA files that the CIA had hired the stage magician John Mulholland as a consultant. After decades of further research, and the fortuitous discovery […]
“Tall, gaunt, cynical, with tragic eyes … like a man who had seen the inside of hell.” — description of Liam Tobin by IRA mole David Neligan Michael Collins, the George Washington of Ireland, picked a 23-year-old man named Liam Tobin to be his spymaster. If I were related to George Washington’s spymaster, I’d never […]
“He had lately become a devotee of the William Mortensen school of photography. Mortensen, of course, is the leading exponent of fantasy in photography; his monstrosities and grotesques are widely known.” — Robert Bloch, “The Sorcerer’s Jewel” (1939) William H. Mortensen, the “leading exponent of fantasy in photography,” was born in Park City, Utah in […]
“Colonel Buchan’s novel Greenmantle has more than a flavor of truth …” — T.E. Lawrence, to Robert Graves In Britain, the first rank of spy novelists has long included writers from the ranks of actual intelligence agencies: John Buchan (British Army Intelligence Corps), Somerset Maugham (MI6), Graham Greene (MI6), Dennis Wheatley (London Controlling Section of […]
