Shunned Houses: An Anthology of Weird Stories, Unspeakable Poems, and Impious Essays Available for Pre-release Orders
WordCrafts Press and editors Katherine Kerestman and S. T. Joshi are pleased to announce the upcoming release of the new horror anthology, Shunned Houses, which is set for an October 1, 2024, retail debut. The anthology is available for pre-release ordering in both hardback and ebook versions, with the paperback version to follow on the release date. Shunned Houses follows the editorial duo’s 2023 anthology, The Weird Cat, which debuted at Number 1 on Amazon.com’s Hot New Releases in Classic Short Stories chart and at Number 1 in Hot New Releases in Classic Fiction Anthologies and Collections. The Weird Cat also claimed the Number 5 spot on the Hot New Releases in Horror Anthology category.
Houses can be reservoirs of joy . . . or misery. When this affective power endures, a place is said to be “haunted.” When this energy for good or evil continues—especially when it touches people who were not involved in the primary circumstance which occurred in that location—then a place is considered alive. Places, then, may serve as portals through which a person can enter into the past, both psychically and physically; moreover, the effects of a place upon a person may influence what happens going forward. Places are causes, and they are effects.
One’s home is a special Place, and yet even your home may be infused with doubtful associations. At the end of a stressful day at work, you may want to run home—to the house that functions as a harbor, shelter, or castle; on the other hand, a home is sometimes a place to run away from, a cage or a trap.
Shunned Houses delves into that larger realm through more than three dozen classic and contemporary short stories, poems, and essays by masters of the craft including; Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Frost, Algernon Blackwood, Ramsey Campbell, whom the Oxford Companion to English Literature describes as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer,” and more than two dozen other contemporary and classic authors.
“The haunted house theme is as old as literature itself, and it’s easy to see why,” Kerestman and Joshi explain. “So much of every person’s intimate life takes place within the walls of one’s home that the invasion of ghosts, revenants, and less explicable creatures into a residence is a horror of particular poignancy. As with our previous volume, The Weird Cat, we strove to seek out first-rate tales, poems, and essays from the farthest reaches of literature that were little-known to present-day readers. In addition, we commissioned works from leading contemporary writers. The mix of old and new writing creates a sense of continuity in this age-old motif—a motif that will remain relevant so long as human beings continue to take comfort in a dwelling, grand or humble as it may be, that can be called a home.
From the book:
A man’s home is his castle—but what if his castle is the Castle of Otranto? Suzie’s a good homemaker, but what if all the Fuller Brush Man’s cleaning solutions cannot get the luminous mold from her basement floor? And what if the answer to the draftiness of your ancestral mansion is double-walled insulation consisting of an internment vault between two stone walls? Some say home is where the heart is, but what if the heart is the “Tell-Tale Heart”?
In the best weird fiction, and in mainstream literature, too, houses are often key players. Not merely backdrops contributing to atmosphere and setting, houses often carry the burdens of past hopes and dread, death and misdeeds. In general—whether or not the supernatural plays a role in its biography—a house is haunted. Sometimes it is the uncertainty (whether a house is haunted merely by its history or by ghosts) that is the crux of the matter, as in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) or Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959).
Perhaps the best we can do is hope that we live in a benevolent house.
About S. T. Joshi
S. T. Joshi is the author of The Weird Tale (1990), H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West (1990), and Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction
(2012). He has prepared corrected editions of H. P. Lovecraft’s work for Arkham House and annotated editions of Lovecraft’s stories for Penguin Classics. His exhaustive biography, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996), was expanded as I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (2010). He has edited the anthologies American Supernatural Tales (Penguin, 2007), A Mountain Walked: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (Centipede Press, 2013), The Madness of Cthulhu (Titan Books, 2014), and the ongoing Black Wings series (PS Publishing, 2010f.). Joshi has won the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the International Horror Guild Award.
About Katherine Kerestman
Katherine Kerestman is the author of Lethal (2023), Creepy Cat’s Macabre Travels: Prowling around Haunted Towers, Crumbling Castles, and Ghoulish Graveyards (2020), and Haunted House and Other Strange Tales (Hippocampus Press, 2024), as well as the co-editor (with S. T. Joshi) of The Weird Cat (2023) and the new Shunned Houses: An Anthology of Weird Stories, Unspeakable Poems, and Impious Essays (2024). More than 60 of her Lovecraftian and gothic poems, essays, and short stories have been featured in Black Wings VII, Penumbra, Journ-E, Spectral Realms, Illumen, Retro-Fan, Dissections, Off-Course, Lovecraftiana and other discerning publications. Katherine has a B. A. in English and History (John Carroll University) and an M. A. in English (Case Western Reserve University), thinks Dracula and Wuthering Heights are the greatest books ever written, and is wild about Dark Shadows and Twin Peaks. Her name is etched among the inscrutable glyphs of the Esoteric Order of Dagon and the Dracula Society. Interested parties may stalk her at www.creepycatlair.com
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