Fresh off a vacation’s worth of reading, Daniel (@dungeondive) rounds up three horror novellas — with actual thunder rumbling outside his window as he records. The star is Kealan Patrick Burke’s The House on Abigail Lane, which Daniel pitches as “a shorter, non-experimental House of Leaves”: a haunted-house history written as an essay, citing a mix of real and invented sources as it traces decades of disappearances, a faceless other world, and the house’s eventual viral fame on Reddit and YouTube. He reads a genuinely unsettling excerpt aloud and reflects on Burke’s shift to self-publishing — and why that distinction may no longer matter. Next is Michael Cisco’s Do You Mind If We Dance With Your Legs, a charitable chapbook from Nightscape Press. Cisco is one of Daniel’s favourite living authors and one of his most challenging; the novella’s phantasmagorical style blurs reality and unreality around Pedrito, an amateur detective investigating a missing woman while his own world dissolves. Finally, Clive Barker’s Tortured Souls — chapters originally packaged with the McFarlane Toys line — is a grotesque mood piece about the Agonistes, who resculpts willing supplicants into killers. Enjoyable, Daniel says, but already fading from memory, unlike Barker’s best.
Burke’s imagery stuck with Daniel for over a decade after a single read. What horror book has lingered in your mind for years — and what image, specifically, refuses to leave?