Macabre Holiday Gift Guide 2016

The time is upon us for another Macabre Holiday Gift Guide! This year, we’ve decided to focus solely on books, in part because there were so many amazing ones this year, and in part because our Boroughs of the Dead guides have had quite a few publications among them in 2016. Also, who doesn’t love a book for the holidays?

Round Manhattan’s Rim

In 1933, journalist Helen Worden of the World-Telegram decided to take a jaunt. With her friend Ruth Steinway in tow, she circumnavigated the waterfront of Manhattan island, and wrote it all up in a pithy little number called Round Manhattan’s Rim. This Depression-era travelogue is a wonderful curio that opens up a vintage Pandora’s-hatbox of questions, from “What is a B.E.F.?” to “Where on earth was Spanish-town,” and “When did the Seaport stop being painted in bright colors of blue and white?”

The Victorian Book of the Dead

Chris Woodyard knows that the morbidly-obsessed Victorians had “as many words for death as the Inuit do for types of snow,” and she shares her knowledge in the relentlessly fascinating compendium of grim 19th century arcana, The Victorian Book of the Dead.

Poe Land by J.W. Ocker

J.W. Ocker’s Poe Land is pure fandom fun. Structured like a road trip from Boston to South Carolina, this engaging travelogue meets up with collectors, enthusiasts, actors, and scholars, to form a fascinating picture of the people who keep Poe’s legacy alive. I must admit that, initially, I wasn’t crazy about the fact that the […]

Q&A With Paul Collins, Author of The Fever Called Living

This autumn, fans have been lucky enough to see the release of two great new books on Edgar Allan Poe.* The first of these, The Fever Called Living, has rapidly become my most recommended resource for anyone out there looking for a really solid and straightforward Poe biography. In an astonishing 107 pages, Paul Collins […]

Guest post from Leanna Renee Heiber: 14 West 10th Street

The following guest post comes courtesy of Leanna Renee Heiber, actress, playwright, and award-winning bestselling author of multiple Historical Fantasy series for adults and teens, including the Strangely Beautiful saga, the Magic Most Foul saga and the forthcoming Eterna Files saga from Tor/Forge. Most of her books are set in Victorian New York and all […]

Titanic First Person Accounts: Lawrence Beesley

  Some of the most compelling Titanic first-person accounts come from Lawrence Beesley’s The Loss of the SS Titanic. Second class passenger Beesley was a scientist and author, and he’s one of those rare people who seem equally gifted in both fields. He writes crystalline clear prose that is devastating without being histrionic: “Imagine a […]