Damnable Tales by Richard Wells EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Richard Wells
- Language: English
- Genre: Horror Anthologies
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 10.2 MB
- Price: Free
FOREWORD
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Benjamin Myers
FEAR NOURISHES. FEAR can comfort. It can provide succour, take us to the
hinterlands of the imagination or jolt us back into being.
There are only really two types of fear that we might experience: rational
fears and irrational fears, and it is somewhere in the space between the two
that the best horror stories grow like mould in the dank cellars of our
psyches. For centuries they have been shared, from fireside to ebook.
But wait, something is changing. All the old fears that we once held as
sacred and which, even at their murkiest, still followed a code of sorts –
those strange and familiar fears that are the bedrock upon which the best
tales of the uncanny are built – are being superseded by new fears, for
which such rules or signifiers are not so easily recognisable.
As the world moves deeper into dystopian realities that few of us
imagined would ever exist away from the pages of fiction, and
technological advancements allow us to live in ways that reach far beyond
the pace that evolution has prepared us for, new fears emerge. Fears most
modern. The digital realm of today presents a dark new landscape that
simply did not exist just three or four decades ago. It is a shadowland whose
architecture is ever-expanding in all directions and is stalked by hordes of
face-swapping ghouls, cynical manipulators and algorithmic revenants
preying upon the vulnerable, all watched over by a chorus of continuously
chattering voices offering a feverish running commentary on our thoughts
and actions.
Infinite and nightmarish, the digital sphere is far from the utopia it might
have been. Suddenly trolls are real. They have crawled out from beneath
their bridges and now they’re in our bedrooms, they are in our beds. We
carry them in our pockets. True horror.
New fears begat new mythical creatures then. Meanwhile, just outside
our front doors: unstoppable viruses, senseless terror attacks, raging
conflicts, growing divisions. Even the things we once held as sacred and
irrefutable – scientific and historic fact, truth – are now routinely called into
question, and have resulted in an anxiety epidemic on an unprecedented
scale. That this has all happened in the same amount of time it takes, for
example, a pine sapling to grow to the height of a house, should be cause
for alarm. Simply put, we have not been sufficiently prepared for the epoch
we now find ourselves inhabiting. Things have accelerated too quickly, and,
in our confusion, we are clinging on for our dear lives.
It is little wonder then that so many of us retreat into those fears we at
least partially recognise, and willingly submit to. Old fears. The fear of the
weird and the inexplicable. The fear of the land that rises up around us once
the sun has set and the orchestra of night plays its dreary lament.
In Damnable Tales, Richard Wells has curated and illustrated a selection
of stories that steers us into the dark recesses of landscapes both literal and
imaginative. These stories unfold in the aforementioned no man’s land
between the rational and the irrational, a dusty interzone where doubt reigns
supreme, and collectively form an ur-text for the folk-horror genre.
For More Read Download This Book
EPUB
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