Last month I was pretty down in the mouth after having received a rejection for the last of the pieces I’d sent out that I was really hopeful of getting published. I still have a short story out which I submitted for a Clark Ashton Smith tribute, but I already expect it to be turned down so I haven’t given it much thought. That said, with an eye towards future submissions, I have recently begun writing some newer prose pieces which are mostly descriptive vignettes about macabre characters, sort of like Marcel Schwob’s Vies imaginaires, Imaginary Lives, where he wrote semi-biographical short stories about the lives of some historical villains (like Captain Kidd, Burke & Hare, etc), though instead mine are about Gothic monsters. I’m not sure if they would qualify as prose poems, but that’s what I am going for, brief poetic vignettes, with little or no dialogue written in a fairytale style. I am thinking of calling it “Magic Lantern”.

Vies imaginaires by Marcel Schwob 1st edition Charpentier & Fasquelle (1896).
The first one I wrote in the series is called Morbidezza. I am tempted to use her full name, Morbidezza Vesepertilio. She is a Venetian vampire in 18th century Germany who is taken captive by an infatuated young vampire hunter (who is the monster here?). It is at, last count, 667 words long, barely two pages, but it is succinct and IMHO beautiful. Anyway, I have decided to hold off from posting it on here because I wish to try it out in some journals before releasing it to the world. I do however, have a scan of one of the working outline papers so you can see some of the myriad forms it took before it made it to its final draft.

Working draft for “Morbidezza”.
The next story is about a werewolf named Rosaire. Although I have set this story in Clark Ashton Smith’s Averoigne, it is not necessarily a Mythos tale. It is a traditional tale with all of the folkloric tropes from the original historical lycanthropy cases. Oddly enough, in my research for the tale, I began watching one of my old favorite werewolf films, “The Company of Wolves” (1984), by Neil Jordan, which features a script by Jordan and Angela Carter, largely based on her the relevant tales from her 1979 book “The Bloody Chamber”. After getting about 20 or so minutes into the movie, I decided to take a look at the source.
“The Bloody Chamber” is one of my all-time favorite books as you may well know, so I decided to take a quick look at some of the tales before I got into my “research”. I read The Erl-King, The Snow Child, and my favorite, The Lady of the House of Love. This last one is about a vampire girl, daughter of Vlad Dracula, who lives in a dilapidated castle in Transylvania. Her watcher, an old woman who sound much like nurse from Hammer’s “Countess Dracula, would lure young men to her lair where they would get a last supper before being drained by their waifish and preternaturally beautiful hostess. One day, a young British soldier on leave takes a bicycle tour of Romania and ends up in the vampire’s snare, but there’s a snag, she falls in love. I won’t ruin it for you but it is sublime and deftly told. It is baroque and Gothic but has a heart and wistful fairy tale wit about it. It is a masterful story which only Ms. Carter could write and it had a profound effect on me when I first read it sometime around 1995.

Dust-jacket for the Gollanncz 1st edition (1979) of “The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories” by Angela Carter.
Rereading it now, I see how much it has influenced my “Morbidezza” in subtle ways I couldn’t have imagined had I purposefully set out to write a piece à la Carter. I can never be quite the brilliant writer she was, but her work is the exemplary standard which I look to for guidance and inspiration. I cannot wait to share it with the world but shall try to be smart about when and where.