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Slavic Folklore: The Likho

Art – Marek Hapon

The likho is part of Eastern Slavic fairy tales. Although not as frequently mentioned as the witch Baba Yaga, the likho assumes many guises from an old woman clad in black or a male goblin-like being. The common feature in both is the likho has only one eye.

In the pre-Christian era, the likho was associated with death and villages conducted rituals during epidemics. An idol with only one eye was burned to banish the servant of Death and the epidemic. Over time, the likho became a being of bad luck and malevolence.

The lihko is often associated with Slavic water spirits like the rusalka and vodyanoy who deliberately drown their victims. But unlike these water spirits, the likho leaps onto its victims to strangle them. Desperate to dislodge the likho, the mortal wades into waterways trying to drown the likho but its grip can’t be broken and the victim inadvertently drowns. In Slavic folklore, death by mysterious drowning was attributed to many of these different supernatural beings.

Caution against calling unnecessary attention to the likho and its misfortune is clear in the Russian proverb: “Don’t wake the likho up when it is quiet.”

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Norse Myth: Nidhogg

Nidhogg (Old Norse Níðhöggr, “He Who Strikes with Malice”) is one of several serpents or dragons in the Nine Worlds. The most famous serpent is Jormungand or the Midgard-serpent but Nidhogg is a dragon trapped beneath the Yggdrasil and constantly gnawing at its roots and corpses. Nidhogg is a force for chaos by destroying Yggdrasil, he will pull the Norse cosmos into chaos and away from balance.

Nidhogg presides over part of Helheim called Náströnd (“The Shore of Corpses”) where perjurers, murderers and adulterers are devoured by the dragon. The potential for Christian influence is apparent here as the concept of the afterlife with moral retribution is not inherent to Norse mythology.

Nidhogg has a prominent role in Ragnarok, the epic battle and destruction of the Nine Worlds and the Norse cosmos. In the Poetic Edda, the poem ‘The Völuspá’ describes how Nidhogg will fly free from beneath Yggdrasil after Ragnarok.

The roots of Yggdrasil keep the Nidhogg trapped until Ragnarok when shaking of the Nine Worlds weakens of Yggdrasil and allows Nidhogg to start chewing and tearing his way free from the underworld with the coming of Ragnarok.

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Greek Myth: Sirens

Funerary statue of a siren with a shell lyre, c. 370 BCE

In Ancient Greek mythology, the sirens are vaguely described by various sources but are usually interpreted as being large birds with the heads of women.

In the classic Ancient Greek legend The Odyssey attributed to Homer, the hero Odysseus’s ship is attacked by sirens who sing from the cliffs with the voices of women. The witch Circe had forewarned Odysseus and his crew to block their ears with wax so not to hear the siren’s song. Odysseus was tied to the mast as he insisted on hearing the sirens but safely tied, he couldn’t be taken from the ship. According to Circe, the sirens would fly down from three cliffs, attack crews and take men back to their roosts to feast on their victims.

The painting John William Waterhouse (1891) and depicts the sirens as described in ancient Greek mythology.

Ulysses and the sirens– John William Waterhouse (1891)

During the medieval period, the siren became confused with the mermaid and was often depicted in many Bestiaries as a half-fish, half-woman or a chimera of both with wings.

Bestiary bound in a theological miscellany. British Library, Harley Collection, MS 3244.

English artist William Petty was one of the first artist to depict the siren as a naked woman in Ulysses and the Sirens (1837) but a darker interpretation than later artists with Petty depicting the sirens an rocky isle atop the corpses of sailors lured to their deaths.

Ulysses and the Sirens– William Petty (1837)

Following the tradition of William Petty, a second siren painting by John William Waterhouse (ca. 1900) The Siren depicts the Petty-style completely different interpretation of the siren. Here, the siren is a beautiful naked woman playing a lyre and sitting on the rocks to lure sailors into the ocean to drown before they reach her.

The Siren– John William Waterhouse (ca.1900)

This transformation of the siren from the classical Greek version into the one we know today as the deadly seductress is a fascinating re-shaping of folklore and mythology over time.

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Asylumfest Horror Convention

May Day Hills Historic Asylum

AsylumFest 2023 will be held October 27 – 29 in Mayday Hills located within Beechworth, Victoria.

Mayday Hills operated from 1867 to 1995 and was one of the largest mental health facilities in the state, with over 1200 patients and 500 staff at its peak. Today, it is a heritage site that hosts various cultural and artistic activities – including ghost and history tours and of course, AsylumFest!

This Halloween weekend, I’ll be appearing at Asylumfest horror convention held at the historicMayDay Hills Psychiatric Hospital in Beechworth, Victoria, Australia. I’ll be participating as an offical representative of the Australasian Horror Writer’s Association and competing in the live reading and judging for the May Day Hills Ghost story competition.

I’ll also be on a panel talking with Australian dark fiction authors Carol Ryles and Aaron Dries about the importance of diversity in New Horror, the emergence of more diverse characters, writer, actors and directors. The continued growth of diversity and representing traditionally marginalised voices is a strong movement that will hopefully continue to flourish. We’ll be talking our own horror works as well as those published in the past for more recently and where we think the world of New Horror is headed.

Hope to see all horror film and writing fans at the Traders Hall and check out the Australasian Horror Writers trade table. Also check out another exciting horror panel on The New Gothic!

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Viking Women

Publisher’s Description

Let’s travel in time together, a thousand or so years back, and meet Viking women in their hearth-lit world.

How did these medieval viragoes live, love and die? How can we encounter them as flesh-and-blood beings with fears and feelings – not just as names in sagas or runes carved into stone?

In this groundbreaking work, Lisa Hannett lifts the veil on the untold stories of wives and mothers, girls and slaves, widows and witches who sailed, settled, suffered, survived – and thrived – in a society that largely catered to and memorialised men. Hannett presents the everyday experiences of a compelling cast of women, all of whom are resourceful and petty, hopeful and jealous, and as fabulous and flawed as we are today.


Summary

I recently read creative historical fiction Viking Women: Life & Lore by Australian-Canadian author Lisa Hannnet.

I was surprised by the sense of adventure that began the book. An engaging storytelling style that promised the Viking escapade and grandeur we all imagine.

The first story struck me hard. The tale of “Melkorka: Concubine and Slave” an Irish princess taken as a slave during a Viking raid. The hopelessness and loss of autonomy was immediate and powerful. Interspersed with this fictional tale were the academic facts and knowledge of slavery in the Viking Age.

My next favourite was a complete opposite to the opening tale. One of the most fascinating parts of Icelandic sagas, “Bergthora: A True and Stalwart Wife” which tells the story of a feud between two powerful women of influential households and the escalation of relation for slights that couldn’t be allowed to stand. The men are the ones who bear the brunt of the feud and in the end tragedy can only occur.

My third favourite “Breeches-Aud: Cross-Dressing Women” is the fictionalised tale inspired by a famous archaeological burial of a Viking warrior. Recent investigations have shown the burial is that of a biologically female warrior buried with the Viking warrior customs which showed the possibility that some Viking women were actively involved in warfare.

Throughout Viking Women, Hannett pauses in the stories to explain the historical and cultural context. These tales provide a sense of real characters, lives and empathy to these amazing Viking women.

Review

Hannet has brilliantly navigated the complex tales of Icelandic Sagas to uncover the lives of everyday women in the Viking Age. Some women are extraordinary and wield the power of their household status while others are powerless and stripped of identity as slaves. This remarkable book spans the academic and historical fiction genres with aplomb. Hannet is to be congratulated.

Conclusion

A highly recommended read for anyone interested in Viking Age history and culture. This is an amazing book that binds history and fiction in a skilful, entertaining and exciting way. Looking forward to the next book!

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Slavic Folklore: Rusalka

The Rusalka is related to water-dwelling nymphs and appears in the form of a beautiful woman. Water nymphs, unlike mermaids, have legs and can walk on land.

Rusalki are found in rivers or lakes they come out of the streams at certain times a year to dance and walk in the woods especially in summer months. In prehistory, they’ve been associated with fertility, but by the 19th century, they represented aggressive water sprites who would seduce young men to a watery deaths.

The origin folklore of the rusalka is unclear, but they are always women and usually virgins who had an untimely death near water. The restless soul became a rusalka because they were un-sanctified or they’d had a violent and untimely deaths. Rusalki are almost always associated with women betrayed by their lovers. They remain in the region to haunt the area of water where they died.

Rusalki often come out of the water and climb into a tree or sit on a rock, singing or combing their hair. Rusalki have green or golden hair which is always wet and their pale skin may take on a greenish hue.

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Peripheral Visions

Publisher’s Description

Peripheral Visions is a unique, award-winning reference collection that includes all of Robert Hood’s 44 ghost stories to date, three of them especially written for this volume. These memorable tales display Hood’s uncanny ability to make the fantastic real, to embrace weirdness and create human characters whose lives – both inner and outer – haunted by mortality, are laid bare and revealed to be our own worst nightmares. Ranging from melancholy reflection on life and death, through disquieting tales of dark humour and vengeance, to chilling visions of ghostly apocalypse.

Hood’s stories are sure to draw you into a terrifying world that in the end is revealed to be irrefutably our own. Though many of these stories draw on the traditions of the past, they are far from traditional in approach.

As you turn each page remember this: not everything here is as it seems. There’s always something more, barely glimpsed, out there on the periphery.


Summary

I recently read the limited edition three volume collection Peripheral Visions: The Collected Ghost Stories by Australian horror author Robert Hood.

This limited edition collection spans forty years of Robert Hood’s ghost story writing with 44 tales covering six different themes of haunting in the horror genre. There are many brilliant stories within each section that focuses on a variety of themes including Haunted Places, Haunted Families, Haunted Minds, Haunted Youth, Haunted Vengeance and Haunted Realities. Some of my favourites included Haunted Places, Haunted Minds, Haunted Youth and Haunted Vengeance. The scope of aspects that Hood delves into in these stories includes the deeply psychological, historical and, at times, what felt like a deeply personal venture in the haunted mind.

Review

Peripheral Visions is a sweeping three volume collection of divided into themes on the horror genre of Haunting. There are some of the most unique, darkly humorous and chilling ghost stories I’ve ever had the pleasure to read. Hood delivers a masterclass in ghost stories with brilliant prose that keeps the pace of this three volume collection moving with a deft storyteller’s hand.

Conclusion

This was a fabulous, wide-ranging collection of ghost stories and hauntings by one of the best horror authors in the business. Highly recommended!

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Egyptian Myth: Hathor

Hathor was known as “the Great One of Many Names” and her titles and attributes are so numerous that she was important in nearly every aspect of ancient Egyptian life and death. Her widespread worship in the Predynastic period is indicated by her depiction on the Narmer palette.

During the Old Kingdom period, her worship was well established. Hathor symbolically represents Upper Egypt while the god Bast represents Lower Egypt and both are depicted in The Valley Temple of Khafre at Giza.

Hathor was originally a personification of the Milky Way which was considered to be the milk that flowed from the udders of a heavenly cow, which links her to the goddess Nut and Bat. But over time, Hathor absorbed the attributes of many other goddesses to become more closely associated with Isis. In turn, Isis usurped Hathor’s position as the most popular and more powerful goddess. But, Hathor remained popular throughout Ancient Egyptian worship.

Festivals were dedicated to Hathor and her worship extended beyond Egypt and Nubia. She was worshipped throughout Semitic West Asia, Ethiopia, Somalia and Libya and she was particularly worshipped in the city of Byblos.

Hathor was among the goddesses that carried the Eye of Ra – a symbolic representation as the female opposite of Ra in which she had an avenging character protection g her from her opposites.

In her feminine aspect, Hathor represented the musical arts, dance, joy, love, sexuality, and maternal care. These were the properties of the goddess and represented ancient Egyptian femininity.
As the goddess of music and dance, her ministry was formed by dancers, singers, actors and even acrobats.

Hathor crossed the boundaries between the worlds to learn from the dead as they transitioned to an afterlife.

She was entrusted to receive the dead to enter the afterlife and when they went to her in an adequate manner, their petitions would be were heard. The goddess Hathor herself would lead them over to the room of the dead. To some, Hathor was a cow goddess that suckled babies with her sacred milk, or was associated with the wild lioness that lived in the desert capable of extinguishing all life.

Hathor was often personified as a cow – or the symbol of a woman with a crown of cow horns and a solar disk. She could also be symbolized as a lioness – the protective emblem used by the pharaohs. She was also associated with a sycamore tree – the yellow trunk of resistant, durable wood.

In Egyptian mythology, Hathor also was the defender of the drunkards, ruled the celebration of drunkenness, which was celebrated in Dendera, twenty days after the overflowing of the Nile. She was named “The lady of joys” for to her cheerful, festive and game-related personality and “The lady of the garlands” for her beauty

Many shrines were consecrated to Hathor with the most famous at Dendera in Upper Egypt where she also enjoyed being worshipped in the temples of her male companions.

By the New kingdom era, the goddesses Nut and Isis took the place of Hathor, but she continued to represent one of the most revered goddesses. At the end of the New Empire, Hathor was overshadowed by the goddess Isis.

During the Ptolemaic era, a rite arose based on Hathor and Horus forming a marriage saw “The Good Gathering” celebrated in the month of Epiphany according to the Egyptian calendar.

Hathor appears as a woman with a cow’s head, or a human head with the ears and horns of a cow.

She can also appear as a lioness associated with Sekhmet or the cat.

In the late period tale, Ra transformed Hathor into Sekhmet who was the eye of her father. He sent her to devastate humankind for not obeying him, but later, in remorse, Sekhmet was so drunk so that Ra transformed her back into Hathor – the goddess who represents love and veneration

In Egyptian mythology, Hathor is the “mother of mothers”, a goddess of women, maturity, children, and work. Her enigmatic energy connected her with women.

In the Book of the Dead from the 13th century B.C., Hathor was one of the goddesses associated with the souls in the afterlife. Among those deities, there was Amentit, a deity of the west, who represented Necropolis or sarcophagi on the western banks of the Nile and the kingdom of life after death.

Hathor’s associates:
Women, musicians, dancers, singers, perfumers, aroMatherapists, cosmeticians, brewers, vintners, magicians, fortune-tellers, diviners, and henna artists

Manifestations:
Hathor is most often depicted as a cow with the solar disk and plumes between her horns or as a woman whose crown is a solar disk held between a pair of cow horns.

Iconography:
Hathor is symbolised as tree with a woman’s breast, with which she nourishes pharaohs.

Attributes:
Mirror, frame drum, and sistrum: the sistrum, a percussion instrument, is sometimes decorated with Hathor’s image, as are Egyptian hand mirrors.

Animals:
Cow, gazelle, cat, goose

Plants:
Myrrh tree, date palm, sycomore fig, papyrus, and henna

Stones:
Malachite, turquoise

Metal:
Gold, copper

Color:
Red

Planet:
Moon. Hathor also has associations with the Dog Star, or Sirius which the ancient Egyptians called Sothis, the Great Provider or the Womb of Hathor.

Places:
Hathor’s principal sanctuary was at Dendera, on the edge of the desert between Luxor and Abydos, where it is believed her cult first began. Dendera was a healing center, the Egyptians considered it the Navel of the Universe, or Earth’s spiritual center. The mountain range to the west of the Nile River and marshes were sacred to Hathor.

Time:
An annual festival of appeasement corresponded with the rising of Sothis (Sirius) or approximately 20 July by our calendar. Hathor was offered copious amounts of beer and pomegranate juice shared by celebrating devotees.

Offerings:
A gift of two mirrors is her traditional votive offering. Hathor is the spirit of alcohol and beer or wine were used as offerings. Other traditional votive offerings include fabrics, scarabs, and other amulets; images of cats and cows; jewelry; and ex-votos (milagros) in the form of eyes or ears to encourage Hathor to see or hear petitioners.

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Anoka

Publisher’s Description

Welcome to Anoka, Minnesota, a small city just outside of the Twin Cities dubbed “The Halloween Capital of the World” since 1937. Here before you lie several tales involving bone collectors, pagan witches, werewolves, skeletal bison, and cloned children. It is up to you to decipher between fact and fiction as the author has woven historical facts into his narratives. With his debut horror collection, Cheyenne and Arapaho author Shane Hawk explores themes of family, grief, loneliness, and identity through the lens of indigenous life.


Summary

I was recently recommended to read Anoka: A Collection of Indigenous Horror from US author Shane Hawk.

While it is hard to choose favourites from this collection which spans so many real-world themes, societal marginalisation, stigma and indigenous horror themes, there were several stories that really resonated with me.

The opening story ‘Soilborne’ was dark tale that really plunged its claws into me. ‘Wounded’ was a journey into the darkness of a mind and family. ‘Transfigured’ was a striking Halloween story that proved the perfect ending to this collection of the dark, haunting and macabre.

Review

Anoka was a fantastic collection of indigenous horror where Hawk delivered a host of genuine characters, masterful storytelling and a series of dark, weird and haunting horror in a well-written psychological horror collection.

Conclusion

Highly recommended read for fans of horror, dark fiction and psychological horror. A must read!


** This is my personal opinion and does not reflect any judging decisions **

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Don’t Fear the Reaper

Publisher’s Description

Four years after her tumultuous senior year, Jade Daniels is released from prison right before Christmas when her conviction is overturned. But life beyond bars takes a dangerous turn as soon as she returns to Proofrock. Convicted Serial Killer, Dark Mill South, seeking revenge for thirty-eight Dakota men hanged in 1862, escapes from his prison transfer due to a blizzard, just outside of Proofrock, Idaho.

Dark Mill South’s Reunion Tour began on December 12th, 2019, a Thursday.

Thirty-six hours and twenty bodies later, on Friday the 13th, it would be over.


Summary

I’ve recently read Don’t Fear the Reaper (Indian Lake Trilogy, #2) the sequel to My Heart is a Chainsaw by US Horror author Stephen Graham Jones.

Don’t Fear the Reaper returns us to the town of Proofrock and to the protagonist Jade Daniel’s – four years after court trials – she’s changed a lot and finally cleared of the crimes from the Fourth of July Massacre. In the minds of some Proofrock residents, she’s still to blame for the Fourth of July Massacre. Others still, wait for the return of Indian ghost witch, Stacey Graves. But Jade is fairly certain that venegful ghost is finally in her watery grave. She hopes.

Proofrock is gripped in the worst ice storm of a century. The FBI have been busy trying to convict a Native American serial killer by returning to the scenes of his crimes across many states hoping for bodies of the victims still missing. But Dark Mill South has other plans. Once the FBI are inevitably caught in the snowstorm, he makes his escape and heads for…Proofrock. The body count starts piling up quickly and soon Jade and a few former school survivors of the Fourth July Massacre begin to wonder just how many killings are due to Dark Mill South or is someone else taking advantage of his presence?

Review

Graham-Jones writes a compelling and more rigorous sequel as though he’s found his ground, the audience are running with him as we’re led through the icy killing grounds of Proofrock once more. The pace is fast, the killer (or killers) are quick and cunning. Graham-Jones writes a brilliant crime story as well as a horror-infused homage to the slasher form. A steadily building pace is jerked into rapid action with a few gruesome but effective splashes of violence. Graham-Jones is a master of keeping the equilibrium perfectly poised.

Conclusion

A thrilling and suspenseful homage to the slasher genre with genuine characters and masterfully written. Great for fans of dark fiction, horror, slashers, suspense, mystery and thrillers. A highly recommended read!!


** This is my personal opinion and does not reflect any judging decisions **