Whew! I just watched the first episode of “Lovecraft Country”. A year ago, I read the book for my local public library book club. As I said then I repeat now, the monsters, now seeing them realized on screen rather than left to my imagination, were the least horrifying aspect. The monsters were life-threatening to be sure. What annoyed and scared me most were the true to life scenes of the Black characters being run out of town. “N---ers, Don’t be here at sundown. Understand?”

Was that James Baldwin in the voiceover montage?

     Horror is not my genre. I said that with muted disdain I have for Stephen King, the Halloween / Firday the 13th / NIghtmare on Elm St, and "The Exorcist”. I remember, but never saw the “The Omen”. But my favorite horror movies are “Jaws”, “Alien”, and “Predator”.

     I approached Shirely Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House with reservations but the Penguin Classics edition copy I read was prefaced with an analysis that compared THHoHH to Turn of the Screw by Henry James. TotS I like. I think in part I was seduced via my introductton to the story from Britten’s opera.

    Some time since having read Turn of th Screw which I added to my week of horror in my observation of Halloween this year.

     I shall continue and complete “Lovecraft Country”, two episodes and two DVD discs to go and watch two cinematic versions of the James novel for this weekend.

      In the similar vein as the James and Jackson novels is Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen’s first novel. Jane Eyre is an overrated favourite by most others; Wuthering Heights, remains still on my deserted island reading list, was much better and offers more important life lessons.

The Gothic, genre and style, gets its name from the word ‘gothic’ which refers the typical setting of such stories, gothic style English manor houses of the late Regency era. Yet, here is what puzzles me, the architectural style is just an extenson or a variation on the collegiate style of Oxford and Cambridge. Today, the term ‘collegiate gotic’ names that specific architectural style copied to some degree or other on most university campuses. I recall to mind Kerckhoff Hall at UCLA.

P. S. I forgot to add that I am taking up re-reading The Woman in White, but I even as fast as I read, I cannot finish a Wilkie Collins in a week.