Blind Cartographer

Her fingers stick together where the blood has pooled. Rabia almost counts herself lucky that she cannot see anymore, because the gore of her own enucleation might have made her sick. 

As it is, all she knows is the sound of her own heavy breathing and the tickle of cool, dank air on the wet insides of her eye sockets. 

There is no pain, just as the ritual promised. It is disconcerting, to say the least, but Rabia can't complain. She has felt so much pain since coming down here. So many friends and colleagues taken by impossible doors and cursed reliefs. It feels like a reward that Wahyudi’s final challenge is to sacrifice a sensation, rather than take on more.

Bridge and Tunnel

“What’s wrong with it?”

Two boys stood in an empty lot between tenements, shielded from street view by evening darkness and a battered chain-link fence. A spindly, barren oak swayed mildly in the wind above them. Eddison, scrawny and little and brown, had a stick the width of his forearm hanging from one loosely clenched fist, just looking for a reason to poke at the twisted, ashen figure before them.

“It’s a she,” Almer said. Broad and short and dark, he squatted even closer to the ground than he normally was to clinically examine the situation. The dirt under the woman was dry and crumbly, almost gravel.

Model Home

Model Home by Rivers Solomon was recommended to me by a friend sometime last year, after I’d mentioned having an interest in architecture horror—things in the vein of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, the indie horror game Anatomy by Kitty Horrorshow, and the movie You Should Have Left (2020) with Kevin Bacon and Amanda Seyfried. My friend, having neither read the book itself nor heard of those other things I’ve listed, thought Model Home might fit that bill. 

It doesn’t, really. Instead, this novel is undeniably a haunted house story, written with a deep understanding of the subgenre, bordering on metatextual.

White Zombies and Black Horror

In a sugarcane mill in rural Haiti, a cane grinding pit emits a creaking groan as a ring of hollow-eyed men push the mill arms around and around. More men ferry bags of sugarcane up and down the warehouse mezzanine. One stumbles and falls backward into the bladed pit. He does not scream. The others push on, heedless of the casualty. As long as their master lives, their work will never end. 

This scene from Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932) illustrates the terror at the center of the zombie myth: loss of personhood and autonomy.