Looking for your next spooky read? Now you can browse a brand new bookstore that specializes in the genre! The Twisted Spine, an independent bookstore focused on horror and “dark literature” just opened up in Brooklyn, New York, earlier this month. I made sure to visit during opening week so I could tell you all about it.
Genre specialty bookstores seem to be growing in popularity. In fact, The Ripped Bodice, a romance bookstore that first opened in Los Angeles in 2016, expanded to a second location in Brooklyn just a couple of years ago and saw a similarly enthusiastic welcome to The Twisted Spine. In many ways, I think these highly curated and specialized indie stores are a reaction against the over-saturation of the book market and the algorithm-driven chaos of Amazon and other online retailers. Horror as a genre is also having a real boom right now—as it so often does in times of uncertainty and rapid change, since it reflects the anxieties of a society. Now is really the perfect time for a horror specialty bookstore, as Twisted Spine owners Lauren Komer and Jason Mellow clearly saw. Continue reading The Twisted Spine—Brooklyn’s New Horror Bookstore!
M. R. James is widely considered the father of the modern ghost story. He was a medievalist scholar and a provost at Cambridge and Eton College in the early twentieth century. He made a hobby out of writing Christmas ghost stories for his students and colleagues and eventually began to publish these stories in collections. Much of his short fiction reflects his academic background and his interest in archaeology and medieval art, architecture, and literature. A few weeks ago,