I just LOVE old Gothic novels.  I love the idea of BEING not here in the 21st Century, where we take technology for granted, but instead living in the 19th Century, where men were men and women were - well women, or so we are led to believe.  If you are a fan of ancient literature as I am, you will see that people were really just the same as we are now.  They lived, loved, worked, laughed and cried and thought that their world was terribly modern.  Just as people will laugh at our feeble attempts at modernism, a hundred years from now, so we knowingly smirk at those who went before, if we can even be bothered to consider their so terribly OLD FASHIONED OPINIONS, in our modern society. However today's modern is tomorrow's history and one day we must hang up our boots and say 'Good Night' to everything we hold dear and true.  Every familiar thing of our modern world will be but the dust of mockery and infantile derision in 100 years and we will be perceived as nought but the foetus of technology in an ancient, discarded and much outdated womb of evolution as our time will have been in 100 years.

I have spent  this Sunday reading 'The Beetle' by Richard Marsh and 'The Sign Of The Spider' by Bertram Mitford.  Amazing stories written in the last years of the 19th Century.  'The Beetle' even outsold Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' when it was released in the same year and I can understand why, it is a better story.  Both are available on Amazon Kindle and are well worth reading.

Now I go on to the Black Gaslight.  Well the simple fact is, that my mother was a great fan of Dennis Wheatley Black Magic books and I was used to seeing the lurid front cover pictures, which held no fear for me as a  child, as my mother would frequently read them in bed.  By the age of 17 I had read just about every Dennis Wheatley book I could get my hands on. My favourite holiday reading one year, on holiday in Whitby, North Yorkshire, with my family when I was 15, was 'The Irish Witch' by Dennis Wheatley and in fact it was a term my father used to call my mother who was steeped in Irishness and Gaelicness.   Yes, some of Dennis Wheatley's ideas were archaic, even then and not socially acceptable, in today's times, but nontheless, his Black Magic books have a great and secret thrill, absolutely second to non.

I feel that there is this undercurrent theme, running through life, even today, that third dimension, that SOMETHING that is weird and wonderful and strange, all at the same time. Something we can transmute in to, if we so choose, our own personal metamorphosis, on to another level of time and space.

Black Gaslight Magazine