Felix Kramer is an occasional student and freelance concept designer living in Southern Tier New York. His creative interests include visual design, prose writing, and poetry, all of which are approached with an eye for surrealism and deformation of existing tropes and systems. He draws influence from the fields of linguistics, mathematics, and architecture, among […]
Lest it seem every figure I describe in these columns is “major,” “unjustly neglected,” or “not-to-be-missed,” allow me to briefly legitimate Marcel Schneider’s claim to fame in the pantheon of French fantastiqueurs. Among his fifty-odd books — including eighteen novels; eleven short story collections; biographies of Schubert and Wagner; studies of Rousseau, Nerval, and Hoffmann; four volumes of […]
When I was in Berlin last spring to give a presentation on the Chapman Brothers and Goya, it was my good fortune to be taken through one of the strangest, most disorienting exhibits created by artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster in collaboration with architect David Adjaye and staged by Blain|Southern. My group was led into a seemingly innocuous […]
(Happy Comic-Con, everyone! This week we’re back with an exciting new crowd pleaser of a series set to debut this fall from Britain’s Titan Comics. Enjoy!) They were born on the battlefields of the Great War, amidst the mustard gas and x‑ray weapons. Beyond good and evil, they took over the great European capitals. Pulp writers made […]
Stefan Grabiński (1887 — 1936) was a Polish writer of horror fiction who considered himself an expert on demonology and magic. Some critics have called him the “Polish Poe” or the “Polish Lovecraft,” and suggested he believed in the supernatural forces in his stories. Known primarily as a novelist, he wrote many short stories, including those under the name […]
(Interrupting our erratic programming in honor of the impending Comic-Con, I’ll be taking a detour from the follow-up to my piece on Marcel Brion to discuss, this week and next, two comics — a graphic novel and a series — forthcoming this fall.) Ludovic Debeurme will be the first to tell you his work isn’t “fantastical,” and that he doesn’t like the […]
Karl Edward Wagner (1945−1994) was an award-winning American writer, poet, editor, and publisher. Possessing a voluminous knowledge of horror fiction and literature, he edited The Year’s Best Horror Stories from 1980 until his death in 1994, along with several collections of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories and many other anthologies; he also helped establish the Carcosa […]
Shane LaVancher’s “Creatures” invites us into a lab of hybrids – somewhere in between our technological future and our cave-dweller past. These bodies are beautiful and monstrous, thriving on the ethereal gothic: it is Gattaca meets Nosferatu. In the press release for the show, LaVancher reminds us that “visible changes in the human body are often preceded by unseen changes in the mind. As […]
I first heard about Kate MacDowell’s wonderful sculptures from writer Maria Dahvana Headley while attending the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. MacDowell’s delicate, grotesque creations invert the strange hierarchy we place upon nature, with humankind at the top and the rest of the environment and animal kingdom, well, far below. You might […]
“The mere touch of cold philosophy.” – Keats Reviewed in this column: The Troupe by Robert Jackson Bennett (Orbit, NY, 2012) Ivyland by Miles Klee (OR Books, NY, 2012) Shiny Thing by Patricia Russo (Papaveria Press, 2011) Hemlock Grove by Brian McGreevy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY, 2012 Recently, the New Yorker has, a little unexpectedly, produced a science-fiction issue. I say ‘unexpectedly’ […]