Over the past few years, I’ve developed something of a tradition of reading something spooky on Halloween1. I didn’t have any particularly long horror novels to read this year, so I decided to do some spooky short stories instead.

So throughout Halloween, I read Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulu, which I had somehow managed to unintentionally avoid for years despite having worked my way through most of his short stories. It’s obviously a classic, and I have a particular enjoyment for his ideas of cosmic horror.

I also have a collection of short stories by Edgar Allen Poe, so I read Metzengerstein and The Pit and the Pendulum, both of which I felt had the spooky atmosphere I wanted.

Finally, I read something much scarier than the others. I started reading a collection of essays and articles I have recently gathered about Facebook and the Metaverse - truly a frightening subject. These ideas around the future of the internet, greater interconnectedness and VR experiences would be less troubling and more exciting, I think, if they weren’t coming from Facebook Meta. Anyway, I have lots of thoughts about this, but they deserve fleshing out on their own another time.

Footnotes

  1. It started as an excellent excuse to drink red wine and read Dracula ↩