“Are There Any Good Supernatural Stories I’m Missing Out On?”
By Barb Lien-Cooper (with Park Cooper)
Hi, I’m Barb Lien-Cooper, and my husband Park Cooper and I write together as a team (we call the team Wicker Man Studios, after the old horror movie The Wicker Man).
When my husband and I aren't busy writing together, my husband teaches English classes at the local community college. Whenever he teaches his “Introduction to the Short Story” class, he tries to pick out genre literature to teach, since the students tend to enjoy such works. Every so often, a bright student asks him, “Are there any good supernatural stories I’m missing out on?”
To help people wanting more supernatural tales, I've compiled a list of my favorites. My original list had about 40 stories on it, but I’m pruning down the list to only include rarer works. After all, most horror anthologies are too busy reprinting “The Upper Berth” yet again to give much space to more obscure horror...
(Note: this list is in no particular order or ranking)
Plot: Vicar Hargreaves comes back from the grave to help Mrs. Oliver keep her home.
I like this story because it’s very character-based. Mrs. Oliver is a nasty old woman, but she doesn’t deserve to lose her home. The pacing is above average, with the horror appearing subtly. While Kirk was an old-school conservative, and it shows in the story (the government official is the villain here), he writes so well that, in spite of me disagreeing with his politics, I’m giving this story a place on my list.
Park says: Yeah, no, seriously, it’s a really good story.
Plot: A little girl raised by an academic finds a room of other little girls to play with. Her imaginary friends turn out to be not so imaginary after all.
I like this story because it shows that supernatural literature can be used not only as a way to scare people but also as a way to write great characters. The ending of this story is as sweet as it is heartbreaking.
Park says: Yeah, it deserves everything Barb’s saying about it.
3/ "Mommy" by Mary Elizabeth Counselman:
Plot: A woman adopts an orphan... but will the child’s dead mother approve?
Mary Elizabeth Counselman is an all-but-forgotten Weird Tales writer, as well as one of my favorite supernatural authors. Her work is subtle, original, and always entertaining to read.The end of this story is by turns hopeful, happy, yet deeply unnerving, which is a hard-to-achieve combination of story tones.
Park says: No, seriously, this light-hearted story is one of the best ones yet. When Counselman is on, she’s really on, and she’s very on in this story.
4/"The Man Who Was Not On The Passenger List" by Robert Barr
Plot: A shipping concern refuses to pay a passenger’s widow for the man’s accidental death.The company soon learns a big lesson in doing what is right.
This story is a deeply satisfying read. Unfinished business ghosts are always entertaining, but this ghost goes the extra mile to make sure that justice is done.
Park says Another one that’s light-hearted and particularly amusing.
5/"The Dead Remember" by Robert E. Howard
Plot: A racist cowboy murderer gets his just desserts.
I hadn’t read any Robert E. Howard before I read this story. My husband is a big Howard fan, so he introduced me to Howard’s “Texas horror.”I decided after this story spooked me, that I’d take the plunge and read more of Howard’s work. I am now a big fan of anything the man wrote. The guy could honestly write well in any genre.
Park says: Of course, I approve of this one. It’s one of the best on the list.
6/"Hey, Look at Me!" - Jack Finney
Plot: Max, an author who died young, has an important piece of unfinished business that really frustrates him.
Most stories that try and write realistically about what it’s like to be an author fail miserably. This story succeeds where others fail because it recognizes one of the main reasons people write.
Park says: It was a little extra-hard to write about this one without hitting a spoiler, but I think we’ve sufficiently managed it. This one has a light-hearted tone sometimes, but this guy—THIS guy—really has a knack for making it feel seriously unnerving to encounter the spirit of a dead person. Chilling AND light-hearted AND sort of sweet, but not all of those at the same time.
7/"The Lonesome Place" - August Derleth
Plot: The childhood memories of places we found to be scary may still be out there...
It’s funny. I’m not a Derleth fan.Most of his stories aren’t all that great, frankly. But he hit three home runs, in my opinion: “The Dark Boy,” “The Drifting Snow,” and this tale.“The Lonesome Place” is like reading a Ray Bradbury story without the “you’ll never get your precious childhood back again” sentimentality. Derleth understood that the magical thinking of many imaginative children sometimes makes the world a frightening place. For some reason, this story scared the hell out of me when I first read it.
Park says: Yes, everything Barb’s saying is correct. This one is scary. The only thing of his better is “The Dark Boy,” but when a story gets its own (excellent) installment on Serling’s Night Gallery, it’s maybe not exactly “obscure,” so I can see why Barb went with this one instead.
8/"Outside the House" by Bessie Kyffin-Taylor
Plot:A young war veteran visits his girlfriend’s family, but something is terribly amiss. Will the guy get the message and not ask any questions? What do you think, reader?
This story has a tone and atmosphere to burn.I genuinely like the characters and wish them well. A rare story where I’ve felt like yelling at the main character, “For God’s sake, stop! Go back!”
Park says: AHHHH! This one! I call this one “The One With The Low Lawn” or just “The Low Lawn” because you do NOT want to be out on the Low Lawn (or outside the house at all really) when it starts to get near sundown! This one’s scary and disturbing! It has a lot going on about “if your family’s weird in a paranormal way, at exactly what point should you have that conversation with your boyfriend/girlfriend?” This story suggests that the correct answer is DON’T PUT IT OFF!
9/"Harry" by Rosemary Timperley
Plot: A mother remembers what happened to her adopted daughter...and shudders.
Subtle, suspenseful, and beautifully written, the story gave me the chills.Not much scares this jaded heart of mine nowadays, but the icy-cold, matter-of-fact suspense in this story blew me away.
Park says: I don’t have much to say about this one. I will mention that it’s particularly short, as I recall. I’m not surprised that Barb chose this one.
10/"Clay-Shuttered Doors" by Helen R. Hull
Plot: My husband summed it up this way, and I think it fits: a gal experiences patriarchal/capitalistic horror after her friend gets into a seemingly fatal car accident.
There is a horror out there that I call “the horror of implication.”It’s a subtle kind of horror that sneaks up on you. Nothing is explicitly mentioned, but reading between the lines, you find yourself deeply disturbed. It’s a difficult thing to do well, but Helen R. Hull did it well here.
Park says: Barb had this one at #8, but I thought it was so strong that I’m like “no, we should end with ‘Clay-Shuttered Doors,’ that’s a very nice strong one to end on” so I moved it down to the end, here. It’s unnerving... very disturbing.
The Talking Cure -A Novel of Magic and Psychiatry The Cutter/Mann Series
Book One
Barbara Lien-Cooper and Park Cooper
Genre: slow build paranormal romance
Publisher: Wicker Man Studios
Date of Publication: Aug 2022
Number of pages: 434
Word Count: 85,000
Book Description:
--Zach Cutter claims he's not really an antiques dealer as such, but that he's really a supernatural investigator.
--Zach claims he's got repressed memories, missing at least a year of his life, probably more.
--Zach claims he can do magic. Not stage magician magic-- real magic.
--Zach claims he's got feelings for his new psychiatrist, Dr. Cynthia Mann.
--Zach claims a lot of problematic things.
But they're all true.
After a disturbing case in New York made Dr. Cynthia Mann wonder if the supernatural might actually be real, she's started her life and her practice all over again in Cleveland, where she meets a new patient, stranger than any she’s ever met before—and far more charming than anyone she’s ever met, too.
During the progress Zach makes as Cynthia’s patient, he tells her stories about his past, and their relationship slowly edges from a doctor-patient one to a friendship—and Zach clearly wouldn’t mind if it became more.
Together, Cynthia and Zach will eventually have to find a way for him to get out of the trouble he stumbled into long ago...
Excerpt
“You’re really
going to make me do magic, aren’t you?”
“Yes. I can’t
believe your story otherwise.”
He reached out
to some fresh roses that were in a vase on my desk. “Watch,” he said.
No magical
energy came from his fingers, and nothing felt or looked any different. He was
just... touching them. But he looked at me as if he’d done something. “...You
didn’t do anything,” I said.
“Touch the
petals.”
As I reluctantly
reached out to the petals he’d been touching, his fingers, drawing away,
touched my hand. “C’mon, they won’t bite you,” he said. Then he reached out
again, and guided my hand across the petals of the flower.
The roses had
been real that morning—I’d put them in fresh water.
But now they
were fake flowers, made of silk. “You have nice hands,” he said.
I took back my
hand. “What did you do to my flowers?”
“Magic,” he
said.
“Slight-of-hand
magic, you mean. You could have just distracted me...”
Zach sighed and
raised his hand, showing me his palm, the fingers splayed out like he was about
to start pointing to it and lecturing me about palm-reading. Then he lowered it
down until his hand was laid out flat on my desk. I watched his hand lower,
then I watched it sit there, waiting for something to happen. His hand didn’t
move... nothing seemed to move... though there was some slight change I
couldn’t put my finger on.
After a few seconds,
I looked more closely around his hand at the desktop. The top of the desk was
transparent.
My desk had been
made of wood. Now, however, the entire desk was made of glass.
It was still
exactly the same shape. It was at least the same weight, since it didn’t budge
when I pushed at it.
I pulled out a
drawer. A glass drawer slid out, on metal wheels turning on metal rails screwed
into the glass by metal screws. I hadn’t really needed to pull out the drawer—I
could already see, somewhat, what was inside: regular-old, boring white
envelopes, some staples, paperclips, pens.
All faintly
visible through see-through glass, glass with a woody brown tint to it... and a
sort of vague wood grain set into it somehow...
“Don’t worry,
it’ll only last a few hours, then it’ll change back to wood,” Cutter assured
me.
What. In the
world.
I stared at him
for almost half a minute. He looked at me patiently. It was as if we were
trying to “read” each other, trying to figure out... I don’t know. Each other,
I guess.
I looked away
first. “I’m sorry, Zach, but you’re not a client of mine yet... I can’t...
until I get to know you... I don’t just give out sleeping pills... I’m sure
other doctors might, but...”
“I don’t want
another doctor. I want you, Cynthia.”
Great. The first
handsome, smart guy I’d met in a while, and not only did he have to be a
potential client, he was some sort of... magician...? “I’m not sure that would
be...” I said, “I mean...” On top of everything else, I found that I was
blushing.
“What if I told
you that...well, uh... I actually... it’s not just sleeping pills... seriously,
I do have some real problems...”
“What sort of
problems...?”
“...Repressed
memories.”
“Oh? When did
that start?”
He smiled
weakly. “After Celeste died. The time right before that is very fuzzy. And the
time right after that is pretty much lost to me. I lost months... probably a
lot more time than that.” He glanced at a clock on the wall and grinned a
winning smile. “But I imagine my time’s up for today...”
“Yes, I suppose
it is...”
“Unless you’d
like to go out to dinner with me...?”
“Mr. Cutter, if
you’re to be my client, I can’t... we can’t meet socially...”
“I’ve always
liked women who have a bit of an authoritarian side to them...”
I took out my
appointment book. “Let’s get you an appointment for next time. I don’t really
appreciate walk-ins, and...”
“—Argh, I hate sticking to appointments. Being a
magician isn’t exactly a 9-to-5 job...”
Barb Lien-Cooper is originally from Minnesota. She was a guitarist/singer-songwriter, and got an album put out on the Imp label. However, she also had health issues: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and fibromyalgia and extreme environmental sensitivities and allergies. (She also has Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder due to issues involving her family of origin.)
For a while, brain fog from the CFS and the fibro made it harder for her to read long and involved works of fiction... So (since she'd always loved them in her childhood) she got into reading comics and graphic novels, particularly the comparatively avant-garde work coming out at that time from DC Comics.
Park Cooper was born and raised in central Texas he read a lot of books and comic books—and then one day, someone in the letter columns of the comic Sandman announced that they were doing a fanzine for readers of that comic. Barb and Park both wrote in.
Park liked the writing Barb submitted to the fanzine, and he wrote to her, and they began writing to each other. Then they started talking on the phone... they fell in love... they started visiting one another...
Then they got married! (To each other!)
They wrote about comics and popular culture for some websites (some of them award-winning), and wrote a lot of reviews and articles and things.
A little after that, Barb started writing her comic Gun Street Girl, and a little after that, they started adapting and editing many, many manga for major American publishers importing manga (and sometimes their South Korean and Chinese counterparts) from the far side of the Pacific. Near the end of this, Barb and Park wrote the manga pitch The Hidden for TokyoPop, perfectly timed to appear the week that that company fell apart.
Then Barb and Park wrote the sci-fi vampire graphic novel Half Dead for Marvel Comics and Dabel Brothers Productions.
Somewhere around this time, Park successfully completed his Ph.D. in literature, and then Barb and Park wrote a vampire prose novel, and Park started writing his cyberpunk comic Swipe for Angry Viking Press, and there were also other various short stories and novels and non-manga-related editing jobs, too many to bother counting here...
These days, Barb and Park live happily together in Austin, Texas.
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