A Rambling love-letter from the Editor

It was almost one year ago today (I’ll never be exactly sure–those days blended into each other like liquid language) when I was seated aboard a train travelling from Bristol to Edinburgh. My hands donned a pair of blood-red gloves I had picked up from a woman in Paris–whose voice was so bitter it could plausibly conjure up the dead, an English breakfast tea with two sugar cubes, and a copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories. Anyone who knows me well enough knows that when I spell my name out loud I sing it like a hymnal, and as if my lungs were made of marble, I let it reverberate and echo until it it washes over waves of silence, and that the Gothic is my favourite genre of literature. So much so that the first adult classic novel I read was A Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde at ten years old, which I am almost certain derailed any prospective sense of normalcy that might’ve lingered, though that I am not awfully displeased about. I found an innate sense of belonging between those chapters, their distinct and terrifying charm always ensuring I came back to their pages like a vagrant, capricious lover, for there is a ragged and truthful beauty that lingers between the shameless lines of the melancholic musings of mad poets. The train clicked and spluttered through the idle fog of the Scottish countryside as I (quite fittingly) devoured every ludicrously strange morsel of Dracula’s Guest. I had neglected my tea and let it grow cold, for there was not a single moment wherein I permitted myself to take my hands off the book. I let each word wash over me like a baptism. I let each word consume me until I was no longer myself, but an anthology of orphic narratives of greater reverence to me than my own soul. 

With this in mind, I present to you the tales of oddities and peculiarities that have wholly consumed the narratives of others. The poetry-infused pages of secret journals that have only just scratched the surface of the day, the uninvited entities that hold the mirror to all that we have expurgated, and all that we have not. The communication of the inexplicable, the vulgar and the divine. It aches to write so plainly about something I love so dearly (I cling onto literature as if it were a crucifix), so I encourage you all to fall down these literary rabbit holes yourself, with outstretched arms and open minds. 

Lots of love, and literary well-wishes,

Emmanuelle.