A quote from one of my favorite movies..."Well I read through that Handbook for the Recently Deceased and it says 'live people ignore the strange and unusual' I myself am strange and unusual" as said by Lydia in the movie Beetlejuice. Hmm...perhaps thats why I enjoy the 'Things Unknown'...

Mundanely I am a normal person, well, as normal as one can be in this day and age. I have a particular fondness for Horror, Gothic Literature, and others like that. Music wise takes me to favorites like Berlioz & Mahler...I have always said that at my wake and funeral...the piece Danse Macabre will be played...as a celebration, a last dance you might say..before I return??

You never know do you.

Literature...ahh, and the poetry I enjoy. Byron is one of my favorites, along with Shelley...hmm..of course you do know that on the night the works of Frankenstein was constructed from the mind of 19 year old Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley...it was a night that Byron, the Shelleys and John Polidori had a contest..to see who could come up with the best Horror story....ahh...two great works came about that night...Frankenstein (or the Modern Prometheus) and The Vampyre.

I hope you like some of the works I will find for you to read and enjoy...horror isn't just about Jason in those Friday the 13th films, or Michael Myers in Halloween...good Gothic Horror is...well..something that makes you want to sit in a room filled with candles, curled up in your favorite seat and spending time reading works like The Vampyre...and perhaps having someone nibbling on your neck while you read...*shivers* Gothic Horror is...Romantic...yes, that is the word...

I've a question for you... What is your first ever memory? Sorry about how direct and intrusive this question may be (after all our mental landscape is sculpted by memory; I might as well have asked you to show a little bit of your soul to me! Very vampiric!), but I'm trying to grasp at an elusive point. A stake point.

Mine is being scared. I must have been about two. I'd taken one of my sisters high-heeled shoes and tried to walk in it. I fell down a steep bank and cut my head. A small cut. I didn't start 'wailing' until I saw my mothers panic stricken face. "But, what has this got to do with this site?", I hear you ask.

Well, I remember my first horror movie in a similar way. I guess it's something akin to the early memories the majority us seem to remember: Fear-filled memories. They seems to stick with us (the majority I have asked, anyway), somehow more persistent, valuable to our developing experience. Learning what to fear, what to avoid. A simple evolutionary mechanism to make us remember the source of the pain.

And so to movies. I can remember being petrified of meeting and becoming a vampire.

My first Horror movie was a black and white BBC production, lost to oblivion no doubt, about a village that had succumbed to vampirism. Similar to a plot device I later saw used in Hammer Vampire flick "Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter" (1973), a war-weary hero returnsto the village that he has been fighting and killing to protect, only to find it has been infected with a 'pestilence'. This eventually leads him to stake his vampiric mother and daughter before fleeing the land of his birth forever. Pretty grim stuff. Petrifying to your average seven year old.

A lesson to be learned: Never trust babysitters to adequately censor children's TV viewing!

I've been affected, obsessed, fascinated and scared witless by reading, watching and imagining all kinds of evil (vampires as the central motif) ever since...

That's my story. What's yours?

Ahhh, a line from one of my all-time favourite songs, which perfectly binds together two of the most important aspects of my life, sex and death. Not everyone understands why the two link together so beautifully, but you do, don't you? After all, you're here...!

Maybe it's just my way of looking at the world... always at the dark side. After all, that's how I live. That's why I dress and look the way I do. People in the street may see me and think 'weirdo' or 'freak', but at least they've looked and thought about me long enough to make an opinion. And to me that's what counts.... I've never been one to fade into the background! One of the biggest compliments I've ever had was when meeting my favourite writer and his wife for the first time, when they recognised me just from my other on-line moniker, Goth Girl! (It goes without saying that this wonderful couple are the amazing Brian Lumley and his charming wife Silky!)

My obsession with the macabre extends into all aspects of my life, not only in the music I listen too, the films I watch and the books I read, but right down to my little house by a graveyard and my close circle of fiends, both on and off-line! It also extends to the stories of mine here in the Erotica section, which I hope you enjoy reading as much as I enjoyed writing...!

As the song from the Rocky Horror Show says... "don't dream it... be it".