Celebrating the First Year: Spotlight on TDS Gothic Authors

​THE DARK SIRE Literary Magazine is about to celebrate its first anniversary.  Over that year, here at TDS, our goal was, and is, to publish the best in Gothic literature.  Our authors have taken their readers through gruesome narratives, supernatural terrors, and dark, picturesque scenery.  When you pick up a copy of THE DARK SIRE, you can be sure that you will find stories that will evoke feelings of suspense and fear and a myriad of frightful concepts.
 
W. C. Mallory crafted his short story, Grave, to be a dark tale inspired by the Hammer horror films of the 1960s.  It is easy to imagine Christopher Lee as the sinister Dr. Wertenberg standing behind the massive oak door that opened “with the weariness that the groans of a hundred tormented souls could not have produced...”  Mallory teased our senses by placing us in a room “heavy with the scent of ash and charred oak.”  We hear, we feel and eventually we become the unnamed narrator as he is manipulated towards his doom.
 
A recipient of the 2015 Oscar Wilde Award from Grival Press, Mike Zimmerman pushed the envelope with his short story, Chambers, as he, with Poe-like precision, takes his hero, the new butler to a great lord, through the dark and heavily draped interior of the lord’s mansion only to discover mysteries of a locked room and  portraits of women wearing the same ruby necklace.  And as with any great Gothic story, we discover the lord’s mansion to have rooms “as cold as the coldest chambers of his heart.”
 
John Kiste is an Edgar Allen Poe impersonator and the winner of the 2019 Camden Press Predators and Editors readers’ poll.  His short story, Kettering Hall,  melds the supernatural and metaphysical worlds into a harrowing story of imagined (or is it) pain and retribution and leaves us wondering who haunts whom?  Look for an interview with him in an upcoming blog.
 
Maureen Mancini Amaturo in Once Bitten: A Vampire’s Lament, took us deep into the mind of a vampire who still remembers who he once was.  “A night animal, fanged and winged and crouching from all that is good and light.  Starved for love.  A monster in other’s eyes, others who did not know me before, never knew me as a man...”
 
At TDS, it has been our sincere hope that our stories have made you, our reader, feel more alive by taking your imagination through realms of  terror, torment, and madness with macabre tales from the finest writers currently creating in the Gothic field.   As we get ready to celebrate our first anniversary, we hope that you will be looking forward to what’s coming in the new issues by remembering what we have read in the old.  To paraphrase Edgar Allen Poe, we want you to peer into that deep darkness with us and dream the dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.

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