Okay, when it comes to reading, I must reckon I still do take immense pleasure from exploring dusty shelves on second hand book stores, paying usually peanuts for their books, bringing them home and reading them under my desk lamp's rather atmospheric light, than doing so on a computer screen - hence the long time it took me to find it out.
Regardless of preferences though, it comes a time when you simply cannot find one or two stories you've been longing for to reading and that's when Horror Masters would come to old-fashioned readers' rescue, like myself.
So if you also have been caught by surprise by this piece of unfortunate news, do rejoice and read on, for you'll find out that not everything is all doom and gloom in this apparent demise.
Regardless of preferences though, it comes a time when you simply cannot find one or two stories you've been longing for to reading and that's when Horror Masters would come to old-fashioned readers' rescue, like myself.
Shrouded in similarly mysterious circumstances to those found in some of the stories that made up its very content, HMs seemed to have closed down without much ado somewhere between 2011 and 2012.
Fortunately, thanks to the honorable The Way Back Machine, not all is lost!
For those not in known, this brilliant idea in the shape of a website, is simply put, a safe haven for internet archiving. Thanks to its robots' outstanding work, you are able to look back at websites snapshots and see how, say, Yahoo! looked like back in 1999, at the height of its glory and "googleless" dominance; or go back in time to cnn.com to the very day when some important news sprung up.
To mine, and I am sure all the other similar-minded horrormasters' orphans' surprise, it looks like The Wayback Machine has not only saved mere snapshots but in fact, most of the website's content and structure!
So far, for every short story link I clicked on, I was pleasantly presented with the stories themselves - nothing more, nothing less.
So if you're keen to try for yourself (even if for the very first time) here's the link to the last saved date, when WB's robots crawled Horror Masters's site - which it took place on the 16th of July, last year.
Even if, I honestly hope, Horror Masters does come back from the dead in the shape of a brand new and powerful server (let's get our seances started, shall we?) such a sudden, erm, cardiac arrest might mean that it might as well occur again - so, hopefully The Way Back will be there for us horror freaks - whenever (if ever) it happens again!
Bear in mind you'll need higher doses of patience - archives of this kind are rather slow when compared to the "real deal", when, what you see now through the Way Back Machine, actually existed!
Good reading and please do remember to report back if you find any issue or non-working link (there certainly must be some). Maybe someone else might come up with alternative links to our beloved creepy stories, you never know!
Good reading and please do remember to report back if you find any issue or non-working link (there certainly must be some). Maybe someone else might come up with alternative links to our beloved creepy stories, you never know!
Nilson Bazana
July 2012
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