Today's word cloud: "The Monkey's Paw" - W.W. Jacobs

"Without, the night was cold and wet(...)" 

With this alternative (oldfashioned?) meaning to the word 'outside', W.W. Jacobs gives a well-deserved atmospheric introduction to his gothic masterpiece. And that dictates the tone of how things are going do develop (to the worse) in the very few pages that follow within this classic horror short story.

And if you call yourself a fan of the horror genre and haven't taken the (very short) time to read this tale yet, set aside a similarly cold and rainy evening you happen to be at home to read it in the dim light.
Then come back and let me know how delightful (actually, frightful) your reading experience was. Enough said about how great this story is, let us proceed to the word cloud itself:

If like me, you read it umpteen times before (I actually took it to the next step, as I told it, lights off and all, to several of my pupils aged 9 to 12 and boy, they loved it!), its most frequent words are not much of a surprise, are they?

So it's either down to it being a short story or the fact it's so direct to the point, the words do reflect what goes on in the plot. Or would you rather wish there were some other ones? Just remember to be careful with what you wish for...

Most frequent words in Bram Stoker's 'Dracula':

Some conclusions one can draw out of this Dracula word cloud are:

 Firstly, as one might expect, the word 'night' appears more frequently than 'day' (duh!).
Also, Van Helsing's name has a higher word-count than Jonathan's fiancée, Mina's (322 times against 237). On top of that, if you add up the reference 'the professor' when used on its own without being followed by his name (111 of them); the total of references to the vampire killer amount to hefty 333 times!

It's also worth mentioning that in all its 237-occurrence glory, Mina's name actually appears less frequently than that of Lucy's (299 times).

Finally, 'blood' is not so common a word as we might come to believe, with 107 samplings. Well, okay then, that's quite a lot still.

Most frequent words used in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein"

Upon reading this world-celebrated work by British author  Mary Shelley, I was struck by the frequent use of the adjective  'wretched' (along with its variances 'wretchedly', 'wretchedness' and of course, the 'wretch' noun) as it is nowadays, not-so-spread out and commonly-used a word. 

By using the excellent 'Tagul Cloud Generator' with the full text to the renowned novel available on Project Gutenberg, I was fairly surprised to find out the word in question wasn't even among the 100-most frequent ones in this novel and, if anything, it probably stands out in Shelley's work more down to its strangeness in our present times than to its sheer number of repeats in the text. So I decided to increase Tagul's maximum threshold to 250 and see if it finally showed up. Can you find it? Let us know in the comment session if you did and in which part of the "Frankie face"'s anatomy above you did.


As to important in the whole text, 'man', 'father', 'life' are, in my opinion, no-brainers. But 'friend' and 'love' though, after reading it several years ago, I can still recall most occasions where they were employed in the book, seem a tad out-of-place, don't they?

Review: Moon Over Soho

Lua Negra Sobre Westminster: Enigmas de Londres 2 by Ben Aaronovitch

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



Maybe the fact I lived both in London and Oxford for several years in the last decade has something to do with my enjoying this read so much; given that, if I haven't been to all the (real) venues and public places portrayed in it, I've at least strolled down the streets where Peter Grant roams about in the story one time or another in the noughties.

At first put off mainly by its Brazilian title, 'Dark Moon Over Westminster', after all there is no jazz club IN Westminster itself (not the London borough, but the area) and as much as I hate reading translations, the real bargain I found it for was too good to be shunned off.

So it transpires I loved this adventurous journey throughout underground London from the first chapter on; given the pure wit and genius behind the adorable, down-to-earth main character, which is Aaronovitch's empowered, tongue-in-cheek writing. Gotta get the previous book of the series pretty soon so hooked I've become on this modern piece of art which the whole series seems to be going to be.

This has most definitely ticked all my boxes regarding enjoyable reading and earned some personal laurels of mine in the process.




View all my reviews

Obituary List: horrormasters.com

It really was some kind of a shock to find out the superb on line horro tales library horrormasters.com, has sadly closed down.

 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.

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!

Nilson Bazana

July 2012