Trusted by 500+ fans to find the fun in the funereal, the absurd in the macabre, and delight in the darkness. Join fiction author Morgan Delaney three times a week for genre-bending stories of cozy horror, dark fantasy and a brain with mind of its own...
Now Who's Laughing?
 I’m a sucker for great names, and today I’ve got one of the best. There’s a German guy here in Georgia selling wine. And his name is: Hilarius Pütz. Go look up Hilarius Pütz Wines. I know you don’t believe me. See? Hilarius is the name of a 5th century pope, as well as the 4th century bishop nicknamed the Arian Hammer. From the Greek for “cheerful”. A popular male name during the Middle Ages, since the 20th century eclipsed in popularity by the female version, Hilary. I can’t be as certain about Pütz. The internet tells me with complete certainty that it originates in Saxony, Bavaria and Prussia. It may refer to cleanliness, puddles or ornamentation, depending on the website. The use of putz as an insult in the US, probably comes from the German word for cleaning or ornamentation, suggesting a useless person. Someone with no skills beyond hanging around looking decorative. Except for when it comes from the Yiddish putz, which is a lot ruder and need not concern us here. So there. Yes, Morgan, but what about the wine? Ah. You got me. I don’t know. Yet. On the website you can buy it in standard bottles, but Nadine – Woman of the Year. Again. – got it the proper Georgian way: filled into a five-litre plastic drum. So that’s the weekend sorted. I’ll let you know next week whether I recommend it. If I remember. In the meantime, I definitely recommend Nadia Bulkin’s Issues with Authority if you’re looking for a clever horror read, or Bob Mortimer’s Hotel Avocado if you’re looking for something more whimsical. Check out my Goodreads’ reviews for Issues with Authority and Hotel Avocado now! Chat soon! Morgan P.S. This is just one of the emails I wrote a couple of weeks ago. |
Dark, Strange and Fantastic Fiction
Trusted by 500+ fans to find the fun in the funereal, the absurd in the macabre, and delight in the darkness. Join fiction author Morgan Delaney three times a week for genre-bending stories of cozy horror, dark fantasy and a brain with mind of its own...
it’s been all bloody go here at the HQ of the Official Hawkinge-By-Hythe Historical Society. First, I had those man sniffles, then a sudden change in weather gave me a migraine. And then I got lumbago. Look, I hate making a fuss, but I’m putting my foot down – carefully, because of the lumbago – whoever has the Morgan voodoo doll, could you stop now, please? The internet tells me “lumbago” is an “outdated term for lower back pain”, and I agree. We should all be using the more evocative German...
Made you look, you dirty duck. Made you look for nothing. That’s the version we sang as children after tricking someone into looking at nothing. Or “gnaw-tin” with the proper Irish accent. Different places around the world have different versions of the song. Perhaps you were a dirty crook rather than a duck. Or at risk of being turned into turtle soup. But the game is best played in Germany, where they don’t seem to know it. When we moved to Heidelberg, our flatmate Anne loved to suddenly...
Listen. Do you hear that? Numbers, floating in the air around us. Trying to tell me something. Listen. It can’t be a coincidence because in my next book, The Cat Wore Black, radios come to Hawkinge-By-Hythe. People love them. Radio gives them all sorts of things. Music, news, entertainment. And when the station stops broadcasting at night, the radios transmit strange random numbers. Which gives them the willies. Then I read in Wired that plastic surgeons use the formula of the Fibonacci...