Maria J Pérez Cuervo

@mjpcuervo.com

6271 Followers 831 Following

Writer, editor, comms manager • Founder/ editor @helleborezine.bsky.social (World Fantasy Awards and British Fantasy Awards finalist) • History, art, myth, mystery. Bristol, UK. 👩🏻 mjpcuervo.com 📖 helleborezine.com

Thomas Waters MAGICK: DECODING THE VISUAL CULTURE OF SPELLS, ILLUSIONS AND PSYCHIC POWERS
Vintage sailor animatronic laughing hysterically
Carved grave depicting a Druid under an oak tree
Sanctum, at home with the uncanny by Mark O’Flaherty
stepped into what appeared to be a cave. that it could not shut. Then, my heart beating violently, I The floor was stone-flagged and as I advanced I was aware sickened me a little. of an odour which I did not recognize. It pervaded the air and I saw that there were candles everywhere - some of them had burned out. I knew that they had been recently lighted and that confirmed my suspicions that it was to this place that those people had come. The cave opened into a square room. There was a table which looked like an altar and I almost cried out in terror, for on it was a large figure - life-sized, and for one horrified moment I had thought that someone was sitting there. The figure on the altar seemed to leer at me. It was evil. I saw then that it was meant to represent the Devil - the horns, the cloven feet were evidence of that; the red eyes seemed to be fixed on me. There were drawings on the walls. I looked at them. At first they were incomprehensible - men and women in coupling groups in strange positions - and then the significance of this was brought home to me. Now I had one desire and that was to get out of this place as quickly as I could. I ran. I kicked the stone away from the door and shut it behind me. I ran through the wood as though pursued by the Devil - and I really felt that I had come face to face with him. My thoughts were in a turmoil. What had I stumbled on?
THE LEGEND, OF THE SEVENTH VIRGIN A spellbinding novel of suspense by the author of MISTRESS OF MELLYN VICTORIA HOLT A woman running away from a mansion next to a stone circle
Mistress of Mellyn by Victoria Holt, paperback edition
Thomas Tryon Harvest Home
Haunted Travellers, edited by Denys Val Baker
Woman smiling awkwardly
Church Doom depicting Hell
Human-shaped growth in tree
National Theatre LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES Lesley Manville and Aidan Turner
The Wicked Lady The Cannon Group presents Faye Dunaway Alan Bates John Gielgud in a Golan-Globus Production of a Michael Winner film The Wicked Lady Co-starring Denholm Elliott • Prunella Scales Oliver Tobias Glynis Barber Music by Tony Banks Screenplay by Leslie Arliss and Michael Winner From the book by Magdalen King-Hall Produced by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus- Directed by Michael Winner Soundtrack available on Atlantic Records
Vivien Leigh as Titania
Cardboard helmet and mask inspired by the Sutton Hoo one
Summer solstice at Stanton Drew stone circle
Still of Alligator people where a humanoid alligator forcefully embraces a distressed woman. Text under woman: me, trying to meet my deadlines. Text under alligator: the summer holidays approaching.
50 strange stories of the supernatural
Perilous Enchantment: The True History of Faeries by Sarah Clegg. It's a bitterly cold morning in late December, and I'm walking along on a ridge high in the Yorkshire moors. The sun is pale white and low on the horizon, and the world leached of colour. In front of me, across a crevasse, is a huge, rectangular heap of stone, over twenty feet high. It's an entirely natural feature, but sits so oddly in the landscape it looks almost manmade, a strange steeple raised in the wilderness. This is the Fairy Church.
Scooby saying ruh roh
Artistic depiction of astral projection, a body floating in the starry sky, the head a nebula.
Book Club Associates 1974 edition
Phenomena: a book of wonders by John Michell and J M Rickard
Armada Lion edition of Alan Garner’s The Owl Service
Underlined paragraph from The Greenwood Faun: It was May Eve or to pagans, Beltane, when the Horned King is reborn. Although she missed her home, the privacy of the attic quarters suited her purpose. For now, her work was here with the family but on this particular night she craved her companions in the woods uniting in rituals as old as the centuries, the Alicker of flame and flesh and her darling horned one. IO Pan! Fleet of foot and onyx eyed, the poets still rhymed to him, musicians chased his melody, writers kept his lore alive, artists filled their canvasses with him, sculptors fashioned his features and Lovers swooned for him. Those of lacklustre hearts feared him and men of progress denounced him. Unlike mortal children, he had been weaned in a day, attained boyhood in a month and become the God of all there is in a year; faun of the glade, soul of the forest, spirit of freedom, pandemonium and revelries, Pan the divine reborn.
Paperback edition of Nina Antonia’s The Greenwood Faun
GIF of Giles at the library
Rupert Giles action figure on my shelf
Anthony Head as Rupert Giles in Buffy
Peter Cushing in Brides of Dracula
Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Doctor Faustus (1966)
A ghostly figure stalking a man
Bennett and Farr conceived of a plan to invoke Taphthartharath, the spirit of the planet Mercury. Bennett composed the ritual with care; apparently aware of the potential danger of such a summoning, he also prepared in advance a 'Hell-broth' as 'physical pabulum [food]' for the spirit, 'which will more than double our chances of getting him materialized. If you could bring that snake and some of the other ingredients to Headquarters [Clipstone Street] Friday afternoon when the Council is to be held, Bennett instructed Gardner in early May, 'I will be there to receive them. You know that you must not talk to anyone save us three of the work we are about to do. It would greatly weaken us. 6 His shopping list also included half a pound of spermaceti with which to fashion a "Magic Candle', so that he would be able to read in the darkened room. Then, several days later, he conveyed the alarming news that 'S.S.D.D. Rosher and myself' had been struck down by 'grim and horrible' dis-eases, though he did not elaborate and Farr made no mention of the setback." Was this Taphthartharath preventing the group from summoning it? The invocation itself was to be performed 'on the day and in the hour of Mercury, most likely Wednesday 13 May, a
Me (left) and Katy at the Temple of Nodens at Lidney Park
Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma
Framed black and white illustration showing a young woman fleeing a room with bats
Poster for John carpenter’s The Fog: a woman pushing a door closed while something tries to get in
Widow’s Bay poster
Stories of the Stones: imagining Prehistory in Britain, Ireland and Brittany
Bill Skarsgard
Enraged panda destroying an office
Jack in the Green coming up St Michael’s Hill, the place of the old gallows
Hammer films jigsaw puzzle
Dracula and Van Helsing figures on my shelf
On Mysticism, by Simon Critchley
The Triumph of Whimsy On the 4th of July 1862, Lewis Carroll first told the story of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland on a boat trip that departed from near the aptly named Folly Bridge in Oxford. Over a century later, the heroines of Jacques Rivette's Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974) embark on a journey that culminates with another boat trip.
Gravity Falls poster- like X Files for kids
Folklore Horror Short Stories by Flame Tree publishing
Maria inside the Hellfire Caves
Christopher Lee in The Devil Rides Out
Fairies: a history, by Francis Young
Puppet and painting of the dead
Dion Fortune—The Goat-Foot God paperback, showing Pan on the cover
Covers of The Goat Food God, Moonchild, The Equinox, The Great God Pan et al