Steve A. Wiggins's Avatar

Steve A. Wiggins

@steveawiggins.bsky.social

Married ex-professor, progressive blogger who likes horror and has lived dark academia.

219 Followers  |  161 Following  |  284 Posts  |  Joined: 15.11.2024  |  1.7561

Latest posts by steveawiggins.bsky.social on Bluesky

Preview
Dark Romance My study of genre leads me to believe that there really may be no such thing.  Or at least many aspects of genre are open to question.  In the case of Steffanie Holmes’ Pretty Girls Make Graves, th…

steveawiggins.com/2025/08/08/d... #books

08.08.2025 10:19 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
Preview
Quatermass Again Quatermass, as I’ve noted before, is a name I knew from boyhood, but with no frame of reference.  Having watched The Quatermass Xperiment, and still seeking Quatermass and the Pit, I found a freebe…

steveawiggins.com/2025/08/07/q... #horror

07.08.2025 10:25 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
Preview
Painting Sleepy Hollow Not being an art critic, I’m in no place to analyze John Quidor’s The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane.  Having written a book about Sleepy Hollow, however, there are a few things I might p…

steveawiggins.com/2025/08/06/p... #horror

06.08.2025 10:54 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
Preview
Dark Introduction Since I’ve discovered that I live in dark academia, I’ve grown curious.  Kara Muller has put together The Little Book of Dark Academia as a kind of first step in the discussion.  I have learned tha…

steveawiggins.com/2025/08/05/d... #books

05.08.2025 10:18 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
Preview
Missing the Rose It was Edinburgh, my wife and I concluded.  That’s where we’d seen The Name of the Rose.  Edinburgh was over three decades ago now, and since the movie is sometimes called dark academia we decided …

steveawiggins.com/2025/08/04/m...

04.08.2025 10:06 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
Preview
The Printed Word I miss them, newspapers.  Now, I’ve never been a great newspaper reader—I tend to live in my own little world, I guess, and I really have no taste for politics.  I still glance over the New York Ti…

steveawiggins.com/2025/08/03/t...

03.08.2025 10:09 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
Preview
Dark Poetry Playful.  Serious. Weird.  Very intelligent.  These are the words that come to mind.  Adrienne Raphel’s Our Dark Academia is a poetry book unlike any other I’ve read.  The poems take many forms fro…

steveawiggins.com/2025/08/02/d... #books

02.08.2025 11:02 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
Preview
Experimenting with Quatermass Hammer films are coy.  In these days of digital rights management, they’re often difficult to locate in the United States.  Even on streaming services.  I’d known about Quatermass since I was a kid…

steveawiggins.com/2025/08/01/e... #horror

01.08.2025 10:46 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
Preview
My Books Buy Buy Buy Buy Buy Buy A Reassessment of Asherah (1993) Weathering the Psalms (2014) Holy Horror (2018) Nightmares with the Bible (2021) The Wicker Man (2023) Sleepy Hollow as …

steveawiggins.com/2025/07/31/b...

31.07.2025 10:14 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Here's an idea: since we can't have snow days anymore, why not excess heat days, for those of us without AC?

30.07.2025 10:22 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
Preview
Club Frankenstein Reading YA novels once in a while reveals that younger folk have quite a good selection of literature from which to choose.  Goldy Moldavsky’s The Mary Shelley Club is a good pick for horror fans a…

steveawiggins.com/2025/07/30/c... #books

30.07.2025 10:11 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
Preview
Rabbit Hole Crawl Rabbit holes can be fun.  They can also leave you scratching your head.  David Schmoeller directed some third or fourth drawer horror films, among which is Crawlspace.  Having fallen down the Schmo…

steveawiggins.com/2025/07/29/r... #horror

29.07.2025 10:23 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
Preview
Remembering to Forget I think I’ve discussed memory before.  I forget.  Anyway, I recently ran across Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve.  Now, I’ve long known that when you reach my age (let’s just say closer …

steveawiggins.com/2025/07/28/r...

28.07.2025 10:13 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
Preview
Mexican Philosophy Once upon a time, I applied for a teaching post at Syracuse University.  (Actually, twice upon a time, but that’s a longer story.)  I was able to gather that one reason I failed to merit an intervi…

steveawiggins.com/2025/07/27/m... #books

27.07.2025 10:27 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
Preview
Philadelphia Story I’m guilty of a little home-state pride when I consider Philadelphia as a seedbed for diverse filmmakers.  Perhaps the most famous is M. Night Shyamalan, but I recently watched Tayarisha Poe’s firs…

steveawiggins.com/2025/07/26/p... #darkacademia

26.07.2025 10:11 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
Preview
Editorializing One of the realities of being an editor is that you have authors consistently ignore your advice and then ask you for solutions when what you predicted would happen does.  Oh, that sentence!&n…

steveawiggins.com/2025/07/25/e...

25.07.2025 10:03 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
Preview
Scientific Monsters The rule is simple.  If you buy something in the gift shop, you can get into A Nightmare in New Hope for free.  So I naturally gravitated towards the books.  I picked up Meg Hafdahl and Kelly Flore…

steveawiggins.com/2025/07/24/s... #books

24.07.2025 10:04 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
Preview
Fear of Puppets David Schmoeller is a horror director I discovered only in the last several months.  I watched his first film, Tourist Trap, after having found Netherworld streaming for free.  Perhaps his most fam…

steveawiggins.com/2025/07/23/f... #horror

23.07.2025 10:27 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
Preview
Zoning In Born Jewish, and Unitarian by choice, Rod Serling believed in the inherent worth and dignity of all human beings.  Like many people, even Serling believed that season four of The Twilight Zone, whi…

steveawiggins.com/2025/07/22/z...

22.07.2025 10:36 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
Preview
Double-Dipping Double-dipping takes many forms.  The kind I’m talking about is trying to get more than your fair share by either taking twice, or by fooling others into buying the same thing two times.  I’v…

steveawiggins.com/2025/07/21/d...

21.07.2025 10:01 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
Preview
Fighting over Chocolate It’s really a teen movie, The Chocolate War is.  That may be the sweet spot for dark academia.  I’m maybe a bit old for such things, but being old tends to mean remembering how it was.  Not exactly…

steveawiggins.com/2025/07/20/f...

20.07.2025 10:51 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

I'm elevated by the company I keep, as always!

19.07.2025 10:18 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
Preview
Being Perceived The philosopher George Berkeley argued that to be is to be perceived.  This perspective goes by the name of immaterialism and I have to admit to being sometimes seduced by it.  The real question co…

steveawiggins.com/2025/07/19/b... #books

19.07.2025 10:17 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
Post image Post image

@steveawiggins.bsky.social’s book on The Wicker Man seen in the wild as a MIT Press Bookstore staff pick!

17.07.2025 14:48 — 👍 2    🔁 1    💬 1    📌 0

Thanks for the shout out, Burke!

18.07.2025 10:02 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0
Preview
A Glimmer You just never know.  A few months back I emailed Liverpool University Press because my book, The Wicker Man, has apparently not sold any copies.  I had never received (have still never received) a…

steveawiggins.com/2025/07/18/a... #books

18.07.2025 10:02 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
Preview
Letting Go I should’ve known from the title that this would be a sad story.  Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go won the Nobel Prize in Literature, despite being speculative.  It’s only mildly so, but enough tha…

steveawiggins.com/2025/07/17/l... #books

17.07.2025 10:11 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
Preview
Non-Saints It was an epiphany.  My wife has, on more than one occasion, accused me of playing the martyr.  I know very well that I let other people step all over me.  The epiphany came when I w…

steveawiggins.com/2025/07/16/n...

16.07.2025 10:13 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
Preview
X-Rayed If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember the comic book ads for x-ray specs.  That’s the idea behind a Roger Corman film that Stephen King thought one of the scariest he’d seen.  X, subtitled Th…

steveawiggins.com/2025/07/15/x... #horror

15.07.2025 10:02 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
Preview
Publish, Perish Publish or perish has been around for quite a while and I feel for younger scholars who are trying to publish their collected essays as their second book.  Collected essays, in case you’re not…

steveawiggins.com/2025/07/14/p...

14.07.2025 10:06 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

@steveawiggins is following 13 prominent accounts