Manly Wade Wellman 15 min read

Fleeing the crowded Goya show, the narrator drifts to a rear stairway where Böcklin's Isle of the Dead hangs, and, nearby, a strange painting of figures dancing about a cross.

Manly Wade Wellman's 1937 Weird Tales story is a superb, chilling tale of a cursed painting. Atmospheric, dread-soaked, unforgettable. Read it for a classic of art-horror, where a picture bought on a whim proves to hold a living, murderous evil, told with the craft of a master of the macabre.

In its time

Published in 1937, during the 1930s, space opera soars.

Reading it

15 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).