This Wednesday is for the more dark and twisted dear readers, for today is July 9, a date that seems to have been plucked from the blackened pages of some cosmic ledger, a day when the literary gods decided to birth their most deliciously deranged and shadow-dwelling progeny.  If you’re the sort of person who finds comfort in the flicker of a guttering candle and the whisper of something unspeakable just beyond the edge of the firelight, then this day is your holy feast.  Let’s raise a glass – hell, let’s raise the whole goddamn bottle – to three architects of the macabre who share this date as their entry point into the mortal coil.

First up, Ann Radcliffe, born in 1764, the original queen of Gothic fiction.  Before her, novels were polite little things, like tea parties with too much sugar and not enough gin.  But Radcliffe?  She dragged the genre into the shadows, draped it in cobwebs, and gave it a pulse that throbbed with dread.  The Mysteries of Udolpho was a blueprint for how to make readers sweat through their corsets.  She is The Voice for the whole haunted castles and moonlit moors crowd, of which I am proudly a member.  Without her, there’s no Poe, no Austen parodying her in Northanger Abbey, and certainly no modern horror as we know it.  She’s the reason you can’t walk past a crumbling mansion without imagining a ghostly figure in the window.  Cheers to you, Ann, you magnificent purveyor of dread.

Then there’s Matthew “Monk” Lewis, born in 1775, who took Radcliffe’s Gothic playbook, soaked it in absinthe, and set it on fire.  At 19 – an age when most of us were still figuring out how to fake our way through adulthood – he wrote The Monk, a book so scandalous it made Victorian prudes clutch their pearls and faint dead away.  Erotic, violent, blasphemous – it was the literary equivalent of a mosh pit in a cathedral.  Lewis obliterated boundaries with a sledgehammer.  He gave us depraved monks, demonic pacts, and enough moral ambiguity to make your head spin.  If Radcliffe was the architect of Gothic romance, Lewis was the punk rock anarchist who spray-painted obscenities on it’s walls.  Here’s to you, Matt – you magnificent, twisted bastard.

And finally, we land in 1945, the year Dean Koontz entered the scene.  Now Koontz might not be Gothic in the traditional sense, but let’s not split hairs while we’re three drinks deep.  The man has churned out more novels than most of us have had coherent thoughts, and his knack for blending suspense, horror, and a touch of the supernatural has made him a household name.  Odd Thomas, False Memory, and Phantoms are like rollercoasters in the dark: thrilling, disorienting, and just scary enough to make you question your life choices.  Koontz is the guy who reminds us that the monsters under the bed are real, but they’re probably just misunderstood.  Dean, you’re a machine, and we’re all just trying to keep up.

So here’s to July 9, a day that gave us three titans of the dark and the strange.  Radcliffe, Lewis, Koontz – each one a master of their own brand of literary mayhem.  If you’re not raising a glass to them today, you’re doing it wrong.  And if you’re not reading their work, you might as well be dead already.

N.P.: “KOOKSEVERYWHERE!!!” – AWOLNATION