A Scare A Day Reading Challenge
Romancing the Gothic founder and organiser, Dr Sam Hirst, is back for another month of A Scare A Day. Dr Hirst curates a daily reading list, and the challenge is to read the story or poem for that day and post your thoughts on social media using the tag #AScareADay (not #ScareADay – don’t forget the ‘A’ at the start like I always do!)
Last year, I posted a creative response to each story or poem featured in the challenge, and turned them into Season 05 of Eldritch Girl, where I talked about the stories and poems, and read my fiction/non-fiction piece inspired by the daily read.
This year, I’m pairing the challenge with #100HorrorMoviesIn92Days so I’m going to be suggesting a film pairing to go with the story/poem, the way I do for my book reviews over on Divination Hollow.
The challenge list is posted on RomancingTheGothic.com, and below. To thank Sam for this service, you can leave them a tip on Ko-Fi!
The “A Scare A Day” Daily Reading List 2026
October 1st – Joanna Baillie – Night Tales of Other Times – 1790 – Read it here
October 2nd – Nikolai Karamzin – The Island of Bornholm – 1794 – Read it here
October 3rd – Anne Bannerman – The Black Knight of the Water – 1802 – Read it here
October 4th – William Harrison Ainsworth – The Spectre Bride – 1821 – Read it here
October 5th – Charles Pigault-Lebrun – ‘The Unholy Compact Abjured’ – 1825 – Read it here
October 6th – Mary Elizabeth Braddon – ‘The Cold Embrace’ (1860) – Read it here
October 7th – Amelia Edwards – ‘In the Confessional’ (1871) – Read it here
October 8th – Elizabeth Stuart Phelps – ‘Since I Died’ (1873) – Read it here
October 9th – Mary Elizabeth Coleridge – ‘The Witch’ (1893) – Read it here
October 10th – Arthur Machen – ‘The Novel of the White Powder’ (1895) – Read it here
October 11th – Gertrude Atherton – ‘The Striding Place’ (1896) – Read it here
October 12th – Elia W. Peattie – ‘From the Loom of the Dead’ (1898) – Read it here
October 13th – Mrs Wilson Woodrow – ‘Secret Chambers’ (1909) – Read it here
October 14th – W W Jacobs – The Well (1911) – Read it here
October 15th – Violet Hunt – ‘The Prayer’ (1911) – Read it here
October 16th – Rabindranath Tagore – ‘The Lost Jewels’ or Monihara (trans. 1917) – Read it here
October 17th – Ellen Glasgow – ‘The Past’ (1920) – Read it here
October 18th – Mikhail Bulgakov – ‘The Red Crown’ (1922) – Read it here
October 19th – John Masefield – ‘The Haunted’ (1923) – Read it here
October 20th – Elsa Morante – The Secret game (1941) – Read it here
October 21st – Dorothy Quick – ‘After an Air Raid’ (1943) – Read it here
October 22nd – Mayra Montero – ‘Corinne, Amiable Girl’ (1991) – Read it here
October 23rd – Ahmed Khaled Tawfik – ‘The Wall’ – Read it here
October 24th – Mariana Enríquez – ‘The Little Angel’s Exhumation’ (2014) – Read it here
October 25th – A. C. Wise – ‘The Stories We Tell About Ghosts’ (2017) – Read it here
October 26th – Brandon O’Brien – ‘The Lagahoo Speaks For Itself’ (2017) – Read it here
October 27th – Darcie Little Badger – ‘Those Hitch-hiking Kids’ (2023) – Read it here
October 28th – Tyler Sookralli – ‘The Devil Wears Skin’ (2024) – Read it here
October 29th – Eleanna Castroianni – ‘They Return’ (2025) – Read it here
October 30th – Ash Vale – ‘consumed’ (2026) – Read it here
October 31st – Quincy Lee – ‘The Dark Follows Me’ (2026) – Read it here
A Scare A Day: Day 18
Day 18: “The Red Crown” by Mikhail Bulgakov (1922). Read it here.
Bulgakov’s story is about the horrors of the Russian post-revolution Civil War (1917-1922), which Daniel Pietersen writes about in Weirdwards. We’ve had a lot of WWI poems and stories in previous years, so a Russian Civil War story makes a change, and also highlights that, at this period, trauma and chaos was everywhere.
It certainly has echoes of WWI trauma in the age of artillery, and the turbulence of the time is reflected in the mental disintegration of the narrator. I really liked it, although I’m not sure ‘liked’ is the right word. It will haunt me for a long time.
A Scare A Day: Plot Summary
Our narrator is narrating from a psychiatric facility, and we become aware this is a war trauma story.
Essentially, he was sent by his mother to bring his little brother, Kolya, ten years his junior, back from the army. His brother told him he could not leave the troop, but to wait for him. Our narrator waited in the Red Cross tent (the medical tent), and soon after the pounding of the guns could be heard, and Kolya rides back with a “red crown” on his head. He has been hit be a shell fragment and his head injury is extremely traumatic – the red crown is blood and the exposed bone of his skull. He isn’t expected to live.
Our narrator is haunted by Kolya coming to him each night, “wearing the red crown” and saying he can’t leave his troop. The narrator is planning to shoot himself to be free of this nightly visitation and all the nightmares.
A Scare A Day: Film Pairing
If you want an earlier brutal war trauma film, try Sauna (2008) dir. Antti-Jussi Annila, written by Iiro Küttner. (The English alternative title is Rising Evil, which is how to find it here).
Set at the end of the war between Protestant Sweden and Orthodox Russia in 1595, the two great powers are carving out Finland between them and redrawing borders. Two brothers, one haunted to insanity by someone he could not save and tormented by the men he and his brother have become, come across a village in a swamp, wherein there is a mysterious sauna with disturbing powers. (It’s also strongly implied the younger brother is gay and that there’s something going on with him and the Russian soldier, but nothing is shown).
The whole film is about borders, drawing them and redrawing them, both internally and externally. It’s about lines crossed in pursuit of goals and values, and I think this works with the short story today where the lines of sanity and insanity, which also blur in the film, and the idea of the dead crossing into the world of the living to torment them with their constant returning.
It also features a blindness motif, echoing the blindness of the returning soldiers in Bulgakov’s story, which in Sauna has a lot of layered symbolism, but can also be read as the war robbing Eerik of his vision for the future. A good analysis of the film can be found here: Liminal Spaces of Sin: The Borders of the Body and Soul in Antti-Jussi Annila’s SAUNA.
I think, even though they are about two very different wars, the brotherly relationship and its disintegration is a theme in conversation. Bulgakov’s fraternal loss is physical, but the narrator is haunted by him to the point of taking his own life. Sauna has the two brothers haunted by each other and the men the war has made of them, and the loss of the younger brother is gradual and mental before it becomes a source of manifested horror.
As a bonus suggestion that’s a bit left-field, if you want a film about the disintegration of the Russian Empire, with a protagonist with a severe unmedicated mental illness, then perhaps Vari/The Shadow (2024) dir. Jaak Kilmi, an Estonian film about the poet Juhan Liiv. This is set in the 1890s – so in the final decades before the Civil War – and has Liiv solving gruesome murder cases in Estonia while living with unmedicated schizophrenia.
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