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’ (1994) – 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 29
Day 29: “They Return” by Eleanna Castroianni (2025). Read it here.
Eleanna Castroianni (they/them) is from Athens, Greece. Their work has appeared in a number of publications such as Uncanny, Clarkesworld Magazine and Strange Horizons. Get in touch at eleannacastroianni.com.
I’m glad we got a Greek story in this year’s selection! I’ve interviewed Danai Christopoulou (they/them) this year, and so it’s good to have some Greek Horror make an appearance in the Reading Challenge.
I really loved this take on Greek zombies, and the Orthodox obsession with the dead, and the way the dead aren’t ever really gone. I enjoyed this, and the really sad, claustrophobic atmosphere of the family suffocated by its dead once a year, and the burden of memory, which the dead lack until their return.
A Scare A Day: Plot Summary
Once a year on New Year’s Eve, the dead return to the living to eat and joke and sleep in the family homes, before returning to their graves. They emerge, rotting, as zombies in the Western media sense, and the ritual begins.
It opens with the protagonist waiting for their father to emerge from his grave, and it is clear they have a strained relationship. It is revealed the narrator blames him for the death of their brother, who drowned at sea after being pushed away by the father.
Nobody has ever returned from a shipwreck, so the brother is missing from the gathering; but he returns anyway, and the narrator has to face his return, and all the things they remember.
Finally, the dead return to their graves, and the father takes the brother along with him. The narrator is furious that he has done this too late, after death, and not before. The dead once more forget everything, and leave the narrator alone with their memories, trying not to forget what they want to say to their family when they return the following year.
It is another story about death, grief, and memory, like Aliya Chaudhry’s Every Version Ends In Death, which I recommended before as a novel-length treatment of these themes.
Dying is forgetting. It’s becoming one with the earth. Unless the earth spits you back every once in a while, with an urgent plea to remember. Again and again, because you don’t know yet what it is you have to remember. Because the living can’t let go of their dead: to them, dying is remembering.
A Scare A Day: Film Pairing
On the one hand, I deeply apologise. On the other hand, I regret nothing. Today’s film has very little in common with the story in terms of the plot, or the tone, but it is another take on the walking dead and a Greek cult classic.
Let me introduce you to Ο Δράκουλας των Εξαρχείων/Dracula of Exarcheia (1983) dir. Nikos Zervos, written by Lili Panousi, Vangelis Kotronis, Tzimis Panousis, and Nikos Zervos.
It’s a musical, it’s wild, and it’s very much the antithesis to the story today, because Greek zombies can also be left wing rock stars. A mad scientist – who is also a vampire, and our capitalist baddie, with a very horny daughter – creates the band Μουσικές Ταξιαρχίες / Music Brigades from body parts of dead musicians, purely to exploit them for profit. The zombies are so angry about this that they unionise and go on strike. Dracula becomes a rock star. It’s full of sex and rock’n’roll.
It also features a fantastic rock version of a famous song by Στέλιος Καζαντζίδης/Stelios Kazantzidis, addressed to those in power, in this case, through the eyes of a zombie cop fronting a zombie concert, and his idea of how power and authority is ultimately enslaving: Δημήτρης Πουλικάκος & Μουσικές Ταξιαρχίες – Υπάρχω (“I Exist”). English lyrics here.
This song, all by itself, also encapsulates the feel of today’s story; if you imagine the context is not political but in the face of death, then the dead exist in songs and memories and the imprint left behind on the living.
So, you see, I’m not quite as wide of the mark as you might suppose.
I’m going to link this amazing review for you: sakana1/film/dracula-of-exarcheia.
You can find this on rarelust to download, or you can find a version on YouTube, linked below (you’ll have to cope with auto-translate if you don’t speak Greek).
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