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.
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 – Ella 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 (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 10
Day 10: “The Novel of the White Powder” by Arthur Machen (1895). Read it here.
This is not a novel. It is in fact a short story contained within a novel, The Three Imposters; or, The Transmutations, which is a Russian Doll series of nested tales and constructed more like an anthology with a framed narrative than a novel with a linear narrative.
The novel comprises several weird tales and culminates in a denouement of deadly horror, connected with a secret society devoted to debauched pagan rituals. The three impostors of the title are members of this society who weave a web of deception in the streets of London, relating the aforementioned weird tales in the process. They search for a missing Roman coin commemorating an infamous orgy by the Emperor Tiberius and close in on their prey: “the young man with spectacles”.
…
Two of the stories in The Three Impostors, “The Novel of the Black Seal” and “The Novel of the White Powder”, have often been anthologized as individual stories. “The Novel of the White Powder” was first anthologized in More Ghosts and Marvels: A Selection of Uncanny Tales from Walter Scott to Michael Arlen (1927), edited by V. H. Collins. “The Novel of the Black Seal” was first anthologized in Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror (1928), edited by Dorothy L. Sayers.
– Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Impostors
I really like this novel although Machen’s Anglocentricity annoys me greatly on the whole, and I’ve no time for modern adaptations of his work like Kingfisher’s The Twisted Ones (based on Machen’s The White People), which perpetuates lazy jokes about the Welsh language and Machen’s own Anglocentric views. I’m still on the look out for decent ones.
“Miss Leicester”, who narrates the story (or “novel”) of The White Powder, is in fact a nameless con artist and a more bloodthirsty member of this secret society, playing the role of Miss Leicester, who doesn’t exist, and the story she tells never happened. She goes on to play the part of other women – all while in disguise – weaving similar supernatural tales, in order to distract the gentlemen to whom she is narrating, and to get a rare gold coin that her employer is looking for.
There are two men also employed to get this coin, and they pop up through the novel playing different roles and telling strange, spooky tales, as well.
You can read the full novel with all its nested stories here. HorrorBabble’s audiobook version is available on YouTube. At 4:20:21 you will find the start of The Novel of the White Powder.
A Scare A Day: Plot Summary
Miss Leciester has a brother, Francis, working himself into an early grave. He gets ill, and Dr Haberden prescribes him a powder to get made up at the chemist’s. Sadly, he goes to the wrong chemist, who gets his powders mixed up. He takes it twice a day and starts to change his habits dramatically.
The doctor comes to see him after some time, discovers the mix up, and sends the powder off to be analysed. During that time, Francis ends up, first debauched, then transmutated into a strange, oozing, primordial thing.
Dr Haberden passes on his friend’s letter, describing what the powder is (it is not good; it’s the powder used in a Witch’s Sabbath), and flees the country. He dies on the ship and poor Miss Leicester is left bereft, and with a terrible oozing black mass (all that’s left of her brother) seeping through her ceiling.
A Scare A Day: Film Pairing
Machen’s story of bodily transmutation was an influence for H.P. Lovecraft’s Colour Out Of Space, so I should really have paired this story with that film.
However, I thought instead I would go for Underworld (1985), dir. George Pavlou, written by Clive Barker and James Caplin, from Barker’s original story.
In this film, a highly addictive drug causes physical mutation in all its users but one – and she has just been abducted. It’s not a great film, and nowhere close to the Hellraiser franchise, nor is it close to Night Breed. It is, however, a bit of a mix of those, with a mutated community of people living in the sewers, all addicted to the substance that has irrevocably changed them.
It also reminds me of the drug in the animated series Arcane (2021-2024), if you want a series that has a similar concept.
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