Large Fierce Mammal

Our research department has been slaving away since last year to bring you only the most choice cuts. (The Witchfinder General’s Library by Andy Fairhurst – a featured artist in this year’s Dark Sentiments)

October again, and the harvest is in, by every definition of the word. Welcome to another season of Dark Sentiments!

If you’ve never experienced it before, “Dark Sentiments” is an annual series that appears here every October, each day of that month presenting observations and tales of people, things, doings, and goings on that come from the dark side of Nature, human and otherwise.

Darkness, as it inspires me, isn’t limited to expressions of evil, mayhem, and bad outcomes. Something can also be considered “dark” if it is unknown, misunderstood, or incorrectly interpreted.  So, depending on your sensibilities good reader, I believe that if the title of the series, let alone its author,  didn’t dissuade you from stepping inside, then you will find some modicum of entertainment in what follows. Nevertheless, you may also come to find, albeit too late because by then the arrow will have already found its mark, that some portions are best avoided by those imbued with that tortured combination of empathy, clarity of visualization, and a propensity for nightmares.

My inspiration for the dark poetry that has appeared in previous seasons, and continues to be featured here, comes to me through tendrils that lead back to a multitude of personal explorations, discoveries, waypoints, and encounters, all of which have contributed to making me Me. It also comes in no small part from a love for the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Service, from which I find myself seeking an atmosphere of the sort that might prevail if the two found themselves snow bound for a month in a lonely cabin far from anywhere.

Welcome to Dark Sentiments 2012. We hunt the night so you don’t have to.