In the new Transmute Tapes, we speak with writer and curator Sarah Elizabeth about darkness, occult art, monsters, ritual, altered states, forgotten knowledge — and our very human attraction to things we cannot fully explain.
Sarah’s website:
https://sarahelizabethauthor.com/
https://www.instagram.com/ghoulnextdoor
Sarah’s latest book “The art f the unknown”:
https://sarahelizabethauthor.com/books/the-art-of-the-unknown/
**D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths — Ingri d’Aulaire & Edgar Parin d’Aulaire
**The classic illustrated retelling of Greek mythology, first published in 1962, combining myths of gods, heroes, monsters, and the ancient Greek world with the D’Aulaires’ distinctive illustrations.
Down a Dark Hall — Lois Duncan
Duncan’s 1974 gothic YA novel about a mysterious boarding school where a group of young women begin exhibiting extraordinary artistic abilities connected to the dead.
Ghosts I Have Been — Richard Peck
Part of Peck’s Blossom Culp stories: an outsider discovers that her supposed ability to see ghosts may actually be real, eventually experiencing visions connected with the Titanic.
The Sphinx and the Milky Way: Selections from the Journals of Charles Burchfield — Charles Burchfield, edited by Ben Estes
A selection from the visionary American painter’s enormous lifetime journals, bringing together his observations of nature, art, depression, spirituality, weather, cosmic wonder, and everyday life. The volume includes an introduction by Burchfield scholar Nancy Weekly. Sarah Elizabeth has also written enthusiastically about the book on Unquiet Things.
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection — Julia Kristeva
Kristeva’s influential study of abjection — the psychological and cultural response to things that destabilize boundaries between self and other, life and death, purity and contamination. Particularly relevant to horror, the body, taboo, art, and religion. Originally published in French in 1980; translated into English by Leon S. Roudiez.
**Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures — Mark Fisher
**Fisher’s 2014 collection exploring culture as something haunted not only by the past, but by futures that were once imagined and never arrived. He develops this through music, film, television, politics, memory, Joy Division, Burial, The Shining, and more.
**The Weird and the Eerie — Mark Fisher
**Fisher distinguishes two related but different cultural modes. The weird suggests something that does not belong; the eerie is often generated by strange absences or inexplicable forms of agency. The book moves through Lovecraft, M. R. James, Daphne du Maurier, Margaret Atwood, Stanley Kubrick, Jonathan Glazer, music, television, and other cultural forms.
The term originates with philosopher Jacques Derrida and Specters of Marx, and was later developed in cultural and musical criticism by writers including Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds. Fisher uses it particularly to think about cultural memory, spectral traces, repetition, and those unrealized futures that continue to “haunt” the present.
The title is Endless Thread, rather than “Endless Threat.” Hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson, the WBUR podcast investigates strange stories, mysteries, communities, phenomena, and rabbit holes emerging from the internet and their connections to life offline.
**Moth — Zoologist Perfumes
**A 2018 fragrance created for Zoologist by perfumer Tomoo Inaba. Moth combines dark spices, powdery florals, honey, resins, woods, patchouli, vetiver and smoke. Inaba describes the fragrance as an olfactory interpretation of the moth’s relationship with darkness, powdery wings, attraction and flame.
**Bill Crisafi — The Glam Reaper’s Guide to Slaying: Life Lessons for Rebellious Souls
**This was the reference in the notes as “The Grim Reaper’s Guide to Self-Care.” The correct title is The Glam Reaper’s Guide to Slaying. Crisafi’s first book brings his occult, camp, folklore-inspired characters — including the Glam Reaper — into an illustrated guide about self-acceptance, negative self-talk, resilience, friendship, and caring for yourself. It was published in August 2026. Sarah Elizabeth wrote about Crisafi and the book on Unquiet Thingswhen it was released.
