Do you like a spooky story at Christmas time? If so join me, @neilbuttery.bsky.social @alessandrapino.bsky.social & @deliciouslegacy.bsky.social at the next @serveitforthfest.bsky.social event for a Christmas Feast of the Uncanny on 11 December 2025

Join @mrssbilton.bsky.social, @alessandrapino.bsky.social & me for @serveitforthfest.bsky.social Christmas special called 'A Christmas Feast of the Uncanny'. It's on 11 Dec & it's online. Tickets are £5 + booking fee & are available here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/a-christma...

Join @mrssbilton.bsky.social, @alessandrapino.bsky.social & me for a @serveitforthfest.bsky.social special 'Christmas Feast of the Uncanny' online & on 11 December Ghosts, goblins, elves & their relationship to food at Christmas time Tickets are £5 via this link: www.eventbrite.com/e/a-christma...

Thank you! I’m so looking forward to it 🤩

Mercifully, I left the play unruined. (Mille grazie to @alessandrapino.bsky.social for the photo).

Well this looks amazing!!!!

✨ Dark Feasts: The Sinister Side of Festive Dining ✨ Join me on 6 December 2025 at 3:30 pm for a talk with London Month of the Dead on the darker palate of festive food and how Christmas eating can slip into ritual, memory, unease & the uncanny. Tickets: londonmonthofthedead.com/gothicdinner... 🖤

It was great talking to @deliciouslegacy.bsky.social 🫓🇻🇪

Thank you to everyone who came to the @derbydracula talk on Food in Dracula today- there’s nothing I love more than bringing people over to the dark side (of food) 🖤

Lovely meeting you, today🤗

Excited to meet @nuzo.bsky.social tonight!! Her new book Futility is out!

New publication ✨ Delighted to share that my article “Ropa Vieja: A Colonial Stew of Global Threads” is out now in The Recipes Project’s Autumn 2025 issue, Globalizing Early Modern Recipes. 📝 Read it here: recipes.hypotheses.org/26459 #FoodHistory #CulinaryHistory #TheRecipesProject #RopaVieja

When the mist comes, lie still. Pretend to be dead. But his wife slipped up- and came back changed. Now she hums in the kitchen, eyes blind and blue. The town says he must end it. But how do you kill what still sings with the voice you love? #AScareADay #ThePathSheSings @romgothsam.bsky.social

Exciting news!! 🖤

It’s alive… again! Delighted, on Halloween of all days, to make a very special announcement 📣 A Gothic Cookbook returns from the lab in 2026 with The History Press🦇reanimated, re-edited, with new additions & a new cover! Ready to feed your darkest cravings. #AGothicCookbook #GothicFood

🩸#AScareADay Heartbreak hurts… but some wounds bleed on long after you’ve forgotten the cut. Dive into #BleedingHearts by @sillysyntax.bsky.social…It’s brilliant 💔 @romgothsam.bsky.social havenspec.com/bleeding-hearts

🎨 The Portrait of Sal Pullman by L Nadler. A tale of an artist haunted by his own creation. When others see the grotesque painting as a self-portrait, Sal realises the horror: the art is alive, feeding on admiration & it’s hungry. #AScareADay @romgothsam.bsky.social www.terror-town.com/stories/3

What if the bibliography was the story? @Nibedita Sen’s Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island turns academic form into body horror and the archive into a mouth. #AScareADay @romgothsam.bsky.social www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/ten-...

Practising for Halloween. I think this might be my better side 🎃☠️🧛🏼‍♀️

She doesn’t speak. They don’t listen. But Rochelle sees. 💀 Uncontainable by Helen Stubbs A story about fear, love, and who we lock away. #AScareADay @romgothsam.bsky.social www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-...

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A confectioner remakes his dead wife in sugar, perfect and edible, then serves her to others. Obsession never tasted so horrific. 🍬 #AScareADay #SweetSubtleties @romgothsam.bsky.social #LisaLHannett Listen to it here: clarkesworldmagazine.com/audio_12_12b/

Starting the day the way I mean to carry on- immersed in horror in the run up to Halloween! When your 📸 captures more than you bargained for… “Has he gone crazy? No. He saw what he saw.” 🕷️ Itsy Bitsy, John L. Lindqvist #AScareADay @romgothsam.bsky.social freenovelread.com/john-ajvide-...

I feel like we may need an intervention. Stay away from the dark Allie! Resist the urge to worship the old ones.

Oooh this #AScareADay story makes me want to visit New York! When Leon takes a late-night subway in search of inspiration, he finds something waiting in the dark that should never have been seen. Clive Barker, ‘The Midnight Meat Train’ @romgothsam.bsky.social readerslibrary.org/wp-content/u...

Two men take a narrowboat holiday and pick up a mysterious passenger. The river grows darker, the air colder & the map no longer makes sense. Elizabeth Jane Howard, Three Miles Up #AScareADay @romgothsam.bsky.social Read it here: s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/luminist/EB/...

Today’s incredibly spooky #AScareADay takes us to the lonely wilds of the Lake District, where guilt runs deeper than water. Hugh Walpole’s The Tarn is a tale of friendship,revenge& something waiting beneath the surface. @romgothsam.bsky.social Read it here: gutenberg.net.au/ebooks07/070...

The dust has begun to settle on the first @serveitforthfest.bsky.social and what a day it was. Thank you to everyone who bought a ticket and for your kind words @mrssbilton.bsky.social @deliciouslegacy.bsky.social @alessandrapino.bsky.social and I are so glad you enjoyed the day.

Loved every minute of @serveitforthfest.bsky.social and thank you to @drdan.bsky.social for sharing the stage with me on this weird and wonderful journey along the Thames, one full of death and food.

"Serve It Forth" is happening tomorrow from 10:30! A little independent, online Food History Festival that is organised by four foodies and historians! Me, @neilbuttery.bsky.social @mrssbilton.bsky.social & @alessandrapino.bsky.social doing our first event together, hope everyone enjoys the talks!

Never trust what sparkles. In Agatha Christie’s “The Blue Jar,” a beautiful trinket becomes a trap, and reality slips like glass between your fingers. #AScareADay @romgothsam.bsky.social pseudopod.org/2020/01/03/p...

#AScareADay Conrad Aiken’s The Vampire. She comes weeping, her eyes “so sweet, so poisonous,” and all who follow her are lost. Desire and death move together like the plough through flesh and bone. 🌒 poets.org/poem/vampire

Just 4 DAYS until the first @serveitforthfest.bsky.social on 18 October via Zoom. You can still get your ticket! Get 25% off with code SERVE25. www.eventbrite.com/e/serve-it-f...

Today’s #AScareADay crosses the Styx with Lord Dunsany’s Charon. The ferryman rows on, weary beyond time, until one day only one soul arrives. “I am the last,” the ghost says. And for the first time, Charon weeps. @romgothsam.bsky.social www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/7...

🕷️ #AScareADay Once I loved a spider… but love bites. Vachel Lindsay’s The Spider and the Ghost of the Fly (1915) turns a nursery rhyme into a nightmare of beauty, hunger, and revenge. Beware the velvet-footed ones, they always come for the heart. 💔🕸️ @romgothsam.bsky.social

Like a dark echo of Giselle, Emma Frances Dawson’s “An Itinerant House” brings its betrayed heroine back from the grave…not through love, but through science and a feverish violin’s cry. When Felipa stirs, it’s not romance that returns… it’s something far stranger.#AScareADay ⚡🎻 #Gothic #WeirdTales

Apples of ashes. Waters of bitterness. A banquet of foul delight. Lionel Pigot Johnson’s The Dark Angel turns beauty and every feast into poison ☠️. #AScareADay 👻 @romgothsam.bsky.social allpoetry.com/poem/8526407...

In Dinah Mulock’s The Last House in C–– Street, a quiet London home hides a secret so long buried it comes back in ghostly form. Some houses remember what we’d rather forget. 🕯️ #AScareADay @romgothsam.bsky.social Read it here: gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/06062…

A weary traveller enters a warm cottage- yet one look at his eyes turns comfort to dread. There’s something not quite human in that “ghastly fair” face…& all are glad when he hides it again. #AScareADay Read Emily Brontë’s ‘And now the house dog stretched once more’ en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Com...

Deep below, the Kraken sleeps 🌊 vast, ancient, and dreaming of the world’s end. Alfred Tennyson’s sea monster still stirs. #AScareADay @romgothsam.bsky.social poets.org/poem/kraken

Today’s #AScareADay, got me reading The Buried Alive by John Galt (1821) ⚰️ A beautiful story about everyone’s worst nightmare- to be conscious while dead. It ends on an electrifying note ⚡️ Read it here: romancingthegothic.com/2025/09/19/t...

“But what we children detested most of all was his big coarse hairy hands…he delighted to touch [our food] until bright tears stood in our eyes.” 🍰💀 Today’s #AScareADay @romgothsam.bsky.social E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman (1816) brings terror to the table, where even sweets turn uncanny.

The Elopement Sometimes you don’t need to get thee to a nunnery because the nuns will try to get to thee…persistently! What a great story for @romgothsam.bsky.social #AScareADay en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Lit...

👻 Thrilled that #AScareADay is back with @romgothsam.bsky.social! Each day we get to creep into a different eerie tale or poem from the challenge list and share our thoughts. 🕷️ October 1st - Robert Herrick, The Hag (1648)

In this bonus episode of Fear Feasts presents @serveitforthfest.bsky.social I share how I found my way into food history and why I’m curious about the foods people make and the meanings behind them. 🍞📖🍇 Listen on all podcast platforms 🎧 #ServeItForthFest podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/f...

Feast yourselves! (darkly, or lightly)

My work on dark food has been published in The Palgrave Handbook of Literary Memory Studies. Very pleased to finally hold a physical copy @panmacmillan.bsky.social It’s a privilege to have my work on dark food included in this volume alongside such excellent scholarship.

The latest issue of Haunted Magazine is here in my witchy hands! I explore ghosts in the theatre – from 18th-c. spirits to 2:22 A Ghost Story @dannyrobins.bsky.social & the return of the actor-ghost 🎭 ✨Plus my interview with @adamzed.bsky.social Don’t miss it! 👉 hauntedmag.com