About

Ruination Street cannot be found on any map - it might be anywhere, or nowhere. 

You may stroll down it as down any normal street, wholly unaware.

Or, traversing the city in the hours just before dawn, you may turn down a random cross-street to get home a bit more quickly, only to find yourself strangely uneasy. This isn't a street you've seen before, yet you know this city well. The air seems colder, and thin; the yellow lamps, few and far between, expel feeble gasps of light amid the strangling dark; the shop windows return no reflection. 

Headlights materialize in the night, and a car glides past with no sound. Its passing seems drawn out, as though it were just a bit too long - and you are not relieved to realize that it is a hearse.

Something is distinctly wrong. You turn back, hastily retracing your steps, feeling your anxiety lifting as you near the street you turned from. It is a main road, well-known and mapped. You shouldn't have left it. 

But just as you are about to reach it you look up, and stop dead in your tracks. 

Before you stands a wall of unbroken brick - a wall where no wall was. A shadow cast upon it assumes a strange form - a gallows. Below, painted or perhaps smeared with a hasty hand, four red letters spell out: DOOM. 

The silent hearse idles beside...

Who's driving?

I'm Anthony. I'm a bookish sort of person with a taste for mystery and horror. 

I started Ruination Street initially to focus on impossible crime fiction, but have since expanded it to embrace my wider reading interests in the mystery genre, which include Golden-Age detection generally, non-impossible puzzlers, hardboiled, noir, suspense/horror fiction with mystery elements, and everything in between. 

The name comes from The Lost Gallows by John Dickson Carr, all-time master of the impossible crime, and whose entire body of work I hope to review here in due time. I chose it both for the atmosphere it evokes, and as an allusion to 'the thing which is, but should not be', that which violates the bounds of reason, or even reality itself. 

Aside from genre fiction, I also like studying languages. As such, a smaller goal of this blog is to review works in multiple languages which may not be available in English, namely Spanish, French, Polish and hopefully one or two other languages. I especially enjoy exploring the intricacies of Polish, and have another blog devoted to this pursuit here: The Polish Student. 

Contact: ruinationstreet@gmail.com