The graphic is pretty self-explanatory.
The very talented and sweet Robert Ottone, aka Chico Malo, has put together a Halloween-themed signing event at the Barnes and Noble store in Newburgh, NY. From 12:00-4:00pm on Saturday, October 4th, you can stop by and meet writers including Sam Rebelein, Dennis Mahoney, Amanda Headlee, Cat Scully, Meg Ripley, Debra Evry, and Leanna Heiber, as well as Rob and myself. Mark the date on your calendar.
Yes, I know how old the photo is.
Five years ago, I was the second guest on Neil McRobert’s new podcast, Talking Scared. Since that time, Neil has emerged as one of the best interviewers in the business, an insightful critic whose now hundreds of episodes have expanded my library dramatically. (I like to joke that when my wallet hears Neil’s voice, it cowers in my pocket.) He’s also spread his talent to horror-related journalism and a soon-to-be-released novella, about which, more later.
The other month, I recorded a new interview with Neil to talk about my newest collection. If you’d like to listen, here it is: Talking Scared. As ever, thanks to Neil for being his typically brilliant self, and making me sound much smarter than I am.
A little while ago, Morgan Sylvia asked me if I would take a look at her forthcoming collection and maybe say a couple of words about it. It was a pleasure to do so:
Morgan Sylvia’s writing is a pleasure to read. It’s no surprise to learn that she’s also an accomplished poet, because her fiction shows a careful attention to language, to its rhythms and musicality. Her sentences shine like chains of gold–but there are hooks strung along their links, waiting to catch the reader’s eye. To read the stories gathered in The Withering Hours is to experience beauty and wonder and horror and the deep satisfaction that comes from excellent work.
If you care about good writing, you know what to do.
The short version: I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve had a new story, “Acolytes of the Famished Giant,” accepted for publication in Steve Shaw’s forthcoming anthology, Something Peculiar.
When your cover could also be a story prompt…
The (Somewhat) Longer Version: I’ve been an admirer of Black Shuck Books for some time, now. They publish some of my favorite writers currently at work, including Simon Avery (whose novel, Poppyharp, more people need to be reading and talking about) and Verity Hollowell (whose collection, Cheer the Sick, is every bit as good as anyone who knows her work would expect it to be). When Steve Shaw invited me to contribute to his annual anthology of Great British Horror (I think as the requisite foreigner; though as a child I did have dual US/UK citizenship), I was thrilled. The only guideline Steve gave me was that the story should in some way be folk horror, or folk horror-adjacent.
Although I considered writing a story set somewhere in rural England, a kind of riff on Wuthering Heights or maybe one of Hardy’s novels, I decided on Scotland, specifically, the town of Gourock, west of Glasgow on the River Clyde. It’s where my father was from, and a place I visited a great deal when I was younger. That stretch of the river was one of the UK’s major centers for shipbuilding; indeed, my paternal grandfather was employed at a shipyard for his entire adult life. When I think of folk horror, I tend to envision rustic scenes, people dressed in crude animal masks and bedsheets repurposed as robes dancing around bonfires. What, I wondered, if your folk horror was tied to other traditions of your location, to its industry and the materials it employed? Call it metallic folk horror. In writing the story, I quickly realized that it was connected to earlier stories set in the same location, to “Corpsemouth” and “Caoineadh.”
There’s more going on here than you might expect.
The kernel of the story, I realized as I was writing it, was a vague memory of my grandmother’s hushed tones as she warned me away from sitting in my grandfather’s chair.
This past Friday, I joined Errick Nunnally and Angela Yuriko Smith to take part in an online discussion on the theme of “Fatherhood, Masculinity, and Violence.” The discussion was moderated by Regina Yau, the founder and president of the Pixel Project, an organization dedicated to bringing an end to violence against women. As a nonprofit, the Pixel Project depends on donations to keep functioning. Our panel was part of a suite of programming that included readings and interviews with such figures as Rachel Harrison and Premee Mohamed. You can find those recordings on the project’s YouTube channel.
Things being what they are, I realize that money is tight for everyone right now. But no amount of money is too small to contribute to such a vital cause. If you have a little more cash available, there is a list of goodies that myself and the other participating writers are offering as rewards for certain donation amounts. These rewards are first-come, first-serve, so if you’re interested, act quickly.
Thanks to Regina Yau and the team at the Pixel Project for allowing me to be part of this event. I intend to return whenever they invite me to.
To my great surprise and delight, Lost in the Dark has been listed in Vulture‘s list of the best books of 2025 (so far). Even better is the writeup that goes along with the listing, courtesy of Neil McRobert:
No, not this Vulture.
No, this is the Buzzard, one of my favorite creations from the insanely talented Eric Powell. And buzzards aren’t vultures. Not really. It’s complicated. But you should go read everything Eric Powell has ever written, starting with The Goon, then moving to the Buzzard, then to Hillbilly. Trust me.
A new John Langan story collection is always something to be excited about, and Langan’s sixth may be his best and most cohesive yet. Water flows through many of these stories, both a thematic thread and a very literal source of otherworldly terror. “The Deep Sea Swell” features horrific visitation aboard a North Sea ferry. The consuming flood of “Breakwater” provides an elemental backdrop to a brutal noir. In “Haak,” a numinous Alpine Lake is the stage for a homicidal twist on Peter Pan. Water also laps at the edges of the two standout tales, both bravura examples of Langan’s professorial, experimental inclinations. “Snakebit, Or Why I Continue to Love Horror,” begins as a critical essay on the construction of a horror tale, before morphing into something stranger and mythological. The title story may be the best thing Langan has ever written: a metafictional blend of media, in which a cult horror movie about a Hudson Valley urban legend is revealed to have disquieting roots in reality. No one has done more to keep the short horror story alive, well, and vibrant over the last decade. Lost in the Dark and Other Excursions is just further proof of his value. —N.M.
I mean, what can you say after a review like this, except, Thank you.
In just a couple of weeks, a book called Why I Love Horror: Essays on Horror Literature, edited by Becky Siegel Spratford, will be released. I was pleased to be asked to contribute to the volume, alongside such luminaries as Paul Tremblay, Stephen Graham Jones, Victor LaValle, and Tananarive Due. My essay is titled, “In the Bermuda Triangle with Sasquatch, Flesh Smoldering.” It’s actually the second attempt I made to answer the book’s motivating question: the first grew and sprawled until it became “Snakebit, Or Why I (Continue to) Love Horror,” which you can find in my latest collection, Lost in the Dark. The piece I wound up submitting to Becky is a more focused look at three of the subjects that haunted my young mind. Here’s a selection of relevant images to whet your appetite:
Yeah, maybe it’s a fake, but the almost casual attitude of the creature seems to lend it that much more credibility.
This was the stuff of nightmares.
This shipwreck is still around. The planes that flew out to bomb it aren’t.
My elementary and high school teachers would shake their heads in shame at my lack of knowledge of the Bermuda Triangle’s exact location.
Is there anything more horrifying than an old, slightly out of focus, black and white photo of a terrible event?
The Dickens connection.
(Oh, and you should preorder the book. You won’t regret it.)
The poster for the 1986 film adaptation of “Rawhead Rex.” To be honest, this is still how I envision the monster.
There’s a new omnibus edition of the first three volumes of Clive Barker’s landmark Books of Blood, with an afterword by Grady Hendrix, who, in addition to writing some brilliant horror novels, has emerged as a historian of the genre. (His Paperbacks from Hell is a witty and insightful survey of the intersection of mass-market paperback publishing and the development of the horror genre; while his podcast series, Super Scary Haunted Homeschool, spent its first season exploring the wide-ranging history of vampire fiction and film; and his survey of Stephen King’s work, the Great Stephen King Reread, is an idiosyncratic and provocative overview of its subject.) As part of his involvement in the new edition of Barker’s work, Grady reached out to a number of horror writers to ask us for a few words on our favorite stories from those early volumes. I chose Barker’s novella, “Rawhead Rex,” which Paul Tremblay and I liked well enough to include in our 2011 anthology, Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters. As for writing a few words, well…
Here’s what I sent Grady (it’s spoilery, so don’t @ me, as the kids say):
The thing is, “Rawhead Rex” is one of those stories you could write a reasonably substantial essay on, itself. In this regard, it’s similar to pretty much all the stories in the Books of Blood, even if this grouping includes only the first three volumes. It helps, I suppose, that “Rawhead” is actually a novella; as I recall, it’s a little over twenty thousand words. It lives up to that designation, too, a little novel condensing enough character and incident into its pages for a peak 80’s-style doorstopper. Indeed, one way to think about the story is as a creature from folklore run through the machinery of the social melodramas of King, McCammon, and Koontz. (Barker would return to the crowded model of the blockbuster with The Great and Secret Show.) To be honest, aside from Barker’s story, the figure of Rawhead is not one I was familiar with; it was only in thinking about what to write for this appreciation that I looked up the name and learned about the story of Rawhead and Bloody Bones. While Barker plays fast and loose with that character, he sticks to the central conceit of a creature with a hideous face who is especially hostile to children and implacable once he has seen you seeing him. Typically, he is the surprise ending to a cautionary tale. As I see it, Barker’s version collapses this figure with the reference to the giants in the earth in the sixth chapter of the Book of Genesis. In turn, this ties into a strain of religious (specifically Anglican) imagery that permeates the story. There’s the character of the Anglican priest; there’s the baptism-by-urination Rawhead bestows on his followers; there’s the secret to defeating him concealed within the physical structure of the church. The literary critic in me wants to argue that the story is structured as a series of inversions of Christianity, particularly the apocalypse narrative. Rawhead the King returns bringing violence. He christens his followers with piss. He kills and devours little children. He is weakened and defeated by the power of the procreative feminine. Even if these parallels are coincidental, the story is remarkable for its sheer forward momentum, its relentless drive. Once Rawhead escapes his prison in the English soil, he brings death to (almost) all he encounters, and he does not stop until he is borne down by the combined weight of the men and women swarming over him. There’s a great deal Barker doesn’t tell us about Rawhead’s backstory, who had him as their king, the story surrounding his imprisonment, the cosmology governing his existence. But I don’t think it matters that much to the story as it is. (In this regard, it’s similar to “The Hellbound Heart” and “The Last Illusion;” even Cabal.) Caught up in the immediacy of its action, we can still pick up on the opposition between Rawhead and the fertility statue secreted in the church altar, between a kind of masculine aggression and feminine fecundity. The story reaches its climax in fire and gore, with the village of Zeal ablaze, and Rawhead’s head smashed in by the ancient statue. It’s the kind of over the top ending you would expect in a Stephen King novel, or in one of the horror films playing at the local multiplex. As in the best of those novels and films, you’re left harrowed, exhausted yet also exhilarated.
The story ends exactly where and when it should. To the best of my knowledge, Clive Barker never returned to the figure of Rawhead Rex or any of his monster brothers. There is a part of me, though, that wishes he had, that wishes at least that the sole cinematic adaptation of the story had spawned a series of sequels, that Rawhead Rex had enjoyed the same sort of legacy as his forebearers, Frankenstein, Godzilla, and Michael Meyers. Imagine: Rawhead Rex vs. Tyrannosaurus: Battle of the Kings! Rawhead Rex Meets the Beast from Outer Space: Who Will Rule the Earth? Rawhead Rex and the Demon: To Reign in Hell, or England?!
My appreciation/analysis was obviously too long to be of much use in Grady’s afterword, but we agreed I would publish it here once the new edition was available. So here’s to a great monster story by a great writer.
The Rackening Returns! Once again, the super-talented Lynne Hansen knocks it out of the park.
The Short Version: I’m pleased to announce I will have a new story, “The Cartographer of Blades and Stars, of Flesh and Agony,” in Tom Deady’s forthcoming anthology, The Rack II: More Stories Inspired by Vintage Horror Paperbacks!
The (Somewhat) Longer Version: As someone who came of reading age during the 1980’s, I was quite taken with the conceit of Tom Deady’s 2024 anthology, The Rack, which drew inspiration from the metal racks of paperbacks you found in drugstores, supermarkets, and the like during the 80’s, and on which you would find original crime, romance, thriller, western, and horror novels, as well as celebrity biographies and self-help books. Each of the writers who contributed to the book tried to write a horror story that in some way emulated the spirit of those novels. There are a lot of projects I think would have been cool to be invited to, but I felt something more acute when it came to The Rack. Ah well, c’est la vie, right?
Then came word that Tom was putting together a sequel volume–what could be more 80’s, right? And shortly thereafter came an invitation from the man himself to contribute to The Rack II. At first, I thought I would try to write to a visual prompt, so I asked my daughter to do an image search for me. She came up with several, of which I found this one the most intriguing:
I mean, that’s pretty cool.
The image prompted an interesting, Pet Sematary-esque idea. But it took a while to coalesce, and while it was doing so, another idea elbowed its way to the front of the queue, complete with first line, opening scene, and basic plot structure. I decided to put the first story aside for the moment and see what I could do with this newer one.
Initially, I thought the story would be (relatively) short, a riff on the slasher films that filled the movie and video screens of the 1980’s. (In this regard, no doubt I’m still reacting to Brian Keene’s teasing about me ever writing a splatterpunk story a few years ago. And everything Stephen Graham Jones has been doing with slashers the last few years also had an effect.) I thought I would make use of the old psychiatric hospital that appeared in a previous story, “Community Garden,” and allude to some lore that I had played around with in a much earlier story, “The Unbearable Proximity of Mr. Dunn’s Balloons.” While I didn’t want to set my story during the decade of Reagan and Bush, I did want to employ one of the favorite plot devices of the time, namely, the group of boys who come together to fight the threat. I decided I would experiment ever-so-slightly with the way their dialogue was presented, as well as with the way the villain’s speech appeared.
The story that resulted was longer than I anticipated, and could have been longer still. (Which, if he reads this, will probably make Tom Deady feel faint.) The more I wrote about these characters and their time and place, the more I found there was to write. I had conceived this as a more-or-less naturalistic situation, to have only the barest hint of the supernormal, but that flew out the window once the piece was underway. Tom had to wait patiently while the narrative expanded, branching off like the corridors of the psychiatric hospital the characters explored. The result was among the most gruesome things I’ve written.
Perhaps fittingly enough, not long after I finished the story, an idea for a sequel occurred to me. Maybe The Rack III. Tom? Tom?
(Oh, and I’ll get back to the rabbit, never fear.)
I am surprised and delighted to share that Bocadaver y otras autobiografias, the Spanish language translation of my fifth collection, Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies, is a finalist in the translated collection category of the Ignotus Awards, Spain’s premier award for Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror. I’m equally pleased to find myself sharing the category with the estimable Gemma Files, and the very worthy Stephen King. Thanks to my publishers, La biblioteca de Carfax, and my translator, Alberto Chessa.
I’m also pleased to note a nomination for best cover art for the talented Rafael Martín Coronel for this beauty.
Mr Gaunt: 