Maybe the most notable thing we saw was a “hermit cave.” (It’s #3 on this list, but unfortunately all the best info isn’t on the website, of course.) According to the historical marker thingy next to it, an Italian priest lived in the cave for roughly five months. Which is pretty cool. But the really good part is that the priest in question was pretty much a character from a Gothic novel. He was the son of a wealthy man who had to leave Europe because he fell in love with a young lady. He traveled around America under several assumed names, living in caves and, at one point, in a hollowed-out tree. He purportedly spoke nine languages, and later he was “mysteriously murdered.” (This is the wording on the marker.)

So that was last weekend. This coming weekend is the Spectrum Fantastic Art Live show. I’ll be there on Saturday, and will be hanging out with folks all around it. I only recently got a chance to take a look at the full exhibitor lineup, and it is, to put it mildly, damn impressive. On top of Mike Mignola, who we all know is a sufficient draw for me by himself, there’s also folks like William Stout and Gary freaking Gianni, among about a billion others. I am going to be hauling around so much stuff to get signed! If you’re going to be there, drop me a line and maybe we can catch up.

The book will be released in paperback and e-book varieties, as well as in a limited-edition hardcover which will feature three extra stories. Without further ado, here’s the lineup:

• Ann K. Schwader, “Cordyceps zombii” (poem)
• A.C. Wise, “Where Dead Men Go to Dream”
• Andrew Penn Romine, “Last Bloom on the Sage”
• Camille Alexa, “His Sweet Truffle of a Girl”
• Chadwick Ginther, “First They Came for the Pigs”
• Daniel Mills, “Dust From a Dark Flower”
• Ian Rogers, “Out of the Blue”
• Jane Hertenstein, “Wild Mushrooms”
• Jeff Vandermeer, “Corpse Mouth and Spore Nose”
• John Langan, “Hyphae”
• Julio Toro San Martin, “A Monster In The Midst”
• Kris Reisz, “The Pilgrims of Parthen”
• Laird Barron, “Gamma”
• Lavie Tidhar, “The White Hands”
• Lisa M. Bradley, “The Pearl in the Oyster and the Oyster Under Glass”
• Molly Tanzer and Jesse Bullington, “Tubby McMungus, Fat From Fungus”
• Nick Mamatas, “The Shaft Through The Middle of It All”
• Paul Tremblay, “Our Stories Will Live Forever”
• Polenth Blake, “Letters to a Fungus”
• Richard Gavin, “Goatsbride”
• Simon Strantzas, “Go Home Again”
• Steve Berman, “Kum, Raúl (The Unknown Terror) – b. 1925, d. 1957”
• W.H. Pugmire, “Midnight Mushrumps”

The three extra stories included in the hardcover edition are:

• E. Catherine Tobler, “New Feet Within My Garden Go”
• J.T. Glover, “The Flaming Exodus of the Greifswald Grimoire”
• Claude Lalumière, “Big Guy and Little Guy’s Survivalist Adventure”

“Black Hill” is maybe my most successful short story to date. In addition to this particular honor, and to recently being acquired for reprint in The Book of Cthulhu 2, it was also selected for podcasting at Pseudopod, where it actually just won the readers’ choice poll for best story of the year! I’m particularly excited about that, because the only other time I published a story at Pseudopod, it also won the readers choice poll for best story of the year. (That would have been “The Worm That Gnaws” a couple of years back.) It doesn’t hurt a bit that both times the stories have been beautifully produced and read by the folks at that fine establishment.

There’s not a full ToC for it yet, but you can see from the cover draft there some of the people I’m going to be sharing space with, including Fritz freaking Leiber guys, oh my god! It will be a reprint of my story “Black Hill,” which was originally in Historical Lovecraft and has since appeared in audio form at Pseudopod and as a Kindle preview for my forthcoming collection. Needless to say that little story’s done pretty well for me.

It was a rare thrill to be pulled aside by Night Shade editor Ross Lockhart and told that he had something he needed to talk to me about, and it’s one more thing off my list of things that authors do to make a handshake deal at the bar of a convention. I’m really thrilled and flattered to be included in this volume (the sequel to what was undoubtedly the cream of a very large crop of Lovecraftian reprint anthologies) alongside a bunch of really excellent stories by really excellent authors, and I’ll talk more about it when there’s an actual ToC. In the mean time, note that Night Shade literally just started their 50% off sale today, so if you’re inclined to pick up The Book of Cthulhu 2 or its predecessor (or any of their other fine titles), now is a good time to do it.

Much of the weekend was spent in the company of Steve Scearce and Bear Weiter Jacob Ruby (who I met at last year’s World Horror) and their lovely wives, as well as the excellent Andrew Fuller, who was good enough to split a room with me so I didn’t have to sleep in a closet. I met a lot of new folks, and was able to spend some more time with several old acquaintances, and I had a really good time. Salt Lake City was a pleasant place to walk around in, and so much of that was done, often at night, amid interesting architecture, pleasant green spaces, and much weird lighting.

I am unlikely to ever catch up to all the things that went on while I was away, so if I missed anything you particularly want me to see, feel free to direct it to my attention. There’ll be more news from me soon, regarding the Fungi anthology and other things, so for now I should get back to it.

So, as I think I’ve mentioned before, I’m going to stalk Mike Mignola shamelessly World Horror 2012 in Salt Lake City in about a week. They posted the programming schedule the other day, and I’m going to be on a couple of panels, so, in case you’re going and want to know where to find me, or in case you’re just insatiably curious what I’ll be sitting up in front of people and talking about while I’m there, here those panels are:

Thursday, March 29th (8PM)
Classic Horror Movies.  What you really need to watch – and own.
(Thomas M. Sipos, Norman L. Rubenstein, Michael McCarty, Orrin Grey, Mike Marano)

Saturday, March 31st (1:30PM)
Reading

Sunday, April 1st (11AM)
H. P. Lovecraft: The short stories.
(Peter Cannon (M), Michael R. Collings, Scott Allie, Travis Heermann, Orrin Grey)

I will try not to geek out too much over being on a panel with Scott Allie.

Unfortunately, there are only two stories (“The Outsider” and “The Hound“), but they’re enough. I first heard about this when somebody posted the cover of the record on tumblr, but I found the mp3s through this guy’s LiveJournal.

You’re all very welcome.

He says a lot of interesting stuff in the post, but there’s one thing in particular that I wanted to pull out and examine, which is pretty much summed up in the last paragraph or so. Here’s the most telling sentence:

All of this puts me in a weird place. In denigrating contemporary horror movies in which I find very little to admire (or even remember 24 hours later), I seem to be advocating older genre fare that never actually existed but was instead cobbled together in my brain from looking at pictures of movies I hadn’t seen.

It’s interesting to me because in a lot of ways that’s exactly how I came to the horror genre, as well. Of course I remember reading spooky books as a kid, but some of my very earliest memories of, well, anything include looking through old books filled with black-and-white photographs of old horror movies, and imagining stories to go with them. Filling in gaps, not having any idea what was actually going on, what the movie was actually about. I think that had a huge influence on how I developed, as a horror fan and as a writer.

There was a giant flea market (a “dirt mall”) that we used to go to sometimes, and one of the sellers there peddled old magazines, and whenever I went I’d buy a few issues of MAD or Cracked, specifically the “monster party” issues, which would usually feature old photos from Roger Corman movies or whatever. Weird guys in bad rubber suits. I ate them up.

Though I dearly love old horror movies, more than probably any other category of movie you could name, I don’t really intend to denigrate modern ones. There’s a lot of garbage, but there’s a lot of gold among them too. But maybe it has to do with the difference between practical and digital effects, or maybe with the inherent staginess and theatricality of the old movies, but I just don’t think a book of film stills from modern movies would have quite the same effect.

One of the things that really struck me about seeing all three films so close together was that West left a similar ambiguity in his explorations of the phenomena (for lack of a better word) at the heart of each film. This sort of ambiguity is a subject that’s near and dear to my heart, so I figured it would be worth talking about. While I’ll try to be as coy as I can, this discussion will no doubt feature some significant spoilers about all three movies, so if you’ve not seen them, and are spoiler-phobic, I’d suggest turning back now.

Still with me? Okay, House of the Devil and The Innkeepers are the ones I saw first, and they’re the ones whose similarities of approach are most striking. Each movie deals with a supernatural phenomenon (a Satanic cult in House of the Devil, ghosts in The Innkeepers), but in each movie there is a possible reading (however likely or unlikely) with a purely naturalistic explanation. In both movies, there is a striking lack of exposition, and the phenomenon is never really explained. In House of the Devil we’re all familiar enough with Satanism movies to know what the cultists are trying to do, but they never sit down and explain it to us. In The Innkeepers, Claire just wants to find out if the ghost that’s haunting the hotel is Madeline O’Malley and what she wants. The goal isn’t even to lay the ghost to rest. But Claire never learns what the ghosts want, and neither do we. The ghosts are terrifying, especially in the last minutes, but their motives are never clear, and there is never any satisfying resolution for anyone. Furthermore, Luke keeps trying to tell Claire something (maybe that he is in love with her, but it could be anything), but we never get to hear what it is.

The Roost is far more of a B-movie than the others, though it is self-aware of its B-movie status. In it, four friends break down on their way to a wedding and end up taking shelter in a barn that happens to be filled with flesh-eating bats that turn their prey into the undead. (Are they zombies? Vampires? They behave like zombies, but they always seem to go for the throat, so…?) In most such movies, the presence of the bats would be explained, to the audience if not to the victims. We would see a government genetics lab or a black magic ritual or something. In The Roost there is no explanation. Certainly the couple that owns the barn aren’t keeping the bats there on purpose, as they’re the first victims, and there’s never any explanation given for where the bats come from, or why their victims rise from the dead.

(None of that’s even touching upon The Roost‘s weird framing device, featuring Tom Noonan as a TV horror show host who gets meta-textually involved in the film midway through. Unsurprisingly, that was my favorite part of the movie.)

Anyway, of these films, only The Innkeepers really elevated itself to a position of a favorite of mine, partly because of the subject matter, partly because of the smart injection of humor and character into the proceedings, but the approach to keeping some things unknown really elevated all of them, even the schlocky Roost above whatever level they would otherwise have attained, and means I will definitely be keeping an eye on Ti West’s future endeavors, more Cabin Fever sequels notwithstanding.

Anyway, I have been exhaustingly busy and, predictably enough, whenever I wasn’t I was too exhausted to do anything, including post, hence why you haven’t heard about, say, The Innkeepers or The Woman in Black yet, and why, now that you are going to hear about them, it’ll necessarily be pithier shorter than I would have liked. So: I saw both of them last weekend, along with catching House of the Devil a second time. They were both quite good. Both were sort of quiet, simple ghost stories, unambitious in scale, but very effective in their own ways. The Woman in Black, I think, lost out a little bit by being in such close proximity with The Innkeepers, which I liked the best of the two, but it also wasn’t helped by the theatre full of fourteen-year-old girls who had come to see Harry Potter square off against a ghost.

I found The Innkeepers to be a big improvement (for me, at least) over House of the Devil, though it had maybe fewer bravura scenes. It was still just as quiet and slow-burning, but instead of just feeling slow, it was charming and funny up until the last few minutes, which were, frankly, harrowing.

Anyway, both were good, though I don’t think that either would be harmed by waiting for DVD. (And, assuming your audience was anything like ours, The Woman in Black might be improved.)

What else? After coming very late to the game with “Chelsea Dagger,” I’ve been listening to a lot of stuff by The Fratellis, especially their second album Here We Stand, which I pretty much love from top to bottom. Call this my second big musical discovery of the year, after The Bird and the Bee.

Finally, thanks to Eric Orchard, I started up an account over on Pinterest. I can’t vouch for how much I’ll be using it or not, but so far I’m mostly sticking up Mike Mignola and Richard Sala drawings. So, y’know, if that sounds like your cup of tea, feel free to give it a look.

This weekend, my lovely wife and I are getting dolled up and going out to see Amelie at the Screenland and then going out to a fancy dinner. I bought a new hat for the occasion, and she bought some very nice shoes. With any luck, there will be pictures.