Horror is Where You Find It

March 20, 2023
cinema, thoughts, we'll send him cheesy movies
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The other night, we watched The Sea Hawk (1940) for the first time. We watched this for several reasons, among them because Grace loves the old swashbuckling novels like the one this picture was adapted from. Books by folks like Rafael Sabatini (who wrote this one), Alexandre Dumas, Frank Yerby, and a variety of others, especially Samuel Shellabarger, who wrote one of Grace’s favorite books of all time, Prince of Foxes, itself adapted into a movie in 1949 starring Tyrone Power, Orson Welles, et al.

While I also like these old Hollywood movies, I was excited about this one for a particular reason. Like The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), another all-timer that we watched for the first time last year, this was directed by Michael Curtiz. While Curtiz is probably best known for Casablanca, and perhaps only slightly less well-known for swashbuckling fare like this, when I think of him, the first two movies that spring to mind are two of his only horror pictures – and two of my favorite horror films of all time: Doctor X (1932) and Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933).

I’ve written about those two films at some length various other places, but for those who are just hearing about them for the first time, know that I recommend them, especially Doctor X, as heartily as I possibly can. Not only are they two of the only surviving films shot in what’s known as “two-strip Technicolor,” lending them a lurid and unmistakable palette, they are also just dynamite examples of the horror films of Hollywood’s golden age – and horror films in general.

On those two films, and several others, Curtiz worked with Polish art director and production designer Anton Grot, who, for my money, may have been one of the best who ever plied that trade. The incredible look of both Doctor X and Mystery of the Wax Museum owes at least as much to Grot’s work behind the scenes as to Curtiz’s work behind the camera.

Grot and Curtiz are working together again on The Sea Hawk, and while the sets here are not as filled with expressionistic horror or pulpish shadows and angles as those of Doctor X, they are no less impressive, or integral to the mood and function of the piece. From possibly the most impressive ship-to-ship battle I have ever seen, which opens the film in dramatic fashion and for which Warner Bros. had to build a larger sound stage to accommodate the full-scale ships, to minor touches in quiet scenes, the production design and art direction here is always top of the line.

In fact, there’s very little in The Sea Hawk that isn’t a shining example of Golden Age Hollywood operating at the peak of its powers. The actors, including Errol Flynn, Claude Rains, Brenda Marshall, Alan Hale, Una O’Connor, and many others, all acquit themselves nicely, while Flora Robson as Queen Elizabeth is an absolute force of nature. But the human elements may be the film’s weakest links. Everything from the score (by swashbuckler stalwart Erich Wolfgang Korngold) to the costumes (by the prolific Orry-Kelly) to the scope and scale of the film itself is absolutely top-drawer Hollywood, as they only did back in those days.

Earlier on, though, I was talking about horror, and I want to address the horror bonafides in The Sea Hawk, which absolutely has them, even if we discount the involvement of Curtiz and Grot. One of the things that really sets The Sea Hawk apart from a number of the other cutlass-and-tights flicks of the era is the way in which it deftly handles a variety of disparate moods, from swashbuckling adventure to throne-room intrigue to romance to tragedy to tension and, yes, horror.

Each of these transitions is handled at once dramatically and dynamically, with touches that are often both small and ingenious. Take, for instance, the sequence of the film which takes place in the New World, where the standard “silver screen” black-and-white of the rest of the picture is replaced with a sepia tone that captures perfectly the changed feel of the setting.

This extends to the film’s few moments of genuine horror. The galleys of the Spanish ships, where slaves are whipped into pulling heavy oars, are rendered in an expressionistic scale that calls to mind the great German silent films, while an attempt at escape late in the movie is suffused with more genuine tension than most entire thrillers can ever manage. The desperation of a slog through the swamps of the New World is rendered suitably oppressive, but the real star of the horror show comes when the escaped crew of the Albatross attempt to return to their ship after an ambush.

Worn down and desperate, they row toward what should be their salvation, but even before they reach the ship, it is clear that something is very wrong. As they climb aboard a ship that should be bustling with the rest of their crew, all is silence and the grim creaking of the rigging, a setting as haunting as any ghost ship ever put on film. The real bravura touch, however, comes as they move to explore the deck, and the camera suddenly switches to a top-down shot from high in the rigging, one that expertly conveys the isolation and the unknown danger of the situation in which they find themselves.

These are only a few brief moments of horror in a film that otherwise moves effortlessly across a variety of other tones and moods, but they are no less deftly deployed for all that and for me, at least, they served to heighten what was already a most enjoyable experience with a classic film of yesteryear.

What We Talk About When You Buy My Books

March 13, 2023
freelancing, guignol, how to see ghosts, monsters from the vault, never bet the devil, on writing, painted monsters, privateer press, revenge of monsters, thoughts
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As of this writing, I am the author of some seven full-length books with my name on the spine. I have contributed to plenty of others, edited one more, and published a handful of chapbooks and zines. But these seven books are all me, from start to finish, minus the occasional introduction by an esteemed colleague.

Four of them are short story collections, because short stories are my primary raison d’etre. Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings, my first collection and first full-length book, has actually been published twice. First back in 2012, in softcover, and then reprinted in a (gorgeous, frankly) deluxe hardcover in 2017 by Strix Publishing. The latter adds new illustrations by Mike Corley and a couple of new stories not collected in the previous edition.

The other three collections are all out from Word Horde, who has been my most reliable and frequent publishing partner. These include Painted Monsters, Guignol, and, most recently, How to See Ghosts. I’m proud of all of them, and all three boast phenomenal cover art by Nick Gucker, who has probably been responsible for selling more copies of any of them than my name ever has.

My other full-length books include two collections of short, informal essays on vintage horror films – Monsters from the Vault, reprinting a column that I used to write for Innsmouth Free Press on the subject, and Revenge of Monsters from the Vault, which continues the theme.

Rounding out the list is Godless, my only published novel to date, written for Privateer Press as work-for-hire, and intended as the first book in a proposed series that never came to pass for various reasons.

Recently, I got royalty statements for most of these books from the publishers, and I thought it might be a good time to talk somewhat transparently about royalties and the writing life and what it means when you buy one of my books. I believe in transparency, in general, and I’ve only gotten where I am thanks in part to the generosity of my fellow writers in this regard.

I am a full-time writer, which most people assume means that I make a living writing novels or even – absurd as the proposition actually is – short stories. This is far, far from the truth. There are writers who make a living writing novels, but I’m not one of them. (I don’t think there have been any writers who made a living writing short stories for… many years.) Instead, my income comes, primarily, from writing “content,” which means any number of things. I write marketing copy of all sorts, from the words on websites and corporate blogs to social media posts to “white papers” and press releases.

I also write for a number of what are sometimes derogatorily called “content mills,” websites that busy themselves with generating a never-ending stream of listicles, articles, and other odds-and-ends. Of these, I am probably most closely associated with Ranker and The Lineup. Ultimately, though, all of this is my “day job,” the work I do to bring in the money to write my goofy little short stories about monsters and ghosts.

Besides all that, I currently produce four regular columns: one on folk horror, one on old horror TV shows, one on board games, and one about… pretty much whatever I want to write about, ranging from muck monsters to Ultra Q and beyond. And I continue to regularly write for Privateer Press, including putting together a large swath of their new Iron Kingdoms: Requiem 5e-compatible RPG.

All of that (with the exception of the columns) is work-for-hire stuff, meaning that, once it is published, I no longer own it. I get paid my fee, and that’s the last recompense I will ever get for the work. Fiction and such is, however, a different beast. When I sell a short story, I am likely to sell it again, at least into a collection down the road. Then, when I publish said collection, I will get a small advance.

Short stories do not pay well, nor have they for many, many years. Short story collections do not pay any better. While advances on novels may vary considerably, one can still potentially expect a few thousand dollars, maybe even five figures, if one is publishing through a larger press. Publishing a short story collection through a larger press is mostly unheard of unless one is already a best-selling author. So, you’ll be going through smaller presses, and your advance is more likely to be in the neighborhood of a few hundred to a thousand dollars, at least in my experience.

The advance is an “advance against royalties,” which means that you have to “earn out” that advance before you start making any royalties. Royalties on a collection are a fraction of the total price of the book. This fraction varies depending on your contract and the form of the book, but let’s say around 5-10% for physical copies, around 25% for ebooks. So, to make the math easy, if you sell a physical book for $1, you’ll make a shiny nickel. If you sell an ebook for the same amount, you’ll get a quarter.

Once you’ve accrued enough nickels and quarters, you will eventually have gotten enough money to pay back your advance, at which time those nickels and quarters start coming to you as royalties. At this point, most of my books (that pay royalties) have earned out, with the exception of How to See Ghosts, which literally just got published at the tail end of last year.

And yet, part of the reason why short story collections don’t pay as well as other books is that they also don’t tend to sell as well. I have been very fortunate, but even then, the number of copies of all my collections that are in circulation – including ebooks – still numbers only a few thousand, less than the print run of the average single novel. This is not a cry for pity or any such thing, but a bid toward transparency. I knew the marketplace of the short story when I got into this business, and I make a nice living with my writing, despite that it isn’t in the form of story sales.

What’s more, as I promised at the beginning of this surprisingly lengthy essay, I want to talk about what happens when you buy one of my books, in any form: I get some money. One way or another, sooner or later. Maybe it’s those nickels and quarters, but they add up. Every three months or so, I get a check from my publishers for enough money that I can buy a couple of nice Blu-rays, or pay part of one of my utility bills. It’s appreciated, and it helps, and that only happens when you buy my books.

And if you’ve already bought my books (thank you), it helps further to blog about them, review them, ask your library to order them. Little books like mine only do well thanks to word of mouth. That’s just the nature of this business. Without people talking about them, posting about them, leaving reviews, and telling their friends, they sink out of existence and into oblivion.

Perhaps even more important, those books selling as well as they do – the numbers might be relatively modest compared to a novel, but they’re pretty nice for short story collections – helps ensure that I’ll have the opportunity for more down the road. I look forward to a nice, long career writing various other stuff on the side so I can keep publishing books filled with stories about ghosts and monsters. And if you look forward to reading more of them, then I hope you keep buying! And for all those who have bought my books so far – I literally couldn’t keep doing this without you!

Heroic Clicking

March 6, 2023
occult, tabletop
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I don’t understand HeroClix. This is not the beginning of a knock against them, I mean it literally. I don’t know how they work, either as a hobby or an industry.

I have been aware of HeroClix for about as long as they have been around, but I’ve never actually played the game, nor known anyone who played it (at least, that I was aware of) or actively collected the figures. I have never so much as seen – let alone read – a rulebook or equivalent. This despite the fact that HeroClix has been in near-continuous production (under a couple of different owners) for over twenty years, so someone has to be buying and (presumably) playing with them.

HeroClix was first released by WizKids back in 2002, when it won a variety of gaming awards – which again, suggests that somebody was playing it. The system made use of the same “combat dial” that had originally been developed for Mage Knight, though I think by now that HeroClix is probably the place that most folks are like to have seen it, a system that, again, I have never seen in action, but that seems honestly pretty clever. Originally, HeroClix were, as the name might suggest, built around comic book superheroes from Marvel and, a little later, DC.

Topps bought WizKids in short order, and some time later the HeroClix line shut down. In 2009, NECA bought some of the IP rights that had previously belonged to WizKids, including HeroClix, and since then, NECA has been in charge of the line. Over the years, it has expanded well beyond just comic books to include various other properties from video games to Yu-Gi-Oh! to movies like Pacific Rim, which got a small string of (sadly not to scale) Clix. There was even a dedicated horror line (HorrorClix) with limited compatibility to the HeroClix line, and a Star Trek series that were all ships, rather than people.

Until somewhat recently, the only HeroClix I owned were a handful of Hellboy ones that I had acquired somewhere simply because they were Hellboy-related. I had no others, and no interest in any others. Then, in a little game shop I visited while on a trip, I found HeroClix, made to scale, of Giganto (the subterranean one, not the whale one) and Shuma-Gorath, which I bought for a song. My fate, as they say, was sealed.

Regular HeroClix, for those who have never seen them, are pre-painted miniatues of a similar scale to those which you might use for, say, D&D. Which means that each human-sized miniature is roughly an inch tall. Giganto and Shuma-Gorath being made to scale means that they are closer to a foot tall. Which is delightful. Shuma-Gorath’s central eye is even articulated!

More recently yet, I happened upon a large lot of HeroClix, which I got purely in order to secure the largest, as far as I know, HeroClix ever made – a similarly scale model of Fin Fang Foom, standing some two feet tall or thereabouts.

(There are, in fact, three variants of the Fin Fang Foom model. In ascending order of rarity, there is the green one I have, a green one wearing his classic purple shorts, and an orange one, harkening back to his coloration in his first appearance back in Strange Tales #89.)

This acquisition left me with several other HeroClix, as well, and among them I found a few that were delightfully weird. Some of these I recognized, such as Man-Thing, while others were (and remain) entirely new to me. But they are extremely strange and sometimes wonderful little miniatures of goofy robots, Stone Men from Saturn, and caterpillars in jars. Apparently, as a result of this experience, I have become a collector of HeroClix after all – albeit only, in keeping with my brand, the weirdo ones.

Stranger Than Fiction

February 9, 2023
cinema, freelancing, thoughts
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How much do you know about the chupacabra? Did you know that it might actually just be the alien from the 1995 movie Species? It seems that Madelyne Tolentino, the first eye witness to describe the chupacabra, had recently seen the film and may have just been describing the alien that she saw on the screen.*

It’s not even the first time something like that has happened, either. In 1972, two teenage boys in Victoria, British Columbia claimed to have seen a monster come up out of nearby Thetis Lake. The story was reported in newspapers, though the two teens eventually admitted to making it up, basing their monster description on the creature from The Beach Girls and the Monster (1965), which had recently shown on TV.

As a freelance writer, I write a lot of stuff. From corporate marketing and social media updates to true crime reporting to movie reviews and beyond. In that capacity, I often get hired to write about oddities of various kinds, from UFO sightings to cryptids to creepypastas and so on. In so doing, I learn frequently weird stuff, some of it true and some of it not. Some of it pretending to be true when it isn’t, some of it pretending not to be true when it is.

Some of what I stumble across makes it into whatever work I’m doing that day. Some of it is quickly forgotten. Some gets stored in the back of my brain and trotted out for something later, or repurposed into something like this blog post. Frankly, the world is filled with fascinating factoids and perhaps even more filled still with things that we believe even though they aren’t true.

Then again, many things are mixture of true and false. Take Project Sanguine, for instance. A real (and obviously extremely practical) government project originating during the Cold War, Project Sanguine would have turned literally 40% of Wisconsin into a giant radio antenna by embedding cables into the bedrock. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was never carried out. But I learned about Project Sanguine while researching Doveland, Wisconsin, an urban legend or creepypasta about a town that supposedly disappeared – and whose disappearance some people blamed on Project Sanguine.

Of course, for every Project Sanguine that turns out to be legit, there’s something that has been accepted as legit even though it’s just emphatically made-up. Take, for example, the story of the Brazilian village of Hoer Verde, which allegedly disappeared back in the 1920s. The story caught on enough to make its way into the 2019 video game Control – but its origin was almost certainly the 1983 Dean Koontz novel Phantoms.

(The Russian newspaper article that originally spread the Hoer Verde story also, and I am getting this secondhand via translation, so grain of salt, blames the Roanoke disappearance on “protoplasm coming from deep in the ocean and eating people,” which it does every thousand years. So maybe we should have been skeptical from the start, is all I’m saying.)

None of this is intended to make fun of the credulity of anyone, though. While we should all be careful about believing what we read on the internet, this is far from a phenomenon that is unique to our modern age. Take H. L. Mencken’s notorious fake history of the bathtub from 1917, which was circulated as true for decades.

Rather, I’m just posting this here because my work occasionally fills my head with lots of weird information, and I don’t always have the luxury of sharing it. (Such as the phenomenon of invisible fire and the low-tech solution NASA worked out to deal with it, or Taku-He, a South Dakota cryptid who is basically Bigfoot but wearing a fancy coat and top hat.) Today, things like Project Sanguine and that information about the chupacabra were buzzing around in my brain, and I thought my readers might also enjoy them. That’s all.

* Of course, reports of similar phenomena go back as far as 1975, where they were simply attributed to Satanic cults or to “the vampire of Moca,” named for the place they were first reported. But both the name and the general description of the chupacabra as we know it today date from 1995, the latter from Tolentino’s eye witness testimony, the former coined by comedian and radio DJ Silverio Perez.

“I dedicate this accursed prose to the damned.” – Junji Ito: Maniac on Netflix

January 22, 2023
cinema, we'll send him cheesy movies
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I have, as of this writing, seen the vast majority of the live action properties that have been adapted from the works of Junji Ito, but precious few of the animated ones. When it comes to live action films, virtually the only gaps in my viewing record are Scarecrow from 2001 and 2011’s Tomio, directed by Ito himself, whilst Junji Ito: Maniac is the first of the various anime adaptations I’ve seen, skipping over Gyo and the previous Junji Ito Collection, the latter because I have heard… not good things.

Was I excited about Junji Ito: Maniac, which actually has an incredibly unwieldy title that adds a whole extra clause that I won’t bother reproducing here? Cautiously. At least the key art that they had trotted out for the show seemed good and, honestly, if the series had ever lived up to any of that key art, we might have had something special on our hands here.

Unfortunately, some of the same people behind the Junji Ito Collection are responsible for this one, and Junji Ito: Maniac certainly gets off to a rocky start, beginning with one of the most inappropriate opening songs I’ve heard in a while. For one thing, the show makes the decision to adapt several of Ito’s more comic stories, including two featuring the morbid Soichi, as well as the first episode, “The Strange Hikizuri Siblings.” We can debate the effectiveness of Ito’s humorous tales, but for me they number among his weakest even while, in the context of his overall oeuvre, they serve a similar function to the “hot and cold showers” of the Grand Guignol. More to the point, “Hikizuri Siblings,” as it is presented in the anime, is handily the worst episode of the bunch.

In fact, it takes until episode 3, a faithful adaptation of “Hanging Balloons,” one of Ito’s most classically Ito stories, before the series really tackles anything that feels more that slight. Even here, however, we see one of the key difficulties of adapting Ito to the screen. The style of animation used for Junji Ito: Maniac is generic to the point of feeling almost sterile – an approach that could potentially work, if the style took a sharp turn during each episode’s reveals of horrific scenes, in order to deliver some extra punch. However, that’s mostly not the case here, and even Ito’s most disturbing panels are rendered inert as a result.

It isn’t until “Intruder,” in episode 5, that the series rises above “literal but uninspiring adaptation.” The original story behind “Intruder” was part of a series of linked pieces, and here it feels like it ends prematurely, but the music and production decisions here at least make “Intruder” feel like its own thing in ways that help to distinguish it from the manga while also working on their own merits. It’s something the show will pull off all-too-seldom, with one other notable example being “Unendurable Labyrinth” in episode 10.

More than perhaps anything else, Maniac is a case study in why adaptation is about more than merely reproducing things as directly as possible. The stories follow Ito’s manga almost exactly and, as such, many of them are spooky enough on their own merits, especially if you’ve never read the original story. (“Tomb Town” was a new one for me, for instance, and kept me involved the whole time as a result.) But they all still feel like pale reproductions of something much better, even when they’re at their best.

Indeed, this has generally been the case with adaptations of Ito’s work, which struggle to find ways to bring to a new medium what makes his pieces so effective and affecting in their original format. Pretty much the only Ito adaptations I have seen that really justify their own existence are the live-action Long Dream and Uzumaki from 2000, both of which were helmed by the same director, who managed to bring their own sense of indelible weirdness to the proceedings, capturing the feel of an Ito manga, rather than merely the text of one.

NoGL

January 18, 2023
freelancing, privateer press, tabletop
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What a quiet and uneventful year 2023 has been so far in the tabletop gaming space, huh folks?

I’m honestly not sure I’m equipped to even provide background here. Back near the beginning of January, a leaked document from Wizards of the Coast, owners (under Hasbro) of Dungeons & Dragons, revealed draconic (pun intended) planned changes to the Open Gaming License, or OGL, which the company first rolled out back in 2000 when the “world’s most popular roleplaying game” was still only on its 3rd edition.

In a nutshell, the OGL was a license for third-party companies to make and distribute stuff using certain select parts of D&D’s product line. It’s something of a weird area, because game mechanics are already not copyrightable, so the ability (or not) for people to do that even without the license is somewhat nebulous and always has been.

There has already been considerable writing, both before and after the leaked OGL draft, about whether or not the OGL was ever actually good for anything besides helping D&D to achieve and maintain market dominance, and I am neither a lawyer nor an industry insider, so there are certainly better voices than mine that you should be listening to in the midst of all this.

What’s relevant here is that this bombshell leak showed the hand of Wizards of the Coast in a way that seemingly destroyed a decade’s goodwill in one fell swoop. The fallout was immediate and considerable. So many people canceled their D&D Beyond subscriptions that it forced the company to do some damage control by attempting to backpedal the most egregious aspects of the proposed new OGL, which they did in a pair of statements released after a damning week of silence.

The damage had already been done, however. In the time between the initial leak and WotC’s statements, easily half-a-dozen of their largest competitors had already announced plans for OGLs of their own, and seemingly everyone in the tabletop hobby space had drawn battle lines in response to the proposed changes.

Those who have been following along for some time know that I’ve been working on and off in the tabletop field for some years now, primarily for Privateer Press. In that time, I’ve worked on several 5e-adjacent books for the new Iron Kingdoms: Requiem setting and system, all of which have made use of the OGL. In fact, I’m in the midst of a new project in that vein as I write this, which is partly why I’m just now getting to it. As such, it seems that I’m obliged to have at least some opinion on this.

I like 5e. It’s been easy to work with, and while it has its drawbacks, it’s fun to play. And I’m still extremely proud of the work that I and others have done on the three sets (and counting) of books for Iron Kingdoms: Requiem. I hope IK:R keeps going for a long, long time, in whatever ultimate form.

But I also recognize what WotC doesn’t seem to, which is that the OGL was, in actual fact, a boon to them more than anyone. Sure, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons may have achieved a similar market saturation back in the ’80s, without the aid of an OGL. (I’m not sure we’ve quite hit “D&D big wheel” levels in 5e just yet, honestly.) But it’s also true that both 3e and 5e would probably not have enjoyed their respective popularities had it not been for the OGL, and D&D’s current dominance of the field is likely as much a result of that as Hasbro’s considerable marketing budget.

Again, I am not a lawyer nor principally a game designer, but as near as I can tell, the biggest benefit that the OGL brought to the community was community itself – a way for lots of folks operating in disparate circles to speak the same language. It made things welcoming that might have previously been opaque, while also opening up the scene for countless newcomers.

I don’t know what the way forward is, really. The damage that WotC has done to their product and their brand is considerable – and maybe insurmountable. If that’s so, I hope that the folks who next pick up the reins are better stewards. What I will say is this: Over the last few years, I’ve gotten back into tabletop gaming in ways that I haven’t been in close to two decades, and in that time, some of my best experiences have come from games that were built only to do what they do, not to be the sort of one-size-fits-all solution that the OGL has often prompted.

Take, for example, the short campaign I played in the Alien RPG from Free League. Though built on their Year Zero engine, the game incorporated plenty of things that would really only work in a survival horror type setting – but in that setting, they worked like gangbusters.

What I’m saying is, whatever happens with D&D, it’s always been good that it isn’t the only game out there, and hopefully, if nothing else, this will remind us all to look to other pastures now and again.

This is the End

December 30, 2022
appearances, cinema, freelancing, how to see ghosts, lists, privateer press, reading materials, secret identity, tabletop, year in review
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As I write this, we are less than two days away from the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023. I’m not going to pretend that 2022 has been an especially good or easy year for… well, anyone, really. Or that 2023 looks inclined to change that trajectory overmuch. But some big things happened for me this year, most of them in the last couple of months.

Earlier in the year, the third set of books for the Iron Kingdoms: Requiem 5e RPG setting hit Kickstarter. As was the case in the previous two installments, I wrote a huge amount for these books, including some very fun stuff that I’m really looking forward to people getting to see. And, as I write this, I’m working on some future stuff in the IK setting, as well.

As usual, I wrote a lot of movie reviews (mostly for older movies getting released onto Blu-ray) and attended Panic Fest back in April, covering it for The Pitch. I also became the movies editor for Exploits, an Unwinnable publication, and acquired some fun essays on movies like The Monster Club, Night of the Devils, Anna and the Apocalypse, The Ghosts of Hanley House, and more. In fact, I kicked off my tenure by immediately making them regret putting me on staff, acquiring an essay from Perry Ruhland on Mermaid in a Manhole. And I “helped” (by not actually contributing much, ultimately) with the movie programming for the NecronomiCon in Providence, even though I then wasn’t actually able to attend due to various circumstances beyond my control.

I also continued to write three regular columns (two monthlies and one quarterly) and added another monthly, while I was at it. So, currently, I write about board games at Unwinnable, folk horror and old anthology TV shows at Signal Horizon, and whatever tickles my fancy, pretty much, at Weird Horror. (You can read my latest, on Man-Thing and Swamp Thing and the weird history of muck monsters, here.)

I continued to co-host the Horror Pod Class with Tyler Unsell of Signal Horizon and, more to the point, we switched over from just doing a standard talking heads podcast to actually hosting the movies we discuss and then recording live at the Stray Cat Film Center. We kicked that off back in March with 976-Evil, and since then we’ve shown Someone’s Watching Me!, Doctor Mordrid, The Mask (not the Jim Carrey one), Night of the Creeps, Uzumaki, Ghostwatch, Yellowbrickroad, and we sadly had to cancel Bloody New Year due to inclement weather. We’ll be kicking off the first part of our 2023 season with The Undying Monster on January 26, so if you’re local, come join us at the Stray Cat for one of my favorite werewolf (?) movies from the ’40s!

Over the course of 2022, I read 42 books, the lion’s share of which were graphic novels. That’s… far from ideal, but here we are. Of those, some notable titles include Jonathan Raab’s The Haunting of Camp Winter Falcon, Victoria Dalpe’s collection Les Femmes Grotesques, Abby Howard’s 2020 graphic novel The Crossroads at Midnight, all of the Orochi volumes that Viz has put out so far, and John Dickson Carr’s 1932 novel The Corpse in the Waxworks.

I also watched an impressive 345 movies so far in the year, though that number may increase by, like, one or two before the year is out. That’s also perilously close to an average of a movie a day, a feat only accomplished by a few days in which I watched several movies in 24 hours, such as during Panic Fest and my annual attendance of Nerdoween. At a glance, that appears to be the most I’ve watched in a single year since I started keeping a journal, which I guess is an accomplishment.

Of those, more than 265 were first-time watches for me, easily demolishing my goal of keeping to at least half “new-to-me” movies each year. Of those, some of my favorites that didn’t come out this year were The Medusa Touch (1978), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), The Glass Key (1942), The Psychic (1977), Jigsaw (1962), War of the Gargantuas (1966), The Flying Phantom Ship (1969), and Mute Witness (1995). You can see the rest of the list over here. By far the best new-to-me movie that I saw in 2022, however, was The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre (1964), one of my favorite new discoveries in a long, long time.

As for movies that came out in 2022, I saw a surprising number of those, as well. Around 35, in fact. We’ll be discussing our favorites on the Horror Pod Class in January, so I won’t do a top 5 or anything, but despite a lot of perfectly good movies this year, very few of the year’s new releases (that I saw) were anything that I fell in love with. There was no Malignant this year, is what I’m saying.

So, that’s all the (substantial, as it turns out) bookkeeping stuff taken care of. With all that going on, it is perhaps unsurprising that I didn’t publish a lot of new fiction in 2022, and of the five or so stories I did put out, two are original to my newest collection. And maybe that’s the biggest news, at least from a professional standpoint: How to See Ghosts & Other Figments, my third collection from Word Horde and my fourth overall, came out in October, though at the time I was a little distracted.

You see, in October we also bought a new house! And I’ve been a little distracted ever since then because, to be frank, a lot has gone wrong since we moved in. We still love the house, though! It just seems that the people who sold it to us don’t particularly love us. (And we’re not terribly fond of them, at this point.)

Those have been the two biggest changes in a year filled with personal milestones – my twentieth wedding anniversary was also earlier this year, for example. As I said, 2023 promises to be filled with new challenges along with a bunch of the same old challenges and honestly, the world is probably just going to be on fire for the foreseeable future. But I’m hopeful that I can achieve some more milestones, too. My goals for 2023 include more reading, publishing more stories, and hopefully some exciting surprises for my readers. Plus, of course, more of the same, too.

Scary Ghost Stories

December 12, 2022
guignol, how to see ghosts, monsters from the vault, painted monsters, reading materials, revenge of monsters
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As you may have noticed, things have been a bit quiet on my end. This is not so much due to not being busy as the exact opposite, but much of what has kept me occupied is the new house and the various trials and tribulations that come along with it. For the most part, things have been good, though a number of expensive problems have cropped up that are often part and parcel of new home ownership, especially for a house as old as this one.

That said, it isn’t as if other things haven’t been going on behind the scenes, with the most notable being the actual release of How to See Ghosts & Other Figments. My fourth full-length collection of short stories, and my third from Word Horde, How to See Ghosts collects everything from some of my most recent pieces to oddities from the earliest days of my writing career, some of them never seen before. I think they all hold together well, and produce a strong collection that takes some different risks than previous things I’ve done. Hopefully, you’ll agree.

I didn’t just come here to say “buy my book,” though. (You should, however. Buy my book, that is. Please do.) I wanted to remind you that, for most of my readers, the holidays are coming up. And most people buy and receive gifts during the holidays. And books make great gifts, whether they’re mine or someone else’s. Notably, why not buy something from Word Horde, who are not only my most frequent publisher but also now an actual brick-and-mortar store filled with all kinds of cool stuff perfect for the weirdo on your list.

Aside from How to See Ghosts, not to mention my two previous collections, if you don’t already have those, they’ve got recent novels by folks like S. L. Edwards and Nicole Cushing, the latest collections from Scott Nicolay and John Langan, and anthologies galore! If you have readers on your list who don’t like scary stories as much – or movie lovers who do – my two books on vintage horror films from Innsmouth Free Press are great stocking stuffers! Monsters from the Vault and its inevitable sequel are both fun, affordable, and compact. Perfect for the monster kid on your list.

And speaking, as I was, about Scott Nicolay, it wouldn’t be a proper list of book recommendations from me if I didn’t mention his continuing work translating the weird fiction of Jean Ray. Buy any of the Jean Ray titles from Wakefield Press to get an idea of the magnificent work he’s doing to bring one of the best writers of the classic weird tale to Anglophone readers like myself. They’re some of my most immediate must-buy books every time a new one is released.

After all, the holiday season is a time for ghost stories. Always has been. The days are short, the nights are long, and it’s good to huddle up and remember why we once feared the dark. If you want my own most recent take on the classic Christmas ghost story, you can find it in How to See Ghosts or listen to it at Pseudopod. A couple of my stories also made it onto Ellen Datlow’s longlist for the Best Horror of the Year this year, including one that’s in How to See Ghosts and another that you can read online at Nightmare magazine.

I’ll be back with more, probably before the end of the year and certainly in 2023. Until then, though, stay warm and read something spooky…

Station Identification

November 21, 2022
news, reading materials
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Anyone who knows me at all knows that one of my favorite movies of all time is John Carpenter’s 1982 classic The Thing. And I’m far from the only one. Someone I met years ago and have worked closely with ever since is probably an even bigger fan of The Thing than I am.

Steve Scearce has a copy of the hat MacReady wore in The Thing. He’s practically got the movie memorized, beat for beat. One of my great pleasures was taking him out to see it in 35mm when it was making the rounds a few years back. Our shared love of the Antarctic-set creature feature is one of the things we bonded over early on, and I’ve worked with him, as I mentioned, for years now on countless freelance projects.

One project that I did not work on is his podcast, Station 151. On that, he collaborated with his brother, Andy, and with Bear Weiter, another friend I’ve known and worked with for years. To suggest that Station 151 is anything but a labor of love, inspired heavily by Steve’s affection for The Thing, would be to engage in dishonesty. But at the same time, to imply that it was nothing more than a pastiche of that excellent film would also be to do the project a disservice.

At this time, I’ve only heard parts of the podcast’s first season, which is currently on Kickstarter until December 9. But I’ve been privy to some of the behind-the-scenes work that has gone into it, and I know that this is a project that everyone involved has poured their hearts and souls into. So, if you like weird, sci-fi tinged audio drama set in the frigid and unforgiving expanse of Antarctica (and really, who doesn’t) consider throwing a few coins into their hat to help keep the lights on at Station 151.

At least check out the Kickstarter, while you’re here. You won’t be sorry you did.

Gates of the Manor

November 8, 2022
news, secret identity
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Over the month of October I bought a house. It wasn’t something that was on my to-do list, at least not for another year or so, and I definitely wasn’t planning on doing it during what is historically one of my busiest months. But we accidentally found a house and fell in love and now we live here, for the last five days or so.

Buying a house, selling our old house, and moving all within a few weeks has been hectic, to say the least. This has been complicated by the fact that the house we bought is more than a hundred years old, although the interior has been entirely refurbished, and it brings with it some… idiosyncrasies, we’ll say. Which have been expensive, exhausting, time-consuming, and stressful – none of which makes the house itself any less delightful, which it absolutely is.

There’s still so much to do, both fun and not-so-fun. There are boxes everywhere, of course, and endless amounts of work to be done. There are expenses and problems that can feel frankly overwhelming at times. And there’s the future to look toward – our lot is huge and it’s going to be a dream to decorate for Halloween next year! In some ways, I am happy that we didn’t get it in time to have Halloween here this year. It would have been too much but also so tempting.

The house itself is special to me. My dentist’s office is right down the street, and every time I have driven by I have admired the property, with its long stone wall out front. The idea that I live here now is a dream come true, and it’ll be worth an awful lot of hardship and sacrifice – which is good, because a lot is coming, and much is already here.

For the most part, though, this has been a happy, exhausting flurry. It’s what I’ve been alluding to for most of the past month, and it has impacted almost everything I’ve done (or not done) for some time, and will continue to do so for the future. Not much of that will likely affect you, dear reader, but it’s a momentous occasion for me and deserves to be properly recorded for posterity. Also, if you’re someone who already has my address, I have a new one now, so if I don’t think to update it, ask before you send me anything.