Countdown to Halloween 2015: Painted Monsters

Lo, I come stumbling forth from my crypt to inform you that I am once again participating in the Countdown to Halloween this year, and while I’m off to something of a late start, I plan to keep the ball rolling a little more reliably than I have in past years. To that end, I have a plan.

As you may have noticed, Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts was just released on an unsuspecting populace, and I’ll be spending the whole month promoting it in a hopefully-not-too-annoying way. While other authors have paired their stories with soundtracks or cocktail recipes, my own sphere of expertise and the theme of my collection suggest some other possibilities, so for the remainder of the month I’ll be discussing each of the thirteen stories in Painted Monsters and suggesting movies that go well with that story.

Painted Monsters was conceived as a follow-up to my previous collection, certainly, but also as a sort of crash course in the history of horror cinema, as told through stories inspired by movies from across the decades. From silent films to found footage, there’s hopefully a little something for every horror or weird fiction fan in Painted Monsters. I’ll be suggesting movies both obvious and not-so-obvious that either influenced the stories or that simply pair well with them. To get you started, the title and epigraph of the collection come from the 1968 Peter Bogdanovich film Targets, which provides a pretty succinct dissertation on the way that horror cinema was changing from before the 1960s to after. It’s also a good place to begin your viewing.

If you pre-ordered your copy of Painted Monsters direct from Word Horde HQ it should be shipping out as we speak, so you’ll have it in your hands directly. Once you do, follow along as I take you through each story in turn, and we also watch some horror movies–some classic, some forgotten, some ridiculous, some sublime–together!