Flickering Shadows

The latest issue of The Dark magazine just went live the other day, and with it, my story “The Hurrah (aka Corpse Scene).” That may not sound much like one of my titles, but it’s definitely one of my stories, and one that I’m pretty proud of. Over on Facebook, Scott Nicolay said, “I don’t know another author who can make a story about a slasher film as simply and elegantly…poignant…as Orrin Grey does here.” While the first review of the new issue at SFRevu called it a “Good story which just comes together perfectly.”

It’s also the first time one of my new stories was available to read online in a long time. The story follows the daughter of an actress who made her debut–and, unfortunately, also her swan song–in a low-budget slasher flick. Think the 2015 film The Final Girls, but veering off in a very different direction.

When I was a younger horror movie nerd, I didn’t think I liked slasher movies much. It took the insights of friends and colleagues like Adam Cesare, Trevor Henderson, and Stephen Graham Jones for me to get to the place where I am today, where I could even write a story like “The Hurrah (aka Corpse Scene).”

This isn’t the only story I’ve got coming out that deals with movies and, specifically, the act of watching them. My “haunted” movie theatre story “The Granfalloon” is being reprinted in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year Volume 10 later this month! (You can preorder it right now!) “The Granfalloon” first appeared in Darker Companions late last year, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to see it showing back up in the TOC of The Best Horror of the Year!