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Obsolescence Redux

May 1, 2024
cinema, freelancing, mignola, on writing, thoughts
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Last night – on Walpurgisnacht, of all nights – an article from last month began making the rounds suggesting that “AI” had been used to generate preproduction art for the upcoming Hellboy movie. This took Hellboy creator Mike Mignola by surprise and by this morning the Mignolas had spoken with the studio and the film’s director, Brian Taylor, had already taken to the website formerly known as Twitter to clarify that there is “exactly *ZERO* AI used” in the film.

Which is a relief for Hellboy fans and a cautionary tale for all of us not to get too het up about news too quickly. BUT it doesn’t really address the larger problem which is that the guy (Jonathan Yunger, President of Millenium Films) still probably did say the thing about using “AI” to create preproduction art, he was just referring to a different movie.

I have been taken to task in the past for my unflinching stance against what is commonly called “AI art.” I have heard all of the usual claims that it is “harmless,” that it is “inevitable,” and so on. And many of the arguments that I have heard were made by other creatives, in good faith, simply coming from places of misunderstanding.

So, let me be clear: My stance is that so-called “AI” has no place in any creative endeavor and “AI” art, writing, music, etc. cannot ever be ethically used in a commercial venture in its current form. The reasons for this range from the ethical to the personal, but the ethical reasons alone are more than enough.

For starters, though, we need to understand what we’re talking about. The people pushing this technology scored a major PR coup when they were able to get everyone to adopt “AI” as the preferred terminology, which has muddied the waters of what the actual threats are here, and what is at stake.

So-called “AI art” (or writing, or music, etc.) has no actual “intelligence” in it. It is more accurately called “procedurally generated,” which is what I’ll mostly be calling it for the rest of this post. Such procedurally generated images or text or songs are made using what essentially amounts to the same algorithm that recommends you movies on Netflix or decides what posts and ads you’ll see on Facebook, just operating at a much larger scale.

It does not know things, and it cannot find them out. It takes datasets and compares them to the sorts of datasets that are usually near them across a staggeringly large number of examples, and then it churns out a new dataset using that information. Nothing more. There are no robot overlords coming from this to wipe us out, Terminator-style. There are simply the same overlords we’ve always had – greedy corporations wanting to take more from us and give us less.

Nor is the problem with these procedurally generated products the same problem as with automation in general. Automation (self-checkout stations replacing human checkers at the grocery store, say) has its own concerns, but they are different than the concerns attendant to “AI art.” We are a long way from automation being something that artists need to worry about just yet and, before we get there, we still have these other problems to address.

The major ethical concerns relating to procedurally generated art, writing, music, what-have-you as I understand them are threefold:

1. “AI art” is theft. Pure and simple. Whether we’re talking about Midjourney or ChapGPT or whatever, these “large learning models” as they are sometimes called have to be “trained” on existing art (or writing, or whatever). And that “training” is actually just copying. It is reproducing – in whole or in part – an image or some text or a piece of music without paying for the rights to do so. And that’s the thing. When an artist creates a piece of art, they own that piece of art (unless they are doing it work-for-hire under contract, in which case the person who hired them owns it). It can thereafter only be used commercially if the artist sells the rights for that use, but they continue to own the drawing (or whatever) itself. When these “large learning models” are “trained” on a piece of existing artwork, they are copying that artwork and re-using it in a way that they have not acquired the rights for. And this is a commercial breach, even if you’re just using MidJourney or whatever to make silly pictures to share on Facebook, because these “large learning models” are, themselves, money making ventures, even without the resulting product being used in an additional commercial capacity. Therefore, “AI art” is labor theft, pure and simple, and can never be ethically used unless a “large learning model” was developed that was “trained” solely on art that was properly licensed for that purpose.

2. “AI art” is environmentally catastrophic. While the actual use of something like ChatGPT to generate a page of text takes relatively little energy, like the various blockchain scams that came before it (indeed, the playbook of “AI art” matches the hype around NFTs nearly exactly), “training” these “large learning models” consumes absolutely mind-boggling quantities of water and electricity. And while there are lots of things that consume large sums of water and electricity, one must ask if the end result is worth the cost and, in this case, it absolutely is not.

3. “AI art” is a tool of labor exploitation. I said earlier that artists, writers, etc. were a long way from needing to worry about being automated out of existence. And that’s true. But they’re already being exploited, and these “large learning models” are already making it worse. “I was able to make 3000 creature designs in an hour,” Yunger said in that article linked above. Artists, designers, writers, etc. are already underpaid and overworked and if procedurally generated assets are able to be used, they will be (and already are) expected to work faster and for less, with the output of a “large learning model” used as justification.

Those are the primary ethical concerns surrounding procedurally generated art, writing, etc. But there’s still a personal reason why I will never truck with “AI art” or what-have-you, one that would not change even if all of those ethical considerations went away.

Sadly, seemingly lost to the internet ether is a pithy reply on social media which sums it up nicely. “Why would I bother to read something that nobody could be bothered to write,” it says, in essence. And that’s what it ultimately boils down to.

Art – whether it be writing, music, film, or visual arts of other kinds – is not a commodity. It should not be something we merely consume or use. We come to it for meaning, for inspiration, for connection, for transcendance, even just for entertainment, and all of those things require that it be a two-way street running between people; between writer and reader, musician and listener, artist and viewer.

Our lives are fleeting and our time here precious. We already have to waste too much of it for various reasons. I have no desire to waste any of it “consuming” art that nobody wanted to actually create.

(From “Hellboy: The Crooked Man,” art by Richard Corben.)

The Cat Creeps Out of the Bag

April 26, 2024
appearances, cinema, glowing in the dark, news, on writing
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Tonight, Tyler Unsell and I will be at the Stray Cat Film Center hosting a FREE screening of the 1939 Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard version of The Cat and the Canary. The show starts at 7pm and will be followed, as always, by our usual semi-academic discussion where we’ll talk about horror comedy, old dark house pictures, and the (possibly tenuous) link between this film and Scooby-Doo, all part of our spring programming linked with Tyler’s Drinkaway Camp 2 project, which is kicking off in just a few days’ time!

Partially in preparation for tonight’s show and partially just because I got the Blu-ray and was excited, I watched the new Eureka Blu of Paul Leni’s original Cat and the Canary from 1927 and wrote about it for Signal Horizon. Technically, I had seen the film once before, on the world’s shittiest transfer, but seeing it fully restored like this it is possibly my new favorite silent film of all time.

If you enjoy me writing and jabbering about movies as I do in that review and at these Horror Pod Class shows at the Stray Cat, you’ll be pleased to learn that my next book is actually going to be a collection of some of the best of my writing on horror films collected from across the last decade.

Due out this October from Word Horde, Glowing in the Dark will collect essays and reviews spanning dozens of movies and across a variety of different eras and topics, albeit all of them contained within the hazy bounds of “horror cinema.” From my now-classic 2011 essay on cosmic horror in John Carpenter’s “Apocalypse Trilogy” to a contemporary review for James Wan’s 2021 film Malignant, I cover a lot of ground in this book, and I really hope that readers will love it.

Many of these essays and reviews first appeared online or in print in places like Unwinnable, Signal Horizon, Weird Horror, Clarkesworld, Nightmare, and this very blog, to name a few. I cover topics from silent films to the present day, as well as films from Japan, Italy, Mexico, Spain, and others. From the use of insects in the films of Guillermo del Toro to the unlikely (and unexplored) futurism of Universal’s early Mummy sequels from the 1940s, there’s a little bit of everything in these pages.

There are also two entirely new pieces in the book, just in case you’re the kind of weirdo who has somehow read everything I’ve written on the subject up to this point. One is an obligatory list of movie recommendations while another tackles a subject that is near and dear to my heart: the link between midnight spook shows and the gimmick films of William Castle.

To the surprise of no one, you’ll be hearing a lot more about Glowing in the Dark as we get closer to publication, including a cover reveal in the coming weeks or months. However, the official announcement dropped last night, so I figured it was high time to make it official on here, as well.

“It is as if the entire film is set in a graveyard in the middle of the night.”

March 18, 2024
how to see ghosts, news, on writing, reading materials
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That quote is from Troy Howarth who was, at the time, writing about Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby … Kill! for his intimidating coffee table tome The Haunted World of Mario Bava. The quote, alas, probably can’t be as freely applied to my story “Marcella,” which is inspired more by the lesbian vampire films of the late-era Hammer studios than by the delightfully lurid continental films that I was supposed to be sampling from when I wrote a story for Jonathan Raab’s Euroschlock Nightmares, which is now available for preorder from Muzzleland Press.

Here’s the thing, though: It’s a quote that I hope could be applied to some of my other stories, and a quote that could certainly be applied to some of my favorite movies and stories, both old and new. And, knowing Jonathan as I do, I can pretty much guarantee you that it’s a quote that could easily be applied to some of the other stories in Euroschlock Nightmares, even if my story in particular is more overgrown gardens and Rococo paintings, decadent manses and towns with burgomasters.

As so many of us are, I’m a busy person, and I don’t write (or publish) as much fiction as I used to, though the dearth there is at least somewhat ameliorated (again, I hope) by an abundance of nonfiction of various stripes. But I do still love a good scary story, and I still write them whenver I can. And I’m happy whenever one of my tales finds its way into print. While “Marcella” may be one of the first to do so in 2024, it won’t be the last, and I’m hoping to have some more specific news on that front very soon.

I thought that “Marcella” was going to be the first of my stories to see print this year, but I had forgotten a small thing – literally, in this case. As part of their recurring Flash on the Borderlands series, Pseudopod recently republished one of my (very) short pieces.

“Masks” originally appeared in an issue of Forbidden Futures back in 2018, where it was written to accompany an illustration of monstrous faces by Mike Dubisch. It was later reprinted in my most recent collection, How to See Ghosts & Other Figments. Like a lot of my stories, it sits at least somewhat in the shadow of a faded version of old Hollywood, although in this case that shadow is faded quite a lot indeed.

Besides the illustration it was written to accompany, the story had as its inspiration a number of images of masks made by photographer William Mortensen, some of them for old movies such as the 1928 Lon Chaney/Tod Browning joint West of Zanzibar. Astute readers may recognize Mortensen as, among other things, the model for my story “Mortensen’s Muse,” which appeared in Ellen Datlow’s Children of Lovecraft, behind a Mike Mignola cover.

Neither of these stories necessarily feel like they take place entirely in a graveyard at night, but I hope they give you a pleasant sort of frisson nonetheless. And don’t worry, there’ll be something more graveyard-y coming down the pike sooner or later. This is me, after all. There’s bound to be.

Speaker for the Dead

January 29, 2024
fungus of terror, on writing, reading materials
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Like most of the rest of the horror community, it would seem, I learned last night that Brian Lumley passed away earlier this month at the age of 86. Lumley’s is a name that never quite attained the same sheen as certain other writers who were his predecessors or contemporaries, but he is nonetheless one who was an important stepping stone for many of us, myself included.

My first exposure to Lumley’s work came from spotting a paperback copy of Necroscope in what was probably a Waldenbooks back in the early ’90s. Of course, it wasn’t the book itself, nor even its evocative title, which drew me in. It was the unforgettable cover art by Bob Eggleton, as inextricably associated with Necroscope as the illustrations of Stephen Gammell are with Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

That first cover, which featured a vampiric skull against a dark background, grabbed me immediately, as it had so many readers before and would so many after – so much so that it was carried on, in variation, throughout the entirety of the series, which spanned more than a dozen books.

I’m not sure how many of the Necroscope books I actually read, but it certainly wasn’t all of them. Reading that first one at a formative age, though, had a big impact on me. Here was pulp horror in a vein I had, at that time, rarely encountered, told with scope and ambition to spare, and crammed with big (and sometimes goofy) ideas.

Lumley’s conception of vampires also remains among my favorites in literature, having more in common with the alien from John Carpenter’s The Thing than with Bela Lugosi, though there’s more than a bit of Lugosi’s Count in there, too.

Over the years, I also read a few of Lumley’s other novels but – and this says more about me than it does about his writing – it was usually his short stories that I gravitated to more, and I probably read all of those that were in print at the time. When I heard about his passing, I pulled one of the five or so short story collections of his that I own down from the shelf, and read a random sampling, in this case, “The Man Who Photographed Beardsley,” which is not exactly a standout.

Lumley did have many standout stories, though. He wasn’t one of the best writers we’ve ever had. His stories were pulp throwbacks through and through but, like the best of the pulp writers, they were usually entertaining, quick to read, and full of ideas, even when the execution was sometimes lacking. And even then, it wasn’t always. Lumley could do atmosphere, when he set his mind to it, and he could describe monsters with the best of them.

He was also important to my development as I tried to feel forward what it was that I wanted to achieve with my own writing. He was one of the first I read to put into words the distinction between horror meant strictly to horrify, and horror meant to entertain. What he calls, in his introduction to the 1993 release of Fruiting Bodies & Other Fungi, “that old black magic, that frisson, that shudder of delight.” Someone who unabashedly puts entertainment as his primary objective when writing. All this, before I had ever encountered the term M.R. James liked to employ, “pleasing terror.”

So, what stories do I recommend, in memory of Lumley’s raconteur spirit? “Fruiting Bodies” is certainly one of his best, and as you might be able to guess from the title, it’s about a subject that is particularly near and dear to my heart. It also won the British Fantasy Award in 1989, so it’s not like you have to take my word for it.

“The Thin People” is another one from that same volume that shows what Lumley was capable of when he was working to his best effect. There are others, but that’s the book I have here next to me as I type this.

Ultimately, Lumley wasn’t my favorite author. Probably not even when I first discovered him, certainly not by the end. But he was an important step in my development, as a reader and a writer, and one that I still return to time and again for some wonderful comfort reading. So, it seems only fair to mark his passing.

Tales for Those Who Can’t Sleep

January 19, 2024
on writing, reading materials, thoughts, year in review
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I watch a lot of movies [brief pause for murmurs of shock to subside] and I read a lot, but I don’t actually read a lot of novels. Last year, I made a conscious effort to read more of them, and largely succeeded, reading some 16 or so novels in 2023, including Silver Nitrate, Clown in a Cornfield 2, Project Vampire Killer, The City of Unspeakable Fear, Scarewaves, Escape from Grimstone Manor, and Deephaven, among others.

Mostly, though, when it comes to reading prose fiction, I prefer to read the same thing I prefer to write: short stories. I’m less likely to consume short stories in other mediums, however. I watch movies but rarely watch short films, for example. That said, in the early weeks of 2024, I have been surrounding myself with some top-notch short form horror in other mediums, without even really meaning to.

Three years ago, I started doing a column called Something Weird on TV over at Signal Horizon. The idea was that I would watch an entire horror TV series from start to finish, and cover it episode-by-episode over the course of a year. I began the series with Friday the 13th then moved on to Tales from the Darkside and Monsters.

When discussing what to do for a fourth year of the column with my editor, I wanted to go in a different direction, so I proposed doing more than one series in the course of the year, and tackling some titles from overseas, beginning with the classic Spanish anthology series Tales to Keep You Awake.

I’d never actually seen Tales to Keep You Awake before, but I picked up the Blu-ray when Severin released it, because I like oddities, and I’m particularly infatuated with ’60s horror and, perhaps especially, black-and-white ’60s TV horror. And so far, Tales to Keep You Awake has been an absolute pleasure to watch. It will keep us busy for the first half of the year, and then I’ve got some other international surprises in store.

Around the same time that I started watching Tales to Keep You Awake, I also happened to dig into the early horror comics of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. In large part, this involved reading the Horror! volume of the Simon & Kirby Library, but I also came across Kirby’s 1971 single-issue magazine Spirit World, which features some similar material and also some of my favorite art that Kirby has ever done.

As is the case with much of the best horror from the ’60s, these tales are often presented as either true or “could be” true, and told directly to the audience from the POV of a learned individual of some sort – providing a nice echo of the introductions to the episodes of Tales to Keep You Awake done by Narciso Ibanez Serrador, themselves a conscious nod to similar introductions by Alfred Hitchcock and Rod Serling.

The results have been invigorating and have simply reinforced my conviction to read more short fiction in 2024. My resolution (as it were) last year was to read more novels and nonfiction books, at least one per month. I’m still planning to do that in 2024, as well, but I’m also making it a point to read more short stories, without necessarily feeling like I have to read the entire book in which they are contained, with a goal of one short story per week in 2024.

Hopefully, all these tales will also prove to be beneficial to my own writing. Even if they’re not, though, they’re bound to be good for the soul.

Year Coming Down

December 25, 2023
cinema, freelancing, how to see ghosts, lists, news, on writing, privateer press, thoughts, year in review
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Writing can be a difficult, lonely, and discouraging path, and I’ve rarely felt any of that more keenly than I did this year. The fragmentation of social media and a long stretch of not going to conventions has left me feeling more cut off from my writerly peers than at perhaps any other time since I started publishing, and there are plenty of other things in the world to feel depressed about, both directly related to writing and otherwise.

I don’t know if it’s the aforementioned isolation from social media or an accurate reflection of the state of the industry, but it feels like there have been fewer good publishing opportunities, and I’ve watched a lot of presses and publications struggle or shut their doors entirely over the past year.

My fourth short story collection, How to See Ghosts & Other Figments, came out just over a year ago and seems to have made not so much as a ripple. This is not a call for pity, just a reality of the job. Some books do well, some don’t. Some catch on right away, others take time to find their audience. There are a lot of reasons why How to See Ghosts may not be performing as well as my previous collections – and it may be that it just seems to not be from where I am sitting, and time will prove otherwise.

Though I ultimately sold a few other stories that have yet to see the light of day, I only actually published two new ones in 2023. “The God of the Overpass” in the June issue of The Dark magazine, and “The Doom That Came to Wyrock” in Mystery, Murder, Madness, Mythos from PS Publishing.

As has generally been the case lately, a lot more of my time and energy went into nonfiction and freelance projects. As I have done for every expansion since the launch of Iron Kingdoms: Requiem, I worked on the latest stuff for that game from Privateer Press, and also wrote four regular columns and extensive nonfiction pieces on everything from Halloween haunted houses to Marvel’s Man-Thing to the problem with the Warrens.

Besides all of that, I also continued to host monthly screenings at the Stray Cat Film Center with Tyler Unsell as part of the Horror Pod Class, where we show free horror movies and then discuss how they might be used in a classroom – or just vaguely talk about them, perhaps more accurately. And this was my first full year as movies editor at Exploits (I started in May of 2022), where I was able to acquire some great essays covering films like Mad Love, Hercules in the Haunted World, Freaks, and Dark Night of the Scarecrow, to name just a few.

Probably the biggest news is that I have a new book coming next year, though I don’t have a release date for it pinned down just yet and can’t give out any details. It’s not another short story collection, and it’s not a novel. What is it? You’ll just have to wait to find out, unfortunately, but I hope you’ll all enjoy it.

None of which is to suggest that there has not been some very good stuff that has happened to me, writing-wise, this year. For starters, I continued to freelance full time, and anyone who has ever tried such a feat knows that every year you manage to keep doing that is a victory.

The two biggest events in my year, where my work was concerned, were probably things that only tangentially tied into my own writing. One was seeing a monster that I had designed turned into a tabletop miniature for the first time, as part of the new Warmachine Mk 4 from Privateer Press. The other was the surprise of seeing my own name in the front matter of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s latest book, Silver Nitrate, which she very kindly dedicated to me – one of the most touching gestures I have ever been on the receiving end of. I also did some work putting together a “film festival” for the official Silver Nitrate book club kit.

And, of course, lots of things happen in a year besides just work. This was also our first full year in the new house, which has been a year filled of joys as well as frustrations. It has required a lot of changes to my lifestyle, as the house simply demands more work than the places I have lived before, but it has been much more pleasure than pain, with beautiful flowers in the springtime, and fallen leaves in autumn. Most importantly, this place just feels like home in a way that no place else ever really has.

As has been my habit for some time now, I kept a tally of the books I read and movies I watched in 2023. I also made it a point to try to read more novels and nonfiction books than I had been getting through in recent years, setting myself a goal of at least one per month. I’m happy to say that I managed it, and read around 65 books this year of various kinds.

Going into 2024, I’m hoping to keep up a similar reading pace, but I’m setting myself a new goal: One short story per week, regardless of what else I’m reading. The parameters are simple enough. I have to read a short prose story each week, and I can’t bank them. Meaning that if I read eight short stories in one week, I still have to read one the following week. We’ll see how this affects my overall book totals by the end of next year, but I think it will be good for me and, hopefully, good for my writing overall.

A surprising number of the books I read in 2023 actually also came out this year, and among those were several favorites, including the aforementioned Silver Nitrate, Jonathan Raab’s Project Vampire Killer, Trevor Henderson’s mid-grade debut Scarewaves, and Deephaven by Ethan M. Aldridge. As in previous years, many of the books I read were graphic novels and collected manga, with high points including the long-awaited English-language release of Junji Ito’s Mimi’s Tales of Terror and a deluxe edition of Kazuo Umezo’s Cat-Eyed Boy.

Probably my favorite book of 2023, though, is one that was originally published in 1943. City of Unspeakable Fear is the latest in an ongoing collaboration between Wakefield Press and Scott Nicolay to translate the many weird tales of Jean Ray into English, often for the first time. As has been the case with virtually every prior volume in the series, it is a gift to those of us who love a classic weird tale, and as Ray’s “other” novel besides Malpertuis, it is particularly welcome.

As for movies, at the time of this writing the year is not quite over, but so far I have watched 301 movies total in 2023, 219 of them for the first time. This keeps me well within my goal of having half or more of the movies I watch in a year be first-time watches, and puts me (unsurprisingly, given other factors) at slightly fewer movies than I watched in 2022.

Of those movies, some 32 were released this year. That’s a small proportion of my overall total, but a decently high number for me in recent years. Of those, my favorite was The Primevals, a flick that, unfortunately, most people have not gotten a chance to see. Other high points include Dark Harvest, A Haunting in Venice, A Corpse for Christmas, Megalomaniac, and Talk to Me.

When it comes to new-to-me movies that were released in years past, this year had no standout so obvious as some previous years, though I saw plenty of solid films. Though there was no equivalent of 2022’s instant favorite The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre (1964), the top of the heap was probably the old 1958 BBC production of Quatermass and the Pit, with The Sea Hawk (1940), Monster of the Opera (1960), The Milpitas Monster (1976), Warlords of Atlantis (1978), and The Dunwich Horror & Others (2007) all hanging around for honorable mentions.

As I did last year, I’m working on a Letterboxd list of my 23 (this time) favorite new discoveries of 2023, though the final list is still a work in progress at the moment.

In all, I was feeling a bit down when I started this post, and I’m feeling better as I come to the end of it. Hopefully that says something about the kind of year it’s been, and bodes well for the year that is on its way.

How to See Ghosts (or Surely Bring Them To You)

October 16, 2023
halloween, how to see ghosts, on writing
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“This part of the book is for children who were born in the morning or around lunchtime. If you were born at midnight – some say just at twilight – you were probably born with the gift of being able to see ghosts and other spirits and don’t have to be told how.”

Back at the tail end of September, I posted a bit about what my October was going to be like. As part of that post, I linked to some of the stories I have available to read online that are set on or around Halloween, but I somehow forgot the most recent one.

How to See Ghosts & Other Figments is my latest single-author collection. Like all of my collections, it is, I think and hope, a series of fun, spooky stories. But also, more so than maybe any of my other collections, it is a book about longing. Because I think, for many of us who stare into the dark, there is as much longing there as fear.

Nowhere is that more true than in the title story, which borrows its moniker from a Vincent Price-narrated audiobook of ghost stories and other spooky stuff which, in turn, got its name from a book of poetry by Leah Bodine Drake, published by Arkham House in 1950. “How to See Ghosts (or Surely Bring Them to You)” may be the only published story I have ever written that doesn’t contain a speculative element.

It is, instead, about four friends who go to a haunted house (modeled on the real-life haunted houses that occupy the West Bottoms here in Kansas City) and, from there, a hotel room with an attached ghost story (modeled on the Muehlebach Hotel, here in Kansas City) where they have a seance. It is a story about unrequited love, about the chains we forge ourselves, and about wanting so badly for there to be something magical in the world, even and maybe especially if it is also terrible.

It’s also one of two stories original to How to See Ghosts that is set explicitly on Halloween, and deals directly with Halloween haunted houses. The other is “Old Haunts,” which is the one I forgot to include in my earlier roundup. A more traditional horror story about an aficionado of Halloween haunts who gets more than he bargained for in a run-down home haunt, “Old Haunts” was presented in audio form by Pseudopod last year, one of a long list of times that they have put out one of my weird tales.

There are several other pieces in How to See Ghosts that, while not explicitely set on Halloween, are probably pretty perfect spooky-season reading. “Masks” is a fragmentary little number about the shadow of old Hollywood. “Doctor Pitt’s Menagerie” features an attraction of sorts that shares a lot of DNA with a Halloween haunt, even while it is ultimately something very different. Even stories like “Prehistoric Animals” or “The Drunkard’s Dream” have Halloween-y moments – and they’re both pieces I’m very proud of.

I’m proud of How to See Ghosts overall, even while I think it has made the smallest splash of any of my collections so far. It’s perhaps the most mixed of them, the themes that tie the stories together less obvious at a glance. But they are there. Releasing the book in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic probably didn’t help, either.

If you’re looking for something to read this spooky season, why not give “Old Haunts” up there a try. If you like it, maybe pick up How to See Ghosts from Word Horde. Who knows… maybe you’ll even see one?

“Just say you aren’t scared. Just say how brave and nonchalant you’d be if you ever saw a ghost, and see what happens.”

X Marks the Spot

September 3, 2023
how to see ghosts, news, on writing, painted monsters, reading materials
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I think I first got to know Ross Lockhart – please correct me if I’m wrong about this, Ross – after he bought a reprint of one of my stories for The Book of Cthulhu II, which would put it around 2012.

Not too long after that, Ross launched his own publishing imprint. The first book published by Word Horde was Tales of Jack the Ripper, which came out ten years ago to the day – around three days ago. (I’m a little late making this post.) My story “Ripperology” appeared in there.

Since then, Ross has continued to be my most frequent publisher. I’ve had a story in very nearly every anthology that Word Horde has released, the sole exception, I believe, being Amber Fallon’s Fright into Flight. Perhaps more to the point, Word Horde has published my last three short story collections, all those I have put out since they launched.

The first of those – and my second collection full-stop – was Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts, released back in 2015. Since then, Ross has put out two other collections of mine, most recently How to See Ghosts & Other Figments, which was released just last year.

Ross and I are also working together on another project. Something that isn’t a short story collection, but I can’t say more just yet. We should be announcing it very soon, though, and I hope my readers will be excited.

I’m excited and proud to have been such a big part of Word Horde’s first decade. Ross has always treated me and my books well, with generous promotion and work behind the scenes that ensures that my books always look amazing. Besides the books with my name on or in them, Word Horde has published a wide array of great titles that I highly recommend.

Word Horde’s first ten years have been filled with unforgettable books, from John Langan’s The Fisherman to Scotty Nicolay’s And at My Back I Always Hear, and many more besides. Word Horde authors include Molly Tanzer, Nadia Bulkin, Scott R. Jones, Livia Llewellyn, Kristi DeMeester, Craig Laurance Gidney, S.L. Edwards, Nicole Cushing… the list goes on and on.

Recently, Ross and company also opened up a physical bookstore, the Word Horde Emporium of the Weird & Fantastic, where they sell much more than just Word Horde titles. Indeed, the Emporium traffics in just about everything suggested by that moniker. I haven’t gotten a chance to visit the physical store in Petaluma, California just yet, but I hope to someday. And in the meantime, here’s to many more years of Word Horde goodness!

“the soot of the factories in its face and the pounding of machinery in its soul”

June 6, 2023
guignol, how to see ghosts, news, on writing, reading materials, thoughts
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If you’ve been following me on social media, you probably saw that my story “The God of the Overpass” is in the June issue of The Dark. I’ve published a lot of short stories over the years, including a couple of others at The Dark, but this one is kind of a big deal for me simply because it’s the first new story of mine to be published in quite a while. Even the new stories that were in How to See Ghosts & Other Figments have already been out in the world for several months now.

Since the start of COVID, I’ve produced less original fiction than I used to. This is due to a variety of factors, with the chief one being that freelancing as a writer full time means more time writing lots of other stuff, and less time spent on my own fiction. So it’s a bigger deal for me than it used to be when something sees publication.

Over on Twitter, I called this story “Clive Barker-inflected,” which is true enough. It’s one of what I think of as my “Kansas City stories,” those explicitly set here in the metro where I live. It’s also of a piece with some of my other stories which have explored the kinds of gods and monsters that have developed out of the post-industrial world in which we live. Stories like “Shadders,” an original in my third collection, Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales, or “Black Hill,” originally published in Historical Lovecraft all the way back in 2011 and the story that first got me the attention of Ross Lockhart, who has become my most frequent publisher.

As much as and maybe more than Clive Barker, “The God of the Overpass” and those other stories I mentioned owe their inspiration to Fritz Leiber’s classic story “Smoke Ghost,” which I quoted in the title of this post. (That’s also an Edd Cartier illustration from the story’s original publication off to the side there.)

Leiber is best known for his sword-and-sorcery stories featuring Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser (and perhaps rightly so), but his weird fiction accounts of the modern supernatural had an enormous impact on me and my work. From stories like “Smoke Ghost” and “The Glove” to short novels like Conjure Wife and, perhaps especially, Our Lady of Darkness, Leiber had left an outsized impression on me when I was beginning to write seriously, and he remains one of the voices I most long to be able to emulate.

In “Smoke Ghost,” in particular, Leiber conjures “a ghost from the world of today,” the sort that “would haunt coal yards and slip around at night through deserted office buildings.” His depiction is a ghost not of one person, but of the “tangled, sordid, vicious” things that make up our “rotten world.”

“I don’t think it would seem white or wispy or favor graveyards,” Leiber’s protagonist muses. “It wouldn’t moan. But it would mutter unintelligibly, and twitch at your sleeve. Like a sick, surly ape. What would such a thing want from a person, Miss Millick? Sacrifice? Worship? Or just fear? What could you do to stop it from troubling you?”

Ever since Leiber revitalized the ghost for what was then the modern world of 1941, plenty of other writers and creators have updated these spooks and specters for an ever-changing world, with some of the most successful being the analog and digital ghosts that have crawled their way out of TV screens and modems in a deluge of Japanese horror tales going back at least as far as The Ring.

“Smoke Ghost” is, itself, an oddly written story, strangely more stilted than some of Leiber’s other classics. But the idea of that modernized ghost, a projection of a world built by humanity, rather than the spirit of the dead, or something from the ancient past, was important, and it has remained important through all these years.

At this point, 1941 is almost as distant from us as the Industrial Revolution was from Leiber’s original writing, depending on how you measure. But the idea of that ghost still holds resonance, and it’s ripe for plenty of other writers to try their hands at similar things.

“The God of the Overpass” is just one of my attempts at doing so. A story about hubris and the gods that we create without ever meaning to. “Monsters that chewed up the earth to make new earth, to build roads and bridges, ditches and canals. Flattening mountains here, building mountains there. So much power, so much motion – how could it do anything but create something more than just inert stone and steel?”

Obsolescence

May 22, 2023
freelancing, on writing, thoughts
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I haven’t posted about this before now for a few reasons. For one thing, I’m a working writer, and I’m busy and, frankly, this should all go without saying. Furthermore, I don’t want to talk or think about it because it annoys the fuck out of me but, unfortunately, I have the think about it, and it’s irresponsible not to talk about it. So, I’ll try to keep this brief:

I support the WGA strike. That’s the first part that should go without saying. Writers are workers, and workers deserve to be compensated extravagantly for the work they produce, let alone fairly. The fact that we have arguments about how much someone is entitled to when they literally produced all the work is fucking absurd. The strike should go on as long as possible, it should be joined by everyone affected, and the studios should fuck off into the sun. If there are no new movies or TV shows made for the next five years, that’s great, we already have plenty, and if the result nets a life that is even one iota better for the people who are actually making these things, then it will have been more than worth it.

But that’s only part of it. Partly due to timing, the discussions around the WGA strike have also become discussions around AI art and writing. And I need to be as clear as possible on this subject: So-called “AI art” (or writing, or any other creative endeavor) is bullshit. It is a misnomer, where the only accurate part is “artificial.” It has no intelligence, and even less art. What’s more, it is anathema not merely to art and writing itself, but to everything that makes life even moderately bearable. I don’t have much in the way of religion, but if I did, this “AI art” garbage would be one of its few blasphemies.

What’s more, while calling it “art” is crap, calling it “AI” is, too. I’m not an expert in software or “machine learning” or any of that, but I know this: There is no sapience here. There are no cool machine overlords coming down the road. There is nothing here but exploitation. These machine learning algorithms can do only and precisely what they are told, and when it comes to creative pursuits such as art or writing, they can do it only through one methodology: stealing. They are not AI, and they are not “creating” anything. They are advanced plagiarism engines, and that is all that they can produce.

By the same token, these algorithms are neither threat nor salvation. They are, as their proponents so often like to point out, only tools. But they are not being wielded by those proponents, not truly. Rather than evil robotic overlords, they are being deployed by the same evil overlords we have always had: corporate greed. Their one and only goal is to steal from writers and artists without paying them in either money or dignity. These engines run on exploitation, and produce nothing – literally nothing – but more exploitation.

Damn them, curse them, scorn them, and let them fuck off into the sun with the studios and corporations I mentioned earlier, who are the only people they will ever “benefit.” We will all be far better off without them.