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year in review

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.

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.

Midway

June 28, 2022
appearances, cinema, lists, year in review
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As we near the end of June, we are at the halfway point of what has already been both a very good and very bad year, sadly not always in equal measures. There have been some real high points, most of them personal, and plenty of low ones, many of them national.

I’m not here to talk about those, though. I’m here, as usual, to talk about movies. As of this writing, I have watched 158 movies so far in 2022. Of those, around 121 have been new-to-me, easily keeping to my goal of watching more new-to-me movies than re-watching ones I’ve seen before. In fact, I’m crushing that goal so far this year.

In spite of that, I’ve seen relatively few new-to-me movies that I really loved so far in 2022. The best new movie that actually came out this year that I’ve seen was Spider One’s Allegoria, which will be releasing on Shudder early next month and which I reviewed for The Pitch. As usual, I’ve been keeping a list of movies that I really dug that I saw for the first time over on Twitter, and while the list is relatively long already, I feel like the proportion of true favorites on it is fewer than would normally be the case.

Without much competition, the best new-to-me movie I’ve seen so far this year is almost certainly The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre, which I literally just caught earlier this month. Other standouts for me include The Pyschic (1977), Ghoulies 2, and finally getting to see War of the Gargantuas and The Unknown Terror, both for the first time.

My biggest month for watching movies was May, when I managed to catch 40. Hopefully, this all bodes well for the second half of the year, with even more new-to-me movies hopefully making the list, and more new favorites discovered.

I’ll also be continuing to host movies and podcasts at Stray Cat Film Center, though we’re taking a break for July, as usual. When we come back, we’ll be discussing what we did on our summer vacation and the 1997 “classic,” I Know What You Did Last Summer.

Of course, I’ll be reviewing movies periodically but, more to the point, if you would like to review some movies, I’m still movies editor at Exploits until they kick me out, and I’d love to get something from you. I’m particularly looking for pieces from marginalized voices, so please feel free to hit me up with a pitch for any movie you’d like to write about. We have a hard cap of 350 words and pay $10 per essay. I’ve got essays locked in for July and August, but I’d love to put a bow on the rest of the year.

“The Year of Dumb Shit”

December 31, 2021
cinema, freelancing, lists, reading materials, year in review
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Well, 2021 sure was a year, huh? I guess it was better than 2020, all things considered, but I think we all also hoped to be someplace better than this by the time we bid 2021 adieu, yet here we are. I have a lot to be thankful for from the year gone by, and a lot to look forward to in the one to come, but that doesn’t mean that getting here was exactly a cake walk.

I’m not really here to rehash everything that happened in 2021. It was a lot. I stayed pretty into tabletop gaming, in spite of mostly not being able to actually play. I wrote a bunch more stuff for Privateer Press, including the contents of a couple of very successful Kickstarters, with another on the way. I didn’t publish a ton of stories, but I had a few come out, and I’m proud of them all.

I kept a daily aesthetic thread on Twitter every single day for the whole year. For the entire month of June, I wrote a tweet-length “story” about a giant monster every day. I got lampooned by the Midnight Society. I largely quit using Goodreads. I read a lot of old comic books and watched a lot of movies, and occasionally wrote about both. I read fewer books than either of those other things, but not none. I did a presentation for the Johnson County Library and peer-reviewed a book for a major university press. I wrote regular columns for Signal Horizon, Unwinnable, and Weird Horror.

It’s been a lot, is what I’m saying.

But a lot of it has been good. My freelance work has kept my nose to the grindstone for much of the year, but I can’t really complain. In all, things in my life have been pretty great, even as the world around me doesn’t always come out looking so rosy.

I said I wasn’t here to rehash the year, though, and I’m not. I’m here to do my usual roundup of things that I watched and read. If you want something more like a proper end-of-the-year list, you can find me writing up a few of these items in various places online, or listen to me chatting with Tyler Unsell about them at the Horror Pod Class.

Now, let’s do the numbers. In the course of 2021, I watched some 270 movies. Of those, 173 were ones that I watched for the first time. Of those, roughly 19 were actually released in 2021. My busiest month was October, at 40 movies. My least was May, with only 13. The first movie I watched in 2021 was Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020), the last was Zeiram (1991).

As I’ve done for a couple of years now, I kept an ongoing Twitter thread of my favorite new-to-me movies of the year, as I watched them. Of those, the highlights not released in 2021 included (in the order that I saw them) Nightmare in Wax (1969), Night of the Devils (1972), Anguish (1987), Opera (1987), Death Ship (1980), City of the Living Dead (1980), Shadow of the Cat (1961), The Spider Labyrinth (1988), The Boneyard (1991), Possession (1981), Frankenstein 1970 (1958), The Snake Girl and the Silver-haired Witch (1968), and Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1972).

My favorite books that I read in 2021 include Jonathan Raab’s The Secret Goatman Spookshow, Stephen Graham Jones’ My Heart is a Chainsaw, and Richard Sala’s (sadly posthumous) Poison Flowers & Pandemonium.

My favorite movie released in 2021 (of the 19, remember, that I saw) was Malignant, which also gave us our Monster of the Year, that thing I do frankly sporadically because I don’t always remember to, what?

Gabriel is one of the best parts of a bonkers movie that I absolutely loved and that was definitely the best time I had in a theater all year – and I’m so glad I managed to see it in a theater, because damn.

There were a few other good monsters this year, to boot, many of them in horror movies. I also dug Antlers more than most people seem to have, and it had a great monster designed (at least partly) by Guy Davis. There are several other movies with promising monsters that I haven’t yet seen, including The Night House and The Green Knight. (Everyone else absolutely loved Raatma in V/H/S ’94, but it didn’t do that much for me, even though it looks a lot like a Trevor Henderson creep.)

Monsters also showed up in a lot of the big-budget movies of the year, too, with Starro from Suicide Squad deserving of a special mention, even though I haven’t actually seen Suicide Squad just yet. There’s stuff I’m looking forward to in 2022, but a lot of it isn’t necessarily new releases. Toward the end of the year, I got Severin’s All the Haunts Be Ours boxed set of folk horror movies, so I can’t wait to check those out, along with Arrow’s massive Shawscope boxed set. Plus, October of 2022 should see the release of my next collection from Word Horde, not to mention some other stuff that I can’t talk about just yet.

And that’s basically it for closing out what I inadvertently dubbed “the Year of Dumb Shit” over at Unwinnable. Here’s to hoping that shit in 2022 is maybe a little less dumb, even if the movies can stand to stay this dumb, that’s totally fine.

Fast Away the Old Year Passes

December 28, 2021
news, year in review
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I said last time that you might not hear from me until it was 2022 and, well, we’re pretty close. But I just needed to pop in and say a few things about what’s been going on around here since my last post, perhaps most notably to point out the culmination of that last surprise I mentioned back then.

My latest story went live at Pseudopod on Christmas Eve. Unlike most of the others that I’ve had performed there over the years, this one is an original that has never before been published anyplace else. It’s the result of my attempt to write something like a traditional “ghost story for Christmas,” one that takes place – or, at least, culminates – on Christmas Eve.

Except that this is me, and so it isn’t really a ghost story, in the proper sense, and is more of a monster story, about a weird bug that just keeps getting bigger and bigger. As always, Pseudopod has done a dynamite job of producing the audio, and Alasdair, as always, manages to tease out the themes of the story so elegantly in his intro and outro that I don’t really have anything to add. So, if you missed it, check out “The Humbug” at Pseudopod now.

If you don’t do audio fiction, no worries. You can also read it on their site and it’ll be in my next collection, which is due out from Word Horde in 2022. Aside from that, I haven’t gotten up to much since I last posted here, save for holiday stuff and the usual work. However, as the candle of 2021 gutters and burns its last, the days of Best of the Year lists have begun.

Due to the weirdness of the Plague Times, I once again won’t have the usual installments at various places, but that doesn’t mean that you won’t hear about some of my favorite things of the past year at Signal Horizon and Unwinnable. In fact, one has already appeared, as I wrote about Jonathan Raab’s The Secret Goatman Spookshow, which was my favorite read of 2021, among a bunch of other contributors over at Unwinnable.

To see the rest (including my favorite new movie that I saw in 2021 – I’ll give you three guesses), just keep an eye on my social media and until then, I’ll see you in the future!

Advent

December 18, 2021
freelancing, on writing, thoughts, year in review
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One week from today, it’ll be Christmas. A week after that, it’ll be 2022. It feels surreal to type that, just as it feels surreal for it to be true. I’m not really prepared for either, but these days, who is?

I’m typing now because there’s a very real chance that I won’t get much else added here until the New Year. I’m coming out of several months of high-intensity work, and staring down the barrel of at least one more. In the course of January, I’ll be writing close to 50,000 words on a project that has to stay somewhat under wraps right now but if you know what I’ve been working on and skim this article, you can probably guess.

Tuesday night, I’ll be recording an end-of-the-year episode of the Horror Pod Class with Tyler Unsell, where we’ll be talking about some of our favorite things from this extremely weird year. I actually saw some new stuff this year, albeit not as much as I would in a more normal year. I’d love to pretend that next year is going to be better – I hope that it will – but with Omicron barreling down on us and everyone just deciding that they’re done acting like we’re in a pandemic, I guess, I don’t know how realistic those hopes are.

Even while I wasn’t necessarily going to theatres very often, I still spent the year watching plenty of movies, playing plenty of board games, and writing the various columns that I now tuck under my belt every month or so. I reviewed The Spine of Night over at Downright Creepy and a couple of different first-run movies for Signal Horizon, not to mention the usual host of retrospective movie reviews at Signal and Unwinnable.

Speaking of Unwinnable, they’re doing a special holiday subscription drive right now, and if it’s successful, we get to do a Gremlins-themed issue! So, go subscribe, is what I’m saying. And all that’s in addition to my column on Friday the 13th: The Series at Signal (which wraps up this month, to be replaced with Tales from the Darkside in 2022) and my recurring board game column at Unwinnable – check out the latest installment of that here.

I haven’t published a ton of stories in 2021, but I’m proud of the ones I did. A jokey flash piece called “The Last Day of Doctor Tillinghast” showed up in Curtains, an anthology to benefit Save Our Stages, while the extremely weird “Anum’s Fire (1987) – Annotated” was in Beyond the Book of Eibon, a tribute anthology to Lucio Fulci – both of which had covers by none other than Trevor Henderson. “The Robot Apeman Waits for the Nightmare Blood to Stop” was published in Tales from OmniPark, edited by Ben Thomas, while “The Cult and the Canary” appeared in the King in Yellow-themed anthology Y from Stygian Fox. And last but certainly not least, my timeloop giallo “Chanson D’Amour” broke into Nightmare, while my story “Screen Haunt” was podcast at Pseudopod.

There should be one more surprise coming this year – even though there is precious little of this year left – so keep an eye on my social media for that, when it comes.

I’ll probably do some sort of post-mortem of the movies I watched this year sometime in early January, but I’ve also been keeping (as is my new habit) a Twitter thread of movies that I loved that I watched for the first time in 2021.

We put up decorations and all that jazz, but the holidays feel… odd this year, and not only because it was 70 degrees in the middle of December the other day. Blame it on the Second Year of the Plague, I guess. I am one of those people for whom the holiday season is always bittersweet, at best, anyway, but there are certainly things I’m looking forward to this year and hoping for in the year to come.

Until that moment arrives, here’s a Yule Cat:

It’s About Time

December 30, 2020
cinema, guignol, news, on writing, painted monsters, year in review
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This post is not actually about the 1992 Amityville Yard Sale sequel about an evil clock. Just getting ahead of that, to spare you the disappointment. No, this is about kicking 2020 in the ass on its way out the door, and to that end, I just want you to know that there won’t really be a traditional year end retrospective around these parts.

Tonight, at the Horror Pod Class Study Group on Facebook, Tyler Unsell of Signal Horizon and I will be getting together to talk about the (precious few) high points of this trash fire of a year, and over at Unwinnable I contributed a blurb or two to the various best of the year lists, but for the most part, 2020 was garbage and we’re all happier to have it in the rear view.

Was the best movie I saw this year really Underwater? Maybe. Was very nearly the only book I read this year Adam Cesare’s wonderful Clown in a Cornfield? Also maybe. Did I buy a bunch of tabletop games that you mostly can’t play at the best of times (because who has that kind of free time) and definitely can’t play in the midst of a pandemic? Almost certainly. Did I get back into Dungeons and Dragons just in time to go into social isolation and then write about how racist it is? You bet I did!

Does any of that matter, in a world where people are dying and laid off and struggling to get by while the ghouls in their high towers play politics with our lives and balk at even so much as throwing us the scraps from their table? Not one iota.

This is getting a little heavy, though, so let’s pump the breaks. I have some good stuff to talk about. We all learned that octopuses like to punch fish, and Painted Monsters took top honors in a best-of retrospective. And hey, if you’d like to take their advice and pick up either Painted Monsters or Guignol, both are currently on sale (along with the entire rest of the Word Horde catalog) direct from the publisher.

For those who may be genuinely curious about the stuff I normally include in an end-of-the-year wrap-up, I watched fewer movies in 2020 than I have in a while. The lockdown had the opposite effect on my viewing habits than it did for a lot of other people, and I found it hard to watch (or read, or write) much of anything I didn’t have to.

Fewer than usual still means 248 movies over the course of the year, though, 155 of which I watched for the first time, meaning that I, at least, breezed by my goal of watching more new-to-me movies than not each year, even if my overall total was down. Among those, high points that didn’t come out anywhere near this year included Hercules in the Haunted World, The Spiral Staircase, Humanoids from the Deep, Mill of the Stone Women, The Outing, Psychomania, Next of Kin (1982), exploring the films of Shinya Tsukamoto for the first time, Prom Night 2, WitchTrap, The Killing (1956), and watching The Muppet Christmas Carol for the first time on Christmas Eve.

I already wrote about some of the stories I was proud of seeing published this year – and ones that I’m looking forward to in the future – and this year I also started two new regular columns, one in Weird Horror about, well, weird horror, and one at Unwinnable as much about wanting to play board games as about playing them. I got bylines in The Pitch, our local cool-kid newspaper here in Kansas City, and I started writing an occult cyberpunk novella for Broken Eye Books that I’m currently behind on. (Sorry about that.)

All the way back when I made my very first post of the year ten centuries ago, 2020 had already punched us in the mouth not even one week in with the death of our beloved cat, and I said back in that post that “sometimes the only thing you can do then is grin with blood in your teeth.” I was such a sweet summer child in that moment, and I had no idea how much harder 2020 was about to come at us, but those of us who are still standing got out the other side of this entirely arbitrary calendrical delineation, so let’s at least flip it the bird while we’re burning to death.

If you have the stomach for a somewhat more normal end-of-the-year retrospective, join Tyler and I tonight on the Horror Pod Class. Otherwise, I’ll see you in the next year. Stay safe, stay weird.

“We can’t know what the future will hold.”

December 2, 2020
freelancing, fungus of terror, guignol, monsters from the vault, never bet the devil, news, on writing, painted monsters, privateer press, revenge of monsters, thoughts, year in review
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Now that it’s December, I think I can say with finality that 2020 will mark the first year since 2015 that I haven’t had a new book out with my name on the spine. It would be tempting to chalk this up to, y’know, 2020, and it’s certainly why there may not be one in 2021 either, but publishing is a slow business, and anything that was going to come out in this dark year would have already been in progress before the year began.

In actuality, there is no reason – either sinister or benign – for there not being a book this year, just as there is no real reason for their being a book each of those others. My first collection came out in 2012, the same year that I co-edited Fungi with Silvia Moreno-Garcia. My second, Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts, was released by Word Horde in 2015. The following year saw the release of Monsters from the Vault, a collection of short essays I had written as part of a column about vintage horror cinema for Innsmouth Free Press.

In 2017, I released both my first and, thus far, only novel – a licensed work for Privateer Press – and a hardcover reprint of my first collection, with a couple of new stories and all-new illustrations by M.S. Corley. 2018 saw the release of my third collection, again from Word Horde, while in 2019 a follow-up to Monsters from the Vault hit shelves.

I have more than enough stories to complete another collection – probably a couple more – but the time is not yet right for any of them. The stories are there, but they do not all fit together. Eventually, those stories will find other stories and together they will form the collections they are meant to inhabit. Until that time, I keep churning.

The next book that’s likely to come out with my name on the cover is probably going to be Neon Reliquary, the short, occult cyberpunk novel that is currently being released in serial form at the Broken Eye Books Patreon. Some delays happened, and they are my fault, but the second installment should be up in the next month or two.

Several stories have already made their way out into the public in various places that are part of a “story cycle” based around Hollow Earths and similar pseudoscience. Once all of those have made their initial bows, the plan is to collect them – along with some original content – into a book, as well. Almost all of them are written and either published or pending publication – one has even made it into the Best Horror of the Year and been reprinted at Nightmare magazine – but various factors have delayed, well, everything, right?

I spent November working on a 40,000 word tabletop gaming-related work-for-hire project that I should be able to announce probably early next year. I had a few new stories published in 2020 that I’m quite proud of. More than in 2019, though not by much. “Prehistoric Animals” in the Weird Fiction Review, “The All-Night Horror Show” at The Dark magazine, “Manifest Destiny” in The Willows Anthology, which also reprinted some of my unfortunate juvenilia from a bygone age, “Screen Haunt” in It Came from the Multiplex, and “The Double-Goer” in Between Twilight and Dawn.

I’ve also sold several stories that have yet to see publication but should be out sometime next year. A Lucio Fulci sword-and-sorcery tribute in Beyond the Book of Eibon, “The Robot Apeman Waits for the Nightmare Blood to Stop” in Tales from OmniPark – both of which were funded via Kickstarter – and new stories in that Hollow Earth “story cycle” I mentioned that will be out in New Maps of Dream from PS Publishing and Tales from Arkham Sanitarium from Dark Regions Press. Plus some others that I can’t name just yet.

2020 has been 2020 for everyone. Someone on one of the Slacks that I’m on said that we are all a decade older than we were this time last year, which sounds about right. But so far I’m hanging in there, and I’m still banging out words on the regular, so expect to see more from me as we end this accursed year and start another, hopefully better one.

I hope you’re all hanging in there, too. Stay safe, stay weird.

The Decade in Review

December 29, 2019
appearances, freelancing, guignol, monsters from the vault, never bet the devil, painted monsters, privateer press, revenge of monsters, secret identity, year in review
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Unknown SkeletonAt the start of this decade, I made my first-ever professionally-qualifying sale. (Pro rates were somehow even lower then than they are now.) I had been writing since I learned how, and seriously attempting to publish since I graduated college not quite a decade before that.

In 2012, the first edition of my first collection, Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings, came out. In five years it would be out of print, then back in print, in a new, hardcover deluxe edition from Strix Publishing.

Looking back, it came out too soon. Not that I’m not proud of the collection – I am, completely, if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t have allowed it to be reissued. I just wasn’t at the “first collection” stage in my career quite yet, but I didn’t know that then.

In the years since, I’ve published two more collections of stories, both with Ross Lockhart’s Word Horde press, not to mention two collections of essays on vintage horror films, both with Innsmouth Free Press. I’ve published more than fifty short stories, and been in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year three times.

I co-edited my first anthology with Silvia Moreno-Garcia, which got translated into Japanese.

I’ve done work for Privateer Press, writing short fiction and in-game content, adventures, and even a licensed novel that is technically my first published novel-length work. In the last year alone I’ve written nearly fifty movie reviews for Unwinnable and Signal Horizon, where I also now co-host a podcast.

I’ve written introductions for reissues of some of my favorite books, including Benighted and collections by Robert Westall, from Valancourt Books, and introductions to collections by some of my favorite contemporaries, including Nick Mamatas and Amanda Downum. I have nonfiction bylines in places like Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Nightmare Magazine.

I’ve been a guest at several wonderful conventions and festivals, gone on a great many podcasts, introduced movies at the local movie theatres, and much more. There are so many things on this list that, had you told me about them ten years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you.

Of all the many surprising things that have happened to me over the course of the last decade, though, perhaps the most surprising is that I quit my day job to write full-time all the way back in 2013, and I haven’t had to give it up yet.

Fiction writing certainly doesn’t pay the bills, so most of my time is dedicated to freelancing, but, as they say in Major League 2, a day of playing baseball is better than whatever most people have to do for a living.

It wasn’t until Grace was asking me if I was planning to do some kind of decade-in-review that I realized how much my life has changed in these past ten years, so it seemed worth taking note. I went from being virtually unpublished (I had sold a few stories, but not many) to having six or more books (depending on how you count) with my name on the spine and writing for a living.

Not too shabby, all in all.