1. Submersible Edgar Allan Poe was a trickster, a hoaxster; were he peering over our shoulders as we stare at pages of his words and, with the omniscience of a ghost, reading our thoughts, I have no doubt he would repeatedly whisper, like a dusty and demented raven, or […]
1. In the early morning hours of October 19, 1998, the Two Elk Lodge and other structures at the Vail ski resort in Colorado burst into flame, the result of an arson attack soon claimed by members of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) movement. It was one of many arsons […]
Reactor has published my essay “Poetry from the Plague Pit: The Early Stories of Clive Barker and Joel Lane”, which explores the work of two of my favorite writers of horror/weird short fiction within the context of Thatcherism and the AIDS crisis. This essay is the product of a year […]
Today is Bob Dylan’s 85th birthday. I expect he finds that number at least as weird as the rest of us do — how did Bob Dylan manage to survive to be 85 years old? But also: how was Bob Dylan ever less than 85 years old? In 2021, I […]
Today is May 5, Karl Marx’s 208th birthday. Last night, celebrities got together for the annual display of wealth that is the Met Gala, this year with the billionaire Bezos family as honorary chairs. Could there be a more appropriate anticipation of Marx’s birthday? Protestors should have set up cake […]
0. When I was putting Finite Eyes together, the most fascinating pieces for me were the ones from right before COVID-19 hit the world and the pieces from that first pandemic year. The earlier stuff felt like messages from a world unknowingly on the verge of destruction, while the COVID-era stuff […]
We must theorize horror. (We must horrify theory.) * …instead of arriving at a clear grip on what kind of entity is horrifying, we are confronted with the feeling that there is this something that must harm us according to its very essence. Horror retains this character of indefinite something […]
I’ve been working on a secret project: a new book. From 2018 to 2024, I wrote a blog called Finite Eyes (the title comes from a poem by Emily Dickinson), where I explored ideas about education, teaching, learning, academic publishing, and open access resources. It was closely tied to my work […]
If you read a lot of horror literature because you like to be scared, then you’re probably a normal, healthy person. If you read horror literature to fulfill some deeply personal predisposition, be assured there is probably something odd and unwholesome about you. Don’t ever let anyone tell you it’s […]
The theme for this year’s International Open Access Week is “Who Owns Our Knowledge?”, a question that ought to be nonsensical, but which is becoming ever more urgent. I cannot help but think about Open Access (OA) within the current context both of our world generally and also my own world […]
Trying to remember when I last saw a new horror movie I liked, I had to go back to my notes on Letterboxd to see what had captured my attention over the last year or so. It feels like I haven’t much enjoyed horror movies lately, at least recent ones. […]
I delivered the following essay as a paper at the 2025 Modernist Studies Association conference in Boston. (There are actually a couple more paragraphs here than in the paper as delivered, since I cut it for the sake of time.) A paragraph or so is repeated from a chapter I […]