Yesterday, April 3, was the singer-songwriter Richard Thompson’s 75th birthday. Thompson is renowned for two things, really: his extraordinary talent with a guitar and his ability to channel various styles and tell myriad stories in the short space of a song. I’m not going to write here about his long career […]
Things which now get buzzed as “AI” (“artificial intelligence”) — large language models, statistical prediction software, image generators, etc. — have infiltrated and infested various industries, tools, and discourses with remarkable speed and gobsmacking hype. AI (I’m not going to keep up the scare quotes, but hope you know that, […]
From all the manifold images traditionally marshaled, none so dreadfully resembles the Gorgon head as the face of human death. —Caroline Anderson By any honest reckoning, Tanith Lee was one of the most versatile and influential writers of fantasy, horror, and science fiction in the English language during the last 100 […]
Uncanny magazine has now posted a collection of remembrances of the wonderful Richard Bowes written by Christopher Barzak, Sam J. Miller, Matthew Kressel, and myself. Rick was someone I knew first as a writer, then as a person, and he became a friend and mentor. My story “Killing Fairies” was […]
The first shot of Todd Field’s 2022 film Tár is phone held by an unknown person, filming a sleeping Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) on a plane. Over the image pop up chat messages: —our girls an early riser isnt she —haunted —ha you mean she has a conscience —maybe —you still […]
I have a new story available online at The Dark magazine, “Rare Bindings”. This is a story I wrote this fall for a Halloween office party at my place of work, which happens to be a library. A good opportunity, I thought, to write about how magical I think libraries and […]
Arthur Machen’s short story “The White People” remains a masterpiece and perhaps his most difficult work of fiction — what Absalom, Absalom! is for Faulkner, what Finnegans Wake is for Joyce, “The White People” is for Machen. Though Machen wrote the story when Joyce was a teenager and Faulkner a toddler, its challenges […]
I thought I might share some thoughts on my new story “The Testament of a Puppeteer”, which I posted to my website yesterday. Today seems the perfect day to do so, as it is Edgar Allan Poe’s 215th birthday, and Poe’s spirit plays a small part in the story’s end. […]
On my website, I’ve now posted a new horror story, “The Testament of the Puppeteer”, a grotesque revenge comedy (though without many laughs). It’s available both as a webpage and as a downloadable ePub file for eReaders. In the winter of 2021, I posted a previously-unpublished story on the site […]
This week, I’ve been attending the annual Modern Language Association Convention, which this year is in Philadelphia. On Saturday, January 6, I was a member of a panel celebrating “100 Years of Mrs. Brown” where we looked at the implications and influence of Virginia Woolf’s essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, […]
Ends and beginnings. I have no sense of 2023 as a particular thing, and I expect in the future that I will think back to various events and items of the year and not remember that 2023 was their year. Perhaps this is a post-2020 effect. The years feel indistinguishable. […]
In April 2024, Lethe Press will publish a new horror novella I wrote, Changes in the Land. The paperback is now available for pre-order from Lethe, and the Kindle version can be pre-ordered from Amazon. The wonderful cover and a really thoughtful interior design was created by Jeremy Parker, one […]
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