My dear friend Chris Barzak and I were lucky enough to have our first novellas published within about a month of each other: his A Voice Calling (Psychopomp) and my Changes in the Land (Lethe Press). We thought it would be fun to talk about the novella form and our own particular […]
Since writing my previous post about loneliness and horror, I’ve had cause to think a lot about varieties of loneliness, lostness, violence (physical and especially psychological), and intimacy. Some has been purely theoretical, trying to continue to tease out some ideas I explored in that post, some has been more immediate, […]
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of leading a discussion with Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy, co-director of punctum books and editor of my punctum book, About That Life: Barry Lopez and the Art of Community. This was part of my regular academic work, as it was a program I set up via […]
At the end of February, my favorite critic of horror cinema, Willow Catelyn Maclay, wrote a piece for her Patreon titled “The Aesthetic of Loneliness in Horror”. It’s subscribers-only, so I won’t quote much from it here, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since I first read it, and […]
Today is the 103rd birthday of Carol Emshwiller (1921-2019), and it provides me with the opportunity to say something I am happy to say every day: “You should read some writing by Carol Emshwiller.” I have a few more things to say, but I am perfectly happy if you skip […]
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, […]
A question I have come back to when providing feedback on a couple of very different manuscripts for friends recently: What is it important for the reader to know? With one of those manuscripts in particular, it was really a question of how much the writer wanted to leave the […]
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 […]