Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) is best known today for two short stories, “The Wendigo” and “The Willows”, both considered among the best works of horror, supernatural, or weird fiction in English. Not far behind those in reputation are a couple of his stories of the occult detective John Silence (especially “Ancient Sorceries”). Beyond […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 In the winter of 2021, I posted a previously-unpublished story on the site […]
After my October 7 post about horror movies, my editor at Third Man Books, Chet Weise, asked if I might adapt it for the Third Man website. Chet always has a great sense of what I will happily write about, and the topic of horror movies is one of my favorites, […]
October is the best month. Though, as the month of my birthday, it is one of the more expensive months of the year for me (mostly because of car registration and inspection), it is also LGBTQ+ History Month and the month of Halloween, giving us an excuse (as if we needed […]