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, my latest book is released: Moon Songs: The Selected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, with a foreword by Kelly Link. The book collects 19 of Carol Emshwiller’s 150 stories, strange tales of aliens, animals, and humans, stories of war and apocalypse, of ordinary life made extraordinary, of beauty and ugliness interwoven […]
This summer, I have mostly stayed away from writing and instead focused on replenishing myself with reading — and, to further that replenishment, letting go of any feeling of obligation that I write about that reading. So I’m not even going to mention it here! But a couple of pieces […]
June 27 was Robert Aickman’s birthday, but I missed it. I was busy somehow. I’m often late to people’s birthdays. I don’t think Aickman minds very much, since he’s been dead for most of my life. To be honest, I was thinking it was this month. I’ve been reading Tartarus […]
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 […]
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 […]
In an interview with Steven Millhauser at the LA Review of Books, Kevin Koczwara asks, “Is there something that you love about the short story form? Today, it seems, short stories are out of style for one reason or another. Maybe they never were in vogue—I am thinking of how John […]
In 2018, I wrote a post at The Mumpsimus about Raymond Carver, inspired by Brian Evenson’s little book about Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Soon after I published it, Google decided the post was plagiarized clickbait and removed it. I could never figure out what […]