Nasty and Brutish Shorts: Reading & Writing Short Horror Fiction

                                                                                                                Earlier this week we dealt with the events of the first Drive-In novel. The stories today are more focused on the second and third parts of the trilogy, so if you haven't read those (let alone the first one), here be (mostly mild) spoilers.  At the end of The Drive-In, the weird shadowy goo that had trapped the denizens of the Orbit Drive-In vanishes, and the survivors stagger into a surreal world that's half prehistoric jungle and half studio backlot. After that... Things As They Seem, What Could be and Everything Improbable by Linda D. Addis...

  I try to keep this blog interesting and entertaining for non-horror readers as much as horror fanatics, but, fair warning, this is going to be inside baseball. In the late 1980s, Joe R. Lansdale wrote The Drive-In: A 'B' Movie with Blood and Popcorn, Made in Texas . In that novel, a few thousand people are trapped inside the massive Orbit Drive-In theater during one of its all-night horror shows when a toothy comet cuts the theater off from the rest of the world. Addled on a diet of soda, popcorn, candy, and splatter films playing on an endless loop, the patrons of the Orbit soon deteriorate into cannibalism and murder. And, once the two-headed mutant Popcorn King and his living tattoos appear on the scene, things get worse. . . The book was a cult hit, and Lansdale wrote two sequels (which we'll discuss next week). In 2024, Christopher Golden (who helped adapt The Drive-In for a comic book mini-series ) and Brian Keene published The Drive-In: Multiplex , a star-studded ...

                                                                                                      This was one of the first posts I had the idea for when I decided to start the blog, so I'm excited about this one. 12 Days of Christmas--12 Horror Stories. Let's Go! And--don't worry about that picture above. It'll make sense soon enough. 1) "The Stocking" by Nigel Kneale Synopsis : A poor young child's Christmas stocking is a conduit for unimaginable horror. Why It's On The Nice List : Maybe the meanest story I've ever read that still had artistic value. Certainly the meanest one originally written in English. It's like Charles Birkin's "The Hens," but with a Christmas coat of paint ...

                                                            Here was a treat I stumbled upon the other day: A horror anthology I'd never heard of, with a fun theme (urban horror), a strong line-up of contributors, and right in my late 80s/early 90s sweet-spot for horror. I often skip the introductions to collections, but given that the introduction to the other Olson and Silva anthology I've encountered ( Post Mortem: Tales of Ghostly Horror ) was a literate, meta-textual ghost story about books of ghost stories, I thought this would be required reading. It is--both F. Paul Wilson's enjoyable thesis statement for the book, and Olson and Silva's exegesis both of the book's themes and of its conception. This isn't quite a "shared world" anthology--there isn't a single fictional place like the Greystone Bay ...