Nasty and Brutish Shorts: Reading & Writing Short Horror Fiction

                                                                                                      That is not dead which can eternal lie, and that's as true for blogs as anything else. We're back, baby! We've touched on Lovecraftian stories here and there on this blog, but haven't gone full HPL yet. Well, this is a good time for it: I went to Necronomicon in Providence this month, and Tachyon just released this Datlow-edited reprint anthology. Like many of Datlow's anthologies, it takes an expansive and progressive view of its subject matter; in the foreword, Datlow writes that "most of the stories collected here are infused with cosmic dread rather than the usual, over trappings of ...

  Here's a surprise! I never expected to come across Quick Chills: The Year's Best Horror Stories From the Small Press Volume I  in the wild. I'd tried, trust me-- I had a fun time delving into the 80s/90s small-press horror era a month or two ago --but even though I was willing to pay silly amounts of money, I just couldn't track it down. However, I recently had the chance to help with the liquidation of a  long-time horror writer and collector's library, and I found it!  Because this is an impossible one to find, I've added notes after each story about where you else you might discover them. Fair warning: In most cases, the other appearances are nearly as scarce as this one. Let's go! While She Was Out by Edward Bryant Synopsis : A suburban woman's trip to the mall becomes a bloody struggle against four teen thugs. Thoughts : How times change. I first read this story in Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror several years ago, and it didn't click with me. ...

                                                                                             I'm working away on my final pre-NECON blog post, but in the meantime, I have a plug for an upcoming virtual event of interest to horror fans: The Colorado chapter of the Horror Writers Association will be discussing Steve Rasnic Tem's novel Deadfall Hotel at 7:30pm (Mountain Time) on July 26.  I plan to attend, and I encourage you to as well! Zoom info below.  https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85995110961?pwd=iEbowBoOfGue8sYkEc4sO8uObWaYPu.1 I'm delighted to share this, because Steve is a living horror legend, and one of my top five American horror writers who's active today. I plan to dial in, and I encourage you al...

                                                                                                        We're back with another look at one of the Camp Necon 44 Writer Guests of Honor: Clay McLeod Chapman, whose Acquired Tastes came out last year and got a well-deserved Stoker Award nomination for fiction collection.   A note before we begin: The meaning of the title here is particularly apt: Something you'll notice in these stories (and that also comes up a little bit in Chapman's What Kind of Mother is a focus on the horror of eating and consumption. Usually, in horror fiction consumption is tied to annihilation and we're worried that the vampire will drink our blood, t...

                                                                                                           Last weekend I crossed an item off my bucket list and went to (probably the last, or at least penultimate, but who really knows) Living Dead Weekend at the Monroeville Mall in Pittsburgh (aka the filming location of Dawn of the Dead ). As part of the festivities, I grabbed this book off the shelf and finally gave it a read. And, what do you know, it's pretty good!  This isn't the first time there's been an anthology set in the world of George A. Romero's ghouls--John Skipp and Craig Spector's splatterpunk epics Book of the Dead and Still Dead: Book of the Dead I...