Nasty and Brutish Shorts: Reading & Writing Short Horror Fiction

                                                                                                           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...

                                                                                                        I love the old small press magazines from the 1980s and 1990s-- Cemetery Dance , Deathrealm , The Horror Show , and so on. Sure, the Internet has made it even easier for 'zines to get made and distributed--there's no shortage of short horror fiction magazines and podcasts online--but, like most analog media, there's a magic to the old school magazines. A lot of it is in the imperfections, which, like the shot-on-video horror movies that were proliferating in the same period, add either goofy charm on lo-fi creepiness. In some cases, as with this cover for Deathrealm #27, it's both...