Nasty and Brutish Shorts: Reading & Writing Short Horror Fiction

Oh, hell yeah. Look, sometimes sequels are better even though the original was great. Mad Max and The Terminator ? Both great pieces of genre entertainment. The first sequel to each? Lightning in a bottle. And that's the situation we have here. Last week , I set out my 'floor and ceiling' framework of story collection criticism: The floor is the minimum general quality of each piece in the collection, and the ceiling is the maximum quality of the best pieces in that collection. The best is when you have a high floor and a high ceiling. And, guys, we have one here.  I love this book. I'm really excited to discuss it. Just to say it, this will probably be the blog post for Thursday as well, because while I like to get a whole week's worth of material out of a book, I wanted to give this book the sort of massive review it deserves. Think of this as getting a king-sized candy bar from a trick or treat house. A quick note on the introduction, which is that IMO you shoul...

                                                                                                              I'm excited about this one! I love vintage paperback horror, and I've been glad to see it getting the attention it deserves over the last decade or so. Many of my favorite summer memories involve having a mass-market horror paperback at the beach or on the porch and happily reading away while demons or bobcats or whatever the fiend du jour is eviscerate a small community. Before we jump into the book, I want to talk about my ideas of floors and ceilings in terms of quality. I don't think this is a new concept, and I think it's one that comes up in business a d...

  We're back with Part 2 of our coverage of the late John Pelan's Darkside: Horror for the Next Millennium . When we last left off, we had a collection of stories that, while a mixed bag, were strong in both quality and in subject matter. The former got it recognized with some awards (which I'm going to start noting in these reviews at the end) Envy by Christa Faust Synopsis : A claustrophobic look at a sado-masochistic relationship. Thoughts : Relative to my point earlier about 'justifying' extreme content, I think this one also does, but only at the last second. Most of this is a laundry list of perversions, provocations, and titillations (which would have been a great name for this blog, dang it), but there's a fantastic element at the very end that makes me think of Freud. The Man of Her Dreams by Alan M. Clark Synopsis : A troubled young woman believes the many problems in her life can all be traced to a sinister figure who shows up in her dreams. Thoughts ...