Welcome!

 

Hi! I’m Gordon, and I’m delighted you’re here. I am an enthusiastic amateur horror writer and an obsessive horror fiction reader. This blog is primarily to discuss great horror short stories (and collections thereof), although eventually I hope to cover some of my own work as well.  

I say short horror fiction, although “short” can still be quite long. I consider something like “The Mist” or “At the Mountains of Madness” to fall under this category; my non-scientific definition is, “would you pay retail price for just this book, or would you need something else thrown in?”

I do read horror novels too, but I mostly read non-genre work when I’m reading novels. Conversely, the bulk of the horror fiction I read are short story collections. There are several reasons:

1)          I think horror works best (or, at least, is scariest) in the short format. Novels can be scary, but there are some structural guardrails a lot of the time. Novels usually don’t  veer off as unexpectedly as horror stories do (there are exceptions; off the top of my head, Jean Ray’s Malpertuis and Thomas Disch’s The M.D. both go completely bonkers vis-à-vis their initial premises, and outside of the horror genre, George Eliot’s  Daniel Deronda suddenly goes from “comedy of manners” to “investigation of 19th Century Jewish identity” in a way that’s hard to see coming). Similarly, the longer and more involved the world you build is, the harder it is to pull off a twist without the reader feeling cheated out of the story they thought they were getting (cf. Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City). There’s more room for surprise in a short story, and surprise is scary.

2)          I don’t have a lot of time to read, and a collection of stories gives a shotgun approach. Don’t like one story? Then you might like the next! Even more important with multi-author anthologies, where you can get a wide sampling of tones and styles, and can try out new authors without the commitment of a whole novel.

3)          I enjoy writing about them. When I got out of college, I got back into horror fiction in a big way. During my first wave of horror fiction enthusiasm up through high school,  (and also, Google Earth had just come out, so I was spending my free time going around to Loch Ness and Groom Lake and stuff like that). But the second time, after I got out of college, there were more blogs, more review sites, and even forums like Vault of Evil that were dedicated to horror and even short horror fiction. I love those. For me, part of the fun of reading is seeing what other people have to say. So I’m writing the sort of blog I’d want to read.

“Why is this stuff so old?” It’s true; the bulk of the stories and books I’ll talk about on here were written before (or almost immediately after) 2000.   When I started reading horror at a young age, it was mostly ghost or science fiction-adjacent  or crime-adjacent stories from the 1950s or before.  When I got a little older and was checking books out of the library, most of those were roughly contemporary, so it was stuff from the mid to late 90s. That period is my first love.

Also, as I talk about in my very first blog post, I had an adjustment period with respect to contemporary horror when I got out of college and finally started reading fiction for fun again. Some of it confused me, some of it just didn’t seem like ‘horror.’ Meanwhile, there was such a backlog of material from what I did (and still do) think of as a horror ‘golden age’ from about 1984 or 1985 through the end of the 20th century.

I’m trying to change that, and read more stuff that’s up-to-date. But there’s only so much time, and you have to read what you love the most. 

Anyway…let’s go!