“Madness is sometimes the best way of dealing with tragedy.” – The Lost Ending of April Fool’s Day (1986)

This post will unavoidably be filled with spoilers for both April Fool’s Day (1986) and the novelization of same by Jeff Rovin. So, if you haven’t at least seen the movie and have somehow managed to make it this far without knowing its notorious twist, then proceed with caution. Or better yet, go watch it – it’s a hoot!

April Fool’s Day is one of my favorite slasher films precisely because of the reason most other people don’t like it. For those who don’t know – or need to be reminded – the premise of April Fool’s Day is classic And Then There Were None. Wealthy heiress Muffy St. John has assembled a bunch of her college friends for a weekend on her family’s island, but it seems that someone is picking them off one by one.

The twist comes in the ending, when it is revealed that no one was actually killed. Indeed, it was all a sort of elaborate April Fool’s prank – a way for Muffy to try out a test run of her plan to turn the family homestead into a bed and breakfast offering murder mystery weekends. As each person was “killed” they were, instead, inducted into the game, and the film ends with a surprise party for the last one standing where all is revealed.

I love this for many reasons, not the least being that it makes the preceding film much less mean-spirited than many of its contemporaries, which rely on the assumption that audiences enjoy watching people be terrorized and murdered. This not only means that the whole shebang becomes relatively wholesome fun, but also frees the filmmakers from the “necessity” of making characters whose deaths the audience will root for.

While the kids in April Fool’s Day may still be rich, WASP-y horndogs, they’re fun to spend time with, and they seem like people who might actually be friends in real life, making them among the more enjoyable of slasher movie ensembles. Honestly, the flick may be at its most fun when we are simply watching them play pranks on one another early on, before the (fake) body count has begun.

The thing is: April Fool’s Day didn’t always end there. The original cut of the film continued on for about another reel, introducing an actual killer and a much more tragic ending, even if the killer wasn’t actually successful in increasing the body count beyond “one” – that being the killer himself.

The actual footage of this ending currently appears to be lost, despite some efforts to recover it for fancy Blu-ray releases. But that doesn’t mean it’s completely gone. There’s the novelization, also released in 1986 and written by Jeff Rovin, whose CV is considerable and varied but whose name is most familiar to me from writing those How to Win at Nintendo Games books that were ubiquitous when I was a kid.

It is de rigueur for movie novelizations to hit shelves around the same time that the movie does, which means that the writer is working from a screenplay, not from the finished product. This often means that novelizations contain scenes and other elements that differ from the final film. In the case of Rovin’s April Fool’s Day, it means that whole ending is still intact.

The place where the movie stops has arrived by around page 175, but the book continues on to page 222, retaining the entire second plot with the actual killer. Besides an opportunity to see at least somewhat how the probably lost ending would have played out, this also adds a second element to the movie. Producers obviously axed that ending after shooting was already at least mostly finished, and the conjuring trick of removing it isn’t entirely seamless.

Early on, Muffy appears to play jokes on everybody by leaving items in their rooms. Unlike the other pranks played throughout the film and book, these jokes are intensely personal and viciously cruel – especially the one left for Nan Youngblood, which references an abortion she secretly had. The movie provides no adequate explanation for these. Muffy apparently planted them, but there is no reason for her to have played a trick so needlessly and specifically cruel, even to further her murder game.

The lost ending provides that explanation. They aren’t the ones that Muffy planted. Oh, she planted jokes, alright, ones specifically tied to each character’s past, but not the ones that they find. Those were planted by the real killer, to give everyone there a motive for offing Muffy, thereby covering his tracks when he killed her in order to take her inheritance.

It’s all a bit convoluted but it at least goes some distance toward explaining away an element that is otherwise incongruous. Was the movie better with the full ending? For that matter, is the book? Probably not, but the book pulls both endings off pretty well, and it’s interesting to have a record of the way things might have gone.

In fact, the whole book is pretty good, albeit odd for a number of other reasons, not least Rovin’s unusual pedigree, as already mentioned. But perhaps the most distracting one is the amount of product placement that goes on in its pages. Anytime it is possible to mention a brand name, you can bet that Rovin does so, and sometimes he goes out of his way to create an opening. Was product placement in novels even a thing? I have no idea, but something sure got him dropping brand names left, right, and sideways.

Feralina

Roughly 18 years ago, Grace and I went to a local shelter to adopt a little black cat named Abracadabra. While we were there, Grace was talking with the shelter folks while I went into the room full of cats to meet Abby. I was sitting in a chair, and I picked up another cat and sat her on my lap, where she stayed. That other cat was named Feralina, and she came home with us that night, too.

Abby and Feralina were both traumatized cats who were formerly feral. They both struggled with socializing and were generally terrified of people. It took us hours and hours of sitting quietly in with them to get them to come out, even around us. And yet, over time, they grew to love us, and cuddle with us. Abby became attached to Grace in a way that I had previously never seen a cat become attached to a person – I have since seen it again when Bindle, our newest cat, bonded with me the same way.

Feralina, meanwhile, became basically the sweetest lap cat you can imagine – if by “lap” you mean “neck,” since that seems to be where she prefers to lay. A few years ago, we lost Abby, but Lina is still with us. She’s around 20 years old, and we’ve had her for roughly 18 of those.

She predates the publication of my first book. She predates this website. She predates my first professional story sale. She predates our first home purchase, and she certainly predates this place where we live now.

She has been with us through several changes of home and career, through many life transitions. She has been with us almost half my life.

For a few years now, we’ve been expecting that the end was getting close. 20 years is a ripe old age for a cat, after all. We were thrilled when Feralina was able to accompany us to our new home, and equally thrilled that she seemed to thrive in the little “apartment” we set up for her here, separate from the other cats.

She lives in the media room, and curls up on my chest pretty much any and every time I watch movies in there. She has a little perch in the window, and lots of beds, including a heated “saucer” that she is in pretty much any time she isn’t laying on me. She likes to tuck her face into my hand when I’m holding her, and she likes to try to steal my food, especially if I’m eating chips.

But the end is drawing near. Yesterday, we learned that she has GI cancer and the prognosis is months, if that. Judging by how she’s doing, I imagine her time is even shorter.

It’s going to be a terrible blow, but also one that we’ve had a lot of time to get ready for. For her last days, however many of them there may be, we’ll just keep her as happy and as comfortable and as loved as possible, and be grateful for all the years we were lucky enough to give her a home.

We love you, Feralina.

“It is as if the entire film is set in a graveyard in the middle of the night.”

That quote is from Troy Howarth who was, at the time, writing about Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby … Kill! for his intimidating coffee table tome The Haunted World of Mario Bava. The quote, alas, probably can’t be as freely applied to my story “Marcella,” which is inspired more by the lesbian vampire films of the late-era Hammer studios than by the delightfully lurid continental films that I was supposed to be sampling from when I wrote a story for Jonathan Raab’s Euroschlock Nightmares, which is now available for preorder from Muzzleland Press.

Here’s the thing, though: It’s a quote that I hope could be applied to some of my other stories, and a quote that could certainly be applied to some of my favorite movies and stories, both old and new. And, knowing Jonathan as I do, I can pretty much guarantee you that it’s a quote that could easily be applied to some of the other stories in Euroschlock Nightmares, even if my story in particular is more overgrown gardens and Rococo paintings, decadent manses and towns with burgomasters.

As so many of us are, I’m a busy person, and I don’t write (or publish) as much fiction as I used to, though the dearth there is at least somewhat ameliorated (again, I hope) by an abundance of nonfiction of various stripes. But I do still love a good scary story, and I still write them whenver I can. And I’m happy whenever one of my tales finds its way into print. While “Marcella” may be one of the first to do so in 2024, it won’t be the last, and I’m hoping to have some more specific news on that front very soon.

I thought that “Marcella” was going to be the first of my stories to see print this year, but I had forgotten a small thing – literally, in this case. As part of their recurring Flash on the Borderlands series, Pseudopod recently republished one of my (very) short pieces.

“Masks” originally appeared in an issue of Forbidden Futures back in 2018, where it was written to accompany an illustration of monstrous faces by Mike Dubisch. It was later reprinted in my most recent collection, How to See Ghosts & Other Figments. Like a lot of my stories, it sits at least somewhat in the shadow of a faded version of old Hollywood, although in this case that shadow is faded quite a lot indeed.

Besides the illustration it was written to accompany, the story had as its inspiration a number of images of masks made by photographer William Mortensen, some of them for old movies such as the 1928 Lon Chaney/Tod Browning joint West of Zanzibar. Astute readers may recognize Mortensen as, among other things, the model for my story “Mortensen’s Muse,” which appeared in Ellen Datlow’s Children of Lovecraft, behind a Mike Mignola cover.

Neither of these stories necessarily feel like they take place entirely in a graveyard at night, but I hope they give you a pleasant sort of frisson nonetheless. And don’t worry, there’ll be something more graveyard-y coming down the pike sooner or later. This is me, after all. There’s bound to be.

All on Tape

Astute readers will already be aware that I have been a loyal devotee of Analog Sunday for many years now. For those who don’t know what that is, Analog Sunday is a monthly event hosted (currently) at the Rewind dive bar behind and beneath the Screenland Armour. It is the brainchild of Elijah LaFollette of Magnetic Magic Rentals, a local designer and tapehead who curates a movie each month from his personal collection that is the kind of thing you could only see at Analog Sunday and then projects it off VHS tape.

These are invariably films of debatable artistic merit but absolutely unquestionable entertainment value. Past favorites include Dial: Help, Winterbeast, The Convent, Get Even, Terror Eyes, Carnosaur, Psyclops, Dead Mate, and many more.

To some extent, this is all born out of an affection for the DIY aesthetic of analog media, but that’s not the draw that brings me out every time. I’m not a tape collector, and I try, in general, to temper my nostalgia.

No, what makes Analog Sunday my most anticipated event of each and every month is Eli’s curation. Attending Analog Sunday is getting a peek into his brain, and that’s worth the trip, every time. Since I first started attending years ago (my first Analog Sunday was Little Devils: The Birth, the only George Pavlou movie not adapted from Clive Barker) Eli and I have become fast friends, and we often go thrifting together or have movie nights at one another’s houses.

Most months, I have to settle for only a single Analog Sunday on the calendar, but March is something special. While there’s still only one Analog Sunday (Eli’s annual “Evil Analog Easter,” this time showing the Hellraiser-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off Hellinger), there are two other Analog-adjacent events taking place in March, one of them under my own aegis.

For starters, this very night, Eli will be hosting a screening of the newest film by shot-on-video indie legend J.R. Bookwalter. The only flick I’ve ever seen of Bookwalter’s is Dead Next Door, but it was quite good. Side Effects May Vary is his first film in twenty years, and while it isn’t shot-on-video, that’s still a legacy that is very Analog-adjacent. What’s more, the director himself will be in attendance for a Q&A after the show.

That’s tonight, March 13 starting at 7pm, for those of you who might be local to the Kansas City area, and it’s at the Screenland Armour. You can also buy tickets at that link.

But that’s not all! On Thursday, March 28 (also at 7pm) our monthly Horror Pod Class event will be taking place at the Stray Cat Film Center. As always, we’ll be showing a horror movie and then hosting a live podcast afterward to discuss some vaguely academic topics surrounding the film, and how it might be used in a classroom setting.

This month, though, we have a very special guest – the aforementioned Eli! He’ll be joining us to host a screening of one of his favorite movies, Puppet Master, projected off a VHS tape in Analog style, and then joining in our discussion afterward, where we’ll talk about Full Moon movies, nostalgia, VHS culture, and why my co-host has a thing for the Leech Woman, among other topics. And, as always, it’s absolutely FREE – though if you want to guarantee yourself a spot, you can get tickets here.

And then, finally, it’s our annual Evil Analog Easter at Analog Sunday on – when else – Easter Sunday itself, March 31 at the Rewind dive bar. Eli goes all out for both Halloween and Easter, so you’re gonna be in for a treat if you can make it out. Like our Stray Cat event, Analog Sunday is free, so just drop by Rewind on March 31 if you can. The show starts at 7pm, though there’s tape trading and hanging out both beforehand and after.

“But by God, Eliot, it was a mask from life!”

Lovecraft is famously – and perhaps apocryphally – difficult to adapt into other mediums, which hasn’t stopped literally hundreds of people from trying over the years. As his stories go, I have always been of the opinion that “Pickman’s Model” made the transition with more ease than many, and my favorite adaptation of it has always been the Night Gallery episode, which originally aired on December 1, 1971 – though, of course, I didn’t see it until several decades later.

It’s a love that I immortalized in my story “Dream House,” which originally appeared in Gothic Lovecraft back in 2016 and can now be read in my collection Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales. In the story, Nick (Gucker, my frequent cover artist) brings up the episode. “I told him it was my favorite adaptation of the story, and someone else – probably Ross – agreed.” That would be Ross Lockhart, owner of Word Horde and my most frequent publisher.

These days, it’s probably still my favorite take on the story – and one of my favorite Lovecraft adaptations overall – and a big part of the reason is the episode’s ghoul, which was reputedly pieced together from costumes of other monsters, notably re-using molds from the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

As a result, the Night Gallery ghoul is quite unlike any other take on Pickman’s eponymous model. And if it is no longer my favorite, possibly usurped by the amazing rod puppet from the “Pickman’s Model” episode of GDT’s Cabinet of Curiosities, then it is still a favorite, and I appreciate both its idiosyncratic nature and its allegiance to the classic rubber suit approach.

Perhaps more to the point here, it was also one of my first favorite Lovecraft adaptations. When I finally saw the “Pickman’s Model” episode of Night Gallery, I saw what I had often wanted Lovecraft adaptations to pursue, and what many had eschewed in favor of other approaches. As such, the episode – and especially its monster – has always held a special place in my heart.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when I was sent a link to an online auction. The ostensible reason for my interest was a handful of Ray Harryhausen resin figures, but what caught my eye was a lot simply titled “sci-fi mask.” Though there was no other information, I recognized that mask. Even flattened and not fitted around a human head, it was unmistakably the ghoul from Night Gallery.

At the time, I was unaware that anyone had ever even made a mask of that specific creature, one both obscure enough that such a find seemed unlikely, and near enough to my heart that it seemed like providence (no pun intended).

Even some preliminary internet sleuthing didn’t turn up much information, and certainly not any other instances of the mask for sale. So, I put in a bid and, a few weeks later, a box arrived in the mail containing an actual mask of the ghoul from Night Gallery.

It turns out it was made by a company called Distortions Unlimited and sold around 1982 or 1983. The back of the mask itself seems to confirm all of this, as it is stamped with text reading: “Pickman’s Model / Night Gallery / Copyright 1982 Universal City Studios Inc. / Trademarks of and Licenced by Universal City Studios Inc.”

Not honestly sure what I’m gonna do with it (besides get a mannequin head to mount it on and, I dunno, bring it with me to conventions or something), but it sure is a treat to have.

“Weirdos turn me on.”

Against my better judgement, I am writing about Incubus.

Despite its reputation as just a bunch of people attempting to ride the coattails of Stephen King’s phenomenal success, the paperback horror boom of the 1980s actually produced a wide range of different writers and stories, most of them now buried under the sediment of history, despite noble efforts at resuscitation, such as Paperbacks from Hell and its companion reprint line from Valancourt Books.

However, it is also true that a lion’s share of the books that lurked behind those garish covers were trading in a handful of the exact same elements: A picture-postcard, Norman Rockwell town beset by often ancient evil, frequently tied to the town’s own history. A sprawling cast of POV characters who were likely to buy the farm shortly after they were introduced. A voyeuristic peek into the inner lives and often sordid underbellies of “regular folk.” And, accompanying that voyeurism, a focus on sexual “deviance” and sexual violence that frequently bordered on misogyny – when it didn’t go careening over the border altogether.

All of these elements are refracted from the doorstop novels of Stephen King, particularly works like Salem’s Lot, first published in 1975, and later It. Ray Russell’s Incubus was published just a year after Salem’s Lot, meaning that it is potentially fair to lump it in with the horror boom that followed. If so, however, it is an early example. More to the point, if those elements we described above are the defining features of so many of the paperback horrors that followed, then Incubus is the book that they all wish they could be.

Some time back, I wrote about the experience of watching Incubus, the 1982 adaptation of Russell’s 1976 novel, directed by John Hough, for the first time. And about the problems that the story’s central premise present when trying to enjoy it. What was true of the film, at least in that regard, is also true of the novel; in some ways more so.

In fact, movie and book run in a perhaps surprising number of parallels, even while they are, in other ways, entirely different beasts. The film somewhat inexplicably transposes the action from California to Wisconsin, of all places, for example. And in an unusual turn of events, my recollection of the film’s ending is quite a bit more of a downer than where the book ultimately goes. Probably the most significant change, however, comes from the elimination of Julian Trask, who is one of the closest things the novel has to a main character.

Trask is to the book as Van Helsing is to Dracula. He is also a familiar figure, by 1976 – an inexplicably well-off playboy anthropology professor who drives a Porsche and has dedicated himself to studying the paranormal. In the book, this makes him one of the main sources of exposition. In the movie, his role is instead divided between a couple of other characters, though the cinematic version also gets less into the exposition than the book does, instead being content to just be like, “Look, demon,” rather than building up a whole vaguely Lovecraftian mythology about “dawn gods” and prehuman ancestors and such.

I had put off reading Incubus for the same reason I put off watching the film: The subject matter. And the subject matter is also what guarantees that Incubus will likely never be singled out as a forgotten classic – and maybe shouldn’t be.

Writing about the movie, I summed up that problem by describing Incubus as “essentially a slasher movie if slashing was replaced with raping.” And that’s largely true in the book, as well, leaving aside that “slasher movie” was a genre that didn’t yet meaningfully exist in 1976.

The town of Galen is beset by a serial rapist whose assaults are so violent – and whose endowment is so gargantuan – that he leaves most of his victims dead. This leads the aforementioned Trask, who once taught anthropology in Galen and who has since devoted his life to the study of these sorts of beings, to the conclusion that there may be an incubus loose in the town, which brings him back to try to help.

“I didn’t love Incubus,” I also wrote about the movie. “The subject matter alone kind of guaranteed that.” And I didn’t love the book, for similar reasons, and yet, while I was still reading the book, I messaged a friend something to the effect that I was legitimately mad about how good it was, because I didn’t want to enjoy a book about this subject matter as much as I was.

It helps in some ways – and hurts in others – that Incubus feels kind of old-fashioned, even for 1976. This means that the assaults themselves are handled with a finesse and consideration that would be absent in just about any book published later in the horror boom. But it also shows up in some of the book’s presentation of men and women and sexuality. Blowjobs are regarded by several characters as either novel or scandalous, while other characters suggest that homosexuality is abnormal, and there is certainly an unpleasant frisson about trans bodies in the novel’s ending chapters, although by then there is so much horror piled up that it’s hard to untangle one thread of it from another.

“Was Russell being sexy or sexist?” wrote Will Errickson, for Tor.com. “Throughout the novel are moments in which it becomes clear that Russell had spent formative years as Playboy’s fiction editor,” Errickson points out. Yet, there are also moments when “women are decpicted as having a sex drive comparable to men and are able to express it in their own terms.”

It’s also true that the male gaze is rampant throughout Incubus, a decision that is at least partly an intentional one, designed to give the impression that, as characters say on more than one occasion, every man in town is a suspect. But it’s also partly just, y’know, the way things too often go. Ray Russell may have been a hell of a writer, but it’s not likely that he’s going to get held up for his feminism anytime soon.

While that undeniably lurid and undoubtedly problematic subject matter is what will turn many people – myself included – off of Incubus, that thing where Russell is a hell of a writer is what made me keep reading, regardless. And while Incubus is far from a perfect novel, even from a narrative standpoint, it shows off nicely what the horror boom formula was capable of, in the right hands.

Russell moves effortlessly between point-of-view characters like a stone skipping across the surface of a pond, with a deftness that is enviable, accomplishing in a few short sentences what other novels would have labored for chapters to do half as well. The mystery and uncertainty is maintained in a way that keeps one turning pages without smacking too much of manipulation (though, of course, it is). In fact, the primary complaint, from a narrative standpoint, is that several of the book’s red herrings and sub-plots aren’t resolved well enough in the closing chapters to justify the amount of time we’ve spent with them up ’til then.

Discovering a heretofore new to me Russell short story in an old anthology recently led me to request what I could of his work from the library that I hadn’t already read. While I knew Russell primarily as a screenwriter, my main previous exposure to his prose was in the form of Haunted Castles, which collected some of his best gothic fiction, including his infamous novellas such as Sardonicus and Sagittarius.

I first read The Case Against Satan, since it was easier to get ahold of due to a Penguin re-issue with a Laird Barron intro from a few years back. A novel notorious mainly for having prefigured The Exorcist nearly a decade earlier, The Case Against Satan pulls off a similar trick to Incubus, in that it takes a form of story I have almost literally zero interest in (the Catholic exorcism tale, in this case) and transforms it into a page-turning mystery mainly by dint of Russell’s approach to the material.

And ultimately that’s the thing that made me keep reading – and keep enjoying – Incubus, despite really not wanting to read about this much sexual assault. Inside the front cover of the copy of Sardonicus & Other Stories that I got from the library was a blurb claiming that, “To anyone in search of the paralyzing thrills provided by the grand guignol (sic), Ray Russell’s horror writing is a fine substitute.” I found that to be true then, and I find it to be true now. Sometimes, that’s enough.

Speaker for the Dead

Like most of the rest of the horror community, it would seem, I learned last night that Brian Lumley passed away earlier this month at the age of 86. Lumley’s is a name that never quite attained the same sheen as certain other writers who were his predecessors or contemporaries, but he is nonetheless one who was an important stepping stone for many of us, myself included.

My first exposure to Lumley’s work came from spotting a paperback copy of Necroscope in what was probably a Waldenbooks back in the early ’90s. Of course, it wasn’t the book itself, nor even its evocative title, which drew me in. It was the unforgettable cover art by Bob Eggleton, as inextricably associated with Necroscope as the illustrations of Stephen Gammell are with Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

That first cover, which featured a vampiric skull against a dark background, grabbed me immediately, as it had so many readers before and would so many after – so much so that it was carried on, in variation, throughout the entirety of the series, which spanned more than a dozen books.

I’m not sure how many of the Necroscope books I actually read, but it certainly wasn’t all of them. Reading that first one at a formative age, though, had a big impact on me. Here was pulp horror in a vein I had, at that time, rarely encountered, told with scope and ambition to spare, and crammed with big (and sometimes goofy) ideas.

Lumley’s conception of vampires also remains among my favorites in literature, having more in common with the alien from John Carpenter’s The Thing than with Bela Lugosi, though there’s more than a bit of Lugosi’s Count in there, too.

Over the years, I also read a few of Lumley’s other novels but – and this says more about me than it does about his writing – it was usually his short stories that I gravitated to more, and I probably read all of those that were in print at the time. When I heard about his passing, I pulled one of the five or so short story collections of his that I own down from the shelf, and read a random sampling, in this case, “The Man Who Photographed Beardsley,” which is not exactly a standout.

Lumley did have many standout stories, though. He wasn’t one of the best writers we’ve ever had. His stories were pulp throwbacks through and through but, like the best of the pulp writers, they were usually entertaining, quick to read, and full of ideas, even when the execution was sometimes lacking. And even then, it wasn’t always. Lumley could do atmosphere, when he set his mind to it, and he could describe monsters with the best of them.

He was also important to my development as I tried to feel forward what it was that I wanted to achieve with my own writing. He was one of the first I read to put into words the distinction between horror meant strictly to horrify, and horror meant to entertain. What he calls, in his introduction to the 1993 release of Fruiting Bodies & Other Fungi, “that old black magic, that frisson, that shudder of delight.” Someone who unabashedly puts entertainment as his primary objective when writing. All this, before I had ever encountered the term M.R. James liked to employ, “pleasing terror.”

So, what stories do I recommend, in memory of Lumley’s raconteur spirit? “Fruiting Bodies” is certainly one of his best, and as you might be able to guess from the title, it’s about a subject that is particularly near and dear to my heart. It also won the British Fantasy Award in 1989, so it’s not like you have to take my word for it.

“The Thin People” is another one from that same volume that shows what Lumley was capable of when he was working to his best effect. There are others, but that’s the book I have here next to me as I type this.

Ultimately, Lumley wasn’t my favorite author. Probably not even when I first discovered him, certainly not by the end. But he was an important step in my development, as a reader and a writer, and one that I still return to time and again for some wonderful comfort reading. So, it seems only fair to mark his passing.

Tales for Those Who Can’t Sleep

I watch a lot of movies [brief pause for murmurs of shock to subside] and I read a lot, but I don’t actually read a lot of novels. Last year, I made a conscious effort to read more of them, and largely succeeded, reading some 16 or so novels in 2023, including Silver Nitrate, Clown in a Cornfield 2, Project Vampire Killer, The City of Unspeakable Fear, Scarewaves, Escape from Grimstone Manor, and Deephaven, among others.

Mostly, though, when it comes to reading prose fiction, I prefer to read the same thing I prefer to write: short stories. I’m less likely to consume short stories in other mediums, however. I watch movies but rarely watch short films, for example. That said, in the early weeks of 2024, I have been surrounding myself with some top-notch short form horror in other mediums, without even really meaning to.

Three years ago, I started doing a column called Something Weird on TV over at Signal Horizon. The idea was that I would watch an entire horror TV series from start to finish, and cover it episode-by-episode over the course of a year. I began the series with Friday the 13th then moved on to Tales from the Darkside and Monsters.

When discussing what to do for a fourth year of the column with my editor, I wanted to go in a different direction, so I proposed doing more than one series in the course of the year, and tackling some titles from overseas, beginning with the classic Spanish anthology series Tales to Keep You Awake.

I’d never actually seen Tales to Keep You Awake before, but I picked up the Blu-ray when Severin released it, because I like oddities, and I’m particularly infatuated with ’60s horror and, perhaps especially, black-and-white ’60s TV horror. And so far, Tales to Keep You Awake has been an absolute pleasure to watch. It will keep us busy for the first half of the year, and then I’ve got some other international surprises in store.

Around the same time that I started watching Tales to Keep You Awake, I also happened to dig into the early horror comics of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. In large part, this involved reading the Horror! volume of the Simon & Kirby Library, but I also came across Kirby’s 1971 single-issue magazine Spirit World, which features some similar material and also some of my favorite art that Kirby has ever done.

As is the case with much of the best horror from the ’60s, these tales are often presented as either true or “could be” true, and told directly to the audience from the POV of a learned individual of some sort – providing a nice echo of the introductions to the episodes of Tales to Keep You Awake done by Narciso Ibanez Serrador, themselves a conscious nod to similar introductions by Alfred Hitchcock and Rod Serling.

The results have been invigorating and have simply reinforced my conviction to read more short fiction in 2024. My resolution (as it were) last year was to read more novels and nonfiction books, at least one per month. I’m still planning to do that in 2024, as well, but I’m also making it a point to read more short stories, without necessarily feeling like I have to read the entire book in which they are contained, with a goal of one short story per week in 2024.

Hopefully, all these tales will also prove to be beneficial to my own writing. Even if they’re not, though, they’re bound to be good for the soul.

Year Coming Down

Writing can be a difficult, lonely, and discouraging path, and I’ve rarely felt any of that more keenly than I did this year. The fragmentation of social media and a long stretch of not going to conventions has left me feeling more cut off from my writerly peers than at perhaps any other time since I started publishing, and there are plenty of other things in the world to feel depressed about, both directly related to writing and otherwise.

I don’t know if it’s the aforementioned isolation from social media or an accurate reflection of the state of the industry, but it feels like there have been fewer good publishing opportunities, and I’ve watched a lot of presses and publications struggle or shut their doors entirely over the past year.

My fourth short story collection, How to See Ghosts & Other Figments, came out just over a year ago and seems to have made not so much as a ripple. This is not a call for pity, just a reality of the job. Some books do well, some don’t. Some catch on right away, others take time to find their audience. There are a lot of reasons why How to See Ghosts may not be performing as well as my previous collections – and it may be that it just seems to not be from where I am sitting, and time will prove otherwise.

Though I ultimately sold a few other stories that have yet to see the light of day, I only actually published two new ones in 2023. “The God of the Overpass” in the June issue of The Dark magazine, and “The Doom That Came to Wyrock” in Mystery, Murder, Madness, Mythos from PS Publishing.

As has generally been the case lately, a lot more of my time and energy went into nonfiction and freelance projects. As I have done for every expansion since the launch of Iron Kingdoms: Requiem, I worked on the latest stuff for that game from Privateer Press, and also wrote four regular columns and extensive nonfiction pieces on everything from Halloween haunted houses to Marvel’s Man-Thing to the problem with the Warrens.

Besides all of that, I also continued to host monthly screenings at the Stray Cat Film Center with Tyler Unsell as part of the Horror Pod Class, where we show free horror movies and then discuss how they might be used in a classroom – or just vaguely talk about them, perhaps more accurately. And this was my first full year as movies editor at Exploits (I started in May of 2022), where I was able to acquire some great essays covering films like Mad Love, Hercules in the Haunted World, Freaks, and Dark Night of the Scarecrow, to name just a few.

Probably the biggest news is that I have a new book coming next year, though I don’t have a release date for it pinned down just yet and can’t give out any details. It’s not another short story collection, and it’s not a novel. What is it? You’ll just have to wait to find out, unfortunately, but I hope you’ll all enjoy it.

None of which is to suggest that there has not been some very good stuff that has happened to me, writing-wise, this year. For starters, I continued to freelance full time, and anyone who has ever tried such a feat knows that every year you manage to keep doing that is a victory.

The two biggest events in my year, where my work was concerned, were probably things that only tangentially tied into my own writing. One was seeing a monster that I had designed turned into a tabletop miniature for the first time, as part of the new Warmachine Mk 4 from Privateer Press. The other was the surprise of seeing my own name in the front matter of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s latest book, Silver Nitrate, which she very kindly dedicated to me – one of the most touching gestures I have ever been on the receiving end of. I also did some work putting together a “film festival” for the official Silver Nitrate book club kit.

And, of course, lots of things happen in a year besides just work. This was also our first full year in the new house, which has been a year filled of joys as well as frustrations. It has required a lot of changes to my lifestyle, as the house simply demands more work than the places I have lived before, but it has been much more pleasure than pain, with beautiful flowers in the springtime, and fallen leaves in autumn. Most importantly, this place just feels like home in a way that no place else ever really has.

As has been my habit for some time now, I kept a tally of the books I read and movies I watched in 2023. I also made it a point to try to read more novels and nonfiction books than I had been getting through in recent years, setting myself a goal of at least one per month. I’m happy to say that I managed it, and read around 65 books this year of various kinds.

Going into 2024, I’m hoping to keep up a similar reading pace, but I’m setting myself a new goal: One short story per week, regardless of what else I’m reading. The parameters are simple enough. I have to read a short prose story each week, and I can’t bank them. Meaning that if I read eight short stories in one week, I still have to read one the following week. We’ll see how this affects my overall book totals by the end of next year, but I think it will be good for me and, hopefully, good for my writing overall.

A surprising number of the books I read in 2023 actually also came out this year, and among those were several favorites, including the aforementioned Silver Nitrate, Jonathan Raab’s Project Vampire Killer, Trevor Henderson’s mid-grade debut Scarewaves, and Deephaven by Ethan M. Aldridge. As in previous years, many of the books I read were graphic novels and collected manga, with high points including the long-awaited English-language release of Junji Ito’s Mimi’s Tales of Terror and a deluxe edition of Kazuo Umezo’s Cat-Eyed Boy.

Probably my favorite book of 2023, though, is one that was originally published in 1943. City of Unspeakable Fear is the latest in an ongoing collaboration between Wakefield Press and Scott Nicolay to translate the many weird tales of Jean Ray into English, often for the first time. As has been the case with virtually every prior volume in the series, it is a gift to those of us who love a classic weird tale, and as Ray’s “other” novel besides Malpertuis, it is particularly welcome.

As for movies, at the time of this writing the year is not quite over, but so far I have watched 301 movies total in 2023, 219 of them for the first time. This keeps me well within my goal of having half or more of the movies I watch in a year be first-time watches, and puts me (unsurprisingly, given other factors) at slightly fewer movies than I watched in 2022.

Of those movies, some 32 were released this year. That’s a small proportion of my overall total, but a decently high number for me in recent years. Of those, my favorite was The Primevals, a flick that, unfortunately, most people have not gotten a chance to see. Other high points include Dark Harvest, A Haunting in Venice, A Corpse for Christmas, Megalomaniac, and Talk to Me.

When it comes to new-to-me movies that were released in years past, this year had no standout so obvious as some previous years, though I saw plenty of solid films. Though there was no equivalent of 2022’s instant favorite The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre (1964), the top of the heap was probably the old 1958 BBC production of Quatermass and the Pit, with The Sea Hawk (1940), Monster of the Opera (1960), The Milpitas Monster (1976), Warlords of Atlantis (1978), and The Dunwich Horror & Others (2007) all hanging around for honorable mentions.

As I did last year, I’m working on a Letterboxd list of my 23 (this time) favorite new discoveries of 2023, though the final list is still a work in progress at the moment.

In all, I was feeling a bit down when I started this post, and I’m feeling better as I come to the end of it. Hopefully that says something about the kind of year it’s been, and bodes well for the year that is on its way.

Scary Ghost Stories

It is de rigeur among horror hounds to make a big production out of how much you dislike Christmas. And if you do partake in the season’s festivities – as, after all, most of us do – then you must do so as ironically as possible. Hence things like the exhausting fake discourses about whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie or the endless and equally exhausting “you’ve heard of elf on a shelf” gags.

And I get it. Christmas, as it exists today, is basically a post-consumer hellscape, and Christian extremists have turned something as impossibly bland as saying “happy holidays” into a battleground over the most entitled bullshit you can possibly imagine. Meanwhile, “first to market” means that Christmas shit fills up the stores earlier and earlier each year. There’s a lot to hate.

But I actually sort of love Christmas, even though I don’t care for compulsory gift-giving or for family gatherings and I’m certainly not a Christian. (It’s cool if you are, though. I’ve got nothing against you, as long as you’re not the shitty kind I mentioned in the previous paragraph.)

While the “most wonderful time of the year” sloganeering was always meant as some whistling past the graveyard – Christmas comes near the solstice, after all, making it literally the coldest and darkest time fo the year – I actually do quite like this season. Part of that is simply that I love brightly colored lights on strings. I love any light designed to provide ambiance over illumination. And I love to see all the houses lit up against the dark that presses in.

And I love that pressing dark, if I’m honest. Night in the winter just feels darker than night any other time of year, and those pools of light with the inky shadows around them is an appealing aesthetic for someone like me.

There’s a reason, after all, why ghost stories are associated with Christmas, rather than Halloween. “It always is Christmas Eve, in a ghost story,” Jerome K. Jerome wrote back in the day, and while that may be an exaggeration, it’s one that captures a truth.

Ghost stories at Christmas are a tradition dating back at least to the Victorians and one that, for all our Krampuses and our Christmas horror movies, we’ve rather lost the thread of. Many of the best ghost stories in the business come from this tradition, particularly those of M.R. James. These don’t always take place on Christmas, but they always have a feel that captures the chill at the edge of the room, as you all gather around the fireplace and listen to someone tell a hair-raising tale.

James was far from alone, either. Charles Dickens may have penned the Christmas ghost story that we all still remember, but it was far from the only one, even in his own ouevre. Check out “The Signal-Man” for one example, which was adapted by the BBC as part of their long-running Ghost Story for Christmas series of telefilms. My favorite classic ghost story writer, E.F. Benson, also got in on the action more than once.

Even when they aren’t set around Christmastime, these chilly tales of “pleasing terror” (James’ term) are always perfect for this time of year. Keep a book of them by your bedside table and read one before bed each night in the run-up to the New Year – feel like a proper Victorian of leisure.

One unlikely place where this tradition is being kept alive is in the pages of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy comics. While it may seem odd at first glance that there are so many Hellboy stories set around Christmas, and so few around Halloween, it actually makes a lot of sense, when you look back at Mignola’s influences. For several years now, a Hellboy Winter Special has presented seasonal tales, and there are plenty of classic Hellboy stories that are perfect for the holidays.

This year, there’s also something new. I haven’t gotten a chance to read Four Gathered on Christmas Eve yet, but it comes to us from a veritable Mount Rushmore of talented cartoonists including Eric Powell, Becky Cloonan, James Harren, and Mignola himself, and it is one of the things I’ve been most eagerly looking forward to this entire year.

The ghost story season doesn’t precisely end at Christmas, either. As long as the nights stay cold and dark and long, it’ll be an ideal time to tell a shivery tale or two. In that spirit, we’ll be showing one of my favorite horror anthology films, the 1945 British classic Dead of Night, which features its own share of Christmas ghost stories, at the Stray Cat Film Center on December 28.

As always, the show is free, and afterward, Tyler and I will be hosting our usual semi-academic discussion, this time chatting about the tradition of ghost stories at Christmas and going over the fact that Dead of Night was the actual inspiration for the Steady State theory of the universe – how many horror films can claim that?

If you’re looking for suitably spooky tales to read on a dark winter’s night, I highly recommend collections by some of the greats of the ghost story, with a few of my personal favorites being M.R. James, E.F. Benson, and Robert Westall. (I wrote the introductions for the reissues of a couple of Robert Westall collections from Valancourt Books.) And if you’ve already read all those and are looking for something more modern, you probably won’t go too far wrong by picking up my latest book.

I haven’t written a lot of specifically Christmassy stories myself, but How to See Ghosts contains one of my only self-consciously Christmas-set stories, “The Humbug,” which was originally performed for Christmas at Pseudopod a couple of years ago. It is, as many of the best Christmas ghost stories are, surprisingly mean-spirited.

We all have our own particular holiday traditions – mine involve those Christmas-tree shaped mini cakes that Little Debbie puts out every year. Whatever your preferred methodology for celebrating the season, even if that is flipping it the bird until the holidays are long over, I hope you get to experience the joy of icy fingers up and down your spine at least once before the long winter comes to an end.

After all, that’s what Christmas is all about.