Celeano Press just released What October Brings: A Lovecraftian Celebration of Halloween. The anthology features fiction by me, Storm Constantine, Arinn Dembo, Cody Goodfellow, Nancy Holder, Brian M. Sammons, Ann K. Schwader, John Shirley, Chet Williamson, and more. Here’s the first part of my story, “Cosmic Cola”: Millie leaned her forehead against the back window of her […]
I and other authors such as David Day, Tim Waggoner, Gary A. Braunbeck, Janet Harriett, and Sarah Hans recently formed the new Ohio chapter of the Horror Writers Association. You can find the new group online at https://ohiohwa.wordpress.com/ and on Facebook. At present, the group is holding quarterly meetings; the next will be on November 4, […]
As a person who’s attempting to write thoughtful, modern weird fiction, I found The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle to be a pure delight. Go read this one, folks! It’s a fabulous novella. The narrative is very much in a dialog with (and functions as a razor-sharp rebuttal to) H.P. Lovecraft’s story “The Horror at […]
“The Horror at Red Hook” is a short story by H.P. Lovecraft that first appeared in the January 1927 issue of Weird Tales. The protagonist of the story is Detective Malone, who investigates a series of kidnappings linked to a mysterious recluse named Suydam. The recluse has been involved in shadowy dealings with gangsters and other criminals operating in the […]
When I started reading Stephen King’s Dark Tower novels, one of the things that resonated with me is his introduction, “On Being Nineteen”, which is included in each book in the series (at least the editions I’ve been reading). In his essay, King covers his motivations for starting The Gunslinger way back when he was just a teenager and […]
The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a brilliant 1892 story that presents the first-person chronicle of a woman in a stifling marriage driven mad by spirit-crushing, enforced boredom and her horrified obsession with the floridly ugly wallpaper in the bedroom of the country manor her husband has rented for the summer. The story […]
“The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe tells the tale of Prince Prospero who, when hemorrhagic fever rages through in his kingdom, retreats behind the walls of his castle and hosts a ball for his nobles while they all wait for the disease to burn itself out on the peasantry. The prince has […]
The Shadow Over Innsmouth is a classic horror novella by H.P. Lovecraft. It tells the first-person story of a young man on break from college who travels to an isolated seaside New England village and discovers that it is run by a cult and most of the townsfolk are doomed to devolve into weird amphibious monstrosities […]
Fiction story ideas are all around us. It’s not a matter of finding them so much as just opening your eyes and seeing them. A story idea could come from a bit of overheard conversation, a photograph, a brief article in the newspaper, or an old family tale. Many horror and dark fantasy authors can find […]
