The Ballad of Black Tom
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
“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 […]
Locke & Key Vol. 2: Head Games
Head Games, the second volume in Joe Hill’s Locke & Key graphic novel series, focuses on the Locke siblings as they cope with life after their father’s death and unwittingly fall more under the influence of the escaped demon Dodge, who is posing as the cousin of the high school’s track coach, Ellie. Bode Locke find the Head […]
Rot & Ruin
Rot & Ruin is the first volume in Jonathan Maberry’s popular Benny Imura series. This novel introduces 15-year-old Benny and follows his adventures as he becomes an apprentice to his zombie-killing older brother Tom, whom Benny has always resented because he feels that Tom failed to save their parents from becoming zombies. (Tom obeyed their mother’s […]
At The Mountains of Madness
At The Mountains of Madness is one of H.P. Lovecraft’s most influential novels. Written in 1931, it presents the first-person narration of Dr. William Dyer, a geologist at Miskatonic University. Dyer is a survivor of a paleontological drilling expedition to the Antarctic and he tells the reader that he is telling his story in order to […]
Kindred
Octavia Butler once described her supernatural, time-traveling neo-slave narrative Kindred as “a grim fantasy”. It’s hard to imagine any realistic treatment of slave life in the antebellum South as being anything but tremendously grim. The novel is most often seen as a historical fantasy, or a type of slipstream science fiction, and not as a horror novel. […]
Some of my recent favorites
I have done a bit of media tie-in work — most recently I wrote stories for Shadowrun and X-Files anthologies — but there are two shows on that I would dearly love to write fiction for (and, frustratingly, there don’t seem to be plans for any yet). The first show I’ve been avidly watching is Stranger Things. I’ve heard some […]
Welcome to Lovecraft
Welcome to Lovecraft, the first volume in Joe Hill’s Locke & Key graphic novel series, focuses on siblings Bode, Tyler, and Kinsey Locke relocating from California to the Keyhouse on the fictional island of Lovecraft, Massachusetts after Tyler’s classmate Sam Lesser murders their father. The murdered Mr. Locke was a high school counselor who met with Sam, […]
