Media Horror in Orlando

Sitting in Atlanta between flights, waiting to board for Orlando, I’m thinking about long times:

• 5 years since I last attended the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts
• 4 years (?) since I was on a plane
• 10 years since I seriously started into scholarship of horror and the fantastic
• 86 years to the day since H. P. Lovecraft died
• 17 years since I started working publishing fiction

Lots of years, successes, missed opportunities, and unexpected joys. Speaking of joys, another long time: writing for more years than I can remember.

And that was much more rumination than necessary to say I’m off to ICFA 44! I’m presenting “Always Already Nostalgic: Dead Tech, Obsolescence, and Retro Affects in Media Horror” this year. Not purely focused on horror fiction, as I often am, and I’m looking forward to all the panels, presents, and conversations.

What We Talk About When You Buy My Books

As of this writing, I am the author of some seven full-length books with my name on the spine. I have contributed to plenty of others, edited one …

What We Talk About When You Buy My Books

Coming Soon To A Screen Near You!

Next week I’ll be giving an online reading and an online talk in support of MetaFilter, a long-lived discussion forum/community weblog that’s been running a fundraiser during November. If you’ve never been there before, swing by and take a look! It’s a diverse online community with many different sub-sites to appeal to different users. I’ve been a member there for about fifteen years, and I lurked for many years before then. Highly recommended.

29 November I’ll be giving a talk in my “academic who horrors” guise, entitled “The Ghost in the Bookstore: The Rise, Fall, and Rise of U.S. Horror Fiction.” For those of you who saw me give a paper about this at ICFA some years ago, later published in Postscripts to Darkness, it’s going to be in something of the same vein, but updates and broadened in various ways. Horror has changed in various ways in the last five years!

1 December I’ll be reading my short story “The Haunted Object.” It’s a cursed story in a number of ways! I’m looking forward to infecting getting it out to a new audience.

Buy tickets for yourself, or for a friend. Hope to see you there!

Halloween Hangover

Yesterday was Day 1 of #HalloweenHangover at the Libbie Place Barnes & Noble in Richmond. It’s a new event, featuring authors from far and wide, including many from the Commonwealth. I didn’t know what to expect, as I’ve never been to anything quite like this at a bookstore before, but it was essentially a horror book festival. I talked to a few people for the first time, hung out with old friends, and bought a few books…

The event’s a two-day affair, so swing by and check it out if you’re in the area. And while you’re there, check out the horror section! It’s been a minute since I visited this location, and they’ve got a very nicely curated set of books. Here’s an endcap featuring Richmond’s own Valancourt Books:

Happy Halloween!