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.
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!
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:
Here in the ol’ unhallowed laboratory concealed in the basement of the collapsing castle, it’s always spooky season, so it’s typically a slight shock to look up from my labors and notice the rest of the world taking notice. I do, however, love all things Halloween, so here on the cusp of October Country, I’m getting ready for slightly more horroring than usual…
Make with the candy dish!
This week marked the return of Fountain Bookstore‘s JABBIES (“Judge a Book by Its Spine”) series, visits to Richmond by publishing professionals to talk about their work, authors, and forthcoming books. I’ve been to a few before and really enjoyed them, but this one was truly up my alley:
The Big 5 Names in Horror
I got a lot out of the event, learning bits and bobs about the industry that I truly hadn’t heard elsewhere. The discussion of comp titles at various stages was welcome, and I particularly appreciated hearing Kelly Lonesome talk about her vision for Nightfire. I’ve seen similar-ish panels before, particularly given the ongoing work I do with the Cabell First Novelist Award wearing my humanities librarian hat, but something about the combination of editors, sales force, and bookseller really gelled for me. And, of course, I bought a couple books…
Unhallowed Reading
I read Nothing but Blackened Teeth a couple months ago, and it’s really stuck with me for its combination of motifs from different horror traditions. Plus it has by far the best ekphrasis I’ve read anywhere in a long time. I got halfway through Devil House in audio this summer and had to return it to the library, and I thought it was really good, so here we are.
As for my own literary efforts, they proceed apace. I didn’t reckon just how much it would strain my patience to shift gears to novels. Right now I’m forging through yet another draft of what I sometimes jokingly call UNTITLED FUTURE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND PULITZER PRIZE WINNER. Which would be a Hell of a trick for a short (~70K?) novel that rides the line between literary fantasy and horror, but stranger things have happened.
What’s next? If all goes as planned, querying on UNTITLED FUTURE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND PULITZER PRIZE WINNER by year’s end, and switching (back) to UNTITLED NOVEL OF ARCANE AND ELDRITCH HORROR (~150K? ~300K?). I traveled to do some on-site research for it last week, and I plan to take another research trip this spring, as I’ll have a better shot at getting inside some buildings and soaking up the vibe.
Here are a few horror movies that really floated my boat over the last 16+ months…
Ready or Not (2019) missed me when it came out, but it’s a delightful, thrilling, winking part of the “the real horror is the rich” micro-trend, with a supernatural side order.
Had never heard of obscure indie flick The Grudge from 2004, so thought I’d check it out. Not bad!
I wasn’t eager to see this or read the book it was based on. Living up to the legacy of a classic horror novel, and a classic adaptation that’s a genuinely great film that the book’s author never liked… seemed a difficult proposition at best. Turns out, what do I know? Doctor Sleep is the real deal.
Angel Heart was a fun, strange watch for me. Many people love it, and it is good, but lacking any sort of nostalgia for it? I thought it was an 80s supernatural thriller, with Robert De Niro mustering big Alec-Guinness-does-Star Wars energy.
I really enjoyed Hold the Dark. Lots to like, and I’m still thinking about it a month later, including the performances and dialogue, but this is one flawed film. Weird editing, lots of things way out of proportion, story-wise. If you like brooding, atmospheric A24 biz, check it out. (Maybe look around online for the opinions about how well Yup’ik language and culture are or aren’t represented here. Apparently the answer is complicated.)
I’m grouping The Green Knight here because it’s A24 and vibes thoroughly with a lot of other A24 stuff. It has the darkness that underlies many, many fantasies and is a sumptuous watch. We saw it in the theater, and it was a sight to behold.
Apparently every die-hard Rebecca or du Maurier fan hated the 2020 version of Rebecca? Whatever! It’s great, and they’re all wrong. Check it out. (And if you don’t think it’s horror… watch it again.)
J. T. Glover 