Bad & Haunted Places

One of my favorite types of horror story is the Bad Place story. You know the one: a person or group of people encounter a place where evil’s plain baked into the ground. The evil might have started with a person, an event, an alien, a demon—but the protagonist’s encounter is strongly localized. “The Dead Valley,” “The Colour Out of Space,” The House Next Door, The Ruins, The Blair Witch Project, YellowBrickRoad, and more: all are stories of The Bad Place (not The Bad Place, though that also features a Bad Place).

Jenny Kiefer’s forthcoming This Wretched Valley [Amazon | B&N | Bookshop.org] is the latest addition to the list, and it’s a doozy, smart and fully aware of its literary and cinematic predecessors. The tale of a rock climbing trip gone wrong, the novel features many of the elements you know and love about horror stories set in the wilderness, but others come into play, too. Some of them are telegraphed clearly, some less so, and there were even a couple points I hit while reading where I thought to myself “huh, she actually did it”—by which I mean things I’ve seen other authors try and fail to execute in stories about the Bad Place. If I told you what those things were, it would spoil the fun of encountering them, but suffice it to say this was one of my favorite reads of the year, right up there with Silver Nitrate.

This book doesn’t stint on violence, body horror, creepiness, or pathos. The advance praise comparisons to work by Alma Katsu or standouts of the genre like The Ruins are well deserved. I enjoyed reading this book, enough so that I expect to re-read it, and I hope you’ll enjoy it, too.

Coming Soon: Dark Corners of the Old Dominion

Do you like horror? How about Virginia? The forthcoming anthology Dark Corners of the Old Dominion, edited by Joseph Maddrey & Michael Rook, with a foreword by Brian Keene, combines both, with stories set all around the Commonwealth. I was happy to be asked to contribute to this anthology, a charity gig from Death Knell Press benefitting Scares That Care, and my short story “The Song Between the Songs” will appear in it. I’ll post more about that in due course, as well as dropping some more links here. Pre-order at B&N, Amazon, and Kobo.

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.

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!

Reading the Pandemic

The most prescient novel I read over the last year was Paul Tremblay’s Survivor Song. Written a few years back, as writing and publishing schedules go, it was released last summer when #PandemicLife was 100% a thing, even for many people who don’t believe in EUAs or booster shots. I’d heard about the book, of course, as I always keep an ear out for Paul’s books, but it didn’t really click that it was a pandemic book.

Reader, I read one review and promptly slid that title (apologies, Paul) to the bottom of my virtual TBR pile. That happens sometimes when subject matter doesn’t work for me, and I hope that it will work down the road. In any case, I couldn’t bring myself to read a current-day book about a pandemic.

This May I finally picked up Survivor Song, and I give it two dangerously infected thumbs up. It brings together in one book many lasting or new themes in horror: rationalized monsters, pregnancy fears, high-style influence, and more. The interest in language tied to disturbed behavior that showed up in The Cabin at the End of the World and elsewhere in his work appears here, too. If you haven’t seen it, watch Pontypool shortly after reading Survivor Song for a different take on the role of language tied to mob behavior & are-they-or-aren’t-they zombies.

The most challenging part of reading the book was, in fact, reality. Like so much speculative fiction, the plot springs from trends that were clearly visible or discernible to anyone with the will to research. And yet, it was frankly disturbing to read about quarantine, mobs, street violence, troops, and crazed militiamen in the wake (?) of COVID-19 and the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. There will always be plagues and political violence, but reading this account of a fictional plague, nutters going on about the U.N., and street battles between would-be saviors and the forces of law and order felt like re-experiencing our recent struggles in an only slightly alternate timeline.

If you haven’t read Survivor Song [Amazon | B&N | Bookshop.org | Waterstones | Goodreads], check it out. Then check out the rest of Paul’s work.

P.S. I didn’t read much else pandemic-related in the last year that I’d recommend… except for one book. It wasn’t precisely about zombies, nor did it rise to the level of this book, but enjoyable and not unrelated is Thomas E. Sniegoski’s Lobster Johnson: The Satan Factory. It’s throwback pulp and overall probably of greatest interest to readers of Mike Mignola’s comics series for which it’s a tie-in, or those of us who like the occasional throwback pulp. It does offer a picture of the use of infectious, lowered-mental-capacity goons for criminal ends. If that doesn’t evoke the politics of our seditious, social-media-infected times…