Hangsaman ultimately offers a heartbreaking, if ambiguous, reason for the disappearance of protagonist Natalie Waite, but the journey getting there is fraught with horrors both real and imagined.

A solid collection of short stories, and the perfect introduction to someone who is new to her work. My personal favorites are “Shutter Stop”, “Burden’s Beast”, and “Never Have I Ever” (which absolutely gutted me).

Jeff Strand texted me last night with this bit of wisdom: ‘As years go by, there’s a lot less “What a tragic loss for the horror genre,” and a lot more “He was my friend!”

…who got there while I was already on a panel, and then his panel started while I was taking a leak, and then afterward we were all signing books, and then the bar was kicking us out. Anyway, Victor — good seeing you for all of five minutes.

Longtime readers will remember that S.T. Joshi thinks I am emblematic of everything that is wrong with modern horror fiction (although, to be fair, he also contends that I had some help from Joe Hill, Laird Barron, Paul Tremblay, Nick Mamatas, Jeff VanderMeer, and others). Those same longtime readers can

Even the weather has dispensed with any pretense of normalcy in what’s left of our time.

(The last great creature features of the era are, in my opinion, William Schoell’s Saurian and Dragon, both published by Leisure at the end of the 1980s. Then it went dormant for almost a decade, until two young authors named J. F. Gonzalez and Mark Williams gave the world a little novel called Clickers, which was published in paperback but also as legitimately one of the world’s first eBooks).

I don’t know anything about Sara’s creative process, but I suspect she lingers with every sentence before moving on to the next, because EVERY SENTENCE is a perfect…

I don’t know if there’s an official subgenre that deals with terrible, gaslighting mothers, but if so, then it’s left hand hold Laurel Hightower’s The Day of the Door and it’s right hand holds Rabbits In The Garden by Jessica McHugh.

That is pathos aplenty. But… what if that dying parent is posssessed by a demon, and what if the whole point of her visit is to pass that demon on to one of the kids? Well, now my friends… we’ve got ourselves a white-knuckled HORROR novel.

…is that it is difficult to believe this is her first published book-length work. Most writers don’t hit this level of craftsmanship until maybe five or six novels in. Some of us never hit it, even after fifty books written and published.

…of another historical tragedy, namely Captain Sir John Franklin's lost expedition to find the Northwest Passage. I’m pretty sure Abraham Lincoln was not, in fact, a vampire hunter, nor did the real-life Jesse James hook up with Frankenstein’s Daughter, but nobody seemed to have a problem with those, either.

At its core, this is a story about the terrible things men have done to women — and not just acts of violence or assault or enslavement, but of diminishment and disempowerment.

Mary and I were on a convention panel years ago (I can’t remember where or when because they all blur together after a while). The topic was Horror Fiction Couples or some such thing. Weston Ochse and Yvonne Navarro were on it with us. I think there might have been two other couples? One thing I do remember is that we all brought up Steve and Melanie Tem as our spiritual guideposts, and we also talked a lot about Tom Piccirilli and Michelle Scalise.

Meta (the company who owns Facebook, Threads, and Instagram) now lets anyone use your Instagram photos in AI images.

With that risk-taking comes a poignant, timely, harrowing work of socially conscious dystopian horror, set in an all-too-believable near future. Comparisons to The Handmaid’s Tale or The Folk of the Fringe are a given, but mere starting points for a wholly original take on those tropes that are staggering. This is raw, emotional, angry prose, and it will evoke those same emotions in the reader, and leave you shaken and wide-eyed.

What was frustrating to many of us, however, was that the novel serves as a conclusion to a long-running cycle of stories called the “Self” saga — an overarching cycle about a modern-day necromancer / occult detective and his demonic familiar. Many of those stories were included in a collection called Deep Into That Darkness Peering, which was only published as a signed limited edition hardcover, so they weren’t readily available to the mainstream public who picked up A Lower Deep…

The Dead Hours of Night is cause for celebration — a solid collection spanning her entire career, running the gamut from folk horror to the supernatural to surrealism, with not a single dud amongst the table of contents. I don’t know which Lisa selected the tales included here

I’m dispensing with the publisher’s synopsis today and getting right into it, because our topic is 12th Century Feminist Werewolf Fiction, and no marketing copy put together by someone in the marketing department is ever going to accurately convey that.

Jay passed away not long after. I don’t know if Jay ever read Morgan Sylvia or not, but I strongly suspect he would have loved her prose. Much like John Urbancik, Morgan’s stuff flows more like poetry than it does fiction. For example: