10/14/26
I did, as hoped, get the audio stuff hooked up yesterday, so the turntable, CD-player, satellite radio, ham radio, and all the rest have power. Still need to run antennas for the latter two. It was nice to spend the rest of the afternoon unpacking to Nine Inch Nails, Church of Disgust, Chet Atkins, Church For Sinners, Kasey Lansdale, Def Leppard, Muddy Waters, Type O Negative, Miley Cyrus, Iron Maiden, and Genesis.
Work-wise, yesterday morning was spent on me and Chris’s two new anthologies, and signing signature sheets for a Czech edition of THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT. Then in the evening I helped Nick Mamatas out with something. I’ll probably get less unpacked — and less written — today and tomorrow, as it is tax time. Those extensions for filing are nice, but ultimately, it’s still a scramble months later.
The Vortex online store opened back for business a little earlier than I expected. Still unboxing inventory, so it will still be a week or so before new items are added and things currently sold out are replenished. Our eBay auctions are also live again.
Not sure if the bear came around last night or not. Have the indoor security system hooked up and active, but still need to do the outdoor system. Hopefully will get to that today.
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Women In Horror Year: Day 130
This B Just Won’t Die! A Novel by Tanya Pell
This humorous, heart-pounding, feminist slasher follows an aging scream queen as she is pursued by a serial killer mimicking the murders from her horror films.
In this darkly humorous love letter to the slasher film and the iconic doll, aging scream queen Barbra Jacobs desperately wants to break out of the box Hollywood has neatly packaged her in. Cast as the star of the Mirror horror franchise films twenty years ago, the role that shaped her career has also destroyed her dreams of being taken seriously as an actress. Now forty, and still seeking the approval of everyone around her, Barb makes her living signing old photos of herself and doing meet and greets at horror conventions.
When a producer calls her to ask about hosting The Monsters We Made, a hot new horror docuseries, she sees it as a step in the right direction. But when fans begin dying around her—and in ways that mimic the kills in her films—Barb is thrust back into a role she can’t seem to walk away from: the final girl.
Will she ever break out of the display-box life, or will Mirror Man end it all in Barbie’s Scream House?
Mary, Chris, and myself all met Tanya Pell for the first time during Chris’s House of Last Resort Weekend (a free convention that he and I organized to promote his then-latest novel). We alll agreed that she was super-nice and funny and respectful, but we asked ourselves the thing all professional writers who have been doing this for a long time ask themselves after such an encounter — could she write?
Chris got a chance to read her before Mary and I, and so, a few months after, he said to me during one of our daily phone calls, “You remember Tanya Pell?” And I said “of course”. And he reported, “She can write.”
And boy, can she.
I reviewed her first novel, Her Wicked Roots, earlier in this series. That book was an accomplishment for a debut novel. With This B Just Won’t Die, Tanya completely scrambles the expectations of her readers, delivering something tonally and narratively different, rather than building on what she did before. It is the work of a writer who has already mastered control of their voice, and is now pushing themselves. If you need a comparison to help you visualize what I’m saying, remember how you felt when you’d read THE RISING and CITY OF THE DEAD, and you thought, “Okay, cool. he’s this type of writer.” And then I dropped TERMINAL on you for my third novel, and all of you were like, “Oh… oh, okay… he’s doing more than just that.”
Transitioning from Her Wicked Roots to This B Just Won’t Die is like that, I imagine. It’s funny, satirical, and full-throatedly feminist, and plays brilliantly with the slasher tropes as inventively as Stephen Graham Jones and Bryan Smith. I would not at all be surprised to learn a year from now that it is being developed for film or TV (I think it would lend itself better to the latter, and if that happens, fellow producers, Barbara Crampton could slay in the lead, FYI). But despite the tone, the book also doesn’t pull its punches. It’s got the style and charm of a Rachel Harrison novel, the socio-political undertones of a Laurel Hightower story, and the punch of a Kristopher Triana book. Highly clever and just an all-around great read.
Tanya Pell can indeed write.
This B Just Won’t Die is available now in hardcover, eBook, and audiobook from Simon & Schuster.
