4/15/26
Was asked to give Parker (my youngest son and his mother’s dog) a bath yesterday evening, because they have trouble keeping him in the tub. Parker is ancient now, but none of us are sure just how old. He was a rescue from an Amish puppy mill down in West Virginia, who spent several years living in a cage before ultimately being freed and making his way through several shelters before coming to us.
After I was done, and had lifted him out of the tub and toweled him off, I took him outside in the sun to further dry off, where he promptly rolled around in the fresh cut grass, got himself nice and dirty again, and then looked at me with an expression that said, “Okay, you got me out here. Now carry me back inside.”
These are life goals for me 15 or 20 years from now.
Went to bed a little after 10pm. Woke up at around midnight and never truly went back to sleep. Lay there, drifting in and out — that weird zone where your brain is running on muted half speed, and you know you’re not asleep but that seems to be the only actual thing you’re aware of. The only thing I could really feel was my ACH tendon in my right foot, which I messed up several months ago, and which has been slow to heal and still hurts if I move my ankle the wrong way.
Then, around 4am, Mary’s cat decided to let me know he was unhappy with her being gone so long, and stood next to me and meowed mournfully, so I gave up sleep as a lost cause.
I have a conference call at 11 this morning — a planning meeting for a one-off revival episode of HOW TO SURVIVE 2025. Doubt I can nap before then. (Yes, we’re bringing it back for one episode, because everything is terrible and you need something nice).
It’s going to be a long day.
~
Women In Horror Year: Day 13
Undead Folk by Katherine Silva
Beyond the smoke-choked skies of an apocalyptic United States, a woman travels the desolate railroad tracks of a small town in search of revenge and a quiet place to settle. Her only companion is an undead fox: animated with backwoods herbal magic and the soul of a middle-aged father who died before the world fell into darkness. Undead Folk is a short, harrowing tale of sacrifice, loss, and damnation.
Okay, first of all, Amazon has brand new copies of the paperback on sale right now for less than six bucks, which is an absolute fucking steal,
Undead Folk is the first book in a (so far) two book series, and it’s absolutely wonderful. It’s Grief Horror colliding with Post-Apocalyptic and Zombie fiction, but there’s also a dose of Magic Realism and a sprinkling of Folk Horror. In lesser hands, such a mix of ingredients might have made for a mess, but Katherine Silva deftly weaves them together with confidence and grace and heart. Without giving too much away, a grieving woman uses herbal magic to imbue a zombie fox with the soul of her dead father. Katherine does some excellent world building in a short amount of time (this is a novella rather than a full length novel), and her prose is note perfect. But where she really shines is in her characterization — both in the protagonist, and in the rest of humanity that survived. It’s a world where some of the worst lived, and some of the best didn’t, and anything humankind may rebuild given those parameters might be dark and bleak, for sure. Undead Folk is currently available in paperback, eBook, and audiobook from Strange Wilds Press.
