5/12/26
The first of two limited engagement revival episodes of HOW TO SURVIVE 2025 went live yesterday. You can listen to it here. This week, we focus on dealing with the anxiety, depression, and other emotions that many are currently experiencing, and offer realistic strategies for adaptability, mental toughness, emotional resilience, and gratitude.
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Best thing I read on the internet yesterday, was this opinion essay by Jon Greenway, equating Jimmy Fallon with the Horror genre. An excerpt:
If the Gothic tradition of fear teaches us that the ruins of the past haunt the present, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon offers the inverse: a present so forcefully flattened, so aggressively “fun,” that it has exorcised history entirely, leaving us trapped in a sterile, eternal loop of viral games and celebrity lip-syncing while the world slides into climate collapse and fascist politics.
The whole thing is brilliant, and very much worth your time.
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John Urbancik’s latest book is out today in paperback. Mind Chaos is a collection of poetry and vignettes. It’s prime Urbancik. His fans and readers know what that means. If you haven’t read him… let me put it to you this way: if Neil Gaiman used to be your favorite, and you just can’t read him anymore… John’s stuff is right there waiting to fill that hole in your life.
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Women In Horror Year: Day 33
Sineater by Elizabeth Massie
According to legend, the sineater is a dark and mysterious figure of the night, condemned to live alone in the woods. He may come out only when a death in the community occurs. As the mourners turn their backs in fear, the sineater devours food from the chests of the dead, thereby absorbing the sins of the departed and freeing the soul to enter heaven. Yet in a small mountain town, the order has been broken. The sineater has a family of his own, even though they must avert their gaze on the rare occasions he visits them. With the violated taboo comes a rash of horrifying events. But does the evil emanate from the sineater, his family, or from an even darker force?
A seminal work of modern horror, Sineater (first published in 1992 by Pan, then again in 1994 by Carroll & Graf, 1998 by Leisure, 2004 by Simon & Schuster, and most recently by Crossroad Press and Macabre Ink) works as a testimony to the fighting power and staying power of Elizabeth Massie, one of the most important women writers in modern horror fiction.
Beth came onto the scene in 1984, with a short story sale to The Horror Show (an issue I remember reading my senior year of high school). For several years, she continued selling short stories to the various magazines, zine, and anthologies of the period. Then, with Sineater, she began selling novels… right as the Horror market collapsed in the mid-1990s. There were a host of upcoming talents impacted by that — Brian Hodge, Tom Piccirilli, Gerard Houarner, and dozens more. But while it became difficult to find works by some of those folks in the ensuing period between the mid-90s crash and the Leisure Books resurgence of the 2000s, that was never an issue with Beth’s work. She has always hustled, always pivoted, always hit the ground running, and that is why her work has endured through not only that crash, but the two otherr crashes that followed, and why — nearly forty books later — it continues to pick up new fans even today.
Praised by Rick Hautala and winner of the Bram Stoker Award for first novel, Sineater is a work that inspired many of my own peers, including my wife, Mary SanGiovanni. While my personal favorite by Beth is her novella, Stephen (which we will get to later in this series), Sineater is a fantastic read, a staggering debut, and an essential part of any horror reader’s expanding education. It is a novel that has rightfully endured, and one that I believe will endure long into the future. Sineater is available in paperback, eBook, and audiobook from Crossroad Press.
