5/26/26
The serialized first draft version of FALLING ANGELS: The Labyrinth, Book 4 concludes this week on Patreon. You can read the entire thing right now in that form for just five bucks. A signed limited edition hardcover form Thunderstorm Books will follow late-summer or early-fall, followed by paperback and ebook editions from Manhattan On Mars in December, and audiobook from Crossroad Press in December or early 2027 (depending on production).
The conclusion to yesterday’s penultimate chapter featured a major character death. After editing and posting it, I came downstairs and wordlessly gave Mary a hug. She, knowing me, asked what was wrong, and after a moment, I explained that I felt guilty and sad about what I’d just done to a fictional character who I’ve been writing about for twenty or so years.
It’s a strange gig, this writing for a living thing.
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A reminder that there is a Women In Horror Year Index here on the site. So, for example, if you missed yesterday’s write-up about The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons, you can simply click the index and find it.
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Women In Horror Year: Day 43
Bad Brains by Kathe Koja
Still reeling from his divorce, would-be painter Austen takes a fall in a 7-Eleven parking lot that leaves him with brain damage and strange visions, a madness that sends him on a cross-country odyssey of debauchery and pain.
I feel bad for you kids that weren’t here for the first great Horror Fiction boom. Yes, objectively, horror as a genre has never been more mainstream or popular than it is right now — both financially and culturally. But that first great surge back in the 1980s and early 1990s was… well, I suppose it must have been what it was like for my parents to be young people in the 1960s and live through the rise of the Beatles, the Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, etc.
You had the big mainstream releases from folks like Stephen King, Clive Barker, Anne Rice, F. Paul Wilson, and Robert R. McCammon. Then you had your original paperback releases. Many of these — the Splatterpunks, T.E.D. Klein, Richard Laymon, Jack Ketchum, Joe R. Lansdale, Chet Williamson, etc — were also released by mainstream publishers. Then you had the mid-list and pulp stuff — the books which decades later would be immortalized in Grady Hendrix’s Paperbacks From Hell. Much of these were released by Zebra, Kensington, and Leisure, and included such genre stalwarts as Edward Lee, Rick Hautala, Ronald Kelly, Ruby Jean Jensen, and William W. Johnstone.
And then you had Dell’s Abyss line.
The creation of editor Jeanne Cavelos, the Dell Abyss imprint was unlike any other publishing initiative at the time. Featuring then-new authors such as Poppy Z. Brite, Brian Hodge, and Robert Devereaux, they published truly groundbreaking, transgressive, and cutting edge horror fiction disguised as mass market paperbacks and available wherever books were sold. By and large, these were dangerous books. The kind of works that, were Tipper Gore and the PMRC to find out about them, would have probably seen horror writers testifying before congress the way we’d seen with rappers and heavy metal musicians. The closest comparison I can think of is the launch of Vertigo by DC Comics or the early heydays of Eraserhead Press and Deadite Press back in 2010/2011.
And Bad Brains by Kathe Koja probably stands as the single best example of what the Dell Abyss line could do. Critics toss around words like “groundbreaking” and “transgressive” and “game-changing” all the time. Hell, I just used two of those words earlier in this write-up. But it’s not hyperbole when it comes to this novel. Kids would loan it out in school. Sailors loaned it out during deployment. Bookstores put it at the counter because teenagers would steal it. The internet didn’t exist then, but the fanzine press did, and I’ve got tons of old fanzines where the letters columns and the review sections are all raving about Bad Brains. This was not your parents’ Stephen King novel. Hell, this wasn’t even your older brother’s Skipp & Spector novel. Bad Brains was something new. Something different. It felt… dangerous. It might possibly have been the last truly great horror novel to be released before the mid-90s crash. (I’d have to do some research and look at release dates to qualify that statement).
Required reading at least once in your life for any horror fiction fan, Bad Brains is — sadly — currently only available as an eBook. There are copies of various editions of the physical book available on the secondary market, but fair warning that they often command a justifiable high price due to the historic significance of the book. If you spot one in the wild for less than twenty bucks, snag it because that’s as rare as a unicorn.
