5/28/26
The Whiteboard of Doom — one of the most popular features on my Patreon, in which four times a year we go deep, deep, DEEP behind the curtain with a look at what’s in the pipeline, including stuff the general public doesn’t know about — has returned.
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Everything old is new again, and that goes for the old Blogging platforms like Livejournal and Blogger. Newly launched Tuhat, according to their introduction, “is a platform for long-form writing. Posts must be at least 1,000 words to publish. No threads, no microblogging, no hot takes. Each writer gets their own page. No algorithm decides who reads you — just a URL you can share.”
If that sounds like early 2000s Blogging… well, that’s pretty much what it is. You get an RSS Feed, etc. It’s the type of space my own HAIL SATEN used to live. Between Patreon and Substack, I currently have no need for such a thing here in the summer of 2026, but I suppose it might be useful should I ever want to migrate this daily Blog off my site for some reason — or perhaps as a mirror for this Blog. I’ve gone ahead and reserved my real estate there. I doubt I’ll use it right now, but I may check back in on it from time to time.
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With it being our wedding anniversary, yesterday’s work day was pretty much nonexistant (except for a few emails related to a potential television production). Now that the first draft of FALLING ANGELS is finished, I intend to focus on me and Chris Golden’s OPERATION LITTLE GOLDEN BOOK today. Tomorrow is my son’s graduation, so no work then, either. this weekend I’ll focus on the few remaining commissioned LOST LEVEL stories, and then next week, continue on those and work on revisions for FALLING ANGELS. Once one of those two things is done, I’ll zero back in on me and Laurel’s novel.
The working on multiple things at once approach doesn’t fit for everyone, but it’s the only way for me.
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Women In Horror Year: Day 45
This Symbiotic Fascination by Charlee Jacob
It's a terrible thing loneliness is.
Tawne Delaney: A woman filled with the hatred of herself and what she's not... Never touched by a man, never loved, until one night in the woods... Tawne watches as a woman's body is crammed into a drain pipe...
A crooked and broken beast beckons to Tawne and passes on his gift to her. Is it the ultimate power or the cruelest joke?
Arcan Tyler: A man tormented by the memories of an insane mother and haunted by the ghosts of a dozen women not yet dead... Struggling with the rage of three beasts, controlled, for now...
Once friends and co-workers, Tawne and Arcan now unite as lovers... Along with each other's body, they share each other's secrets: Arcan, his beasts; Tawne, her power... Is it the love of dreams or the sheer terror of a nightmare come to life?
Published multiple times over the decades (1997, 2002, 2011, and 2022) This Symbiotic Fascination was the debut novel of the undisputed Queen of Extreme Horror — Charlee Jacob, who had spent a decade before its publication writing and submitting short stories to the various zines, magazines, and anthologies of the time. Charlee was always able to bring the ick-factor. She could go toe-to-toe with Ed Lee and Wrath James White in that regard. (One of the grossest things I ever heard in my 30 years in this business was a story Charlee performed one year in the long-running Gross Out Contest, for which she used a raw chicken as a prop). But Charlee’s voice was unique and special and absolutely beautiful. Even when writing the sickest stuff imaginable, she delivered it with elegance and a poet’s knack for nuance and metaphor that no one since her has managed to do as capably.
This Symbiotic Fascination puts that talent front and center. It contains multitudes — the kind of novel where the themes and ideas presented can shift and change upon multiple rereads. And she does it so seemingly effortlessly — delivering what is simultaneously a dense, rich, thematically heavy novel that reads breezily and enthrallingly, like a song that’s over too quickly so you listen to it again and again and again, catching new things each time.
I’ve often said that Charlee’s work is extreme horror for literary folks who think they wouldn’t like extreme horror. She was one of a kind — a unique voice that fell silent way too soon. She paved the way for authors today such as CJ Leede (whose work reminds me in some ways of Charlee — not as imitation or pastiche, but in heart and emotion) and Eric LaRocca, as well as authors who aren’t necessarily thought of as extreme horror writers but whose work has that same nuance and subtlety, such as V. Castro and Laurel Hightower. This is the perfect introduction to her remarkable body of work. Available in paperback and eBook from Macabre Ink.
