6/20/26

There’s a new episode of KEENEVERSATIONS available. Mary and I crunch the box office numbers for Backrooms and Obsession versus the umpeenth franchise films (Star Wars, Masters of the Universe, Super Mario, etc) and the results might surprise you.

Episodes of KEENEVERSATIONS are available on Patreon, Spotify, and Brian Keene dot com. As always, new episodes are paywalled for the first month.

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Speaking of podcasts, I cleaned up the tabs there at the top of this page (for those of you who still read the web in a computer browser rather than your phone or other mobile device). It should be pretty self-explanatory, but just in case, click the Podcasts tab and that will show you the archives for the various shows.

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Women In Horror Year: Day 63

Doomed To Repeat It by D. G. K. Goldberg

Out of Print

It's a miracle that sassy, self-proclaimed punk-cowgirl Layla Mac Donald hasn't gone off the deep end: Her mother gruesomely murdered in one of Charlotte, North Carolina's most scandalous love triangles, 'Daddy-Useless' drinking himself into despair, another temp job leading nowhere fast, and the painful memories of her boyfriend's abuse still as fresh as open wounds. Till she meets Ian. And suddenly, dormant desires are awakened. Madness is unleashed. Surreal violence explodes.

Because Ian is a ghost...

The wandering ghost of an 18th century Scottish rebel, compelled by dark forces neither he nor Layla understand, seeking vengeance for 300 year-old horrors from the bloody highland battlefields. Their fates are bound together, and Ian is driven to protect Layla, with violent consequences, as madness and lust simmer amidst the ethereal world of lost spirits. Now under suspicion for Ian's rampages, the law's on Layla's tail, and her only escape may be to join her spirit lover, both of them doomed to repeat an endless cycle of ghostly horrors.

Kelly Goldberg, who wrote as D. G. K. Goldberg (sometimes styled as lower case d. g. k. goldberg), was a force of nature — the energy level of the Tasmanian Devil from Looney Tunes imbued with the constitution and stamina of Hunter S. Thompson and a versatile gift for prose that hovered somewhere between Tom Piccirilli and Carlton Mellick III. She was the incarnation of the tricketer god, reborn in the body of a diminutive southern belle.

Upon graduating college, Kelly started out as a social worker, but in time she transitioned to the life of a full-time writer, and for the better part of fifteen years, she wrote hundreds of short stories for various magazines and anthologies. Her love was horror fiction, but like so many others during that time, she wrote outside of the genre, too (as Horror had gone into hibernation in the kid-1990s). She also wrote hundreds more nonfiction articles and essays, including for travel, food, and wine publications, and countless peices for NASCAR.

But as I said, her love (other than NASCAR) was horror. She was always a relaible presence at World Horror Con and the Bram Stoker Awards (back then, there was no such thing as StokerCon). She wrote hard, partied hard, lived hard, and loved hard. If you made friends with her, you were her friend for life. If you made an enemy of her, welll. sucks to be you.

The vast majority of Kelly’s stuff was short fiction and nonfiction articles, but she did write two novels in her lifetime, both of which are horror. Doomed To Repeat It was her second novel, and its a raunchy, rollicking, over-the-top modern gothic about a southern girl who falls in love with — and has a relationship with — a ghost. The prose is beautiful and sharp, in the style of Charlee Jacob and the aforementioned Tom Piccirilli, and the book itself is equal parts scary, funny, and surreal. The protagonist — sassy, self-proclaimed punk-cowgirl Layla Mac Donald — is clearly a stand-in for Kelly, as much as Adam Senft and Tony Genova have been stand-ins for me. Every author does that. Not every time. But they all do. Rereading the book now is like traveling back in time and watching Kelly outdrink Jack Ketchum and still be coherent enough to opine on the work of Anne Rivers Siddons and still keep a watchful eye on then teenager Kelly Laymon (whom she was fond of). She was a den mother, troublemaker, and bard allk at the same time.

Almost all of her written work is now out of print, which is a travesty, and the reason I’m featuring her in this series. Doomed To Repeat It is one of the more easy to find books, however. Copies of the paperback go on the secondary market for $40 to $50, but there’s several on Amazon right now for $15 to $17.