6/27/26
Finished another of those reader-commissioned LOST LEVEL short stories this week. At this rate, the final ones should be finished within the next two weeks, at which point everyone who commissioned a story will receive their signed manuscript. Meanwhile, my pre-readers are hard at work on the manuscript for FALLING ANGELS: THE LABYRINTH Book 4.
Today, I’ll switch gears to put the (hopefully) finishing touches on a Top Secret anthology that has been so classified I didn’t even give it a public codename or mention it publicly at all. It’s not either of the ones that Chris Golden and I are currently working on. It’s nonfiction. And I’ll give you more details soon.
Tomorrow will be spent visiting various mid-Atlantic movie theaters, scouting for a suitable location that’s large enough for a full cast and crew premiere of DEAD FORMAT. And next week will be spent on ONE-EYED MONSTER (a novel I’m cowriting with Laurel Hightower) and those aforementioned remaining short stories.
And speaking of Laurel…
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Women In Horror Year: Day 67
The Day of the Door by Laurel Hightower
Once there were four Lasco siblings banded together against a world that failed to protect them. But on a hellish night that marked the end of their childhood, eldest brother Shawn died violently after being dragged behind closed doors. Though the official finding was accidental death, Nathan Lasco knows better, and has never forgiven their mother, Stella.
Now two decades later, Stella promises to finally reveal the truth of what happened on The Day of the Door. Accompanied by a paranormal investigative team, the Lasco family comes together one final time, but no one is prepared for the revelations waiting for them on the third floor.
Way back on Day 18 of Women In Horror Year, we talked about Crossroads — that phenomenal work of grief horror that I confidently proclaimed one of the best novellas of the decade (and a declaration that I’m happy to fight anyone on, but won’t, because so far everyone who’s read it agrees with me). I also compared her writing to that of the much-missed Tom Piccirilli. Stylistically, the two are different, although not as different as you might think. Pic could be a stylistic chameleon, depending on the project, and many of his works do indeed utilize that disarming, casual style of Laurel’s where beauty and brutality live side by side in the same sentence and can turn on a dime. But what I was thinking of when I made that original comparison was not stylistic similarities, but the way, like Pic at his best, Laurel can absolutely break your heart like no one else writing today.
When it comes to Grief Horror, Tom Piccirilli walked so that Laurel Hightower could run, and The Day of the Door is her marathon. A novel by a writer in full command of her talents, written with surety and certainty, not one word wasted, expertly building on the dread, piling it onto the reader (and the characters) chapter by chapter to the point where you can’t put the book down and yet you fear turning the page. It’s the type of read that will have you saying, “I know I’ve got to work tomorrow, but just a little bit more” and then it’s 3am and you’ve finished the book and you are an absolute sweat-soaked emotional wreck in need of a long walk or the voice of a friend, except neither of those things are available at three in the morning, and oh god, you’re going to die one day.
The Day of the Door pulls no punches and it neither gives nor asks for any quarter. It’s a genuinely scary, emotionally harrowing read — the type of novel that I can promise you has the same impact on the writer as they are crafting it as it does on the reader experiencing it. Required reading for every horror fiction fan, and available in paperback and eBook from Ghoulish.
