But what really spoke to me with Bishop is her mastery of using setting and place to help drive the story. The Great Northern wilds are so vividly detailed and fleshed out here, the wilderness very much feels like one of the main characters of the book.

Bubbles, curled up atop my printer so she can yell at the birds who have the audacity to perch on the power line, is also quite comfortable

Regardless, it’s unacceptable. It’s a disservice to readers and, quite frankly, it’s unfair to Hailey, a writer whose star is firmly on the rise, as my own was back in 2003. And because I’ve been there I know first hand…

Katherine does some excellent world building in a short amount of time (this is a novella rather than a full length novel), and her prose is note perfect.

My father-in-law is in his late Seventies and starting to deal with all the shit life throws you at that stage. He and I were talking about space travel a few weeks ago and he sighed and said, “I guess I won’t be around to see a human set foot on Mars.” But hell, at 58, I’m not sure I will be either.

Spellcheck insists that isn’t right, but I’ve been married into an Italian family long enough to know that it is

Born in Kentucky in 1913, Jane Rice was a writer of horror and fantasy short stories. Her first was published in a 1940 issue of Unknown Worlds.

Magical realism and an accurate, well-researched historical setting collide with an unflinching brutality not often seen outside of a Jack Ketchum novel.

And the IHG were an organization devoted to horror fiction — sort of an alternative to the HWA, because even back in the 1990s, people had problems and quibbles with the HWA…

And this is why the much anticipated release of the government’s UFO/UAP files will be as anticlimactic as the release of the JFK and MLK files were. Any technology retrieved from crashed UFO/UAPs was given to the private sector — companies like Lockheed Martin, Haliburton, etc — and the private sector is immune to things like Freedom of Information act and disclosure edicts. As we’ve seen from the Epstein files, if they want to cover something up, they’ll cover it up.

There’s a direct line of influence from Charlee Jacob and Elizabeth Massie to Sandy’s stuff, and A Manhattan Grimoire is a perfect introductory work for someone wanting to check out her books.

I would have also liked to have had a steak, but once you turn 50, the doctor doesn’t allow you to eat anything fun anymore.

The easy analogy would be that Chesya walked so that today’s generation of authors (particularly women of color examining their experience via horror) could run, but I think the better analogy is that Chesya charged the battlefield so they could follow.

Had Somer been born many decades before, You’re Mine is a book that would have been right at home among the classic Zebra Horror paperbacks of the 80s and early 90s (and indeed, the cover even has that same sort of vibe).

It is an absolute masterclass in worldbuilding, as well as in how to effectively write cross-genre stories (it is as much an action-adventure novel as it is a horror novel, owing perhaps more to The Dirty Dozen or The Guns of Navarone than it does Salem’s Lot or Dracula).

…and then it would become 'Brian Keene Ruins Women In Horror Month By Nuking Half Of Social Media', and that's not good for anybody.

Technology, which we are told with each new iteration, will increasingly make our lives simpler, and instead, each new iteration is making them more terrible.

Mary reminded me that Sundays are supposed to be my day off, so other than

Vanguard Comics previewed a new comic and animation series called Daniel Peacock’s The Moons On Mars which was made using generative A.I., and it is laughably bad, even by generative A.I. standards.

You will be better at expressing your art in some forms more than others. But it is the expression that matters. Doesn’t do you or the world any good to keep that expression bottled up inside.