…of another historical tragedy, namely Captain Sir John Franklin's lost expedition to find the Northwest Passage. I’m pretty sure Abraham Lincoln was not, in fact, a vampire hunter, nor did the real-life Jesse James hook up with Frankenstein’s Daughter, but nobody seemed to have a problem with those, either.

At its core, this is a story about the terrible things men have done to women — and not just acts of violence or assault or enslavement, but of diminishment and disempowerment.

Mary and I were on a convention panel years ago (I can’t remember where or when because they all blur together after a while). The topic was Horror Fiction Couples or some such thing. Weston Ochse and Yvonne Navarro were on it with us. I think there might have been two other couples? One thing I do remember is that we all brought up Steve and Melanie Tem as our spiritual guideposts, and we also talked a lot about Tom Piccirilli and Michelle Scalise.

Meta (the company who owns Facebook, Threads, and Instagram) now lets anyone use your Instagram photos in AI images.

With that risk-taking comes a poignant, timely, harrowing work of socially conscious dystopian horror, set in an all-too-believable near future. Comparisons to The Handmaid’s Tale or The Folk of the Fringe are a given, but mere starting points for a wholly original take on those tropes that are staggering. This is raw, emotional, angry prose, and it will evoke those same emotions in the reader, and leave you shaken and wide-eyed.

What was frustrating to many of us, however, was that the novel serves as a conclusion to a long-running cycle of stories called the “Self” saga — an overarching cycle about a modern-day necromancer / occult detective and his demonic familiar. Many of those stories were included in a collection called Deep Into That Darkness Peering, which was only published as a signed limited edition hardcover, so they weren’t readily available to the mainstream public who picked up A Lower Deep…

The Dead Hours of Night is cause for celebration — a solid collection spanning her entire career, running the gamut from folk horror to the supernatural to surrealism, with not a single dud amongst the table of contents. I don’t know which Lisa selected the tales included here

I’m dispensing with the publisher’s synopsis today and getting right into it, because our topic is 12th Century Feminist Werewolf Fiction, and no marketing copy put together by someone in the marketing department is ever going to accurately convey that.

Jay passed away not long after. I don’t know if Jay ever read Morgan Sylvia or not, but I strongly suspect he would have loved her prose. Much like John Urbancik, Morgan’s stuff flows more like poetry than it does fiction. For example:

But as far as the actual Women In Horror Month goes? Well... for one month, your social media feed is positively full of such accolades and recommendations, and then, if the vagaries of the algorithms hold sway, such content will vanish from your feed fairly quickly, replaced by whatever terrible outrage is taking place today or perhaps a more palatable video of a cute kitten that may or may not be generated via AI.

You can either dig that or you don’t. I don’t care. It’s my bandwidth, and I will set the limits.

…a book length collection of erotic horror that is both sensual and sinister, often simultaneously. They range from one-page flash fiction to the novella-length title story, and along the way…

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

As one reviewer wrote at the time of its release back in 2011: “As much as these stories appear to be erotic, in fact, they aren’t really about sex at all. They are about the fear of sex, of what…

…or the absolutely masterful “Violet is the Color of Your Energy” — easily my favorite of the collection, and a staggeringly great reimagining of Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space”…

Riff didn’t ask for much. A Coke and a burger during one afternoon of some much-deserved R&R which we spent taking intertubes down the Jordan River, and he was alright with the world.

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.

DC Comics continues to woo both readers and creators with a new golden age, while Marvel is late paying their creators.

If you miss the golden age of Bizarro — those early days of Eraserhead Press, Lazy Fascist, Raw Dog, etc (the era of The Baby Jesus Butt Plug and Ass Goblins of Auschwitz and Love In The Time of Dinosaurs and The Greatest Fucking Moment In Sports), then my friend, Eve Harms has you covered.

Post-production continues on DEAD FORMAT. We have a composer attached now, so look for an announcement on that soon. Lombardo and I are going to view…