I have no idea why he’s pissed off at me. But Reggie and Drew, who’d been standing by the door, discussing writing music, have watched the entire thing unfold, and they are in hysterics.

I know the book is heralded as the first dystopian horror / science fiction novel, but folks, I’d like to present to you the argument that this was one of the first works of grief horror, because

She never got to see its success or know if its influence, and we, as horror fiction fans, were robbed of what would have absolutely been a powerful, genre-defining voice.

It has been said that “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” is the quintessential song of my generation, and I suppose it’s as good a song as any to sum up Gen-X. But what once served as a soaring melodic signal of triumph as John Bender left detention for the day in The Breakfast Club becomes a haunting and melancholy meditation decades later.

That’s how they function. They were built off stolen works — books, films, songs, and artwork. It is my contention that the end product they produce is not “transformative”. It is not “fair use”. It is not “inspired by”.

…but I don’t know the details because I am not an HWA member. I will say that if an organization — ANY ORGANIZATION — consistently doesn’t align with your values, needs, or goals, then the best way to change that is to…

She wasn’t doing poetry slams in my living room like Linda, or sharing a one-bed hotel room at a convention with me, Maurice, Wrath, and Jesus (because that’s all we could collectively afford).

It looks like the rest of 2026 is going to continue to be as busy behind the scenes as it has been so far, family-wise. For the foreseeable future, email and other forms of contact will continue to be sporadic. Family comes first.

…but what I have read is a bunch of Megan’s short fiction, primarily in the anthology A Chronicle of Horrors and in the pages of Cosmic Horror Monthly, which Mary and I subscribe to. Indeed, it was her multiple appearances in CHM that put Megan on my radar.

Hangsaman ultimately offers a heartbreaking, if ambiguous, reason for the disappearance of protagonist Natalie Waite, but the journey getting there is fraught with horrors both real and imagined.

A solid collection of short stories, and the perfect introduction to someone who is new to her work. My personal favorites are “Shutter Stop”, “Burden’s Beast”, and “Never Have I Ever” (which absolutely gutted me).

Jeff Strand texted me last night with this bit of wisdom: ‘As years go by, there’s a lot less “What a tragic loss for the horror genre,” and a lot more “He was my friend!”

…who got there while I was already on a panel, and then his panel started while I was taking a leak, and then afterward we were all signing books, and then the bar was kicking us out. Anyway, Victor — good seeing you for all of five minutes.

Longtime readers will remember that S.T. Joshi thinks I am emblematic of everything that is wrong with modern horror fiction (although, to be fair, he also contends that I had some help from Joe Hill, Laird Barron, Paul Tremblay, Nick Mamatas, Jeff VanderMeer, and others). Those same longtime readers can

Even the weather has dispensed with any pretense of normalcy in what’s left of our time.

(The last great creature features of the era are, in my opinion, William Schoell’s Saurian and Dragon, both published by Leisure at the end of the 1980s. Then it went dormant for almost a decade, until two young authors named J. F. Gonzalez and Mark Williams gave the world a little novel called Clickers, which was published in paperback but also as legitimately one of the world’s first eBooks).

I don’t know anything about Sara’s creative process, but I suspect she lingers with every sentence before moving on to the next, because EVERY SENTENCE is a perfect…

I don’t know if there’s an official subgenre that deals with terrible, gaslighting mothers, but if so, then it’s left hand hold Laurel Hightower’s The Day of the Door and it’s right hand holds Rabbits In The Garden by Jessica McHugh.

That is pathos aplenty. But… what if that dying parent is posssessed by a demon, and what if the whole point of her visit is to pass that demon on to one of the kids? Well, now my friends… we’ve got ourselves a white-knuckled HORROR novel.

…is that it is difficult to believe this is her first published book-length work. Most writers don’t hit this level of craftsmanship until maybe five or six novels in. Some of us never hit it, even after fifty books written and published.