Horror and Dark Fantasy Blog
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
As a horror writer, I still have to shake my head at the way reality consistently trumps ficton when it comes to lunacy, audacity, and sheer whacked-out nuttiness.
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
Meticulously researched and beautifully written, David Morrell’s Murder As A Fine Art takes its name from an essay by Thomas De Quincey, whose memoir Confessions of an English Opium-Eater created a scandal in Victorian London when it was published in 1821.
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
It happened again the other day. A woman I’d recently met asked me what kind of writing I do. When I said I write horror, she seemed taken aback and said that was the last thing she’d have expected. This is not uncommon in my experience, yet I’m fairly certain that romance writers, for example (unless they happen to be male), don’t get this sort of reaction.
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
“The chief reason why I’m poorer today than when I was born is that I’m a writer who hasn’t convinced the world of it. Nor a single editor. And the boss told me once I would do better raising guinea pigs as a side line.”
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
The happiest endings are sometimes too random, too unbelievable, too ‘contrived’ to ever work in the world of fiction. A writer can’t just wrap up a suspense story with “…and then, when all seemed lost, something unexpected happened and everything turned out okay!”
A few days ago, I got a frantic phone call from Angie, a woman who feeds a small colony of feral cats along a depressing industrial strip in Grover Beach. One of the regulars had failed to turn up, and now Angie was hearing cries coming from a storage locker in a unit adjacent to the lot where the ferals normally gather.
- Category: Dark Fantasy Blog
Sugar Skulls, Candy Coffins, and Pan de Muertos
Ever wish you could trade holidays with another culture? In my Central Coast neighborhood, Halloween decorations are starting to appear: pumpkins on porches, skeletons dangling on doors, witches’ cauldrons dusted out to be filled with bite-sized Milky Ways and Hersheys and the like.
But while folks here are gearing up for Halloween, in Mexico and in Mexican communities around the US, this is the time of preparation for Dia de Los Muertos. Tradition has it that on midnight on October 31, the gates of heaven open and the souls of children return; souls of departed adults follow the day after, on Nov. 2. All are greeted with bountiful offerings of food, drink, and flowers. And heartfelt, often jovial, reminiscences.