News & Blog

I have a new article online, written with my 100 Fathoms Below co-author Steven L. Kent, over at CrimeReads. It’s called “The Monsters Among Us Are the Most Terrifying of All,” and it looks at six classic literary characters who could rightfully be called monsters in human skin. Is your favorite literary human monster among them? Click the excerpt below and find out!

Forget about Frankenstein’s Monster, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, or even Godzilla. The thrills we get from them may be indisputable, but it’s the knock on the door in the middle of the night, the silhouette of a man waiting at the far end of the alley, or the stranger who’s sitting in your living room when you get home that evokes real terror. It’s the monsters among us that we truly fear.

And don’t forget that 100 Fathoms Below is out in paperback now!

The kind folks at Killer Nashville asked me to write an article for their website. I wrote a piece called “Adding a Supernatural Element to Your Thriller,” and now it’s live! Click the excerpt below to read the whole thing:

Growing up, I was a Monster Kid through and through. One of my favorite memories from my youth is how every Sunday morning at 11 AM, WPIX-TV out of New York City would show an old, black-and-white Abbott and Costello movie. It seemed like they showed every film the comedy duo ever made, and week after week I watched and laughed along with their classic mix of physical comedy and wordplay. I enjoyed all the films, but my true, whole-hearted devotion was reserved for the movies in which Bud Abbott and Lou Costello encountered monsters, haunted houses, and mad scientists, movies like Hold That Ghost, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, Abbott, and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, and of course their greatest film and one of my all-time favorite movies, the incomparable Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

Tune in to hear me and my 100 Fathoms Below co-author Steven L. Kent discuss John W. Campbell’s classic novella “Who Goes There?” and Howard Hawks’ 1951 film adaptation The Thing from Another World with host Keith Chawgo on season 2 episode 31 of the Literary License Podcast! You can catch it on:

Podbean

Soundcloud

Spotify

iTunes

or the Literary License Podcast website!

I hope you’ll give it a listen!

Monica Kuebler, Rue Morgue Magazine‘s managing editor and resident bibliophile, has a new online venture called Library of the Damned that features a welcome focus on horror literature instead of the usual movies and video games. It soft-launched with a few news items in September, including an announcement about the release of In the Shadow of the Axe, but now that October has arrived the site has launched for real with a month-long series of author interviews called “31 Days of Halloween” — and the very first author she interviews is yours truly!

Swing by the site to learn which scene in a horror novel scared me the most, what I consider the all-time scariest horror story, and more! Here’s a sneak peek, which you can click to take you to the interview:

It’s very rare that the written word truly frightens me. I think, for me, real fear relies on other parts of the brain than reading does: visual or aural stimuli, mostly. A glimpse of movement from the corner of my eye or an incongruous sound will scare me a lot more than words on a page, probably because I can have some control over the images those words put in my mind, even if that control is limited, while sights and sounds are completely out of my control.

Monica will be featuring a new horror author every day for the rest of the month. I’m deeply honored she chose to start with me. Here’s wishing Library of the Damned long life and much success!