Columns

How 15 Horror Writers Celebrate Halloween

October 31st, 2016

Image: David James Keaton No other day gets me more excited to be alive than Halloween. But Halloween isn’t just a day. It isn’t just a month. Sometimes, it can be your whole lifestyle. Do you live your life spooky? If not, you should reconsider. October 31st is the day everybody celebrates ghouls and creeps together, and I love it like no other. I asked a bunch of my favorite horror writers how they celebrate this day, and here’s what they gave me:

Read Column →

Storyville: 10 Lesser-Known Stephen King Books Worth Reading

October 28th, 2016

Over the years, I’ve read just about all of Stephen King’s books—novels, novellas, collections, comics—you name it. Here is my list of ten of his lesser-known titles that I think are worth reading. Enjoy!

Read Column →

The Horror Fiction Atlas: 7 Spooky Books with Settings You Can Actually Visit

October 28th, 2016

As a New Englander, I'm a lucky horror fan. In a day, I can visit the birthplace of Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King's home in Bangor, and a number of sites that directly inspired H.P. Lovecraft. But there are exciting stops for the more macabre among us all over the country. Here are just a few of them:

Read Column →

10 Poems to Old-School Your Halloween

October 27th, 2016

Jackolantern via Matheus Bertelli / "Bookmark" by Quinn Dombrowski Watching horror movies is an obvious (and fun) way to celebrate on the 31st, but if what you want is something a little more intimate and atmospheric, lighting a bunch of candles or gathering around a campfire and reading some creepy poems aloud really can’t be beat. So I’ve chosen ten of my favorite seasonal poems for you to old-school your Halloween.

Read Column →

Witness Protection, Barbecue, and Crushing Loneliness: Highlights from the 'South Village' Book Tour

October 27th, 2016

Last time I went on tour—for my second novel, City of Rose—I wrote dispatches from the road. You can find them here. For my third book, I decided to sum everything up at once, because it would be a great way to kill time on the flight home. I am tired of sitting on airplanes. This time around I made four stops. A jaunt up to Boston before a swing through the American Southwest. It seemed to go well, in that I did not get beaten up by a frat guy or stung by a scorpion.

Read Column →

Community SPOOKlight: October 2016

October 27th, 2016

There's a rental house I see every day when I walk out to my car. It's a normal house, fits into the neighborhood, nothing special. Right now, for Halloween, the front yard of that house is full of fake webs, witches, ghouls, all the spooky stuff a Walgreens can provide. And there's something genuinely eerie about it. It's not the flying skeleton wrapped in a burlap cloak, holding its bony hands up over its head in that classic ghost pose. It's not the giant spiders that, in the evening, look even bigger somehow.

Read Column →

What To Do When Your Book Jumps the Shark

October 26th, 2016

Oh, Happy Days. How I loved you when I was young. But remember that time you felt like you needed to jazz things up, improve your ratings with a wild and crazy stunt? So you had the Fonz don his leather jacket and too-short swim trunks, water skis and a life-preserver belt? And you made him - quite literally - jump over a bit of ocean in which a white shark - reminiscent of Jaws, released two years before - circled round and round and round. Menacing. Threatening.

Read Column →

Tech and Product Round-up: October Edition

October 26th, 2016

image via Amazon Japan Hey folks, welcome back to another edition of LitReactor's monthly tech news round-up, whereby I'll talk about a few things in the technology world of special interest to writers. We've got stories about Google's less A.I. A.I.

Read Column →

12 Horror Novellas to Read on Halloween Night

October 24th, 2016

If you aren’t reading horror on Halloween night, you’re doing Halloween wrong. Hell, if you aren’t reading horror any night, you’re doing life wrong. The novella form is perhaps the best outlet for horror literature. Novellas don’t outstay their welcome. They tell the story that’s supposed to be told, then they let you move on to what’s next. This Halloween night, I’d recommend digging into one of the following twelve novellas. Each one of these could easily be read in a single sitting (I tested them all!).

Read Column →

Manga For Beginners: Horror!

October 21st, 2016

Ghosts! Demons! Devils! Oh My! It's October and that means I'm back with a horror edition of Manga for Beginners. In general, when I think of Japanese media and horror, ghosts (Ringu, Ju-on,Dark Water) and extreme violence (Ichi the Killer, Audition) come to mind. While both work well in film/television, I wasn't as confident that I'd find great horror manga.

Read Column →