Columns

Fatter than Flash, Shorter than Short: The Joys of the Brief Story

October 26th, 2018

In the spring of 2015, I taught a graduate course called The Craft of Fiction. It was the first time our department had offered this course, and I approached it as a study in forms of storytelling. Every week I assigned the reading of fiction that I had arranged under loose headings:

Read Column →

Dead Batteries and Killer Apps: Technology in Horror

October 25th, 2018

KillerCon was held in Austin at the end of August. It was a superb conference and hardcore horror legend Wrath James White did a fantastic job. I had a blast that weekend. I did a reading, was on a few panels, and got to hang out with some of my favorite people.

Read Column →

How I Would've Died In 20 Stephen King Novels

October 23rd, 2018

Plague strikes. Pets and children return from the dead. A bunch of kids get fried at the prom.  Stephen King has a talent for killing folks in his books. I'm pretty sure we're meant to read one of his horror novels and think how we'd handle the situation, and I'm pretty sure that I would handle most Stephen King situations by dying immediately. I'm no survivor set on rebuilding society. I'm no brave kid venturing into the sewers to battle evil. I'm one of the many bodies that litter the pages. 

Read Column →

Celebrating Goosebumps: A Literary Profile of R.L. Stine

October 22nd, 2018

Any child of the 1990s surely recognizes the bold colors, eerie illustrations, and signature drip lettering of R.L. Stine’s flagship series and crowning achievement, Goosebumps. Over the course of 62 books, the Midwestern author earned himself the title “Stephen King of children’s books” by launching a TV show, creating over two dozen spin-off series of books, and scaring countless kids out of their pants in the process.

Read Column →

A History Of The Halloween Franchise In Print

October 19th, 2018

Forty years ago this month, HE came home—he being Michael Myers, of course—and Halloween, the little low budget independent movie that could, soon transformed into a franchise behemoth, spawning sequel after sequel, a remake, a sequel to the remake, countless imitators, and a whole lot of narrative retcons. For the film's anniversary, Jamie Lee Curtis once again steps into the role that made her famous, Laurie Strode, in a new sequel that ignores the entire franchise save the 1978 original.

Read Column →

10 Things You Didn't Know About Noah Webster, the Inventor of American English

October 16th, 2018

Header image via Wikipedia Commons While a "Webster's" was a regular feature of my bookshelf growing up, I never thought anything about the man, himself, until recently. When I did some research, I learned that he was a manic intellectual and a bit of an anti-social blowhard. He was well known in his time for being overly confident and fussy, mouthy and self-serving, but also a bit of a loner and a weirdo.

Read Column →

Put A Vampire In It!

October 11th, 2018

By now we’ve injected vampires into just about everything. Jane Eyre got the re-VAMP experience in Jane Slayre. We crammed vampirism into Emma (Emma and the Vampires). We’ve even mashed up Abraham Lincoln and vampires in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. I guess being our greatest President wasn’t enough for some folks. “That's great and all, but what if he, like, also killed vampires!?”

Read Column →

15 of Literature’s Most Villainous Names

October 9th, 2018

Whether they hail from Disney or Dickens, all great villains have something in common: a malevolent, terrifying name. One that strikes fear into your heart from the first time you hear it, making you think, “How in the world did someone come up with that name?” Some of these may look familiar, but they’ll still send a serious shiver down your spine. Read on to relish 15 of the best villainous names in literature, sure to inspire dread (or at the very least a good Halloween costume).

Read Column →

Comics vs. Television: Iron Fist

October 4th, 2018

Danny Rand, the Immortal Iron Fist, has a problem. He has no idea who he is, or what kind of hero he should become. His eponymous series, Iron Fist, suffers a similar setback—it cannot decide what kind of show it wants to be, even after two seasons. It uses Marvel’s tried and true formula and tries to borrow all the best bits of its predecessors, but the end result is considerably less than the sum of its parts. Why is Iron Fist the one superhero Marvel can’t spin into gold?

Read Column →

Nitpicking 17 Great Horror Comedies

October 3rd, 2018

Horror and comedy go together like Leatherface and chainsaws. Like Candyman and mirrors. Like candy corn and the garbage can. But even the best horror comedies have lousy moments, tiny little things that change the tone or take a person out of the story. It’s these things that keep me up at night. Not the Kruegers or the Vorheeses. It’s these tiny, nitpicky things.

Read Column →