Columns

Ranking 20 Literary Monsters

October 31st, 2018

Here, I present to you, a ranking of literary monsters. They’re ranked from worst to best. So if you want to find the best monsters, skip to the end. If you want to start with the worst, you’re in the right spot, and you’ll get to hear all about why the Jabberwock sucks.

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How a Community and a War Spawned a Collection

October 30th, 2018

2011… My first campaign as a novelist was a success, insofar as I had accumulated a lot of words and pages, generated characters and plots, and had a basic beginning and end. It was stuffed with all manner of crazy, carefully crafted ephemera as well: fake magazine and newspaper clippings, court reports, and handwritten letters that took me as long to create as the novel took to write. It was a tome about false identity and missing lovers and the narcotic draw of Hollywood.

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Engage Your Readers By Putting Them To Work

October 29th, 2018

We all know that writers put a lot of work into their stories, but we don’t often enough consider the work readers put into reading them. This might be because few of us think of reading, especially reading fiction, as work, but rather as a pleasure, an escape, an inspiration. It is work, though, even if it’s not work we think too much about. And without that work, reading wouldn’t be nearly so rewarding. As writers, then, we want to ask our readers to do the right kind of work, the kind that helps them engage with our stories as much as possible.

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Book vs. Films: "The Haunting Of Hill House"

October 26th, 2018

In 2019, Shirley Jackson's seminal The Haunting of Hill House will celebrate its 60th birthday.

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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:

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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