It occurs to me that I haven’t yet shared the final TOC for Dark Awakenings, even though, as I mentioned earlier today, the book is on schedule for publication this November or December. So here it is: TABLE OF CONTENTS for DARK AWAKENINGS Apologia Pro Libro Suo FICTIONS: Teeth The Stars Shine Without Me Desert…
Category: Arts & Entertainment
In serving his vision of truth, the artist best serves his nation
These may be my favorite words ever spoken by an American President. They come from a speech delivered by John F. Kennedy on October 26, 1963 — less than a month before his death — at Amherst College, in honor of the late Robert Frost. The speech was published the following February in The Atlantic…
North Shore Art Throb: Launch of a Cool Arts Initiative — Right in Lovecraft Country
Many of my readers are die-hard fans, students, and spiritual children of H.P. Lovecraft, so with that in mind I thought I’d give a heads up about the launch of a cool and interesting new online arts publication in Boston’s North Shore, which is, of course, right where Lovecraft located a substantial portion of his…
Original music for Conrad Aiken’s “Silent Snow, Secret Snow”
A couple of years ago I composed some original music to accompany a recorded reading of Conrad Aiken’s sublime 1934 short story “Silent Snow, Secret Snow,” about a young boy named Paul who grows progressively more lost in the delusion of a silently falling snow that slowly envelopes his world. The music didn’t make it…
Frightening secrets of a deeper life
A dose of really astute psychological insight from Hawthorne: The mind is in a sad state when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot confine her spectres within the dim region of her sway, but suffers them to break forth, affrighting this actual life with secrets that perchance belong to a deeper one . . . . Truth…
DARK AWAKENINGS: Signed, sealed, and delivered at last
Yesterday around 2 a.m. I hit the “send” button to email the completed manuscript of my forthcoming collection of horror stories and essays, Dark Awakenings, to its publisher, Mythos Books. This was a long time coming. People who liked my first book, Divinations of the Deep, have been asking me ever since its publication in…
Economic doom indeed: Fantasy, SF, and horror publishers and publications scaling back and shutting down
Okay, so this developing trend doesn’t rank up there in severity with things like peak oil, spiking unemployment, riots around the globe, and dead bees. But it’s still quite interesting, at least to somebody like me, who has written horror for years, spoken on panels at several genre conventions, and made a lot of personal…
Bad Titles for Horror Movies
For those who like their humor absurd with a dash of lame, here’s a list of 25-plus-one really awful titles (and ideas) for horror movies. The inspiration for this rather useless expenditure of mental activity goes back to a conversation I had with my friend and fellow horror writer Mark McLaughlin in 2001, when he…
Fiction as Religion: Some good words about DIVINATIONS OF THE DEEP
Here’s something for those of you who have read or are thinking about reading my first book, the cosmic-spiritual horror collection Divinations of the Deep (Ash-Tree Press, 2002). Last month Des Lewis, better known to the world at large as extremely prolific and much-respected weird horror author and editor D.F. Lewis, bought a copy of…
My interview at Thomas Ligotti Online
It’s no news to my readers — whether they know me from The Teeming Brain, my literary critical work, my published stories, or some combination thereof — that I’m a huge fan of contemporary horror writer Thomas Ligotti, whom I honestly consider to be one of the greatest living writers in the English language (an…