I was recently interviewed by the good folks at This Is Horror for their popular podcast. Here’s the result, published today as the first of two parts. The conversation with TIH mastermind Michael David Wilson and co-host Bob Pastorella turned out to be extremely wide-ranging. We talked about my Horror Literature through History encyclopedia plus…
Category: Arts & Entertainment
Horror encyclopedia updates: An interview at Rue Morgue, a positive review from Kirkus
Today Rue Morgue magazine published an interview with me at their website. It basically serves as an online supplement to their recent feature story about Horror Literature through History in the print magazine. Here’s a taste: What is the primary aim and purpose of this book? To quote from the publisherâs description, which is of…
“Horror Literature through History” an unexpected Amazon bestseller
Much to my surprise, a two-volume encyclopedia priced for institutional purchase by academic and public libraries has become a bestseller at Amazon. I don’t know the actual sales figures, and I’m sure they’re pretty small in terms of absolute numbers, since the book’s category (the history and criticism of horror and supernatural literature) is a…
Your smartphone is built to hijack and harvest your mind
At the beginning of each semester I tell my students the very thing that journalist Zat Rana gets at in a recent article for Quartz when I deliver a mini-sermon about my complete ban on phones — and also, for almost all purposes, laptops — in my classroom. A smartphone or almost any cell phone…
Art, creativity, and what Google doesn’t know
From an essay by Ed Finn, founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University: We are all centaurs now, our aesthetics continuously enhanced by computation. Every photograph I take on my smartphone is silently improved by algorithms the second after I take it. Every document autocorrected, every digital file optimised….
Thomas Ligotti on horror literature and those who read it
Here’s the ending to my interview with Thomas Ligotti in Horror Literature through History (which, as I just learned, was published a few days ago, slightly ahead of the advertised schedule). I think these lines represent my favorite thing Tom has ever said in an interview. (And as you know, his interviews are plentiful.)…
‘Horror Literature through History’ – Full Introduction and Table of Contents
It’s less than two weeks until the official publication date of Horror Literature through History: An Encyclopedia of the Stories That Speak to Our Deepest Fears (available from the publisher, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and elsewhere). It’s presently the subject of a feature article in the 2017 Halloween issue of Rue Morgue magazine. With…
The Sad Failure of ‘Fahrenheit 451’ to Prevent the Future
Teeming Brain readers are familiar with my longtime focus on Fahrenheit 451 and my abiding sense that we’re currently caught up in a real-world version of its dystopian vision. This is not, of course, an opinion peculiar to me. Many others have held it, too, including, to an extent, Bradbury himself. I know that some…
Farewell, George Romero. You helped us understand the “real” world better.
George Romero, 1940-2017 Rest in peace, Mr. Romero. I’ll never get to tell you this in person, but you played a major part in my mental-emotional life, with your Living Dead world helping to explain the non-cinematic “real” world to me in more ways than one. The paper in my Dark Awakenings collection about the…
Our smartphone apocalypse, animated by Steve Cutts
This remarkable animation comes from the hand (or computer) of illustrator and animator Steve Cutts, famed for such things as 2012’s Man, which packs an unbelievable punch. So does the one I’ve chosen to post here. Cutts created it for last year’s hit song “Are You Lost in the World Like Me?” by Moby and…