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…
Apocalypse-check, January 2009: Yep, the sky’s falling
It’s the end of the first month of 2009. The apocalypse, or at least the human race’s version based on hubris and greed, began in earnest last year. So how’s it looking now, 31 days into the new year? A sampling of prominent headlines will sketch the picture: America’s economy is worse than it looks,…
Citizens stage mass strike and demonstration across France (with riot in Paris) over government bail outs of banks while U.S. citizens remain asleep in their La-Z Boys
Check out this BBC video from yesterday (Thursday, January 29): Crowds riot in striking France [Whoever posted the video to YouTube requested to have external embedding disabled, so you’ll have to click on the link and actually visit YouTube to watch it.] The summary and upshot: All across France yesterday, citizens staged a HUGE strike…
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…
U.S. Toyota bigwig refers to “the inevitability of peak oil”
I don’t plan these hiatuses, but they do happen anyway. Welcome back to The Teeming Brain after a two-month pause during which I felt no internal compulsion to post, and during which time I was extremely busy with other stuff anyway. I hope 2008 ended and 2009 began on a good note for everybody reading…
After G20, Bush openly refers to “the Greater Depression”
Color me shocked. Seriously. Today, George W. Bush openly mentioned the possibility that the U.S. may be staring down the barrel of what various parties have been referring to for months and even years as “the Greater Depression.” And it’s all on video. The big moment came in the wake of today’s G20 summit in…
Nietzsche on the horror of existence
[NOTE: For another post about Nietzsche and horror, see “Nietzsche: Loving existence even though it’s horrifying and absurd.”] Every lover of books can narrate a personal history of his or her encounters with books and authors whose influence proved to be life-changing. For me, the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is one of those…
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…
The Frankenstein Economy, part 2: It’s alive!
It’s everywhere now. The Frankenstein metaphor is being used far and wide and fast and furiously to describe the monster of a financial/economic crisis that has taken on a life of its own and is rampaging through the little Bavarian village called America (or perhaps, more accurately, Planet Earth). Two days ago I uploaded a…