"You're going nowhere, son. Just you, me ad the walls. So wipe that bloody grin off before it's shot off, and don't slouch. You toe rag. You bin. Pay attention when I break you. And break you I will, boy. You're in my manor, now." Buck up! It's Terry Finch's THE REPRISALIZER! Follow Bob Shuter, whose mission of reprisal against his brother's killers, their families, associates, progeny and property takes him across the desolate wasteland of 70s Britain, primarily Kent AKA FINCHLAND. Finch, writer of The Reprisalizer and DRAW!, the cowboy whose name means death, is soon to be the subject of a major motion picture from Matthew Holness, creator of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace.
posted by Artw on Dec 13, 2011 - 15 comments

Daniel Manitou is ActualPerson084 on Twitter. He writes slices of life about marketing and unspeakable horror. He is a real person and not a metal ghost in a rainbow box.
posted by The Whelk on Dec 12, 2011 - 44 comments

Kim Newman discusses the novels that inspired Anno Dracula, his epic pop-culture mashup of all things vampire, set in a Victorian London ruled by Dracula. Newman's long fascination with Dracula led to two more novels in the setting and several short stories, several of which can be found online.
posted by Artw on May 19, 2011 - 36 comments

Cold Reading - A rationalist ghost story by Alan Moore.
posted by Artw on Jan 21, 2011 - 50 comments

This may only occur to the obsessive student of The Parent Trap, but once the subtleties are noticed, hints start stacking up, and a creeping sense of the mythic pervades the film...

Join Chris Stangl, King of the Beanplaters, as he obsessively studies The Parent Trap, Little Shop of Horrors, Beetlejuice, Teen Wolf, the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and more.
posted by Iridic on Oct 28, 2010 - 33 comments

Are you an aspiring writer of genre fiction? Would you like to workshop your stuff before submitting it to magazines and publishers, but you don't happen to have a group of local friends that you can workshop with? Critters.org is an online, highly automated fiction workshop. You submit your manuscript, it waits in a queue until its time comes up, and then it gets sent out to all the active subscribers, some of whom will hopefully send you some helpful feedback! Make sure to critique at least one story every week, though, or you lose your privileges to post your own stories to the queue. [more inside]
posted by kavasa on Aug 1, 2010 - 19 comments

Too Much Horror Fiction: "Covering horror literature and its resplendent paperback cover art, mostly from the 1960s through the early 1990s. Mostly."
posted by kittens for breakfast on May 9, 2010 - 21 comments

The secret origin of TV Tropes (Previously)
posted by Artw on Feb 24, 2010 - 48 comments

How to raise money for the Shirley Jackson Awards? Why, a Lottery, natch. The Shirley Jackson Awards, established in 2007 to reward "outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror and the dark fantastic" is holding an online lottery beginning today and continuing through February 23 to raise funds for the program. Participants can buy $1 digital lottery tickets for any of 51 donated prizes from authors, editors, artists, and agents. Which prize will draw the most interest? Perhaps an autographed computer keyboard from Neil Gaiman? Or the chance to be Tuckerized in an upcoming work? [Tuckerization explained] Or ... star in a porn role? [more inside]
posted by taz on Feb 9, 2009 - 32 comments

Pseudopod - a podcast of short horror stories.
posted by Wolfdog on Oct 16, 2008 - 9 comments

Darker Projects has a bunch of original audio dramas in the sci-fi, horror, and suspense vein. Think of it as your local community audio-only theatre, or not-actually-old-timey old-time radio. [more inside]
posted by Wolfdog on Jun 1, 2008 - 9 comments

MicroHorror: Terrifying tales, related in 666 words or fewer. [more inside]
posted by hermitosis on Jan 17, 2008 - 16 comments

"The Great God Pan," by Arthur Machen. "The Beckoning Fair One," by Oliver Onions. "Green Tea," by J. Sheridan LeFanu. "The Boarded Window," by Ambrose Bierce. "The Horla," by Guy de Maupassant.
posted by Iridic on Oct 31, 2007 - 15 comments

"Oh, Whistle, And I'll Come to You, My Lad," "Casting the Runes," and other stories by M.R. James, the master of the ghost story.
posted by Iridic on Oct 31, 2006 - 22 comments

D. F. Lewis: Weirdmonger. "Lewis is either a genius graced with madness, a madman cursed with genius, both, or neither ... But there is more to Lewis than that. Believe you me, my pretties. Oh yes, much more. Because every so often you catch sight of something stirring beneath the frosted surfaces of his dreamy prose, something brilliant yet dark and brooding, something revelatory, something true, something that were you to see it all in a single glance would burn you to a cinder; but you still want to see; it speaks to you. In sibilant whispers. It tells you something you've been waiting to hear."—SAMHAIN review of BEST OF DF LEWIS. "I have a paranoid sensation that I'm always being followed by DF Lewis ... he's always there to torment me ... I can't get away from him even if I switch genres... Is he for real or did somebody invent him purely to annoy me?"—Problem page of OVERSPACE #13. "Then I turned over the page and AAARGH! DF f**king Lewis again!"—from THE SCANNER #11. "DF Lewis? When he's bad, he's awful, but when he's good there's no-one can touch him."—Rhys Hughes.
posted by Sticherbeast on Sep 20, 2006 - 1 comment

"It is here, however -- perhaps 50 pages into this 800-plus page anthology -- that something begins to shift, and what was supposed to be sublime (but is actually ridiculous) becomes something that was supposed to be ridiculous, but is actually sublime."
Why H.P. Lovecraft is scary after all.
posted by Tlogmer on Apr 19, 2005 - 40 comments

Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back
The tattoo is of a great, blue mushroom cloud, and in the cloud, etched ghost-like, is the face of our daughter, Rae. Her lips are drawn tight, eyes are closed and there are stitches deeply pulled to simulate the lashes. When I move fast and hard they rip slightly and Rae cries bloody tears. That’s one reason for the martial arts. The hard practice of them helps me to tear the stitches so my daughter can cry. Tears are the only thing I can give her.
East Texas writer Joe R Lansdale has written horror, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, suspense, westerns, "men's adventure," and just about every other kind of writing you can think of. On his website (see main link) Lansdale makes a story available for free every week to his readers.
Lansdale also wrote a novella featuring an aging Elvis Presley who teams up with a delusional, African American John F. Kennedy to battle an ancient Egyptian mummy with a predilection for anal soul-rape. It made it to the big screen, too: Bubba Ho-Tep. With Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis. More inside.
posted by matteo on Nov 5, 2004 - 9 comments

"That's it. I'm done. Done writing books." After Stephen King publishes his next five new books, he's ending his career in publishing. Viewing his latest work as mere recycles of older novels that he has written, he's choosing to stop while he's at the top of his game rather than meet a grim end to his career. Are any fans of his work disappointed or do you feel satisfied with the body of work that he has created over his career?
posted by crog on Jan 30, 2002 - 68 comments