Last Minute Updates for Late October
Hey friends. I’m sorry I haven’t been as regular here as you or I would like. With Haunted Hearts coming out at the end of this month, I’ve been single-minded, focusing on promoting the novella on other platforms and arranging author appearances. You know, all that writing stuff that isn’t actual writing. It’s necessary, and I do like parts of it (especially in-person events), but I feel most at home when I’m putting one word in front of the other. That’s especially true in this newsletter, which I strive to keep as a conversation between myself and my readers (hey, that’s you).
October is already past its midpoint, and I can hardly believe it. We finally got some cool, breezy fall weather this past week, but because this is Texas, I suspect it may change back to eighty or ninety degrees by the time you’re reading this. My daughter is still saying that Ah-ooh, our 7-foot animatronic werewolf, is her best friend. My son has been watching a YouTube channel that reminds me of shows like Ghost Hunters but more YouTube-y (read: extremely loud and in-your-face). I can’t decide if the creator is a huckster or simply aiming to entertain. I guess that was true of Ghost Hunters and similar shows too. While I personally believe in the possibility of ghosts, I’m skeptical of anyone whose income is tied directly to making believers of others, so I tell my son that it’s fun to speculate but to take anything someone says on the internet with a grain of salt. He seems to get it, but it’s hard to tell what they internalize and what they don’t. I am happy to see him consuming spookier content, though.
This past weekend, after camping with my son’s scout group, I hauled butt to Eleven Below Brewing in Spring, TX to join Wrath James White, Shane McKenzie, Jae Mazer, C.L. Connolly, Dicey Grenor, and several other authors and vendors for Terror on Tap: A Boozy Book Fair. We sold some books and made a lot of meaningful connections. It turns out that the Houston area has a healthy horror community. That’s good to know—with some exceptions, I’d like to do mostly local events, as traveling can be a lot to add to everything else that I’m doing.
If you are in that area, I highly recommend Eleven Below Brewing—and not just for the beer. The pizza they serve at the on-site food truck is the BEST pizza I’ve had in the eleven years since I’ve moved to Texas. Even Wrath, a native Philadelphian, was impressed by what the food truck has to offer.
With Halloween is coming, I have been keeping my inner child happy during the day with horror cartoons and commercials from the 80s and 90s. By night, though, I’m usually watching something a bit more adult-oriented. I told myself at the beginning of the month that I would only watch movies that were new to me. For example, even if it’s an older movie, it counts if I haven’t seen it before this month. This rule is not something I’ve stuck by, but I’ve struck a nice balance between old favorites and newer discoveries, so I’ll call that a win.
Here are some standout movies I’ve seen so far:
The Stuff (1985): This one isn’t new to me at all; I used to own the DVD and even caught it in a theater once. However, when the month kicked off and Jean (who isn’t much of a horror fan) said she’d be willing to watch something with me, I figured this Larry Cohen classic was a safe bet. And I was right: she loved it!
V/H/S Beyond (2024): The gimmick around the latest entry in this found footage franchise wasn’t based around a specific year like the previous three films. Rather, it meshed its analog horror aesthetic with science fiction tropes. This wasn’t the first time the filmmakers tackled science fiction, but instead of relegating it to an individual segment, this was SF horror from top to bottom. My favorite was “Live and Let Dive,” but all the segments were pretty solid.
Bride of Frankenstein (1935): I didn’t think I’d seen this all the way through before, and I’m still not convinced that I had before the other night. It’s one of those movies that has been clipped and used in memes so much over the several decades since its release that it’s hard to say. What isn’t hard to say is that it’s a brilliant piece of work. A masterpiece, even. Aside from the fact that it’s in black and white and one scene in which a rubber bat “flies” on a string across screen (they did that a lot in those old Universal movies), it holds up. James Whale and his screenwriters had a wicked sense of humor that nicely balances the inherent tragedy of Mary Shelley’s original text.
You’ll Never Find Me (2023): This Australian movie is tense and doesn’t stop manipulating the audience’s expectations until the midpoint when everything hits the fan. In a good way, of course! The film starts out feeling Hitchcockian or like the opening act of 2022’s Barbarian. Then it turns into something more like 1980’s Maniac. Definitely check this one out on Shudder if you haven’t.
Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1973): This movie falls in the “new to me” category. It’s one of those classics I’d always heard about but never got around to watching. This October, I decided to fix that and was delighted to find a slice of 70s surreal horror that is rife with enough subtext to make this English major roll up his sleeves and get ready to do a deep read. I’m not convinced I could’ve come up with anything other critics and film scholars haven’t already said about the film, but it sure was a fun text to dive into. While a lot of the ideas explored have been examined by better, more memorable filmmakers in the fifty-one years since Let’s Scare Jessica to Death’s release, it was nice to finally cross this movie off the old horror bucket list.
On the reading front, I’m still checking out the stories in Ronald Kelly’s The Halloween Store, and I’m juggling that with The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson. The latter is one of many books I dug out of storage while visiting with my dad a few months back. I remember being terrified of this book and its film adaptation when I was younger. And I do still think the film is an effective slice of American horror, but boy oh boy, speaking of hucksters. . .
Anyway, here’s a paragraph from my work-in-progress:
The door to the luxuriant house reminded Arnold Fogerty of a wide-open mouth, primed to devour anyone who stepped through. It didn’t help that the two arched windows positioned on either side, slightly above the entrance, looked a lot like a pair of eyes. Set against the gray sky atop a grassy hill, there was something dreamlike about the structure, as if it had descended and come to rest there for the sole reason of cutting such a stark contrast to its backdrop. Or perhaps it had grown from beneath the ground like a wart on the skin of the earth. Arnold never much liked places like this. He preferred his rich folks to have beachfront estates or Brownstones in New York. Mansions in the countryside seemed relics of a bygone era, and all relics were haunted in some fashion, even if not necessarily by ghosts.
As you can see from the above passage, I am getting more comfortable with longer paragraphs and literary tricks like foreshadowing and describing one thing in multiple ways. I’m not quite ready to talk about what this piece is yet. Even though I’ve got thirteen pages of notes (including a full outline), I’ve had a lot of stop-start on projects this year, so to protect myself from disappointment and temper expectations, I’m playing things close to the vest until I have a workable draft. That said, you can expect to see the occasional excerpt from this and other works in progress from now on. I think it’s a good way to incentivize you, my lovely subscribers.
That’s it for now. I’ll see you next week: same time, same channel. In the meantime. . .