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From Stephen Elliott
Adrian Van Young, whose fiction wades in traditions formed by writers like Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O’Connor, and Edgar Allan Poe, explores horror, terror, and the supernatural in new and unexpected ways.
...moreToday’s zombies are not what they once were—being one of the walking dead comes with a whole slew of creepier characteristics.
Thus being one of the most popular creepy fiction phenomena around, zombies have been somewhat reinvented throughout the years. Yet aren’t they somewhat limited by nature?
...more“How to write sci-fi erotica: Imagine what Mary Shelley would write after fucking Pris from Blade Runner.” At PANK, Kirsty Logan wants to tell you how to write genre.
What are the scariest books you know of?
“One hit literary wonders” (via)
Why writers have to be careful when they talk.
...more“JC: Though the book also has elements of horror, like Stephen King, it reads very differently than a Stephen King novel. Do you consider it in the horror genre?
“VLV: It’s my great hope that this book will be considered a horror novel!
...more“How certain are you, anyhow, that what you call ‘unpleasantness’ is not a necessary, even crucial, part of our experience?
Maybe you should lock yourself up in your heart long enough to work out your actual relationship to matters like shame, loss, envy, panic, brutality, greed, insecurity, loneliness, failure, whatever you find particularly unpleasant.
...more“Sometimes there would be an isolated house hanging onto the edge of an open field of shadows and shattered glass. And the house would be so contorted by ruin that the possibility of its being inhabited sent the imagination swirling into a pit of black mysteries. Upon closer approach, one might observe thin, tattered bedsheets in place of curtains.
...moreI watch movies so people will show me the things that make me flinch, question myself, curse the heavens, and want to enroll in primal scream therapy. I don’t think I read for the same reasons.
But movies, I feel, can be particularly cathartic because they pivot on sight, our most dominant sense.
...more
Two recent anthologies bring a literary touch to stories of the macabre.