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The Revel is all, or almost all; the weight of the story, and of the reader’s experience of the story, is given over to the physical materials of the catastrophe: the bump in the night, the splat on the wall, the slaughter of the innocents, the razing of the town.
In “All You Can Do is Breathe,” the long men seem to be siphoning off what makes Stuart a survivor, or maybe his will to live. What do they want it for? The long man represents the way we react to a survivor. We treat survivors as heroes, and exalt them for a while. We […]
This month, we have original fiction from Megan Arkenberg (“The Crowgirl”) and Norman Partridge (“10/31: Bloody Mary”), along with reprints by Kaaron Warren (“All You Can Do is Breathe”) and Alaya Dawn Johnson (“The Score”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview with award-winning author Margo Lanagan.
Can you tell me a little bit about how “10/31: Bloody Mary” came to be? I’ve always loved post-apocalyptic stories, and I had an idea for a world where (basically) the things that go bump in the night crossed over one Halloween and took over. For me the best way to give that premise a […]
It seems slightly unfair (if hardly inaccurate) to label Joe McKinney one of the reigning kings of zombie fiction, because his work has extended beyond the walking dead into ghost stories (his novels Inheritance and Crooked House), virus thrillers (Quarantined), and hardboiled noir (Dodging Bullets). However, McKinney has found the greatest success with his Dead World series, which consists of Dead City (2006), Apocalypse of the Dead (2010), Flesh Eaters (2011), and Mutated (2012), all published by Kensington Books. In addition to being a Bram Stoker Award-winning (for Flesh Eaters) horror writer, McKinney is also a lifelong Texan, a husband and father of two, the holder of a Master’s Degree in English Literature, and a San Antonio police officer who has also worked as a homicide detective and disaster mitigation specialist. McKinney’s next book, The Savage Dead, comes out this month from Kensington.
I had picked up a copy of Joseph Brodsky’s Less Than One: Selected Essays, and was reading his great piece on St. Petersburg, “A Guide to a Renamed City,” and realized with a kind of shock that I could write something similar (but more like a guidebook entry) about the city of my birth and childhood, Milwaukee. My feelings about Milwaukee are mixed and cloudy, and they veer back and forth between hostility and acceptance. I thought I could pack all kinds of feelings about the city into this story if I did not stick to the literal truth, to physical accuracy, but instead permitted myself to exaggerate and invent, and by those means perhaps to express another, deeper kind of truth.
Fred Fraser is a Vancouver-based self-taught photographer and dedicated people-shooter. Two decades into his profession, Fraser took his work old school when he began to experiment with wet plate portrait photography, a technique dating from the 1850s and employing gear older than your grandparents. Its process is arduous, perilous, and unforgiving, and the results are fittingly dramatic: monochromatic, intensely dark, dripping with atmosphere and age.
The genesis of “The Nest” came from a brief phase I went through, where I decided that I wanted to create a small ant farm using an old television set. I did months and months of research, and became more than slightly obsessed. But the more research I did, the more I realized that any ant farm I built would be pitifully small, and that the ants would probably die after a few weeks. I didn’t really want to take them from their nice home in the ground, put them into a TV set, and then watch them slowly die. As fun as that whole process sounded, it’s not really my idea of a good time.
Long before I found my way to horror, as a reader and a writer, without realizing it, I sought horrible female characters to confirm what I knew. In mainstream fiction I was drawn to transgressors who allowed a glimpse of the monster inside the female heart.
This month, we have original fiction from C.S. McMullen (“The Nest”) and Linda Nagata (“Halfway Home”), along with reprints by The Walking Dead’s Robert Kirkman (“Alone, Together”) and legendary horror scribe Peter Straub (“A Short Guide to the City”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with most of our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview with horror author/homicide detective Joe McKinney
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