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It’s Alive! by Julian David Stone is not a horror novel. It is indeed being published in the historical fiction category, appropriate enough because it does involve actual people and actual events. So why does Adam-Troy Castro think our readers will want to read it? Check out his review to find out!
If the devil is real, he is neither skulking in dark corners nor leering at the unwary nor hatching plots of unimaginable evil. If the devil is real, he is laughing. He is proffering a juicy secret and waiting, not to see if you’re tempted, but how much. He is waiting to see whether this is the temptation that, at last, proves irresistible. Whatever it takes for you to give in, whatever marks the tipping point—whatever that is, that’s the devil.
Taylor Grant has developed and written children’s series, including the animated Beetlejuice; he worked alongside the legendary Stan Lee at Stan Lee Media; he’s written short films (The Vanished and Sticks and Stones) that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival; and his work as a writer of short horror fiction has garnered him two Bram Stoker Award nominations.
Much like The Last Unicorn in her woods, I one day set off to find my own kind. And by “kind,” I mean a community of Romanian Horror writers; something I thought I’d surely find within minutes. After all, what other country could be a better petri dish for all sorts of dark fiction? It’s hard to imagine a place more represented in Horror than Romania, except maybe suburban Maine.
This month Terence Taylor reads two works centered on identity: Ally Wilkes’ new polar horror novel, All the White Spaces, and Aaron Durán’s new comic book, Season of the Bruja.
Somewhere along the way we have lost our patience for the slow, unfurling depth of horror. And I think that’s a problem. I’m a member of several film groups on social media, and I constantly see complaints about the slow pace of The Green Knight, or the arthouse vibe and weirdness of Under the Skin, or frustration and boredom at the pie-eating scene in A Ghost Story. No, my friend, no. I disagree. We need to let these stories unfold, we need to sit in the space of that telling.
Adam-Troy Castro delves into the ghostly realm as he reviews the haunted space novel Dead Silence, by S.A. Barnes, and the haunted apartment film Last Night in Soho. Want to get your ghost on? Find out if these works are for you!
When I’m watching a horror film, I always know something good is coming when we step off the beaten path. We might be campers who trudge through the snow to a nearby cabin, going to push the door only to find that it creaks open of its own accord, revealing bad taxidermy and dangling fetishes which look disturbingly like they’ve been made from human teeth. We might be a team called in to investigate signs of distress at a remote outpost.
This month, Terence Taylor reviews The Night Lady by Debra Castaneda and The Fervor by Alma Katsu. As he says: “The two books I’m reviewing in this issue share the kind of fresh perspectives new voices are able to bring to the fiction of fear, along with a use of well- and lesser-known historic events to explore grim aspects of human nature, reflected in deadly supernatural forces.” Don’t miss it!
In 1996 Wes Craven saved horror. That’s the abiding narrative anyway: that Scream revived a genre otherwise coding on the table. It’s hard to disagree, and I’m no depreciator of Craven’s vision. Scream was, indeed, an adrenaline shot for a horror corpus bloated by excess and exhausted by endless pacing in the same, diminishing circles.1
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