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But why bother pointing out the myriad failures of a half-century old novel? Matheson is dead, but like Hell House’s moldering emasculated patriarch Emeric Belasco, he haunts us still. With a lingering nostalgia unmoved by decades of new and exciting work, many horror publications and fans insist that the genre’s golden age rests squarely in the lap of about four white men who wrote most of their best work between 1970 and 1985.
On the evening of January 14, 2021, Corey Johnson was placed on a cross-shaped gurney in the death chamber of the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana. He was strapped down, fitted with an IV, and asked if he had any last words. “No, I’m okay,” Johnson said, before adding, a moment later, “Love you.” As the drugs started to flow, Johnson lifted his wrist slightly to wave at someone in the observation chamber.
There exists an intermittent but very real phenomenon of movie critics, mostly male but some female, revealing—sometimes inadvertently and sometimes unabashedly—that they are deeply in love with the actresses they write about. It is always actresses, for some reason, at least in the manifestations I have seen. Examples would be the one well-known TV guy who kept praising one lady as the most fascinating actress of her generation until his partner finally demanded, “Can you name even one memorable movie she’s been in?”
I’ve watched monsters topple cities, scorch the countryside. I’ve explored the caverns they dwell in and swum the depths they arose from. When I existed in a different form, smaller, a bit more eager, I sought these monsters out or, more often, whimpered while I waited for them to slither out of the shadows. Would one appear while I showered? The sound of their squelching webbed steps hiding in the hot hiss of the water’s spray? Would they hover outside my window, backlit by the moon, their claws dragging down the windowpane?
Eric J. Guignard has gone from a short story writer to an acclaimed and award-nominated novelist (for his first novel, 2019’s Doorways to the Deadeye) to an editor and small press publisher (Dark Moon Books). Eric oversees two book lines that offer insight into horror’s history: Exploring Dark Short Fiction, which provides primers to various writers; and the Horror Writers Association’s Haunted Library of Horror Classics (co-edited with Leslie S. Klinger).
It’s time to let the women with the long wet hair in Asian cinema and their Western remakes rest. They’re tired. Now I’m not saying the ghost herself should disappear. I think we can all agree that the images are haunting and succeed in inducing fantastical visual scares. What I’m saying is that the Asian “revenge wraith” trope needs to be updated. Misogyny in Western horror films is nothing new, but there’s been such a dramatic and positive shift with the roles of the “Final Girl” it makes me a tad envious.
My quarterly review column “Read This!” is being replaced by “de•crypt•ed,” a space where guest authors revisit favorite books to decode their personal interpretations for the benefit of other readers. The recipe is a flavorful, well-seasoned stew of analysis and homage, with a dash of memoir in any influence the work has had on the author’s own. For my farewell column and the debut of the new I want to share a notorious Russian novel I first read in the Michael Glenny translation: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.
Do the dead still matter? Years ago they did. Very much so. Especially in the horror genre. The dead—of the shambling, ambulatory, flesh-hungry variety—led the vanguard of the genre’s social commentary in George Romero’s horror films from the late 1960s through the mid-eighties. Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead captured conscious and subconscious social tensions of their times better than many stories in any genre. Racial conflict. Anti-war sentiment. Consumer culture. Cold War dread.
Of late I have gravitated to reviewing one book and one movie, a mixture that is more or less appropriate even if it also leaves me feeling apologetic toward those publishers who have left my shelves groaning with works that surely deserved some coverage here. (Movies, I feel, even as a guy whose mania for the art approaches laser focus, can largely carry their own water.) But it ain’t going to change this time, as we once again have one book, and one movie, fortuitously linked by the commonality of predatory smiles.
You’re gonna love this band. They’re fucking terrifying. Horror fans often talk about disturbing books and movies, but music rarely enters this conversation. It’s a shame, given how some of my most terrifying experiences have come from a flimsy CD. Heavy metal, more than any other genre, scares me the most. Metal has no shortage of horror tributes. Legendary death metal band Cannibal Corpse has spent their thirty-plus-year career writing songs about serial killers, zombies, and torture chambers, with gory album covers to match.
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