Gwendy’s Button Box: A Brand New Castle Rock Novella by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar!

We are extremely pleased to announce the World’s First Edition of Gwendy’s Button Box by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar, a brand new original Castle Rock novella!

Featuring full-color cover artwork by Ben Baldwin and black and white interior artwork by Keith Minnion, this book marks the first-ever colloboration by these two long-time friends and award-winning authors.

Please visit the product page to read more about this exciting news and to reserve your copy today!

Gwendy's Button Box

Thank you, as always, for your continued support and enthusiasm!

Big News Coming Tomorrow!

Tomorrow, February 28, we’ll be announcing the trade edition of the brand new Stephen King and Richard Chizmar novella.

Please note that things might be a little crazy because Entertainment Weekly is “revealing” the book first, so please be patient if you have trouble accessing the CemeteryDance.com website. Our hosting company is preparing things on their end, but you know how the Internet can be.

You can follow Cemetery Dance Publications on Facebook and Twitter to see the news as soon as possible since the newsletter will probably go out very slowly.

Also, please be sure to sign-up for Richard’s FREE mailing list for occasional updates, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram.

Thank you, as always, for your continued support and enthusiasm!

The Women I Have Known

The Women I Have Known
by Mary SanGiovanni

As a horror writer coming up in the first decade of the new millennium, I’ve had the opportunity to see the dual perspectives of women’s place in the horror genre, the former reflecting where we used to be, and the latter reflecting how much progress we’ve made. Continue Reading

Epilogue, Part One

November 16, 2016

Brian and his oldest son have spent a week in Seattle. His oldest son, now twenty-five, is a social worker by day, and a budding rock guitarist by night. He is a fan of Alice In Chains, Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Mother Love Bone, and the rest of the grunge-era music (which is now considered classic rock—something that makes Brian feel that full weight of fifty that he knows will be drawing down on him next year). Given this, Seattle makes sense for what will be their first father and son vacation since the now-young-man was ten years old.Continue Reading

HUGE Stephen King and Richard Chizmar News Coming on February 28! Plus: The Dark Screams eBooks Have New Covers!

Next Tuesday, February 28, Stephen King and Richard Chizmar have some huge news that will be first announced by Entertainment Weekly! If you’re not already following Richard and Cemetery Dance on social media, THIS is the time for sure!

Sign-up for Richard’s FREE mailing list for occasional updates, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram.

You can follow Cemetery Dance Publications on Facebook and Twitter.

Also, as you might remember, Richard Chizmar and Brian James Freeman of Cemetery Dance Publications joined forces with the cutting edge team at Hydra, a division of Random House, to publish a series of horror eBook anthologies called Dark Screams that features the best horror authors working in the business today. Recently, Random House hired Kealan Patrick Burke (a man of many talents!) to create brand new covers for these eBooks and ALL FIVE volumes are available for immediate download:

Dark Screams

Dark Screams 2

Dark Screams 3

Dark Screams 4

Dark Screams 5

Thank you, as always, for your continued support and enthusiasm!

Charles L. Grant, Part 2: The Short Stories

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.

This sentiment haunts me. It has since I first heard it quoted by Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society. The quote in its entirety, by Henry David Thoreau, is even more chilling:

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them.

The implications make me shiver. Most men lead lives of quiet desperation. Most of us are gripped by worry, anxiety, fear, and a crippling helplessness. But it’s repressed deeply inside; quiet, restrained, shackled, bringing us to the brink of madness without ever quite plunging us over the edge. And in the end, we go to the grave with the song still in us, never able to express what we wanted to—needed to—while shuffling through this numbing thing called “life.”Continue Reading

Review: ‘Zoopraxis’ by Richard Christian Matheson

Zoopraxis by Richard Christian Matheson
Gauntlet Press 
$275.00 lettered edition; $150.00 Limited Edition; $6o.oo Numered Edition
Reviewed by John Skipp

In the thirty years since Richard Christian Matheson burst upon the scene with his brilliant collection Scars and Other Distinguishing Marks, many things have changed. Up until his arrival, the short-short story was the purview of a miniscule handful of writers—Fredric Brown, Henry Slesar, and O. Henry leap most readily to mind—who’d mastered the art of telling a tight, twisted tale with a punch at the end in one thousand words or less, on a fairly regular basis.Continue Reading

Review: ‘Relics’ by Tim Lebbon

Relics by Tim Lebbon
Titan Books (March 21, 2017)
336 pages; $9.76 paperback; $9.99 e-book
Reviewed by Dave Simms

The first literary hit of the new year has been born. Tim Lebbon, no stranger to penning stories which shrug off the shackles of genre, has hit 2017 hard with the first of a breathtaking trilogy. Equal parts thriller, horror, and fantasy, Relics takes readers back to his best world creating in the apocalyptic Silence, Coldbrook, and The Nature of Balance, along with the more fantastic in Fallen and Echo City. Continue Reading

Full Circle

The second to last weekend of October, I made my way up north again, this time for the Merrimack Valley Halloween Book Festival in Haverhill, Massachusetts—a mass-signing event organized by Christopher Golden and involving about twenty or thirty horror authors. Podcast co-host Dave Thomas accompanied me for this part of the tour, and we stayed at the home of author James A. Moore.Continue Reading

Review: ‘Infernal Parade’ by Clive Barker

Infernal Parade by Clive Barker
Subterranean Press (February  2017)
81 pages; $275.00 lettered edition; $60.00 limited edition; $3o.oo Trade Edition
Reviewed by Blu Gilliand

Infernal Parade is the second volume compiling stories created by Clive Barker to accompany figures created in conjunction with Todd McFarlane. The first, Tortured Souls, benefited because it began life as a novella that was broken up to go along with the packaging of the various figures. Infernal Parade is a series of character sketches meant to lend a little backstory to the figures, making it feel incomplete when pulled together in one volume.Continue Reading

R.I.P. Fangoria and a Plea for Uncle Bob

I admit it. I’m an old softie. Yes, longtime gorehound that I am, horror reader, rough and tough machinist for the Navy, I am a sentimental fool sometimes. When I read that Fangoria as a print magazine is almost certainly gone, I got teary-eyed.Continue Reading

Interview: Ania Ahlborn

An Interview with Ania Ahlborn

Ania Ahlborn is the bestselling author of the horror thrillers Brother, Within These Walls, The Bird Eater, The Shuddering, The Neighbors, and Seed, and the novella The Pretty Ones. Her latest release is The Devil Crept In, out now from Gallery Books. Recently, Ania was kind enough to take time out from exploring the dark corners of her imagination to share a few words with us.

Continue Reading

Home Movies

Mary SanGiovanni and I have a ritual when we curl up on the couch at nine o’clock in the evening and watch television together. I always pick the first movie, and she always picks the second. We do this because I am always ready for bed by eleven at night, and Mary often stays up until one or two in the morning—and also because she likes to pick the worst horror movies you’ve ever seen. Continue Reading

Review: ‘Lilith’s Demons’ by Julie R. Enszer

Lilith’s Demons by Julie R. Enszer
A Midsummer Night’s Press (December 2015)

64 pages, $14.95 paperback
Reviewed by Joshua Gage

For those who don’t know, The Alphabet of Ben Sirach is a medieval rabbinic text famous, amongst other things, for its reference to Lilith. Lilith is the woman that, according to Hebraic lore, God made before he made Eve; she was Adam’s first wife, but refused to submit to him sexually, so she flew off and became mother of demons. Julie R. Enszer builds on this mythos in her book, Lilith’s Demons.Continue Reading