Review: Splatterpunk #13 (10th Anniversary Issue) edited by Jack Bantry

Splatterpunk #13 (10th Anniversary Issue) edited by Jack Bantry
Reviewed by David Niall Wilson

When I received this for review, I had absolutely no idea what to expect. I’d never seen an issue, but I’d seen author’s names associated with it that I was familiar. When it arrived, and I pulled it out, it felt as if I’d stepped into a time capsule.

splatterpunk 13Continue Reading

How I Spend My Halloween: V. Castro

banner reading How I Spend My Halloween

If you know anything about Cemetery Dance, you know that the arrival of October…The Spooky Season…is a very special time of year for us. To celebrate, we’ve invited some of our favorite spinners of spooky tales to share their favorite Halloween traditions and memories with us.

Today we’re joined by V. Castro, Mexican American author, full-time mother, Latinx literary advocate, and co-founder of Fright Girl Summer, a platform to amplify marginalized voices. Continue Reading

“The Long and Winding Road (with apologies to Sir Paul McCartney)” by Thomas Smith

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cemetery Dance published Thomas Smith’s Something Stirs on October 13, 2022. In this special guest essay, Smith shares his journey back to the world of horror fiction. (See his previous essay, “Don’t Panic, I’m Not Gonna Preach.”)

cover of Something Stirs

Kevin Lucia asked me to say a word or three about my odd road back to writing horror since it has been somewhat “interesting,” so, let’s jump right in. 

John Denver once asked the musical question, “Ain’t it good to be back home again?” And I have to answer with a resounding Yes it is

I got my start writing horror, way back in the Dark Ages when computers ran on kerosene and if you typed too fast, the pilot light went out. Back in the day when you mailed every manuscript in a manila envelope and included a similar envelope with enough postage to bring the manuscript back to you (lovingly called an SASE: Stamped Self Addressed Envelope). Or at the very least, a regular business sized SASE that would hold the first page of your manuscript on which you had typed Disposable Manuscript, all the while, hoping it would actually contain a contract and a check.

Ah, those were the days.Continue Reading

Dead Trees: Bite by Richard Laymon

banner reading Dead Trees by Mark Sieber

cover of The BiteRichard Laymon is one of the most controversial authors in the horror genre. I don’t see him discussed so much anymore, but at one time his work was hotly debated.

Many called Laymon one of the greatest writers we had. Others derided him as a hack and a sexist. Me, I think it’s just as ludicrous to cite Richard Laymon as one of the best as it is to claim he was a bad writer. He knew how to pace a novel, and his plots are always complicated and surprising. Laymon spent time developing his characters before he threw them into the maelstrom.Continue Reading

Halloween eBook Sale!

Hi Folks!

We wanted to let you know about our Halloween eBook sale! The following three titles are on a Kindle Countdown Sale which ends October 20th! We plan to make these eBook sales a quarterly event, to highlight our impressive eBook backlist, and raise more awareness for these fine works of horror and dark fiction!

Four Octobers by Rick Hautala

cover of Four OctobersThe days are getting shorter, and the wind blows cold from the north. After the maple and oak leaves turn from green to bright reds, golds, and oranges, they wither, fall, and die, clattering like old bones as they blow down the street in the twilight. The sun isn’t as bright as it used to be, and the nights are dark and cold and long. This is the time of the harvest the time of Hallowe’en and a time for reminiscences of the summer just past  and of other summers, now long gone. This is a time of mystery and expectation as the earth prepares for the frigid onslaught of winter.

Four Octobers collects for the first time four loosely interconnected novellas from the vivid imagination of best-selling author Rick Hautala. Each story is set in October, the month of pumpkins and trick or treat, of skeletons and haunted graveyards, and each story is filled with nostalgia for times past for summers and youth now gone for chances not taken for opportunities now lost forever.


The Celebration by Paul Melniczek

cover of The CelebrationHalloween is approaching and the small town of Shington is excited to begin their annual festivities, which they call The Celebration. But something is different this year… Something is wrong…

Seven years ago, Nick carried out a series of vicious pranks and mischief. The trouble only stopped after Nick and his beloved blue Nova crashed into the town’s river during a high speed police chase and he died of his injuries.

Now, seven years later, the pranks have started up again. Halloween decorations destroyed, pumpkins smashed, animals gone missing. Worse yet, people are claiming to have seen Nick and his blue Nova…

The Celebration is rapidly approaching and this year something evil is coming along for the ride…

Johnny Halloween by Norman Partridge

cover of Johnny HalloweenNorman Partridge’s Halloween novel, Dark Harvest, was chosen as one of Publishers Weekly‘s 100 Best Books of 2006. A Bram Stoker Award winner and World Fantasy nominee, Partridge’s rapid-fire tale of a small town trapped by its own shadows welcomed a wholly original creation, the October Boy, earning the author comparisons to Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, and Shirley Jackson.

Now Partridge revisits Halloween with a collection featuring a half-dozen stories celebrating frights both past and present. In “The Jack o’ Lantern,” a brand new Dark Harvest novelette, the October Boy races against a remorseless döppelganger bent on carving a deadly path through the town’s annual ritual of death and rebirth. “Johnny Halloween” features a sheriff battling both a walking ghost and his own haunted conscience. In “Three Doors,” a scarred war hero hunts his past with the help of a magic prosthetic hand, while “Satan’s Army” is a real Partridge rarity previously available only in a long sold-out lettered edition from another press.

But there’s more to this holiday celebration besides fiction. “The Man Who Killed Halloween” is an extensive essay about growing up during the late sixties in the town where the Zodiac Killer began his murderous spree. In an introduction that explores monsters both fictional and real, Partridge recalls what it was like to live in a community menaced by a serial killer and examines how the Zodiac’s reign of terror shaped him as a writer.

Halloween night awaits. Join a master storyteller as he explores the layers of darkness that separate all-too-human evil from the supernatural. Let Norman Partridge lead you on seven journeys through the most dangerous night of the year, where no one is safe…and everyone is suspect.

Book Trailer: Something Stirs by Thomas Smith

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cemetery Dance will publish Thomas Smith’s Something Stirs on October 13, 2022. Check out the trailer below, and visit Cemetery Dance for more information!

ABOUT THE BOOK

Ben Chalmers is a successful novelist. His wife, Rachel, is a fledgling artist with a promising career, and their daughter, Stacy, is the joy of their lives. Ben’s novels have made enough money for him to provide a dream home for his family. But there is a force at work-a dark, chilling, ruthless force that has become part of the very fabric of their new home.

A malevolent entity becomes trapped in the wood and stone of the house and it will do whatever it takes to find a way to complete its bloody transference to our world.

Local sheriff, Elizabeth Cantrell, and former pastor-turned-cabinetmaker, Jim Perry, are drawn into the family’s life as the entity manipulates the house with devastating results. And it won’t stop until it gets what it wants. Even if it costs them their faith, their sanity, and their lives.

Review: Daphne by Josh Malerman

cover of DaphneDaphne by Josh Malerman
Del Rey (September 2022) 
272 pages; $24.99 hardcover; $13.99 ebook
Reviewed by Haley Newlin

The small town of Samhattan has a secret. A thing everyone knows but nobody questions.

That is until high school baller Kit and her friends play a game of “Ask the Rim.” The rules are simple: ask the rim a question, you shoot the basketball, a swish is a yes, a miss a no.

And the rim never lies.

What was Kit thinking when she asked the rim about the local legend of a “freak” named Daphne?Continue Reading

How I Spend My Halloween: Stephen Graham Jones

banner reading How I Spend My Halloween

If you know anything about Cemetery Dance, you know that the arrival of October…The Spooky Season…is a very special time of year for us. To celebrate, we’ve invited some of our favorite spinners of spooky tales to share their favorite Halloween traditions and memories with us.

Today we’re joined by Stephen Graham Jones, whose novel My Heart is a Chainsaw took the horror genre by storm last year and will, in true slasher tradition, be followed by at least two sequels.
Continue Reading

“Don’t Panic, I’m Not Gonna Preach” by Thomas Smith

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cemetery Dance will publish Thomas Smith’s Something Stirs on October 13, 2022. In this special guest essay, the author shares a behind-the-scenes look at the journey the novel took from its original publisher to its new home at Cemetery Dance.

cover of Something StirsIn October, Cemetery Dance will re-release my book, Something Stirs. And while it’s a big deal for me, the fact that they are releasing it is, in itself, not news. That’s their job. 

Their passion. 

They create books.

But this particular book is something a little different for them. Something Stirs was one of the first (if not THE first) haunted house novels written for the Christian market. The original publisher (I won’t name them because they did their best) loved the idea, bought the book, then didn’t know what to do with it. They even hired a company to make what was probably the first book trailer of its kind. It was literally a mini movie. So, they had the right idea. Continue Reading

Book Trailer: Every House is Haunted by Ian Rogers

Cemetery Dance is proud to publish Every House is Haunted, the debut collection of short fiction by Ian Rogers. This collection includes the story “The House on Ashley Avenue,” which is currently in development as a feature film for Netflix.

Check out the new book trailer, and visit Cemetery Dance to learn more.

ABOUT THE BOOK

“There are haunted places in the world, all existing in reality and every bit as tangible and accessible as the house next door. Sometimes it is the house next door.”

In this brilliant debut collection, Ian Rogers explores the border-places between our world and the dark reaches of the supernatural. A mysterious double murder draws the attention of an insurance company with a special interest in the paranormal. A honeymoon cabin with an unspeakable appetite finally meets its match. A suburban home is transformed into the hunting ground for a new breed of spider. A nightmarish jazz club at the crossroads of reality plays host to those who can break a deal with the devil…for a price. With remarkable deftness, Rogers draws together the deadly and the disturbing in twenty-two showcase stories that will guide you through terrain at once familiar and startlingly fresh.

Night Time Logic with Rudi Dornemann

Night Time Logic with Daniel Braum

Rudie Dornemann
Rudi Dornemann

Night Time Logic is the part or parts of a story that are felt but not consciously processed. Those that operate below the conscious surface. Those that are processed somewhere, somehow, and in some way other than… overtly and consciously. The deep-down scares. The scares that find their way to our core and unsettle us in ways we rarely see coming…

Hello and welcome. My name is Daniel Braum, I am an author of strange tales, a term used by Robert Aickman to describe his unique brand of stories. Many of Aickman’s stories were what we now may call “quiet horror.” Often it was ambiguous as to what if any supernatural elements were present and in play. Aickman’s strange tales operated with “Night Time Logic,” the kind of scares and elements that were felt but not consciously processed.  In this column, which shares a name with my New York based reading series, I explore the phenomenon of Night Time Logic and other aspects of horror fiction by diving deep into the stories from authors ranging from award winning favorites to emerging new voices. 

My previous column with Gwendolyn Kiste explored her latest book, Reluctant Immortals, a fresh take on some very well-known characters in a time and setting we haven’t seen them before: California during the Summer of Love. Today I talk with author Rudi Dornemann about his settings-based fiction and more. Dornemann’s work is filled with alternate worlds ranging from those just a little bit different than ours to those strange, horrific, and not familiar. We begin our conversation with a look into his cover story from the August 2022 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, a publication that has delivered to us many horror classics over the decades.Continue Reading

Review: New World Monsters by Chris Mcauley and Jeff Oliver

cover of New World MonstersNew World Monsters by Chris Mcauley and Jeff Oliver
Hellbound Books (October 2022)
130 pages; $29.99 paperback
Reviewed by Joshua Gage

Dr. Chris Mcauley is a writer of prose novels, magazine short stories, video and tabletop games and audio dramas. Chris has been given the Reggie Bannister award for excellence in Horror writing and is nominated for a similar award in science fiction. Jeff Oliver writes that he “began writing Dark Poetry at just 11 years old. Transferring darkness to paper at such a young age. There are thoughts about a troubled childhood, thoughts of love and imagination that never elude his pen. A poet by passion and a father of 8 beautiful children. Yes you read that right 8! His dedication to his family & his craft is second to none.” Their newest collaborative collection is New World Monsters, which is illustrated by Dan Verkys. Continue Reading

How I Spend My Halloween: Hailey Piper

banner reading How I Spend My Halloween

If you know anything about Cemetery Dance, you know that the arrival of October…The Spooky Season…is a very special time of year for us. To celebrate, we’ve invited some of our favorite spinners of spooky tales to share their favorite Halloween traditions and memories with us.

Today we’re joined by Hailey Piper, who is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Queen of TeethThe Worm and His KingsYour Mind Is a Terrible ThingUnfortunate Elements of My Anatomy, Benny Rose, the Cannibal King, and The Possession of Natalie Glasgow. She lives with her wife in Maryland, where their mad science experiments are secret.
Continue Reading

Stephen King: News from the Dead Zone #230

Stephen King News From the Dead Zone

Time for another Stephen King news update, don’t you think? Recently we saw the publication of King’s latest novel, Fairy Tale, and I have news about the next adaptation, which launches this week. In addition to those items, I’m going to talk about two associational projects, one of which involves yours truly and the other that involves someone from New Brunswick in Canada—and it’s not me!
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Review: Gallows Hill by Darcy Coates

cover of Gallows HillGallows Hill by Darcy Coates
Poisoned Pen Press (September 2022) 
384 pages; $12.99 paperback; $4.99 ebook
Reviewed by Haley Newlin

Deep in the hills of a small town, a cloud of birds explode into the sky. Their screeches disturbed as though their shelter surged jolts of pain into them.

It’s haunted. Well, some thought so. Others say Gallows Hill was cursed, laced with a poisonous vestige of murder and betrayal.Continue Reading