Author Lavie Tidhar has a short story up on The Dark Magazine titled “Sirena” that I think you should definitely check out. It’s about a killer vending machine. Seriously! And it feels like a classic Stephen King story from the ’80s. It’s just the right kind of fun for this type of horror story, and you’ll be hooked from the first paragraph. Did I mention there’s a killer vending machine?
The Black Museum: The Ghost and the Lady is a peculiar story that mixes real history with very much made-up fantasy and horror. It opens with a woman in a long, black dress, holding candles and standing at the base of the stairwell, seemingly looking at the reader and asking if there’s interest in a tour of the black museum. After this atmosphere-setting image, the woman begins to give a tour, but things are thrown off when a ghost appears.Continue Reading
Night Time Logic is the part or parts of a story that are 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 award winning authors to emerging new voices.
Today I talk with UK author and editor James Everington about strange tales, his fiction, and his anthology projects including Ebb Tides, an anthology of liminal stories all set at the sea-side.Continue Reading
Ricardo Delgado grew up obsessed with monsters and has turned his childhood love into a career. He’s worked as a conceptual artist in Hollywood, published The Age of Reptiles graphic novel series, and is coming out with books on Dracula. After the success of his illustrated novel Dracula of Transylvania, his The Art of Dracula of Transylvania was put on Kickstarter where it quickly earned its goal. The Kickstarter continues until November 9, and Delgado spoke to Cemetery Dance about his early interests, his career in conceptual art and graphic novels, and why Dracula has obsessed him for so long.Continue Reading
Horror fans, I have a terrible confession to make. I read Chuck Wendig’s Star Wars books and decided he wasn’t an author for me. The books were good, but I got the sense that Wendig’s writing style didn’t hit the right notes for me to continue with his other stories. So I passed on Wanderers. I passed on The Book of Accidents.
Holy smokes, am I an idiot. I am a giant, foolish idiot who made a horrible mistake.Continue Reading
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 Cynthia “Cina” Pelayo, the Chicago-based, award-winning author and poet. Apple cider donuts and The Rocky Horror Picture Show are just some of her Halloween traditions — read on to learn more! Continue Reading
So, yeah, I have a bigfoot costume in my attic. And I may have donned it during a multi-author book signing at a New Jersey brewery and run amok, startling every day drinker in my path. On Halloween, I quite possibly made some small children cry as I offered them treats from my hairy hand (see the author in his glory below). For shits and giggles, wearing the squatch mask at random doesn’t seem all that strange to me, even as I sit in my belfry and write this column.
Richard 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
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
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
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! Continue Reading
“The Summer of Love: Wild. Psychedelic.
Like a super-feminst Hammer film.”
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 coined by Robert Aickman to describe his unique brand of stories. Aickman’s stories were often what we now may call “quiet horror” and 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 notions of what makes horror and good fiction by looking at the stories of my favorite authors along with the work of new voices.
My previous column with author Brenda Tolian explored her collection of stories relating to a setting specific supernatural phenomenon. Gwendolyn Kiste’s latest book Reluctant Immortals is also set in a very distinct place and time in addition to presenting a fresh take on some very well-known characters. Gwendolyn has been a guest of the series both in person in New York and online. You can find one of her appearances here. We begin our conversation with the character of Lucy Westenra from Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula.Continue Reading
Following his studies at an American university and at business school, French author Jérôme Hamon began his professional life in New York as a financial analyst. Convinced that the life he wanted was elsewhere, he left the field two years later to travel around the world. Back in France, Hamon strung together a number of jobs in the movies, video games, and television. In parallel, he began to write his first comic book and graphic novel scripts. In 2008, Hamon went to Angouleme to present his first completed scripts, and it was there that he met artist Marc Van Straceele. The two would go on to collaborate on Yokozuna, a graphic novel on sumo wrestling in Japan (Kana, 2013). Following that, Hamon worked with artist Antoine Carrion on Nils, a saga halfway between Nordic mythology and the works of Miyazaki (Soleil, 2016). His newest graphic novel, in collaboration with freelance artist Suheb Zako, is Dreams Factory, a dark steampunk tale about mines, kidnapped children, and mechanical beasts.Continue Reading
Francesco Artibani has long worked for the Walt Disney Company Italia, where he writes many tales for Topolino, PK, and W.I.T.C.H., of which he’s been a scriptwriter and story editor for three years, and has created the science fiction series Kylion. Werther Dell’Edera is an Italian comic book artist who provided interior art for the unreleased comic Aliens: Colonial Marines – Rising Threat for Dark Horse Comics, as well as Marvel Comics, and BOOM! Studios hit Something is Killing the Children. Their newest collaboration is the WWII graphic novel He Who Fights With Monsters. Continue Reading
Hard to believe that one of the greatest horror anthologies of all time hit theaters forty years ago. In that span of time, I’ve had two dogs, three cats, two turtles, at least seventeen hamsters, three hundred goldfish and beta fish (most of them lasting two days), one salamander and one dwarf rabbit that grew to be the size of Gunnar Hansen. A big fuck you to the pet store clerk who sold me that bill of goods. Dwarf my ass. Oh, and I went from a virgin to way not a virgin, got married and had two amazing children.
And now back to the real story. When I watched the coming attraction for Creepshow on TV and saw that it was the love child of Stephen King and George Romero, I believe I had a Bob Rossian happy accident in my skivvies. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead had rewired my brain a few years earlier and King was feeding me nightmare fuel every night before I hit the lights. His cocaine and booze years made for my caviar and champagne days and nights. Continue Reading