Massachusetts pop culture scribe and novelist Kevin Quigley’s career began in 1996 at the age of twenty-one when he established his own Stephen King fan site, Charnel House. There he wrote about King’s work in all its various shapes and forms. From there he went on to pen articles and books on King (such as Ink in the Veins: Writing on Stephen King and The Illustrated Stephen King Movie Trivia Book, which he co-wrote with Hans-Ake Lilja and Brian James Freeman) for Cemetery Dance Publications. In addition, he has contributed essays to other writers’ works, such as Stephen Spignesi and Michael Lewis’ Elton John: 50 Years On, Brian James Freeman’s Reading Stephen King, and Anthony Northrup’s forthcoming Stephen King Dollar Baby: The Book, just to name a few. He has also written a book-length study of Blitzen Trapper’s 2008 album Furr. Despite these impressive accomplishments, Quigley’s true passion is writing fiction.
Quigley has only published two novels, I’m On Fire and Roller Disco Saturday Night, although he claims to have written another thirty that are unpublished. At this point in his fiction career, it’s his short fiction that he’s best known for. His short stories have appeared alongside the likes of Stephen King, Peter Straub, Ramsay Campbell, Richard Chizmar, and Clive Barker in the anthologies Shining in the Dark (edited by Hans-Ake Lilja) and Halloween Carnival: Volume Five (edited by Brian James Freeman). He has published two impressive short story collections (both with Cemetery Dance), This Terrestrial Hell (2012) and Damage and Dread (2020). His stories are masterful and cover a lot of ground in terms of scope and tone.
With this in mind, I sat down to talk with Kevin Quigley about his fantastic new collection Damage and Dread and all things writing.Continue Reading
Discovering George Beahm’s first Stephen King Companion in 1989 was a revelation. Even then, there had been plenty of books written on the subject, starting off with Douglas Winter’s prescient The Art of Darkness; since, most books on King had tended toward the academic or the hyperbolic, with little in the way of a middle ground for readers who wanted to know more but didn’t necessarily want to take an American Lit class. The Stephen King Companion filled that gap, offering plenty of background information on King and the books, transcripts of important talks King had given, statistics on limited editions and insights into the books and stories that made up the bulk of interest on King. 