A few years back, a young guy named Benjamin Kane Ethridge started e-mailing me; he had a new novel out called Black and Orange, and since it was about Halloween and since I was a Halloween expert, would I read it? I did...and it was wild. In the beginning, I wasn't even sure about it, but Ben kept working on it and revising it and polishing, and ( Read more... )

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If you haven't yet had the pleasure of meeting the irrepressible Gardner Goldsmith, you've missed out on one of horror's most energetic and just plain fun guys. Well, Gardner grabbed me at the recent World Horror Convention for a bit on his podcast, and managed to bring out the egomaniac I normally try to keep a tight chokehold on: Gard's podcastHe ( Read more... )

Now, you all know that I have a lifelong love affair with Famous Monsters, so of course I always think it's tremendously cool when I get some mention therein. And today, FM's review of The Castle of Los Angeles showed up: The FM Review.

Okay, so I certainly don't mind comparisons to The Shining and Ghost Story (!), but I'm mainly just happy to see ( Read more... )

Word's starting to filter back on The Castle of Los Angeles. Two reviewers have already written to tell me they loved it (one of those reviews should be posted very shortly). Two friends just read it and were very complimentary. And it just showed up at Locus, which is tremendously cool.

More as it develops...

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The e-mail shown below makes me ridiculously happy ( Read more... )

Yep, there is no other way to sum up 2009. Incomprehensible, exhilarating, grim, schizophrenic, joyous, and lunatic all combine to equal something simply strangeThe good adjectives are derived from the writing side of my life. I achieved one major goal in 2009, and that was to demonstrate to the world that I can write fiction longer than 5,000 ( Read more... )

Pursuant to a brief mention on my Facebook account...

My second novel, The Castle of Los Angeles (which will be my first published novel in about a month), began life as a collision of two different interests: 1) the traditional Gothic novel; and 2) the Los Angeles artists' community known as The Brewery. In the first instance, I wanted to conduct ( Read more... )