Now We Are September
Immediately following Crypticon KC I came down with a bad case of the ol' con crud which put me out of commission for the better part of two weeks. Shortly after that, I raised up my head and it was suddenly a week into September. The best part about September, besides its close proximity to October, is that it means I can finally put up my Pusheen calendar, which automatically improves, well, everything.
Has lots happened since Crypticon? Absolutely. Can I talk about most of it? Sadly, no. But here's a few things, in bullet-point form, because I haven't done that in a while:
Has lots happened since Crypticon? Absolutely. Can I talk about most of it? Sadly, no. But here's a few things, in bullet-point form, because I haven't done that in a while:
- Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse hit shelves, though I haven't actually held a copy in my hands yet. It's the latest anthology from my Fungi co-editor and frequent co-conspirator Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and I get to be an honorary Canadian for it, with my story of the ghost apocalypse, "Persistence of Vision." It references Pulse AND Ghostbusters 2, among others, so what's not to like?
- Meanwhile, the roster of contributors was finally announced for Letters to Lovecraft, the first anthology edited by my good friend Jesse Bullington, which will include my story "Lovecrafting," which, appropriately enough, is maybe the weirdest thing I've ever written, at least structurally.
- Blood Glacier showed up on Netflix instant, and I made the mistake of watching it. Let me spare you the same fate.
- On the other hand, I also watched (on YouTube, of all places) a surprisingly great movie called One Dark Night, the first film from Tom McLoughlin, who would later make the fourth Friday the 13th movie and the adaptation of Stephen King's Sometimes They Come Back, as well as something called The Staircase Murders. In addition to being pretty fantastic (the first and last reel are, I think, truly great, while the middle is solid 80s horror cheese, he said as if that was a bad thing), and featuring psychic vampirism, floating corpses, and excellent use of hot pink, One Dark Night prompted me to observe that horror flicks in the 80s and early 90s were set in graveyards a lot, an observation which may yet bear an intriguing harvest. More on that later.
- I finally read Stephen Graham Jones' great The Last Final Girl, which, as I said elsewhere, feels like the book he was born to write.
- Assuming it updates, I will once again be participating in the Countdown to Halloween. I got an email from the organizers, so in spite of the ossified status of the website, hopefully it's alive and well, or at least clawing its way free of the loamy earth like a suitable revenant. Even if it's not, though, I'll be doing something to mark the occasion, though I haven't settled on a theme or anything yet.