Prologue “Will it hurt?” Patty Cakes paused, the tattoo needle in her hand, looking at the man who lay facedown on the table. He was as white and hairless as a worm. She could have lied to him, but she never did that. “Yes,” she said. The man took a long time before he…
Many of my favorite novels are not easily classified and often fall under that nebulous term “Literary Fiction.” But I value my origins. As a teenager, I learned to love reading through the Horror genre, and I knew just where to go in the stacks to find Stephen King and Anne Rice. When I later…
Cassandra Taylor, like many middle-aged women, has plenty of practice putting her own dreams and career on the backburner in order to focus on her family. She has a lovely home in Hillston, New Jersey. Three wonderful daughters. And fills her free hours with a part-time docent position at a museum. It’s not the life…
The Loop is a heart-racing thriller where a small town nestled in the hills of central Oregon becomes the epicenter of an epidemic of violence when the teenaged children of several executives from the local biotech firm become ill and aggressively murderous. Cinematic comparisons are inevitable with a horror novel of the breadth and scope…
Many of us film watchers rely on critical reviews of movies to help us decide whether a particular title is worth our time, whether it’s a new release we’re thinking of seeing in a theater or an old one we’re considering checking out through various means. But what to do when a certain movie has…
Film is a medium of two senses: sight and sound. We can’t touch the people or objects depicted, we can’t smell or taste them. But horror? Horror involves all the senses.
Ever read a book and think, “Wow, I wish there was a movie of this”?
Most of my favorite stories, whether written or on the big screen, have one thing in common: it’s difficult to put them in a box. Shamelessly borrowing tropes from multiple genres and subverting expected plot structures serves to expand our understanding of how narrative works. As a result, suspense is even more suspenseful for being…
Join Brian Greene as he revisits the trio of horror movies that resulted from the collaboration of Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur in the early 1940s at RKO Pictures. In 1942, film industry professional Val Lewton (1904-51) was hired by RKO Pictures to head up its new horror movie initiative. Lewton, who had recently worked…
Growing Things and Other Stories is a chilling collection of psychological suspense and literary horror from multiple award-winning author Paul Tremblay. Paul Tremblay and I have something in common. We’re both high school teachers. That being said, he’s more likely to teach Calculus while I teach English. One of my most well-worn rules when teaching…
