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I've always used my position as a message board moderator and a website owner as a sort of confessional. It seems to help me, and people have been kind enough to tell me that they enjoy it. So let me tell you about the worst week of my life.

I guess it was inevitable. Twenty years of being a machinist, struggling to hold tolerances, when any wrong move can mean a catastrophic error. I don't know many older machinists who are not either addicts or absolutely bugfuck crazy.

Add the that a childhood with precious little emotional support. I have always been fiercely independent. A rock. Being the arrogant ass I was, I dismissed those with mental or emotional problems.

Of course all my friends know that I lost my loved ones a few years ago. I haven't gotten over it, even though at times I felt as though I had. Too many miserably lonely nights. Too many tears. You can't go on forever like that.

Then there were a couple of incidents recently where my life was in danger. One was an accident at work, and another was a gunfight in a WalMart that happened right in front of me.

My father died recently, and even though we were far from close, it had a huge effect on me.

Now, even though I knew it was coming, my darling stepdaughter India will be moving to California. I know it won't be impossible to visit, but it will be damned hard. And damned expensive.

Too much loss. Too much stress. Not enough spirituality. Not enough love. I was headed for catastrophe. And it happened last Wednesday night.

I woke up at 2 AM in the midst of the worst fear, terror, panic, of my life. I jerked awake and jumped out of bed. Staggered around the house, alone, in the thralls of absolute panic.

It was, of course, a classic panic/anxiety attack. I had heard about them, but I had no idea how completely debilitating they can be. It's like you are dying. Or having a nervous breakdown.

It subsided, as least to a degree. But I can't shake it. I still feel fear, dread, and overwhelming anxiety all the time. Work has been very hard.

I never thought that I would ever see a therapist, but I made an appointment and saw the doctor on Thursday. She's a nice lady and the talk helped. She doesn't think I need medication. I'm not so sure. I'm going to see her again this coming Thursday and probably for more visits after that.

I'm not so bad off when I'm with people, but when I'm alone, I get the shakes and the anxiety. I can't stop thinking of death, disease, madness.

So I haven't been reading anything. Or watching any horror whatsoever. There's no way I can deal with it for now.

I hope to get better. The analysis is helping, but what's an hour a week?

I don't know what is going to happen. Things seem hopeless right now. They can't stay like this forever. Can they?

---

I've always used my position as a message board moderator and a website owner as a sort of confessional. It seems to help me, and people have been kind enough to tell me that they enjoy it. So let me tell you about the worst week of my life.

I guess it was inevitable. Twenty years of being a machinist, struggling to hold tolerances, when any wrong move can mean a catastrophic error. I don't know many older machinists who are not either addicts or absolutely bugfuck crazy.

Add the that a childhood with precious little emotional support. I have always been fiercely independent. A rock. Being the arrogant ass I was, I dismissed those with mental or emotional problems.

Of course all my friends know that I lost my loved ones a few years ago. I haven't gotten over it, even though at times I felt as though I had. Too many miserably lonely nights. Too many tears. You can't go on forever like that.

Then there were a couple of incidents recently where my life was in danger. One was an accident at work, and another was a gunfight in a WalMart that happened right in front of me.

My father died recently, and even though we were far from close, it had a huge effect on me.

Now, even though I knew it was coming, my darling stepdaughter India will be moving to California. I know it won't be impossible to visit, but it will be damned hard. And damned expensive.

Too much loss. Too much stress. Not enough spirituality. Not enough love. I was headed for catastrophe. And it happened last Wednesday night.

I woke up at 2 AM in the midst of the worst fear, terror, panic, of my life. I jerked awake and jumped out of bed. Staggered around the house, alone, in the thralls of absolute panic.

It was, of course, a classic panic/anxiety attack. I had heard about them, but I had no idea how completely debilitating they can be. It's like you are dying. Or having a nervous breakdown.

It subsided, as least to a degree. But I can't shake it. I still feel fear, dread, and overwhelming anxiety all the time. Work has been very hard.

I never thought that I would ever see a therapist, but I made an appointment and saw the doctor on Thursday. She's a nice lady and the talk helped. She doesn't think I need medication. I'm not so sure. I'm going to see her again this coming Thursday and probably for more visits after that.

I'm not so bad off when I'm with people, but when I'm alone, I get the shakes and the anxiety. I can't stop thinking of death, disease, madness.

So I haven't been reading anything. Or watching any horror whatsoever. There's no way I can deal with it for now.

I hope to get better. The analysis is helping, but what's an hour a week?

I don't know what is going to happen. Things seem hopeless right now. They can't stay like this forever. Can they?

---

In 1980, President James Earl Carter reached the dubious decision to reinstate draft registration in the United States. This was in response to the Soviet Union's military aggression in Afghanistan, and was intended to demonstrate America's "resolve" by requiring a few hundred thousand scrawny and stoned young males such as myself to schlep their asses to the post office and sign a form which would facilitate their legalized kidnapping should Jimmy, or some other asshole subsequently occupying the Oval Office, decide that America's security was sufficiently threatened. Of course, there hasn't been a point since that time that any President has seriously considered drafting anyone, primarily because doing so would be politically unpopular, but perhaps more so because war has become a more high-tech endeavor, requiring fewer boots on the ground, and allowing a disinterested public to view it on cable news as one would normally gawk at a video game. The idea of a draft might have flitted through what one could generously call Bush's "mind" when General Shinseki broke the news that he didn't have enough bodies to quickly stabilize Iraq, but if so, I doubt it tarried for long. After scaring a gullible public into signing up for the dumbest foreign policy move since Vietnam, the genius of Bush's technique was that he succeeded in temporarily insulating the masses from the consequences of war. Bush Jr. traded in the Second World War's widespread self-sacrifice for tax cuts that would exacerbate today's debt problem, and appeals for everyone to go out and shop. With a complicit U.S. press corps all too ready to sanitize the unpleasantries, who could resist Bush's bold stratagem? Here's some money. Go buy shit. A month or two later, President Chimpy McJumpsuit strutted like a peacock on an aircraft carrier declaring "Mission Accomplished" for a war that would not end for more than another eight years, at which point the U.S. economy would lie in a smoldering heap.

But I digress. To get back to 1980 and Amy Carter's pappy, his pathetic attempt at striking fear into the Soviets' hardened Commie hearts was no doubt the source of unbridled hilarity at the Kremlin, since they probably knew that Carter's threat depended on guys like me, most of whom possessed the physical prowess of an overweight, medicated basset hound. Unfortunately for our Commie pals, the Afghans were inflicting an unexpected dose of American subsidized whoop-ass, which most likely muted their giggles a bit. But what Carter did succeed in doing was pissing me off big time at the indignity of being forced by the government to participate in this silly-assed ritual, in what was purported to be the land of the free. My petulant outrage now seems quaint when contrasted with the fates of many of my countrymen whose only crime was to have been born ten to fifteen years before me.

One such ill-fated wretch is H. T. Brown, a.k.a. Tom Brown, who spent the better part of two years trapped at great expense in the U.S. Army's maze of bureaucratic insanity. In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that Tom is a friend of mine, and that he and I were briefly band mates in 1992 as part of Zoogz Rift's Amazing Shitheads. But in all honesty, had we never met, I'm sure his recent book would have had exactly the same effect on me. Summer of Love, My Ass! is Tom's meticulously detailed memoir describing the extreme unpleasantness of being unwillfully sucked into America's monumental fuck-up, the Vietnam War. Because in case you didn't know, in those days an annual draft lottery was held using a convoluted system that "randomly" determined, based on birth dates, which unlucky sons of bitches would be required by their government to report for "duty."

Unfortunately, Tom's number came up in June, 1967, just when his life was swimming along very well as a drummer in a successful top 40 cover band in Southern California. Fresh off a four-day binge of sleep deprivation and awe-inducing drug ingestion, designed to convince the Army that he wasn't their guy, a twenty-two month nightmare ensued, despite Tom's Herculean efforts to make it clear to the powers that be that under no circumstances would he be willing to participate in a war that he believed to be depraved and morally repugnant. As you might expect, a failure to communicate quickly developed, producing a dizzying sequence of mostly disagreeable interactions with bewildered and abusive military personnel, FBI agents, cops, prison guards and inmates. Not to mention an unbelievably faithful girlfriend, who made weekly trips to the Ford Ord stockade to furnish contraband reefer and the occasional furtive handjob under the table.

Tom's account of his ordeal is a veritable page-turner, even for a guy like me who admittedly isn't an avid reader. His diary of perpetual humiliation and fear is rendered in excruciating detail, interspersed with enough levity to make it bearable. Having one's freedom stolen is one of those things I imagine to be unimaginable unless it happens in the first person, but to experience it against a backdrop of injustice and the pent-up violence and sadism that permeated military prisons in those days would tax any normal person's sanity.

1968 was not a particularly wonderful year for race relations in the United States. With riots erupting in many major cities after decades of institutionalized racism, and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., American life was as far removed from the freeze-dried, flower power horse shit nostalgia that gets barfed up today as Sha Na Na's faux doo wop was from "Work With Me, Annie." This racial conflict made its way into the military prison system, and predictably the Army did little to control it, other than when it chose to exploit it for its ulterior purposes. So imagine being jailed for a cause you consider to be just, only to be thrust into a situation where at any moment you could be beaten, raped or killed by a fellow inmate simply because of your skin pigment. Combine that with a hopelessly opaque judicial process that not only gives you as little information as possible, but also bends and breaks the rules at will, almost by caprice, rendering the expression "Kafkaesque" completely obsolete. Anyone naive enough not to be concerned by the affronts on civil liberties perpetuated in post-9/11 America in the form of the Patriot Act and the detention bill recently signed by Obama would be well served to read Summer of Love, My Ass!, and to then imagine themselves before a purportedly fair military tribunal.

The book winds its way through the induction center, boot camp, multiple trips through jails and military stockades, escapes and AWOLs, all punctuated with horrific defining moments that I won't go into here. What gets extruded from the Army's psychological meat grinder is a 21 year old with wisdom regarding the human psyche that most people living to a hundred couldn't claim. How this guy remained the kind, affable fellow he is today baffles me. It's a truly gut sickening book to get through, but even if you're still one of those who buy into the notion that Bob Hope's and John Wayne's assessments of the Communist threat were on target, I think you'd be well served to give this a read if only to challenge many of your preconceptions about how the military operates, and how that jibes with America's purported values. It seems like the least you could do for the 58,000 Americans and 1,000,000+ Vietnamese who were butchered for ultimately no good reason.

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Robert McCammon. Sometimes I want to pinch myself. To make sure that I'm not dreaming and that Mr. McCammon is indeed publishing again. I know, it's been nearly ten years since he returned to the field. He was gone for ten years though, and that was a long dry period. He was so sorely missed. Despite many fine writers emerging in and out of the genre, no one could even come close to replacing Robert McCammon.

When I heard that McCammon's first book after his absence was a historical novel, I was only slightly disappointed. Historicals were never my favorite type of book to read. But it was McCammon.

I should not have had the slightest misgivings. Speaks the Nightbird is arguably the best book that Robert McCammon had published to date. It's a vividly realized portrait of the turn of the seventeenth century, and it also introduced readers to a wonderful protagonist named Matthew Corbett. Corbett was a magistrate's apprentice in Speaks the Nightbird, but he has gone on to more interesting career paths in the three books that have featured him since then. Corbett is now a professional 'problem solver' in 1703 New York City.

Yes, McCammon is doing his first series with the character. Corbett has been featured in three other books since Speaks the Nightbird: The Queen of Bedlam, Mr. Slaughter, and now The Providence Rider. The great thing about this series is that each novel has its own personality. When many writers do a series, the books are essentially the same story with details changed. Not so with Robert McCammon and the Matthew Corbett series.

In The Providence Rider, Corbett is launched quite literally into his most exotic adventure yet. Already targeted by the nefarious "Emperor of Crime", Dr. Fell, Corbett is taken against his wishes to an island where the Doctor reigns supreme. Though Fell has previously marked Corbett for death, he now needs the young problem solver to help him with some of his own troubles. So young Mr. Corbett is off on a perilous journey across the sea, where he will find danger, intrigue, romance, and genuine evil. Far from his comfortable home in America.

What makes this series work so, other than McCammon's flawless depiction of the past and the exquisite language he conjures it up with, is the basic decency of Matthew Corbett. The young detective is intelligent, tenacious, honorable, and simply a good human being. Yet no man can face the evils Corbett faces in these books and remain wholly innocent.

The publisher states that The Providence Rider is a perfect entry point for new readers of the Matthew Corbett books. And it is. But if you haven't read the first three, take my advice: Get them all and take a month off from work and read them all in order.

Subterranean Press has pronounced 2012 to be The Year of Robert McCammon and that is a very fine thing. The Providence Rider will be published in May, and other classic reprints are to follow. I can think of no better home for the incomparable fiction of Robert McCammon.

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Not so long ago I was watching an old favorite movie with a friend. It was Of Unknown Origin. Remember it? Peter Weller played an urbanite who lives in a beautiful restored brownstone. His idyllic life is shattered by the intrusion of a very large, very intelligent, very aggressive rat. If you haven't seen it, you should. It's pretty good.

Anyway, at one point Weller is at a library researching rats. My friend made the comment, "That was back when people went to the library".

I didn't think about it a lot at the time. I was engrossed in the movie, even though I had seen it a few times before. But later it kind of haunted me. Back when people went to the library...

My friend was right, though. It's true. People don't go to the library much anymore. And why should they? Everything is available on their computers and e-books are cheap. Who needs to go to the library?

I do. I've always loved libraries. I've spend countless hours in them. Roaming among the books, reading magazines, just enjoying time among the words. Not to mention getting plenty of free reading materials.

I think it's sad. I've always considered libraries to be the cornerstone of any civilized community. So much is there to be had, and for free. Knowledge, entertainment, art, culture.

Libraries offer so much. The local ones near me offer free tax consultations. Free computer lessons. Clubs and events. Movies. Writer groups. Events for children.

But people simply aren't going to libraries anymore. Some are, sure, but not like before. Programs are cancelled because of lack of interest. Some people don't even want to read books from libraries because they fear that someone has soiled them somehow. I've heard that people have found boogers in library books, but of the hundreds I've borrowed I've never seen evidence of that. I'd be more concerned about touching door handles and credit/debit card machines. Not that I am. That way lies madness.

There could conceivably come a day when libraries become obsolete. Everyone content to stay at home and do all of their reading, researching, and even socializing at their computers and other electronic gadgets. It sounds like an Orwellian nightmare to me.

When is the last time you spent any time at your local library? I can't speak for all of them, everywhere, but all of the libraries I've been to have been filled with great people and great books.

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The Devil's Coattails is the second anthology from fledgling publisher, Cicatrix Press. The first one, The Bleeding Edge, is a wonderful assemblage of stories, many of which were written by the greatest living legends in the field. The Devil's Coattails relies less on big names, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

I don't mean to imply that The Devil's Coattails is bereft of stellar writers. In its pages are superstars like Ramsey Campbell, Dan O'Bannon, John Shirley, Melanie Tem, Steve Rasnic Tem, Richard Christian Matheson, Earl Hamner Jr., and Gary Braunbeck.

It's nice that the editors chose to use stories by lesser-known, but not lesser-talented writers. The Devil's Coattails is more than a worthy successor to The Bleeding Edge. And best of all, both of these books are refreshingly free of the constraints that so many theme anthologies have.

I liked all of the stories, but as with any anthology, I have my personal favorites. The great Ramsey Campbell kicks off the fiction with a creepy piece of fiction such as only he can come up with: The Moons. As with The Bleeding Edge, co-editor Jason V. Brock provides one of the most powerful stories in The Devil's Coattails, Object Lesson. I had never read James Robert Smith prior to this book, but if his story, "On the First Day" is any indication of what his fiction is like, I'm sure I'm going to be a big fan of his work.

The book ends with another writers whose work is new to me: Paul G. Bens, Jr. If You Love Me is a moving, disquieting, sad story of love and sacrifice that I won't soon forget.

From whimsical to epic poetry, a Twilight Zone-inspired teleplay to a true-life memoir, The Devil's Coattails has a little bit of everything in it. A cross pollination of styles and approaches to writing that have one common denominator: Excellence.

Books are often more than just a collection of ink, glue, cloth, and paper. They can be works of art. I only have an Advance Reading Copy of The Devil's Coattails, and it is stunning. It is filled with darkly beautiful illustrations and photography. I can only imagine how amazing the actual book will be.

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A strong message is going out to Hollywood: Horror films do not need to be made with obscene budgets that would feed a third world country. I hate the look of those high tech movies that appear to have been made on computers. Ingenuity, performances, and screenwriting are far more effective than endless mind-numbing special effects. Especially when it comes to the overused CGI technology.

The first Paranormal Activity was reportedly budgeted at an astonishing $15,000. In theaters alone it brought in nearly two hundred million dollars in box office revenue. This is before home video and television sales.

The second Paranormal Activity was made for quite a bit more money, but still a pittance in comparison to nearly any other movie that gets a wide distribution. Three million dollars to make it, and it earned seventy five million dollars at the box office. Not quite the hit as the first PA movie, but not so shabby either.

The third Paranormal Activity movie was the biggest success of all of them. Made for five million dollars, it made $203,148,425 worldwide.

As always, fans were divided about these movies, but I liked them all. And I'm most heartened that I felt that the third Paranormal Activity was easily the best in the series so far. With these kind of profits there will certainly be another in the series this Halloween. Let's hope that the filmmakers can keep the same kind of quality up that we've seen in them so far.

Released in August 2010, The Last Exorcism was budgeted at merely 1.5 million dollars. It wasn't as lucrative as the Paranormal Activity films, but it brought in nearly seventy million dollars. Not a bad haul for its backers. I really liked this one, too. It's one of my favorite horror movies of the last decade.

Last year's Insidious had the same million-and-a-half dollar budget that The Last Exorcism had, but it was even more profitable. Insidious made over ninety million smackers home. I did like Insidious, and I felt that the first half had some seriously intense moments. It kind of fell apart in the end for me, but not enough so that I hated it. Insidious is a pretty good horror movie. I sure as hell have seen a lot worse.

Now we have The Devil Inside. It has only been in theaters for a couple of weeks, but it has brought in almost fifty-million dollars so far. And that number is rising. Its budget? One million dollars.

I have not seen The Devil Inside yet, but I plan to before the week is over. The trailer looks pretty damned good to me.

I know that a lot of independent, low budget horror movies are made, but the movies I have talked about here have gotten wide theatrical releases and they have all been huge money-makers. I'm not talking about Avatar-type money, but for the relatively small investments, they are, in my opinion, just as successful.

We've all seen big budget horror done well. The Exorcist, The Silence of the Lambs, and Scream come immediately to mind. But for most longtime fans, the most effective horror movies have been done in the low budget arena. Big budget horror in recent memory has been acutely disappointing: The Wolf Man, Van Helsing, and that Underworld crap come immediately and painfully to mind.

I urge everyone to get out and see The Devil Inside. As well as any other low budget horror movies that come to theaters near you. I know it's hard to tear yourself away from your beloved home entertainment systems, but we need to continue to send the message to Hollywood.

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Ah, rebellious youth. What red-blooded, penis-carrying American adult didn't engage in a little hell raising during his adolescence? Culturally, it's expected of us, in the same way that a salesman at Best Buy is expected to ask if you'd like an extended warranty on a $25 rabbit ear TV antenna. So why is it that so few of us take advantage of these extended warranties? I'm not really sure, but I do know that it's probably not the same reason why so many of us are pissed off when a carload of post-pubescent brats unfurls twenty rolls of Charmin in our cottonwood trees. Or perhaps you have Japanese maples at your house. After all, they're much sturdier and the fall foliage is beautiful. But try explaining that to these goddamn kids who are leaving burning sacks of dogshit on your front porch or calling at three o'clock in the morning to ask if you have Prince Albert in a can. And how many stations can you pick up with a $25 TV antenna anyway?

My rebellious teenage period bore many similarities to that of Frankie Dane, the central figure in Crime in the Streets, played by John Cassavetes. For example, I also wore V-necked sweaters and avoided social workers, attributes which I carry with me to this day. But perhaps the similarities begin to fade at that point, because while Frankie spends his leisure hours planning homicides, beating other juvenile delinquents with chains and two-by-fours, and applying untoward peer pressure on Sal Mineo to participate in all of the above, my most rebellious acts involved the aforementioned toilet paper dispersed among the upper branches of neighbors' trees, and leaning against a wall in front of the bowling alley, smoking filter tipped Swisher Sweets, while listening to Foghat blaring from the 8-track player of a nearby Plymouth. If I had been given access to Sal Mineo, I'm skeptical that I would have had any influence over him. And by the time I was 27, as Cassavetes happened to be when this film was made, I wasn't threatening my relatives with a switchblade, but rather filing my first Schedule A to take advantage of the mortgage interest deduction. Still, I feel a kindred bond with Frankie, and I suspect that had he known there is a 7.5% income threshold which must be met before any medical deductions can be claimed on Schedule A, he also might have elected to simply listen to Foghat when he wanted to annoy his parents.

Anyway, it's probably worth mentioning that this is a pretty good movie with an excellent cast, including Cassavetes, Mineo, Virginia Gregg, James Whitmore, Will Kulava, Malcolm Atterbury, and Mark Rydell, who as "Lou" gives Frankie a run for his money in the sociopathic asshole sweepstakes. And goddamn, as if that weren't enough, fans of Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla will also find the uncredited Duke Mitchell, as "Herky," a guy who enjoys a gang beating as much as anyone, but who draws the line when Cassavetes decides to orchestrate a murder to settle a grudge. James Whitmore plays the concerned 24/7 social worker who tries with limited success to encourage them to enjoy more fountain drinks. As a central character, he's surprisingly impotent, but it's not for lack of trying, since he's just as likely to pop up at 2 A.M. in a dark alley as he is during normal working hours.

For 1956, it doesn't pull many punches, and it's a well paced, worthwhile diversion from Don Siegel, better known for Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Dirty Harry. There are obvious comparisons to West Side Story, but the characters are nastier, the script is better, nobody bursts into song, and the run time doesn't challenge my increasingly limited bladder capacity. It's in a Film Noir box set, but sometimes it pops up on TCM, so even the mildly curious should be able to find it.

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GOSH! WOW!

I was a serious science fiction fan when I was a kid. I'm not talkin' about that George Roddenbery/George Lucas stuff either. I was a reader.

My main inspiration as an SF fan was the work of Robert A. Heinlein, but right after that was The Legion of Space, by Jack Williamson.

The Legion of Space is the definitive Space Opera novel. For me it defined the era of SF before the Golden Age. I thrilled to it as a lad. And I eagerly devoured the sequels: The Cometeers, and One Against the Legion. There was another sequel, published decades later, called The Queen of the Legion, but I never read it. I always intended to re-read the first three before tackling the book. But I never did it.

Even in those humble years, I knew The Legion of Space was rather silly, but it was such a rollicking good time that I barely had time to notice it while I was reading it. I think I was around 12 years old when I read the book--the perfect age in which to enjoy it.

The Legion was originally serialized in the venerable Astounding Science Fiction, and later reprinted in novel form. Each chapter ends in a kind of a cliffhanger.

Savvy fans have suggested that George Lucas had read The Legion of Space and was influenced by it when he created Star Wars. Either way, Star Wars set the SF genre back nearly fifty years.

Jack Williamson, though not as famous as the Big Three Science Fiction writers (Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov), was one of the most influential and important figures in the history of the genre. His fiction matured massively in the years of his long career, but none of his later works bring forth as much affection in me than The Legion of Space.

I plan to re-read The Legion of Space in 2012. I'm almost afraid to do so. Will I experience the same wonder that I did when I was twelve? That's incredibly unlikely. I hope that I don't hate The Legion of Space, and destroy that bit of youth and innocence that is in my heart for it. That's the risk any of us take when we choose to revisit the past. I'm not sure when I'll actually start reading The Legion of Space again, but I'll let you know when I do. Stay tuned to this website.

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2011 was, like most years, good and bad. The world and my country seem to continue to fall apart, and more people seem concerned about playing the blame game than come up with any solutions. My personal life has been miserable, but things at my job have greatly improved. Ebooks continue to overtake publishing, but thanks to true bibliophiles, the small press is thriving.

Allow me to list some of my favorite books and movies of the year.

One of my very favorites of the year came out of nowhere. I received an offer to review a YA horror novel called Rotters, by Daniel Kraus, and it completely blew me away. Not enough people in the community took a chance on this one.

Old favorites of mine turned out some of the best work of their careers. Lansdale returned with his popular Hap and Leonard characters with Devil Red and Hyenas. Both were excellent. And Joe also published a ripping YA book called All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky, which I rank with his very best work.

F. Paul Wilson continued his revisionist Repairman Jack series with The Dark at the End, and I thought it was one of the best books he has done.

Bill Pronzini somehow manages to keep his longstanding character, The Nameless Detective, fresh and compelling. Camouflage, the latest, is as good as any book Bill has given his fans.

Preston and Child created a new character and series with Gideon's Sword. While not as fun as their Pendergast books, Gideon Crow makes for fun reading. And Cold Vengeance continued the Pendergast series in a dark, violent story. Their legion of fans eagerly await the next adventures of both Crow and Pendergast.

Stephen King finally wrote a book that pleased nearly everyone. 10/22/63 is a long novel, but it is one of King's finest creations. His best in decades, or possibly ever.


Lewis Shiner has been a big favorite of mine since I first read him, and his 2011 novel, Dark Tangos, is a hard, lean, mean look at things most of us have no desire to see. If you missed it, don't hesitate to get yourself a copy. No one is better than Shiner.

Matthew Warner wrote a big nasty one called Blood Born. Despite its lurid subject matter, it's literate and beautifully written.

The legendary Richard Matheson returned with a new novel called Other Kingdoms. While it can't hold a candle to his earlier classics like I Am Legend, Somewhere in Time, or Hell House, Other Kingdoms is interesting and unusual. You should read it.

Norman Prentiss followed up his brilliant debut, Invisible Fences, with another great book, Four Legs in the Morning. If you miss the wonderful type of horror fiction that was being published in the 70's, read it.

Chet Williamson returned after far too long of an absence from the field with Defenders of the Faith, a very dark suspense novel. It's a controversial book that didn't win over everyone, but I thought it was one of the best of the year.



It was a pretty good year for movies. Not a lot of great horror was released in theaters, but there were some highlights.

Audiences responded in a big way for Paranormal Activity 3. I thought it was easily the best in the series.

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark suffered from a deceptive ad campaign, and it disappointed many viewers. I felt that it was a fine feature with a nice, dark fairy tale essence.

Insidious performed well at the box office, and thought that the first half was highly effective. The second half fell pretty flat, but not enough for me to suggest that you shouldn't give it a chance on home video.

Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson brought back their Scream franchise with Scream 4. It was good to see the characters again, but the results were fairly lackluster.

As usual, my favorite film of the year was not a horror movie. Alexander Payne's The Descendents is a rich mix of humor, drama, and pathos, with a rich Hawaiian soundtrack. Do not miss this one.

Payne co-produced another big favorite of mine from 2011: Cedar Rapids. Being a conventioneer myself, I really appreciated this one. It is hilarious and almost as raunchy as The Hangover, but Cedar Rapids had much more heart.

The Hunter S. Thompson adaptation, The Rum Diary was finally completed and released. I thought it was one of the best movies of the year. Most reviewers did not agree.

Woody Allen, loved by thousands, despised by millions, is my favorite director. Midnight in Paris was his most successful movie ever. All but the most hard-hearted Woody haters sang its praises.

Judd Apatow and Paul Feig teamed to prove that the girls can be as raunchy and hysterical as the dudes. Bridesmaids was a blockbuster that played to big audiences for weeks. It was a star-making film for Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes wasn't perfect, but it wiped away the horrid memory of Tim Burton's wretched remake.

I liked some others, but the ones listed above were the ones I felt were most noteworthy. There are others I wish to see, like Hugo, Young Adult, War Horse, and J. Edgar, that I haven't gotten to yet.

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Come, boys and girls. Join me on a trip back in time. To a more innocent, happier, purer time for Horror. Back to the days of the late 1980's and early 90's. A time before the genre was drowned in a deluge of remakes. When craftsmen and women created special effects by hand. Before everything was trashed by a deluge of zombies. Back to The Horror Hall of Fame.

The Horror Hall of Fame was a televised award show. There were three of them in all, and the host was none other than Freddy K., Robert Englund.

Held at Universal Studios Florida, The Horror Hall of Fame was a ceremony modeled after the Academy Awards. It was all obviously set up beforehand, but that didn't lessen the fun one bit. In it, worthy movies, actors, effects artists, etc, were honored. Celebrity presenters would joke and announce the inductees, and behind the scenes footage was shown. Clips for upcoming horror movies were also aired on it. Some really forgotten (or forgettable) ones like Highway to Hell, and Guilty as Charged. The awards committee also chose the best horror movie of each particular year.

There were a lot of worthy inductees: Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Forrest J Ackerman, Vincent Price, Roger Corman, William F. Gaines, Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Alien, and many, many more.

Some of the presenters were obvious choices. Others were a bit odd. Phyllis Diller, for instance, and obnoxious comics Sam Kinison, Joan Rivers, and Gilbert Gottfried. The Cryptkeeper from HBO's Tales from the Crypt made appearances.

How-To special effects demonstrations were done by Steve Johnson and Linnea Quigley. The attempts at humor in these are pretty cringe inducing, but that was part of the charm. They weren't trying to be ultra hip.

In fact, the whole affair was more than a little cheesy, but we loved it. It was a great time for horror and we all knew it. But the landscape was changing rapidly. The corny fun of the 80's was dead by the mid 90's. And it never really came back again.

I taped these shows when they were originally aired. Remember frantically hitting the Pause button when the commercials came on when taping things like this? I watched them over and over again. In those pre You Tube days, it was very difficult to see the kind of footage that was on The Horror Hall of Fame.

My tape collection meant the world to me, but they're all gone now. I gave them up when DVD hit it big. Who had room for everything, anyway?

I recently bought the three years of The Horror Hall of Fame from some guy on ioffers. Watching them again was a warm, but melancholy, experience.

I miss those days. As I said in the beginning of this essay, it was a simpler, more innocent time. We watched our movies on creaky tapes. We obsessively taped movies and shows, marveling over the technology that allowed us to do so. We got our news from Fangoria and other magazines. Though they were rapidly dying, drive-in theaters were more plentiful. We watched movies at independent theaters. Desperate to communicate with others that shared our love of horror, we wrote letters in longhand and sent them to the magazines.

Things are better now. We have the Internet in which to get news, information, and to communicate with others who share our dementia. We stream movies from it. Sound systems that blow away what most theaters had are affordable to almost anyone. Nearly every movie ever made is readily available in one form or another.

Logically, everything is much better. Then why do I feel so sad and nostalgic when I watch The Horror Hall of Fame?

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To everyone who comes here to read, join in at the forum, lurk, and even those that hate my guts. Regardless of your belief system, have a good weekend. Merry Christmas. Treat your loved ones well. A kiss can mean much more than a store-bought gift. Saying I LOVE YOU carries more weight than any gadget.

Let's hope for a New Year of great books, movies, music, and love.

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I know that, as owner of a site called Horror Drive-In, I am supposed to be mining for gold nuggets in the world of independent and foreign horror. I'm should be championing the latest transgressive film from Spain or from some guy editing a subversive horror movie in Peoria.

I did that stuff for years and I got tired of it. Oh, I still like horror movies, but these days I prefer to watch films that portray people in real-life situations. Our everyday lives are filled with horror and imagination. Love and hate. Fear and joy. Wonder and despair.

Last night I watched a good one called Welcome to the Rileys. It stars James Gandolfini, playing against type, as a man whose longtime wife suffers from agoraphobia. Their teenage daughter had died in a car wreck, and wearying of existing with her in a kind of living death, he befriends a teen stripper/prostitute while away at a convention. A gentle man, he attempts to help her. Meanwhile his wife must overcome her affliction and find him in order to save their marriage.

I sometimes get down on my knees and thank the Movie Gods for greenlighting smart, performance-driven films like Welcome to the Rileys. There isn't a lot of commercial potential in such a project, and it made almost nothing in theaters. Box Office Mojo reports Welcome to the Rileys as having earned $158,898.

The fact is, most people do not WANT to see grim, dark stories about people in uncomfortable situations. They want explosions and wisecracks, pirates and cartoons, CGI and 3D.

Kristin Sewart plays the young prostitute and she is marvelous. I also thought she was very good in Adventureland and The Runaways. Sadly, it seems as though the fickle teenage Twilight fans do not wish to see her in other types of roles. I look forward to seeing her in next year's adaptation of On The Road.

I was mostly unfamiliar with Melissa Leo, who plays the wife, but she is marvelous in Welcome to the Rileys, too. Her performance is flawless and it must have been a difficult one to realistically portray.

Also predictably, the dunderheaded critics mostly panned Welcome to the Rileys. "Slow", "Weak", "Facile", "Ponderous", they claim. Well, some of them. It got a 54% rating at Rotten Tomatoes. Ebert gave it three stars and I can't argue with that. I've seen better movies, but Welcome to the Rileys stands well above most of what is being produced these days.

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Randy Chandler earned a lot of fans with his pair of horror novels, Hellz Bellz and Bad Juju. These were published by the badly-missed Hellbound Books. Both of these novels are well-written, suspenseful, and gloriously horrifying.

Other than some odd pieces here and there, Randy Chandler hasn't been publishing a lot for the last few years. All that changes in February, thanks to Comet Press. Comet does nice affordable books. Trade paperbacks that fall into the horror and suspense categories.

Chandler's next novel, Daemon of the Dark Wood, shares the same basic plot of Brian Keene's The Rutting Season/Dark Hollow, but the approach the two writers use are vastly different.

Daemon of the Dark Wood starts off with the comfortable feel of an 80's horror novel. You have the rural setting, well-drawn characters, and an ancient evil coming forth. It starts off at a leisurely pace, and gradually builds to a frenzy. Chandler offers up wild situations and images that bring to mind Bentley Little. Or maybe even Edward Lee.

The two novels that I mentioned above by Randy Chandler are hotly sought after collector's items. For good reason. His work is well above the average stuff coming out from the small press. Trust me on this: You don't want to miss out on Daemon of the Dark Wood. Buy one soon or be very sorry.

Preorder Daemon of the Dark Wood now at Barnes and Noble for the very reasonable price of $10.08.

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I've only read one book by Alan Ryan, but I cannot overemphasize how much it meant to me.

Well, I think I actually read two. One was an anthology called Hallowe'en Horrors. I also read some of Alan's short stories in anthologies. Ryan was apparently a favorite of Charles L. Grant.

The one novel I read was called Dead White. I liked it a lot. But it was more than that. Dead White was one of the books that really pushed me from being a science fiction fan to a horror reader. I had read everything from King by that point. Some Ramsey Campbell, James Herbert, Straub, F. Paul Wilson, T.E.D. Klein's The Ceremonies, Dennis Etchison. Monteleone. And of course Charles Grant.

There was something about Dead White. As anyone who knows me at all knows, I love the cold and snow. I read Dead White on a cold night. I lived in this meager house that didn't have great heating. I remember sitting there in a recliner, reading it. I was enjoying the cold air in the house, which made the book even more chilling.

Alan Ryan had a couple of other novels out, but for some reason I never got around to reading them. They never seemed to turn up in the used bookstores, which was just about the only place I could afford to buy reading materials back then.

Alan Ryan was of the Old School horror writers. Atmosphere, mood, and character, rather than gallons of blood and guts. As most of us know, that type of fiction fell out of favor by the late 80's. Like a few others, Ryan drifted away from the genre. When I asked people in the know about him, I was told that he was involved in travel writing.

I would think about Dead White from time to time, always remembering how much I liked it. How important it was to me. This novel helped define me as a horror reader. I was still reading SF back when I read it, but around that time I stopped almost completely. I read more now, mostly Golden Age stuff, but for years and years I mostly stuck to horror and suspense.

I was glad to hear that Alan Ryan, now going as Alan Peter Ryan, had a story in Shivers 6. Damn me, I still haven't read it, but I will. Soon.

Then I heard the worst news. Alan Peter Ryan had died. From the worst, most despicable sort of cancer. Pancreatic, which claimed my brother.

We're losing the best ones. The stylists who shaped the genre into something wonderful. Unfortunately, few seem to be aware of it. The great Les Daniels died, with barely a ripple in the community. We already lost Charles Grant a few years ago.

Now for the good news: Cemetery Dance Publications just announced two new books by Alan Peter Ryan. One is a collection of short stories called The Back of Beyond. The other is a novella called Amazonas,which may have been inspired by his travel writing.

We can't bring Alan Ryan, Charles L. Grant, Les Daniels, Richard Laymon, Robert Bloch, Manly Wade Wellman, Karl Edward Wagner, Ray Russell (just to name a few) back from the dead. But we can keep their voices alive. By reading their published works. Cherishing them, and passing them on to others.