Cemetery Dance Online

HUGE Stephen King and Richard Chizmar News Coming on February 28! Plus: The Dark Screams eBooks Have New Covers!

Cemetery Dance OnlineFebruary 23, 2017February 23, 2017Breaking News1 Comment

Next Tuesday, February 28, Stephen King and Richard Chizmar have some huge news that will be first announced by Entertainment Weekly! If you’re not already following Richard and Cemetery Dance on social media, THIS is the time for sure!

Sign-up for Richard’s FREE mailing list for occasional updates, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram.

You can follow Cemetery Dance Publications on Facebook and Twitter.

Also, as you might remember, Richard Chizmar and Brian James Freeman of Cemetery Dance Publications joined forces with the cutting edge team at Hydra, a division of Random House, to publish a series of horror eBook anthologies called Dark Screams that features the best horror authors working in the business today. Recently, Random House hired Kealan Patrick Burke (a man of many talents!) to create brand new covers for these eBooks and ALL FIVE volumes are available for immediate download:

Thank you, as always, for your continued support and enthusiasm!

Charles L. Grant, Part 2: The Short Stories

Cemetery Dance OnlineFebruary 23, 2017February 23, 2017RevelationsA Glow of Candles, Black WIne, Charles L. Grant, Columns, Kevin Lucia, Revelations, Scream Quietly, Tales from the Nightside5 Comments

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.

This sentiment haunts me. It has since I first heard it quoted by Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society. The quote in its entirety, by Henry David Thoreau, is even more chilling:

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them.

The implications make me shiver. Most men lead lives of quiet desperation. Most of us are gripped by worry, anxiety, fear, and a crippling helplessness. But it’s repressed deeply inside; quiet, restrained, shackled, bringing us to the brink of madness without ever quite plunging us over the edge. And in the end, we go to the grave with the song still in us, never able to express what we wanted to—needed to—while shuffling through this numbing thing called “life.”Continue Reading

Review: ‘Zoopraxis’ by Richard Christian Matheson

Cemetery Dance OnlineFebruary 22, 2017February 19, 2017ReviewsGauntlet Press, John Skipp, Reviews, Richard Christian Matheson, Zoopraxis4 Comments

Zoopraxis by Richard Christian Matheson
Gauntlet Press
$275.00 lettered edition; $150.00 Limited Edition; $6o.oo Numered Edition
Reviewed by John Skipp

In the thirty years since Richard Christian Matheson burst upon the scene with his brilliant collection Scars and Other Distinguishing Marks, many things have changed. Up until his arrival, the short-short story was the purview of a miniscule handful of writers—Fredric Brown, Henry Slesar, and O. Henry leap most readily to mind—who’d mastered the art of telling a tight, twisted tale with a punch at the end in one thousand words or less, on a fairly regular basis.Continue Reading

Review: ‘Relics’ by Tim Lebbon

Cemetery Dance OnlineFebruary 21, 2017February 19, 2017ReviewsDave Simms, Relics, Reviews, Tim Lebbon, Titan Books2 Comments

Relics by Tim Lebbon
Titan Books (March 21, 2017)
336 pages; $9.76 paperback; $9.99 e-book
Reviewed by Dave Simms

The first literary hit of the new year has been born. Tim Lebbon, no stranger to penning stories which shrug off the shackles of genre, has hit 2017 hard with the first of a breathtaking trilogy. Equal parts thriller, horror, and fantasy, Relics takes readers back to his best world creating in the apocalyptic Silence, Coldbrook, and The Nature of Balance, along with the more fantastic in Fallen and Echo City. Continue Reading

Under My Skin

Cemetery Dance OnlineFebruary 20, 2017February 18, 2017EssaysEssays, Kathe Koja, Marilyn Munster, Seanan McGuire, Skin, Under My Skin, Women In HorrorLeave a comment

Under My Skin
by Seanan McGuire

When I was a little girl, I wanted nothing more in this world than to grow up to be Marilyn Munster.Continue Reading

Full Circle

Cemetery Dance OnlineFebruary 17, 2017February 16, 2017Brian Keene's End of the RoadBrian Keene, Columns, End of the Road5 Comments

The second to last weekend of October, I made my way up north again, this time for the Merrimack Valley Halloween Book Festival in Haverhill, Massachusetts—a mass-signing event organized by Christopher Golden and involving about twenty or thirty horror authors. Podcast co-host Dave Thomas accompanied me for this part of the tour, and we stayed at the home of author James A. Moore.Continue Reading

Review: ‘Infernal Parade’ by Clive Barker

Cemetery Dance OnlineFebruary 16, 2017February 13, 2017ReviewsBlu Gilliand Infernal Parade, Clive Barker, Reviews, Subterranean PressLeave a comment

Infernal Parade by Clive Barker
Subterranean Press (February 2017)
81 pages; $275.00 lettered edition; $60.00 limited edition; $3o.oo Trade Edition
Reviewed by Blu Gilliand

Infernal Parade is the second volume compiling stories created by Clive Barker to accompany figures created in conjunction with Todd McFarlane. The first, Tortured Souls, benefited because it began life as a novella that was broken up to go along with the packaging of the various figures. Infernal Parade is a series of character sketches meant to lend a little backstory to the figures, making it feel incomplete when pulled together in one volume.Continue Reading

R.I.P. Fangoria and a Plea for Uncle Bob

Cemetery Dance OnlineFebruary 15, 2017February 13, 2017Horror Drive-InBob Martin, Columns, Fangoria, Horror Drive-In, Mark Sieber1 Comment

I admit it. I’m an old softie. Yes, longtime gorehound that I am, horror reader, rough and tough machinist for the Navy, I am a sentimental fool sometimes. When I read that Fangoria as a print magazine is almost certainly gone, I got teary-eyed.Continue Reading

Interview: Ania Ahlborn

Cemetery Dance OnlineFebruary 14, 2017February 13, 2017InterviewsAnia Ahlborn, Blu Gilliand, Essays, Interviews, The Devil Crept In, Women In HorrorLeave a comment

An Interview with Ania Ahlborn

Ania Ahlborn is the bestselling author of the horror thrillers Brother, Within These Walls, The Bird Eater, The Shuddering, The Neighbors, and Seed, and the novella The Pretty Ones. Her latest release is The Devil Crept In, out now from Gallery Books. Recently, Ania was kind enough to take time out from exploring the dark corners of her imagination to share a few words with us.

Home Movies

Cemetery Dance OnlineFebruary 10, 2017February 10, 2017Brian Keene's End of the RoadBrian Keene, Columns, End of the Road1 Comment

Mary SanGiovanni and I have a ritual when we curl up on the couch at nine o’clock in the evening and watch television together. I always pick the first movie, and she always picks the second. We do this because I am always ready for bed by eleven at night, and Mary often stays up until one or two in the morning—and also because she likes to pick the worst horror movies you’ve ever seen. Continue Reading

Review: ‘Lilith’s Demons’ by Julie R. Enszer

Cemetery Dance OnlineFebruary 9, 2017February 8, 2017ReviewsA Midsummer Night's Press, Joshua Gage, Julie R. Enszer, Lilith's Demons, ReviewsLeave a comment

Lilith’s Demons by Julie R. Enszer
A Midsummer Night’s Press (December 2015)
64 pages, $14.95 paperback
Reviewed by Joshua Gage

For those who don’t know, The Alphabet of Ben Sirach is a medieval rabbinic text famous, amongst other things, for its reference to Lilith. Lilith is the woman that, according to Hebraic lore, God made before he made Eve; she was Adam’s first wife, but refused to submit to him sexually, so she flew off and became mother of demons. Julie R. Enszer builds on this mythos in her book, Lilith’s Demons.Continue Reading

Review: ‘The Final Reconciliation’ by Todd Keisling

Cemetery Dance OnlineFebruary 8, 2017February 5, 2017Reviews- Frank Michaels Errington, Reviews, The Final Reconciliation, Todd Keisling2 Comments

The Final Reconciliation by Todd Keisling
Crystal Lake Publishing (February 2017)
106 pages; $3.99 e-book
Reviewed by Frank Michaels Errington

First, some background on The King in Yellow. Prior to season one of HBO’s True Detective series, many folks had never heard of Robert W. Chambers or his book of short stories by the same name. The book is named after a fictional play with the same title. The first half of the book features highly esteemed weird stories, and has been described by critics as a classic in the field of the supernatural. There are ten stories, the first four of which mention The King in Yellow, a forbidden play which induces despair or madness in those who read it.Continue Reading

Review: ‘Universal Harvester’ by John Darnielle

Cemetery Dance OnlineFebruary 7, 2017February 7, 2017ReviewsBlu Gilliand, John Darnielle, Reviews, Universal HarvesterLeave a comment

Universal Harvester by John Darnielle
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (February 7, 2017)
224 pages; $15.00 hardcover; $11.99 e-book
Reviewed by Blu Gilliand

When you work at Cemetery Dance, you tend to make certain assumptions about the books publishers send to you for review. Sometimes, those assumptions are way off. John Darnielle’s Universal Harvester proved to be one of those instances….in the best possible way.

When I got the book (cleverly packaged in a plastic clamshell case like an old VHS tape, for reasons that would become clear when I read it) and scanned its press sheet, a few things jumped out at me: mentions of the “haunted, open landscape of middle-America;” “ominous and disturbing footage” spliced into a video store’s rental tapes; an investigation into “the origins of these unsettling scenes.” I took these tidbits and began to splice together my own version of the book.Continue Reading

Where Are We Going, Where Have We Been?

Cemetery Dance OnlineFebruary 6, 2017February 5, 2017EssaysDamien Angelica Walters, Joyce Carol Oates, Women In Horror1 Comment

Where Are We Going, Where Have We Been?
by Damien Angelica Walters

The first book I read by Joyce Carol Oates wasn’t by Joyce Carol Oates at all. It was a creepy thriller called Soul/Mate, written by Rosamond Smith, about a psychopath who becomes infatuated with a woman and kills anyone he thinks stands in the way of her happiness. Continue Reading

That Guy

Cemetery Dance OnlineFebruary 3, 2017February 2, 2017Brian Keene's End of the RoadBrian Keene, Columns, End of the Road1 Comment

In early October, Mary and I climbed into the Jeep and drove from Pennsylvania to Louisville, Kentucky, where we were both guests at a fairly new convention called Imaginarium. The organizers put on an excellent event. It is geared primarily towards writers, and it encompasses all genres. I highly recommend investing the money and traveling to the next Imaginarium, particularly if you are a beginning author. There were some fantastic, informative panels, and some wonderful networking opportunities.Continue Reading

FREE email updates!

Categories