Missing in Action

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Missing in Action

I spent an afternoon recovering at the home of poet Linda Addison before my next signing at the Barnes and Noble in Tucson, and during that time, I’d begun to mull over something important. Before I tell you what it is, we have to backtrack a bit.

A decade ago, you could find my books in any bookstore. Indeed, most Borders and Barnes and Noble carried a few copies of each book in my backlist, thus creating a Brian Keene shelf, right next to Stephen King and Jack Ketchum. I can’t tell you how crucial this was to increasing my audience. If you’re a customer browsing the horror section (or even the alphabetical K section) your eyes are naturally going to be drawn to an entire row of books written by the same person, rather than a lone book by a lone author. Continue Reading

Review: ‘Puppet Skin’ by Danger Slater

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PuppetSkinPuppet Skin by Danger Slater
Fungasm Press (July 2016)
126 pages; $8.95 paperback; $4.95 e-book
Reviewed by Blu Gilliand

Adolescence is its own kind of horror show, as anyone that lived through it can attest. I’m quite a few years removed from it myself, but reading Danger Slater’s Puppet Skin served as a striking, less-than-fond look back at that time—albeit through a warped and cracked lens.Continue Reading

Review: ‘Floaters’ by Kelli Owen

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FloatersFloaters by Kelli Owen
CreateSpace (July 2016)
270 pages; $10.99 paperback; $4.99 e-book
Reviewed by Frank Michaels Errington

Two quotes at the start of Floaters set the tone perfectly for the story which follows:

America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil. Before the settlers, before the Indians…The evil was there…Waiting. — William S. Burroughs

Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful. — Mary Shelly, Frankenstein

Kelli Owen’s new book starts out looking like a police procedural involving flood waters causing a riverside graveyard to lose a number of its residents, including several Native Americans. It’s all fairly straightforward, until BAM…tentacles.Continue Reading

Review: ‘Jedi Summer with The Magnetic Kid’ by John Boden

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jedisummerJedi Summer with The Magnetic Kid by John Boden
Post Mortem Press (July 2016)
76 pages; $10.00 paperback; $2.99 e-book
Reviewed by Kevin Lucia

There’s something about coming-of-age stories that resonate with the child we used to be. The nostalgic longing for a simpler time allows us, just for a little while, to escape the often maddening grownup world we live in. When a writer is able to balance that nostalgia with a clear eye, avoiding romanticizing or demonizing the past, you’ve got something special indeed.

That’s what John Boden has done with Jedi Summer with the Magnetic Kid. He’s offered us a clear view to a simpler time which wasn’t without its own complications, but it isn’t a bitter, depressing tale either. It’s simply what it is: a story about childhood, a time which can never be again.Continue Reading

Tower of Babble

Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories Brian Keene's End of the RoadTags , , , 4 Comments on Tower of Babble

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Tower of Babble

Hello. If you’re just joining us, this is End of the Road—a weekly column in which I detail my nine-month cross-country promotional tour for my new novels Pressure and The Complex. I write about what I’ve learned out here on the road, and how the horror genre, and our industry, and our country, and myself have changed over the last twenty years. We now rejoin the column, already in progress.

The drive from San Diego, California to Tucson, Arizona is a lonely haul through a bleak and desolate stretch of sunbaked wasteland that resembles the set of a Mad Max movie. Or, at least, that’s how it felt to me. So far on this Farewell Tour, I’d had partners to ride with, but Jamie LaChance and Kasey Lansdale had now returned home, and I was alone in the rental car with only my thoughts for company. This wasn’t a good thing. Anyone who truly knows me will tell you that my thoughts do not, in fact, make for excellent company.Continue Reading

Review: ‘Deadsville’ by T.D. Trask and Dale Elster

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deadsvilleDeadsville by T.D. Trask and Dale Elster
Downtown Books Publishing (September 2015)
200 pages; $22.49 paperback; $2.99 e-book
Reviewed by Josh Black

1 TOWN. 2 AUTHORS. 13 TALES OF HORROR.

That’s the short and sweet pitch for Deadsville, the first anthology from authors T.D. Trask and Dale Elster. The fictional upstate New York town of Rock Creek is host to some strange and horrible things. Being a big fan of Kevin Lucia’s Clifton Heights mythos, I was intrigued by the idea and eager to get lost in another town full of stories to explore. Trask and Elster alternate tales here, their styles ranging from subtle to slapstick to gore-drenched, and all this from moment to moment rather than story to story. You never know what you’ll get next, and it’s done in a way that won’t push away readers who lean hard toward any particular aspect of the genre.Continue Reading

Review: ‘The Booking’ by Ramsey Campbell

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booking-cover-mockupThe Booking by Ramsey Campbell
Dark Regions Press (2016)
75 pages; $13.00 paperback; ebook $3.99
Reviewed by Anton Cancre

The Booking is a tight little yarn about Keifer, a man flailing to find his place in a new job. Simple enough idea. Of course, that new job is putting together a website for a bookstore that seems as reclusive and crotchety as its owner. A mess of disjointed words cloistered in shabby isolation from the surrounding world that seems to drag Keifer deeper into itself as he tries to bring its contents out to the public.

Though quite short, this is a very slow moving story. For most of it, very little occurs and much of that is quite mundane. Personally, I like how long Campbell took setting up the character and the situation and really cementing the atmosphere of Books Are Life. We spend so much time in the head of Keifer and in the abode of Mr. Brookes that they begin to feel as if they have wrapped themselves around us. The whole bears the feeling of Campbell slowly, meticulously setting up an array of dominoes, full or whorls and loops and inwardly spun spirals. The process is dizzying, but fraught with anticipation.Continue Reading

Review: ‘Psychopomp & Circumstance (Books of Nethermore #1)’ by Adrean Messmer

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psychopompPsychopomp & Circumstance (Books of Nethermore #1) by Adrean Messmer
A Murder of Storytellers (April 2016)
186 pages; $9.99 paperback; $2.99 e-book
Reviewed by Josh Black

Psychopomp & Circumstance, the first in a series of standalone books, is Adrean Messmer’s first novel.

It follows a group of friends and “frenemies” somewhere between the carefree world of high school and the uncertainty of what comes next. Unfortunately for them, what’s going on in the present—and whether they’ll even live long enough to see college or careers take off—is just as uncertain. After one of them posts a Facebook update she has no recollection of, things get weird. People are missing. People are dying. Lurking somewhere around the periphery of it all is the Sewercide Man, a mysterious figure glimpsed only occasionally, but whose mere presence seems to bring chaos and have a disconcerting effect on the recently deceased.Continue Reading

Review: ‘Where You Live’ by Gary McMahon

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whereyouliveWhere You Live by Gary McMahon
Crystal Lake Publishing (November 2013)
266 pages, $12.99 paperback; $2.99 e-book
Reviewed by Joshua Gage

Where You Live is a varied collection of short stories by Gary McMahon. McMahon is an award winning author of both novels and short stories, and this collection gathers some of his best together. The bulk of this collection was originally published as a limited edition book from Gray Friar Press titled It Knows Where You Live, but the current collection expands that previous collection with newer stories and makes it available to a wider reading public. Overall, Where You Live is a really satisfying collection of horror pieces.Continue Reading

Drive On

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Drive On

CD
A quick side-trip to the beach. (Photo Copyright 2016 Brian Keene)

Early morning in Los Angeles, and after a week, I was still on East Coast time. As a result, while the rest of the household slept, I was sitting out on David Schow’s balcony in the Hollywood hills, looking down on the city, and drinking coffee. It was the first moment of reflective, quiet, alone time I’d had since leaving home, and I was enjoying it. I watched the sun rise. I watched a coyote slink behind a neighbor’s house far below. And I watched three big black crows alight on some electrical wires just beyond David’s balcony. Squawking to each other, they looked out upon the world as if they owned it. And who knows? Maybe they did.

I sat there, quietly sipping coffee, watching three crows from the balcony of the man who co-wrote the screenplay to The Crow, and smiling at the universe’s little joke. Then Kasey Lansdale swept in like the Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil, and the spell was broken, and the coffee was finished, and we headed out to the next signing—at Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore in San Diego.Continue Reading

‘Con’ Man: Adam Cesare on Fans, Cons and ‘The Con Season’

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‘Con’ Man: Adam Cesare on Fans, Cons
and ‘The Con Season’

ConSeasonAdam Cesare’s new novel, The Con Season, is available to read for free right now—well, the first couple of chapters, anyway. If you want to read the rest, you first have to do your part in helping it get published.

Like many authors (such as Norman Prentiss), Cesare is testing the waters of the Kindle Scout program with his latest work. Readers can check out a portion of the book and throw a nomination its way if they would like to see it published. Cesare talks more about the program in our interview, but suffice to say that it’s another innovative approach to publishing made possible by today’s technology.

You can check out The Con Season at Amazon, but before you do, take a few moments and enjoy this chat with Cesare, who talks about the slightly unreal world of horror conventions, the mindset of horror film and literature fandom, and much more.
Continue Reading

Ramsey Campbell on bookstores, scary limericks, and ‘The Booking’

Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories InterviewsTags , , , , , 1 Comment on Ramsey Campbell on bookstores, scary limericks, and ‘The Booking’

Ramsey Campbell on bookstores, scary limericks, and ‘The Booking’

booking-cover-mockupFor the third book in the Black Labyrinth line of psychological suspense novellas, Chris Morey, owner/publisher of Dark Regions Press, turned to a master of the form: Ramsey Campbell. It was a move Morey has long envisioned making.

“Ramsey Campbell was a must for the Black Labyrinth imprint,” Morey said. “I knew I wanted an original piece from Ramsey for the imprint on the day that the imprint first materialized.”

Morey got his wish, and earlier this week the preorder period for Campbell’s The Booking began. The story sounds like classic Campbell:

Kiefer is desperate for a job when he comes upon an opening at a curious bookstore in England, BOOKS ARE LIFE. He approaches the owner for a job and gets it, learning quickly that the owner is stranger than the books that he sells in the shop. As he continues to help the bookstore’s transition to the internet, he discovers oddities in the shop and has increasingly strange visions and encounters.

We here at Cemetery Dance Online were honored to get a few words from Campbell on The Booking and its inspiration.

Continue Reading

Ramsey Campbell on bookstores, scary limericks, and 'The Booking'

Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories InterviewsTags , , , , , Leave a comment on Ramsey Campbell on bookstores, scary limericks, and 'The Booking'

Ramsey Campbell on bookstores, scary limericks, and ‘The Booking’

booking-cover-mockupFor the third book in the Black Labyrinth line of psychological suspense novellas, Chris Morey, owner/publisher of Dark Regions Press, turned to a master of the form: Ramsey Campbell. It was a move Morey has long envisioned making.

“Ramsey Campbell was a must for the Black Labyrinth imprint,” Morey said. “I knew I wanted an original piece from Ramsey for the imprint on the day that the imprint first materialized.”

Morey got his wish, and earlier this week the preorder period for Campbell’s The Booking began. The story sounds like classic Campbell:

Kiefer is desperate for a job when he comes upon an opening at a curious bookstore in England, BOOKS ARE LIFE. He approaches the owner for a job and gets it, learning quickly that the owner is stranger than the books that he sells in the shop. As he continues to help the bookstore’s transition to the internet, he discovers oddities in the shop and has increasingly strange visions and encounters.

We here at Cemetery Dance Online were honored to get a few words from Campbell on The Booking and its inspiration.

Continue Reading

Horror Drive-In vs. ‘The Conjuring 2’

Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories Horror Drive-InTags , , , , , 1 Comment on Horror Drive-In vs. ‘The Conjuring 2’

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Horror Drive-In vs. The Conjuring 2

Conjuring2Poster1I try. I really do. I want to like every horror movie I see. Every book I pick up. I know I can be a curmudgeon, but I have never gone into something with the intention of trashing it.

And yet I am disappointed all too often. Not only am I disappointed, I usually seem to be on the opposite end of the opinion spectrum than most.

Case in point: The Conjuring 2. A movie that is earning a lot of positive buzz. According to Rotten Tomatoes, this sequel is being well received by the critics. Well, I’ve always maintained that your average movie critic hasn’t a clue as to what constitutes quality horror.

I didn’t mind The Conjuring. I thought the first half had some extremely effective moments. Director James Wan has shown skill at establishing and maintaining tension and dread in his movies. The second half of The Conjuring? Well, it all became kind of silly once the cat was out of the bag and we began to see physical manifestations of the haunting.Continue Reading