Columns Archives - Page 11 of 29 - Cemetery Dance Online

Dark Pathways: The Stories That Linger

Cemetery Dance OnlineAugust 19, 2022August 6, 2022Dark PathwaysChildren of Chicago, Columns, Cynthia Pelayo, Dark Pathways, Ken BroskyLeave a comment

Dark Pathways

cover of Children of Chicago I just finished reading Cynthia Pelayo’s Children of Chicago, another of this year’s Stoker Award nominees for Superior Achievement in a Novel. I want more. I want ten more books. I want Pelayo to go comb through every single fairy tale she’s ever read and mine each one for the horror lingering between the words and turn each one into a story.

OK, I might be a little biased. I did, after all, write The Grimm Chronicles, so I have a little experience with modern-day fairy tales. But Pelayo is playing with a story that I entirely forgot about: The Pied Piper. From the book’s description:

Chicago detective Lauren Medina’s latest call brings her to investigate a brutally murdered teenager in Humboldt Park—a crime eerily similar to the murder of her sister decades before. Unlike her straight-laced partner, she recognizes the crime, and the new graffiti popping up all over the city, for what it really means: the Pied Piper has returned.

Part horror story, part murder mystery, Children of Chicago expertly weaves the tale of the Pied Piper into something truly horrifying. I know what you’re thinking: OK, the original story was already horrifying … after all, the guy just took a bunch of people’s kids! Yes, point taken. But incorporating any sort of myth or fairy tale into an original story can be an absolute disaster. It requires an understanding of culture, history, and, yes, meaning.Continue Reading

Night Time Logic with Brenda Tolian

Cemetery Dance OnlineAugust 5, 2022July 4, 2022Night Time LogicBrenda Tolian, Columns, Daniel Braum, Night Time LogicLeave a comment

Night Time Logic with Daniel Braum

Night Time Logic is the part or parts of a story that are felt but not consciously processed. Those that operate below the conscious surface. Those that are processed somewhere, somehow, and in some way other than… overtly and consciously. The deep-down scares. The scares that find their way to our core and unsettle us in ways we rarely see coming…

Hello and welcome. My name is Daniel Braum, I am an author of strange tales, a term I use for stories written in the spirit of Robert Aickman, stories which explore the tension between the psychological and supernatural. These stories are often but not always of the quiet or literary kind. In this column, which shares a name with my New York based reading series, I explore the phenomenon of Night Time Logic and other notions of what makes horror and good fiction by looking at the stories of my favorite authors along with the work of new voices.

My previous column with author Venita Coehlo explored ghosts and folklore specific to India. Brenda Tolian’s stories are also setting specific all of them intersect with a place called Blood Mountain which you will learn about in our conversation. Continue Reading

Dead Trees: The Making of a Monster by Gail Petersen

Cemetery Dance OnlineJuly 29, 2022July 26, 2022Dead TreesColumns, Dead Trees, Gail Petersen, Mark Sieber, The Making of a MonsterLeave a comment

banner reading Dead Trees by Mark Sieber

vintage cover of The Making of a Monster Horror was in a time of transformation in 1994. John Skipp and Craig Spector’s final novel, Animals, had been published the previous year. The original Splatterpunk era was over. Necro Publications and the underground hardcore horror fiction wave was a couple of years ahead. Cemetery Dance had spearheaded the small press revolution, but it was still gaining momentum. The biggest thing in the genre, other than King and Barker of course, was the Dell/Abyss line of postmodern horror paperbacks.

I liked some of the Abyss titles and authors. Poppy Z. Brite and Kathe Koja were and are favorites. I liked Brian Hodge and Dennis Etchison. However, the books began to wear on me after a while. It seemed like some of the writers were trying too hard to be hip. I didn’t care for novels by Tanith Lee, Nancy Holder, and Jessica Amanda Salmonson. I lost faith in the Dell/Abyss brand and stopped buying the books.Continue Reading

Review: Zatanna: The Jewel of Gravesend by Alys Arden and Jacquelin de Leon

Cemetery Dance OnlineJuly 18, 2022July 4, 2022Reviews, The Comic VaultAlys Arden, Columns, Jacquelin de Leon, Reviews, The Comic Vault, Zatana: The Jewel of GravesendLeave a comment

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cover of Zatana Zatanna: The Jewel of Gravesend by Alys Arden and Jacquelin de Leon
DC Comics (July 26, 2022)
208 pages; $16.99 paperback
Reviewed by Joshua Gage

Alys Arden was raised by the street performers, tea-leaf readers, and glittering drag queens of the New Orleans French Quarter. She cut her teeth on the streets of New York and has worked all around the world since. The Casquette Girls, her debut novel, garnered over one million reads online before it was acquired by Skyscape.

Jacquelin de Leon is an illustrator and comics artist currently located in San Jose, California. She graduated with a BFA in illustration and entertainment design from Laguna College of Art and Design. Since graduating in 2015 she has become an illustration brand, self-publishing multiple books and working full-time to produce for her online shop and her YouTube channel. When not working on major projects, her favorite subjects are vivid and magical mermaids, sultry witches, and tattooed punk girls with colored hair. Their most recent graphic novel is Zatanna: The Jewel of Gravesend.Continue Reading

Review: Blackwater by Jeannette Arroyo and Ren Graham

Cemetery Dance OnlineJuly 11, 2022July 11, 2022ReviewsBlackwater, Columns, Jeannette Arroyo, Joshua Gage, Ren Graham, Reviews, The Comic VaultLeave a comment

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Blackwater by Jeannette Arroyo and Ren Graham
Henry Holt and Co. BYR Paperbacks (July 19, 2022)
304 pages; $24.99 hardcover; $17.99 paperback
Reviewed by Joshua Gage

Jeannette Arroyo was born and raised in New Mexico but recently relocated to the rainier Seattle area. She has done freelance in animation and children’s book illustrations. A huge fan of the horror genre, Jeannette likes to mix in some lighthearted spooky elements in her work.

Ren Graham is a fiction writer and illustrator currently residing in the rainy Pacific Northwest. They have B.A. in Art History and a graduate studies certificate in Science Illustration, so biology, world mythology, and natural elements tend to influence and reappear in their work. Ren is interested in spooky stories, chilly hikes in the woods, and the ways in which art and science intersect. Co-created, Blackwater is their debut graphic novel. It’s a fabulous horror story geared towards a teen audience.Continue Reading

Dark Pathways: A Ghostly Reckoning

Cemetery Dance OnlineJuly 8, 2022July 4, 2022Dark PathwaysColumns, Dark Pathways, Ken Brosky, LaTanya McQueeen, When the Reckoning ComesLeave a comment

Dark Pathways

cover of When the Reckoning Comes Stoker Award nominee LaTanya McQueen has incredible storytelling skills. Her book, When the Reckoning Comes, is obviously scary (that’s why we’re here!), but what stood out to me while I was reading it is the pure talent. This book goes down smooth. It’s the literary equivalent of a one-story beer bong–you open the spigot and enjoy.

OK, so maybe that analogy is a little pointed. Let me try to explain it another way: I’ve read a lot of books that force me to stop and start — a bad paragraph here, a pointless chapter there — and it requires moments of slog. You slog through it because the book is very good (not great), so you accept that sometimes the writing is iffy. McQueen’s novel is not like this. Every page flows. She’s a master of narrative.Continue Reading

Night Time Logic with Venita Coehlo

Cemetery Dance OnlineJuly 1, 2022June 26, 2022Night Time LogicColumns, Daniel Braum, Night Time Logic, Venita CoelhoLeave a comment

Night Time Logic with Daniel Braum

In this column, which shares a name with my New York-based reading series, I explore this phenomenon, other notions of what makes horror tick, and my favorite authors and stories, new and old with you.

My previous column back in October 2021 with author Inna Effress concluded with an examination of evil, and crime, and the point of view of bad men as Inna mentioned. Bad men, and crime, and evil are all present in the work of Venita Coehlo, even though most are half a world away. In her short story collections Venita gives us feminist stories and stories arising from and intersecting with the headlines in India Continue Reading

Dead Trees: Stephen King: The Art of Darkness

Cemetery Dance OnlineJune 10, 2022June 7, 2022Dead TreesColumns, Dead Trees, Douglas E. Winter, Mark Sieber, Stephen King, The Art of Darkness1 Comment

banner reading Dead Trees by Mark Sieber

cover of Stephen KIng: The Art of Darkness Enter the Wayback Machine and go back to 1984. I was still shrugging off the science fiction habit I had all my life and becoming a full-fledged horror fan. I read authors like Grant, Straub, Wilson, Etchison, Campbell. And of course Stephen King. When I finally got around to reading him, my reading life changed forever. Pet Sematary had just been released in paperback. Ahead were wonders like The Talisman, Thinner, Skeleton Crew, and It.

Horror was in a state of flux. In the movies, the slasher era was cycling down. In ’84 we had The Mutilator, Splatter University, The Initiation, and Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. A Nightmare on Elm Street was ushering in a new breed of horror. Stephen King adaptations were in a bit of a lull, as disappointing productions like Children of the Corn and Firestarter hit the screens. Bigger and better things were ahead.Continue Reading

Review: Black Beth: Vengeance be Thy Name by Blas Gallego, Alec Worley, DaNi

Cemetery Dance OnlineJune 9, 2022June 7, 2022Reviews, The Comic VaultBlack Beth, Columns, Joshua Gage, Reviews, The Comics VaultLeave a comment

Black Beth: Vengeance be Thy Name by Blas Gallego, Alec Worley, DaNi
Rebellion (June 7, 2022)
80 pages; $24 paperback
Reviewed by Joshua Gage

Black Beth was a one-time character published by Scream in the 1980s. She was a combination of Red Sonja and The Punisher, an armor-clad woman warrior who sought vengeance against the tyrants that slaughtered her love and her village. Aided by her mentor, the blind wild man Quido, she sought vengeance for 23 pages before disappearing into the memories of comic aficionados until 2016, when Rebellion purchased the rights from the original publisher. Alec Worley and artist DaNi have reinvented Black Beth for modern audiences in a dark fantasy tale that is sure to thrill readers. Continue Reading

Dark Pathways: Goddesses, Filth, and Inciting Incidents

Cemetery Dance OnlineMay 6, 2022April 25, 2022Dark PathwaysBram Stoker Awards, Columns, Dark Pathways, Goddess of Filth, Ken Brosky, V. CastroLeave a comment

Dark Pathways

In the first ten pages of V. Castro’s Stoker-nominated The Goddess of Filth, a young woman is violently possessed. The moment is so jarring and powerful that I found myself going back to make sure I hadn’t accidentally started the book on the wrong chapter! But upon confirming I had, in fact, started the book on the correct page, I decided to just go with it. “I trust Castro,” I said to myself. “Let’s dive right in.”Continue Reading

Review: John Carpenter’s Night Terrors: Sour Candy by Kealan Patrick Burke and Jason Felix

Cemetery Dance OnlineMay 5, 2022May 3, 2022Reviews, The Comic VaultBlu Gilliand, Columns, Jason Felix, John Carpenter, Kealan Patrick Burke, Night Terrors, Reviews, Sour Candy, The Comics VaultLeave a comment

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cover of Sour Candy John Carpenter’s Night Terrors: Sour Candy by Kealan Patrick Burke and Jason Felix
Storm King Productions (March 2022)
104 pages; $17.99 paperback
Reviewed by Blu Gilliand

Back in 2015, I had the pleasure of reviewing Kealan Patrick Burke’s then-new novella, Sour Candy. You can see the full review here, but I’ll include the plot summary from that review below:Continue Reading

Exhumed: Bonus Content! Me & CD, a Brief History of an Unlikely Love Affair

Cemetery Dance OnlineApril 29, 2022April 25, 2022ExhumedColumns, Exhumed, K. Edwin Fritz, Richard ChizmarLeave a comment

banner reading Exhumed - The Fiction of Cemetery Dance by K. Edwin Fritz

Exhumed is my humble attempt to read and review every short story and novel excerpt ever published by Cemetery Dance magazine. In their 33+ years of publication, there have been a total of 577 (and counting!) pieces spread out over 77 issues. Since each Exhumed post covers just two stories (one “old” and one “new”), I think I’m going to be doing this for a while. I sure hope you’ll join me along the way. And, by the way, I’m always looking for requests, so go forth and comment which story you’d like me to unearth.

Normally at this point I’d jump into the nuts and bolts of the stories I’m reviewing this time around, but this time around I have something very different for you. In recent months I’ve had several people ask how I can review the really old stories when those issues are so hard to find. Do I own them all? Does Cemetery Dance hook me up? It’s a great question with a rather complicated (and, dare I say it, entertaining) answer.Continue Reading

Video Visions: All Hail Tubi and the (Kinda) Return of the Video Store

Cemetery Dance OnlineApril 22, 2022April 21, 2022Video VisionsColumns, Hunter Shea, Tubi, Video VisionsLeave a comment

Black background with spooky lettering that says Hunter Shea Video Visions and the Cemetery Dance logo

Quick show of hands, how many of you out there in the transom miss the video store? Yeah, streaming is easy, and you don’t have to be kind and rewind. Kindness in general is in short supply this day.

But, who pines for the Friday or Saturday trips to the video store (it could have been Blockbuster, Sun Coast Video, or the local mom and pop like the one I named this column after), browsing the aisle of front facing VHS boxes, carefully making your selection and maybe grabbing a little bag of freshly popped popcorn?Continue Reading

Dark Pathways: A Frightening Sense of Foreboding

Cemetery Dance OnlineApril 8, 2022April 4, 2022Dark PathwaysBram Stoker Awards, Columns, Dark Pathways, Ken BroskyLeave a comment

Dark Pathways

The nominees for this year’s Bram Stoker Award for Short Fiction blew me away. Serpent hair? Yes, please. Ancient cults? Thank you! Man-eating sheep? Don’t mind if I do. I had the terribly good fortune of reading all this year’s nominees in one sitting, which was the equivalent of consuming one of the most bonkers anthologies ever collected.

I loved every moment of it.Continue Reading

Horror Drive-In: Scaaaa-REEM!

Cemetery Dance OnlineFebruary 4, 2022January 30, 2022Horror Drive-InColumns, Horror Drive-In, Mark Sieber, ScreamLeave a comment

banner reading Horror Drive-In and Mark Sieber and Cemetery Dance

I am the perfect age to be a slasher fan. Halloween was released when I was seventeen years old — roughly the same age as the victims in John Carpenter’s masterpiece. I saw it in a walk-in theater and the experience was truly transformational. I was on the verge of adulthood and this movie, which was based on an oft-told urban legend, felt like the beginning of something entirely new.

Halloween was a runaway success and along with the inevitable sequel, imitator movies were quickly made and released. The biggest of them is, of course, Friday the 13th. I was eighteen years old.Continue Reading

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