An Interview with John Skipp & Andrew Kasch:
Telling ‘Tales of Halloween’
One Halloween night. Ten interlocking tales. That’s the premise of Tales of Halloween, the new anthology film scheduled for limited theater and nationwide video on demand release on October 16. The movie boasts an impressive lineup of creative talent, including directors Lucky McKee (May, Red) and Neil Marshall (The Descent, Dog Soldiers), and the writer/director combo John Skipp and Andrew Kasch.
Skipp and Kasch were kind enough to take time away from their hectic pre-release schedule to talk about their segment of the film, how it all came together, and what it was like to film a Halloween movie in the middle of the Christmas season.Continue Reading
On the back cover of John Skipp’s The Art of Horrible People, author Josh Malerman implores readers to “savor this book.” It’s a good suggestion, but difficult to follow with prose like this, which fully embodies the tried-and-true cliché of being difficult to put down.
Each year as the special holiday approaches, Earthling Publications treats horror readers with a special book that harkens back to the good old days of the genre. The supernatural is at play with haunted houses, monstrous creatures, and otherworldly scares which make the Halloween Series such a fixture in horror fiction. Paul Miller has yet to produce a bad book, yet after last year’s stellar The Halloween Children, expectations were set at a high level.
Blood Feud #1 by Cullen Bunn (W), Drew Moss (A), and Nick Filardi (C)
Discovering George Beahm’s first Stephen King Companion in 1989 was a revelation. Even then, there had been plenty of books written on the subject, starting off with Douglas Winter’s prescient The Art of Darkness; since, most books on King had tended toward the academic or the hyperbolic, with little in the way of a middle ground for readers who wanted to know more but didn’t necessarily want to take an American Lit class. The Stephen King Companion filled that gap, offering plenty of background information on King and the books, transcripts of important talks King had given, statistics on limited editions and insights into the books and stories that made up the bulk of interest on King. 
When we think of the great many characters conjured by the imagination of Stephen King, we most likely think of Carrie White, Annie Wilkes, Jack Torrance or Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Few authors in history have known how to construct such a vast array of multidimensional villains and villainesses. As a result, what gets lost in King’s sea of personalities are his heroes — the most interesting of whom is arguably one Johnny Smith, the main man of 
The Silent End by Samuel Sattin
A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay
The Girl in the Maze by R. K. Jackson
Where We Live and Die by Brian Keene
Mr. Suicide by Nicole Cushing
Back when I reviewed Memorial Day, Harry Shannon’s first Mick Callahan novel, I called it “a completely winning, engaging first mystery.” Further, I wrote: “Mick Callahan is no detective or cop. He’s no private dick. No, he’s a disgraced and defrocked television therapist – not your usual tough guy! Think a slicker, more photogenic Dr. Phil. But Shannon wisely hedges his bets and makes Callahan a washed-out Navy SEAL and one time kid boxer – enough pedigree for him to get into fights most of us would eagerly avoid.”