Kevin Lucia Archives - Page 5 of 6 - Cemetery Dance Online

Review: Speaking to Skull Kings and Other Stories by Emily B. Cantaneo

Cemetery Dance OnlineFebruary 19, 2018February 18, 2018ReviewsEmily Cantaneo, Kevin Lucia, Reviews, Speaking to Skull Kings and Other StoriesLeave a comment

Speaking to Skull Kings and Other Stories by Emily B. Cantaneo
Trepidatio Pub (May 2017)
203 pages; $13.55 paperback; $3.95 e-book
Reviewed by Kevin Lucia

Reading Emily Cantaneo’s short fiction collection Speaking to Skull Kings is a wonderfully surreal trip into the fantastic unknown. The stories collected straddle all sorts of genres. Each take place in their own universes—realms far stranger than our own, or perhaps only slightly askew of our reality—with their own sets of rules, their own logic. There’s plenty of humanity here, however, and that’s what gives them their power.Continue Reading

Review: And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe by Gwendolyn Kiste

Cemetery Dance OnlineFebruary 14, 2018February 11, 2018ReviewsAnd Her Smile Will Untether the Universe, Gwendolyn Kiste, JournalStone, Kevin Lucia, ReviewsLeave a comment

And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe by Gwendolyn Kiste
JournalStone (April 2017)
267 pages; $15.93 paperback; $3.95 e-book
Reviewed by Kevin Lucia

And Her Smile With Untether the Universe is an amazing collection of speculative fiction by Gwendoyn Kiste which touches on surreal fantasy but never loses its grip on an all too tangible—sometimes painfully so—sense of reality. This is important for me, because I often find that happens with surreal stories of the fantastic. While I admire the world created and the surreal experience rendered, I sometimes feel distant from the characters and their experiences, and the stories fail to really impact me on an emotional level.Continue Reading

Revelations: T.M. Wright

Cemetery Dance OnlineJanuary 19, 2018January 18, 2018RevelationsColumns, Kevin Lucia, Revelations, T.M. Wright3 Comments

At one time, T. M. Wright was like Alan Peter Ryan, Charles L. Grant and so many others—just another name I’d heard here and there, most often in a quote from Ramsey Campbell (also, at that point, just another name), which said: “T. M. Wright is a one-man definition of quiet horror.”Continue Reading

Review: ‘Stephen King and Philosophy’ edited by Jacob Held

Cemetery Dance OnlineNovember 24, 2017November 22, 2017ReviewsJacob Held, Kevin Lucia, Reviews, Stephen King, Stephen King and PhilosophyLeave a comment

Stephen King and Philosophy edited by Jacob Held
Rowman & Littlefield (August 2016)
328 pages; $13.56 paperback; $9.99 e-book
Reviewed by Kevin Lucia

In a documentary filmed many years ago, bestselling author Peter Straub lamented the fact that, ever tongue-in-cheek and self-deprecating, Stephen King once referred to his own work as the equivalent of a “Big Mac and fries.” Straub considered it an unfortunate comparison which didn’t do King justice, that his work was far more substantial than mere intellectual junk food. Continue Reading

Revelations: Paul F. Olson

Cemetery Dance OnlineNovember 17, 2017November 13, 2017RevelationsColumns, Kevin Lucia, Paul F. Olson, Revelations2 Comments

For the most part, this column travels in semi-chronological order, chronicling the writers I’ve discovered the last few years who’ve had an impact on me as a writer. I will, however, occasionally stray from this chronological path, simply because, well, I feel like it. This is one of those cases, as we discuss writer Paul F. Olson.Continue Reading

Creating Strange Stories: An Interview with Kevin Lucia

Cemetery Dance OnlineOctober 25, 2017October 23, 2017InterviewsBlu Gilliand, Interviews, Kevin Lucia, PatreonLeave a comment

Kevin Lucia has been creating strange stories for a long time. It’s a passion project for him, borne out of a love for reading and an overwhelming desire to share the people, places and things that dominate his dreams and nightmares. His work has appeared alongside many genre greats in numerous anthologies and magazines, and now he’s looking to take his efforts to the next level with the pursuit of his very own Patreon. Recently I swapped a few emails with Kevin about his latest project (among other things—he is, after all, the Reviews Editor for Cemetery Dance magazine and Cemetery Dance Online). Enjoy!Continue Reading

Revelations: Gary A. Braunbeck

Cemetery Dance OnlineSeptember 22, 2017September 17, 2017RevelationsColumns, Gary A. Braunbeck, Kevin Lucia, Revelations1 Comment

I see the sentiment expressed in horror circles often: “I read and write horror, but I don’t often read anything which actually scares me.” Of course, the word to consider here is “scare.” I have this discussion with my English classes every year when we read The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. They always ask, as I’m handing out Jackson’s seminal haunted house novel, “Will this be scary?” I always answer, “Let’s talk about that word and what it means.” We discuss the differences between the adrenaline-based reaction they refer to as “scary”—what they experience while watching a horror movie in the theaters—and the nature of “horror” and being “horrified.”Continue Reading

Review: ‘Bone White’ by Ronald Malfi

Cemetery Dance OnlineJuly 25, 2017July 24, 2017ReviewsBone White, Kevin Lucia, Reviews, Ronald MalfiLeave a comment

Bone White by Ronald Malfi
Kensington (July 2017)
384 pages; $10.17 paperback; $7.99 e-book
Reviewed by Kevin Lucia

Seven years ago I was sent an ARC (Advance Reader Copy) for a novel called Snow by some author named Ronald Malfi. I’d not read anything by him then, and at first the novel looked pretty pedestrian. Monsters devastate a town during a blizzard. The initial setup seemed to point in that direction: a flight is cancelled because of the snowstorm, so several folks set out in a rental car to try for home the long way, and come upon a town cut off by the storm. It looked like a fairly simple paint-by-the-numbers affair, albeit written very well.Continue Reading

Discovering Alan Peter Ryan

Cemetery Dance OnlineJuly 14, 2017July 10, 2017RevelationsAlan Peter Ryan, Columns, Kevin Lucia, Revelations5 Comments

I can’t remember where I read it—one of his blog posts, or in one of his now out-of-print blog collections—but Brian Keene once recounted the story of how he and some fellow writers, early in their career, visited a used bookstore while at a convention (maybe World Horror; I can’t remember). Excited at their own writing futures, while browsing the stacks, looking for their favorite classic authors, they discovered, with a rising sense of unease, a number of authors they had never heard of before. Writers who had at least ascended to paperback fame (of a kind) only to descend once again beneath the waters of obscurity, with barely a ripple. Continue Reading

Review: ‘Life in a Haunted House’ by Norman Prentiss

Cemetery Dance OnlineMay 17, 2017May 16, 2017ReviewsKevin Lucia, Life in a Haunted House, Norman Prentiss, ReviewsLeave a comment

Life in a Haunted House by Norman Prentiss
Amazon Digital Services (May 2017)
175 pages; $0.99 e-book
Reviewed by Kevin Lucia

I absolutely love coming of age stories. I don’t know why. Maybe because I’m an overgrown kid myself. Maybe there’s something inside me which looks back on those years fondly, but also remembers how hard it was to be a kid. Everyone expects you to “grow up” and figure out what it is you want to do with your life, all before your sixteenth birthday. I remember those years well, and as a high school teacher, I see it enacted before me, in living color, every single day. So I’m always a sucker for a well-told, engrossing coming of age tale. Continue Reading

Al Sarrantonio: The Weird King of Halloween

Cemetery Dance OnlineApril 28, 2017April 23, 2017RevelationsAl Sarrantonio, Columns, Kevin Lucia, RevelationsLeave a comment

I first encountered Al Sarrantonio the same way others most likely did; in his Orangefield Cycle, which regales the tale of the strange Pumpkin Capitol of Orangefield, New York, through the novels Halloweenland, Hallows Eve, Horrorween and the novellas The Pumpkin Boy and Hornets. In Orangefield, strange things happen around Halloween. People die mysteriously, create suicide pacts, conduct pagan rituals, and see strange things from other worlds. Like the mythical Pumpkin Boy, a robot with a pumpkin for a head. Or Samhain himself, trying to take advantage of Halloween’s thin dimensional walls in his repeated attempts to sneak into our world as the advance scout of an unholy army lead by something far worse. Continue Reading

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

Charles L. Grant, Part 1: The Novels and Collections

Cemetery Dance OnlineJanuary 4, 2017December 27, 2016RevelationsCharles L. Grant, Columns, Kevin Lucia, Revelations, Shadows, The Carousel, The Grave, The Orchard3 Comments

It was his Oxrun Station quartets which first drew me in.

It was March, 2011. We were spending Spring Break with family in Michigan. We’d visited the year before, and I’d wanted to visit a used bookstore there but hadn’t gotten the chance to because of our schedule. Fresh off my experience with Paul Wilson, Tom Monteleone and Stuart David Schiff, hitting Jellybean’s Used Books was a high priority on our next trip, to be sure. When I had some free time in our schedule, I scooted over to Jelly Bean’s, clutching cash in my grubby little fingers. To my delight, I found a sprawling bookcase full of horror. Wasn’t long before I was sitting on the floor next to a teetering stack of books.Continue Reading

Review: ‘The Progeny’ by Tosca Lee

Cemetery Dance OnlineDecember 29, 2016December 19, 2016ReviewsFeatured, Kevin Lucia, Reviews, The Progeny, Tosca LeeLeave a comment

The Progeny by Tosca Lee
Howard Books (May 2016)
336 pages; $17.10 hardcover; $15.99 paperback; $13.99 e-book
Reviewed by Kevin Lucia

I first encountered Tosca Lee’s work in her debut novel, Demon: A Memoir. A moody, tense, gripping story about a down-on-his-luck literary agent and his encounter with a demon who demands he tell Its story told to the world, Memoir predicted big things for Tosca, big things which have come to pass. Continue Reading

Introducing ‘Revelations’

Cemetery Dance OnlineNovember 8, 2016November 7, 2016RevelationsColumns, Kevin Lucia, Revelations4 Comments

revelations_banner

thegrave Over the span of my thus far short writing career, I’ve been fortunate to experience several moments of clarity; moments which have changed me as a writer and a person. One of them came in the form of my first actual critique from an editor, regarding the first short story I ever submitted. The critique stung with its stark, unflinching truthfulness, but it forced me to face my writing weaknesses head on, and showed me the immeasurable value of honest feedback. It set the tone for how I approach editorial critique, to this day.Continue Reading

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