“Here the snow begins in your / postcards. // & black apples arrive / in the arms of a girl” – Joshua Marie Wilkinson, “The Book Of The Umbrella”
It’s a week before Halloween, but our last Friday in October. Next week is Noirvember, which I’m super excited about, but maybe expect a few extra horror links next week too. In the meantime, let’s savor as many scares as we can get. You still got time to re-watch all of the Scream movies, or all of Jordan Peele’s movies, or Dog Soldiers, or Dogface: A Trap House Horror if you want to. Just make sure you get all your sacrifices to the Great Pumpkin in before Wednesday.
What I’ve Been Reading This Week:
Probably too much, honestly, but I was overwhelmed with the spirit of Halloween. All re-reads this week, plus an anthology I’d never read cover-to-cover. I ended up having a pretty busy October, like personal life stuff, but I managed to carve out good writing time for scary stuff I care about/enjoy writing. SGJ inspired me. Wanted to keep those good vibes going into poetry week. So I read Tiny Nightmares, edited by and Nadxieli Nieto, The Book Of Whispering In The Projection Booth by Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Fjords Vol. II by Zachary Schomburg, and R E D by Chase Berggrun.
Tiny Nightmares, edited by Lincoln Michel and Nadxieli Nieto: inspired by barreling through Never Whistle At Night, I decided to cover-to-cover this bad boy. On a back blurb, Carmen Maria Machado calls these stories “literary bonbons,” and claims she could gorge herself all day. You totally can, all of these stories are 1,500 words or fewer. May I recommend, however, not. Read like two or three of these at a time. My complaint about collections of flash (Lydia Davis books, for instance) is that if I read all of them right in a row, everything starts to blur together. Then it’s me doing a disservice to the stories. One of my top five favorite stories, “The Marriage Variations” by Monique Laban, is in this anthology. I should do a column on my top five favorite stories. Right after I make a top five. Shoutout to fellow blogger for being one-half of this editorial team—these stories are top notch and the book itself is a beautiful object (brilliantly sectioned into “Head / Body / Limbs / Viscera” categories, cover design by co-editor Nadxieli Nieto, and the thick, sturdy pages1). If you are teaching a horror writing class, assign this anthology.
The Book Of Whispering In The Projection Booth by Joshua Marie Wilkinson: Agent Dale Cooper believes that every day, you should give yourself a little present. For me, a present is putting a JMW book on the calendar, then reading it in one sitting. This book has sections of tiny short poems and sections of long, fragmented ones that stretch on for pages and feel like someone spilled a photo album out of an old shoebox. Would Josh consider himself a horror poet? Probably not, but there is always the sense that something terrible and tremble-inducing is looming. Agent Cooper would love this book, I bet.
Fjords Vol. II by Zachary Schomburg: Speaking of something looming—maybe booming with slowness? Ah, that’s volume 1—Zach’s books are another gift I give myself. This is my second time reading volume 2, and it struck me that Tim Robinson should be given a show where he adapts Zach poems. Zach deserves TV millions you can’t tell me you wouldn’t watch I THINK YOU SHOULD FJORD.
R E D by Chase Berrgrun: Gifts! It’s a Halloween miracle! Allowing myself any Dracula art is a gift. I adore this book. It’s my third time reading it, and every time, something new unfolds. I’ve only read Dracula once (though of course I’ve seen multiple adaptions and watch the Coppola one every year) and was thinking it might be time to read these two books together—a project for next year. Dracula is famously an epistolary novel with multiple narrators. reading this, though, I find myself hearing each line in either Mina’s (ultimate object of the vampire’s affection, oppressed and repressed Victorian housewife) voice or Jonathan’s (emasculated and humiliated by the vampire and in turn oppressive Victorian husband) voice. I suspect this reading has to do with knowing the speaker is trans, knowing the speaker is journeying into their own womanhood. Me being a cis man, this next statement is certainly no tidy summation of all this book has to offer, but lemme say: all cis men could stand to read this book with an eye toward killing the oppressive Victorian husband that lives in your head.
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? Yo, I’m just gonna hit you with another Haunt Season trailer, come on, you gotta see this movie.
Accidentally disturbing a Native American Burial Ground is a time-honored trope in horror. This is because we USians are babies, who lack object permanence, and we think we can bury our sins. We cannot. For example: Oregon is a state founded as a white supremacist paradise. The problem white supremacists have, though, is that Black people have also been on this continent for 400 years (or more). Arya Surowidjojo has a story in OBP about new archaeology in Maxville, a segregated logging town, revealing the lives of Black loggers at the turn of the 20th century.
Hey, remember on Wednesday, when we talked about how horror can reveal how big the world is sometimes? Here’s my old Cracked comrade Cezary Jan Strusiewicz in Tokyo Weekender on the “bizarre and violent” Japanese mermaids, aka ningyo. Apparently, ningyo’s ground bones grant eternal life, sooooo—don’t go looking for them? I assume if you read this blog, you know enough to pursuing immortality is a fool’s errand destined to drive you mad? You don’t really want to cross oceans of time, right?
Any right winger will tell you that Chicago is a city full of dead bodies. Right wingers, though, don’t have anything interesting to say. Paul Dailing at Chicago Reader? He has an interesting piece about scrapyard grave sites, unaccounted for bodies in parks, bodies in museums—someone call Pete Davidson, we got bodies bodies bodies. Fascinating read about this land, and a story of one man buried amongst the heavy machinery.
From a while ago, but it cropped up on my Bluesky feed, and it’s new to me. In Lit Hub, Elvia Wilk has a look at New Weird and Eerie Fiction, which concerns “…the thing that literally exists but nonetheless resists linguistic description or cognitive explanation, the thing that dismantles the very tools of signification and representation that fiction depends on.” Me quoting just that sentence is being a little simple, as is saying the New Weird is close to Lovecraftian Old Weird, just without all the racism and xenophobia. There’s a lot in here about current societal anxieties, including the existential threat of climate change and the fact that our computers mean we all know too much about each other. Bookmarking this article and the media suggested therein for Swamp Monster novel inspiration.
Let’s go out with another Cezary feature. You know horror and comedy are siblings? And there’s a whole genre called “horror comedy?” Yeah, you knew that. Well, here’s an article in Tokyo Weekender about Yokai with butthole eyes and houses made of scrotum.
What’re you still doing here? It’s Friday! Have you done your one-year anniversary re-read of Vine yet?
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. I hope you get to be exactly as spooky as you want to be but I hope work itself is not scary.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
The thick, sturdy pages that you can expect from a publishing imprint backed by a Koch trust fund. Honestly, no judgment to any of the authors and editors. Every Catapult book I have is gorgeous, and when Elizabeth Koch shuttered the website for whatever vanity project she’s on now, it was a loss to the internet. We are all anxiously awaiting the day Elizabeth Koch decides to become a literary hero and [REDACTED] the rest of her [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED]. Now let’s remember some Wyatt Koch.