![\"a](\"https:\/\/www.lazyandentitled.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/6540082468993065472-1-642x1024.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nWe’ll have another serialized fiction project in 2027. The superstitious part of me hates typing that sentence, because The Mysterious Forces will now conspire to make it not happen, but that’s the plan. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now: Happy Halloween, let’s talk horrors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What I’ve Been Reading This Week: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Two books that are re-reads, for different reasons. One, to re-read with new knowledge. One, to re-read for pure joy. You know, what’s the point of being a horror writer if you can’t really<\/em> celebrate the spooky season? I’ve read some great books this month, and there’s already more in the TBR pile. Let’s talk about The Ballad of Black Tom<\/em> by Victor LaValle and R<\/em> E D <\/em>by Chase Berggrun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Ballad Of Black Tom <\/strong><\/em>by Victor LaValle: <\/strong>stories about Black people are never framed as “one man being pushed too far,” are they? There’s no Falling Down<\/em> remake starring Idris Elba. The Joker of The Dark Knight<\/em> and The Killing Joke<\/em> likes to say that insanity is one bad day away or whatever, and if there’s a version of The Joker out there that’s even POC-coded, I haven’t come across it. No, even though racial minorities in the U.S. have to endure casual indignity after outright outrage after sideways glance1<\/a><\/sup>, but when they snap? It’s all, hey what’s he so angry about<\/em>. The narrator in this novella, Charles Thomas Tester, begins the story as 20ish Charles Thomas Tester. Within 60 pages, he’s been asked to transport a book that could end the world from Harlem to Queens, he’s been hired to play an evening of music in Flatbush despite knowing four songs, he’s been mugged by cops, an old white man has spoken about awakening an Old God known euphemistically as The Sleeping King, and a cop has shot his dad with two full magazines of bullets. Black Tom was not born, Black Tom was made. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This novella was the first cosmic horror I seriously read2<\/a><\/sup>. It still feels like a good introduction to the genre. If Wednesday’s column<\/a> got you curious, check this novella out. LaValle’s explanation in the back of how he wrote it in direct response to Lovecraft’s story “The Horror At Red Hook” is really instructive. Hey, if you just need a few good scares and some catharsis reading about what happens when USian racism collides with the Old Gods? Read this book. <\/p>\n\n\n\n R E D <\/em>by Chase Berggrun: <\/strong>I think I’ve resolved to read this every October. It’s 59 pages, I love it, and Agent Dale Cooper says to give yourself a little present every single day, so on Tuesday of this week? R E D<\/em> was my present to myself. A brief rehearsal of the premise: the book is an erasure of Dracula<\/em>, done as the writer was beginning their own gender transition. It’s an interrogation of monstrousness, womanhood, Victorian sex and gender politics, and more. Something that clicked this time around is how much this reads like a novel-in-verse. I either didn’t know or had forgotten that Chase has studied with Matthew Rohrer, who also taught novel-in-verse writer Melissa Lozada-Oliva, and who is also the author of 48-page-chapbook-that-reads-like-a-novella They All Seemed Asleep<\/em>. As someone who has written a novel-in-verse and is endlessly fascinated by the form, I enjoyed reading it with this in mind. <\/p>\n\n\n\n LINKS!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Something to listen to while you browse? It’s Halloween, we should do something scary. Spooky or scary? Hmmm. You know what, a band I genuinely think is good at making “music to write horror while listening to it” is Syncatto. Especially the latest record. Here’s “Hollow.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.lazyandentitled.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/IMG_6632-1024x768.jpg\")