I TURNED 53 just over a week ago. Not sure how that happened. Seems like I was just 35. I had to be away from home this year — I had a four-day business trip to Las Vegas that meant I was working for 12 hours on “the day.” I’m not a gambler, so I’m not a big Vegas fan, but I did manage to make the most of the small amount of free time…
THIS WEEKEND, I’ll be hanging out with some of my best friends at Capricon 39, a science fiction / fantasy / horror convention in Wheeling, IL. Hoping to see lots of genre fans at my reading tomorrow night, as well as at the panels and autographing session I have coming up over the next four days. We’ll be talking about everything from “The Art of Violence in Horror” to the “Twisted Mind of Guillermo Del…
THE BALL HAS dropped. The family’s in bed. 2018 is over. As I write this, I’m spending the first hour of 2019 with The Marx Brothers and a movie they made 87 years ago (Horse Feathers). There are some things that stand the test of time. And many, many more that are forgotten. I’m going to reflect here on a few things I’d like to remember about the past 12 months. I will definitely remember…
IT’S BEEN ALMOST four months since our baby blue parakeet, B.B., managed to fly over my head and out the door when I was taking out the garbage. I detailed that horrible day in a blog on Sept. 3rd. But what I haven’t written about is the amazing turn of events that followed a week later — and led to a month of “pet” adjustments in our house. As I sit here on Christmas Eve,…
MY 7TH NOVEL Violet Eyes is on a Kindle Countdown Sale this weekend for just 99 cents! Yesterday, because of the sale, it was featured on the BookBub e-book newsletter service and sold over 500 copies, which vaulted it into the the Amazon Bestsellers lists for Horror and Science Fiction. That’s always a great thing because then the book gets seen by more new readers who might decide to check it out. For about 24…
I AM A HUGE FAN of Dario Argento’s 1977 film, Suspiria. So when I heard that director Luca Guadagnino was remaking it, I have to admit, I was not excited. Suspiria is one of those “crowning achievement” films. It’s a garishly gorgeous, if still flawed, work that did not need to be remade. Nevertheless, I had to see what they did to it and so last night, I went to the theater at 10 o’clock…
IT WAS A PRETTY awesome Halloween week. For the first time in years (maybe decades) I ended up so busy that we never carved pumpkins. While that was a bit of a bummer (because it means I also didn’t make pumpkin seeds, which I always do!) lots of cool stuff DID happen. On Halloween (Wednesday) around 5 p.m., I did a live reading of the Prologue of The House By The Cemetery during a presentation…
IT’S BEEN AN amazing couple of weeks for me while I have done a series of book signing events for The House By The Cemetery! I already wrote about the launch party at Bucket ‘O Blood Books that kicked things off. But since then, I’ve also signed at my local Barnes & Noble store in Naperville, IL (the first time in a decade that I’ve signed there!), the Vogt Woods Visual Arts Center in Tinley…
THERE HAS NEVER been a horror movie more beautifully shot than Suspiria. There has never been a release of Suspiria more beautifully realized than Synapse Films’ 4K remaster of the film. The film’s power has always been all about the color and the lighting, and the Synapse edition brings out the power of those elements like no previous release. The Blu-Ray is sharp, crisp and eye-poppingly colorful. Suspiria looks like it was shot using exclusively…
WHERE BETTER TO HOLD a book launch party for a horror novel than a store called Bucket O’ Blood Books and Records? On Thursday, October 11, 2018, that’s exactly where I held mine! Bucket O’ Blood is a very cool used and new books and records and DVDs store in Chicago and they agreed to host the first booksigning stop for my new novel The House By The Cemetery. I actually did signings and readings…
