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…
IT’S OCTOBER. In just a few days, my 10th novel, The House By The Cemetery will finally be released and available at bookstores everywhere! To spread the word, my publisher, Flame Tree Press, has set up a blog tour running over the next week. Follow along and check each stop out. I’ll add the links to each stop to this as they go live: October 2: Not Another Book Blogger October 3: Donna’s Book Blog…
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, was just like any Saturday. I ran up to the store to get some groceries, and after unloading, I went to take a full bag of garbage out to the garage. And a second later, life took one of those forks in the road that you can’t ever turn back from. As I stepped down into the garage with the bag, our baby parakeet, B.B., shot like an arrow from the cage…
“MY DAUGHTER IS A CHILD at whatever age.” That simple, and yet slightly deceptive sentence sums the pain at the core of Death Occurred Last Night (La morte risale a ieri sera) a 1970 Italian murder mystery/giallo directed by Duccio Tessari (also known for The Bloodstained Butterfly). The film has been restored and released on Blu-Ray with one video interview extra by Raro Video. At the outset of the film, we meet Amanzio (played by…
I LOOK FORWARD to Flashback Weekend: Chicago Horror Con every year. It’s one of my favorite parts of summer, and this year, Flashback Weekend 2018 was extra special, because it also served as the “Sneak Peek” local launch of my upcoming 10th novel, The House By The Cemetery. My publisher, Flame Tree Press, was able to print a batch of advance reader copies of the book so that we could stage a bit of a…
I HAVE WANTED to go to the Carolinas for over 30 years. My wife Geri and I have talked about going for most of that time. George, one of my best friends in college, had planned to drive there with me over our winter break during my junior or senior year while we were at University of Illinois… but then a massive ice storm hit the east coast that Christmas, and so we had to…
I LOVE FILM, and over the years I’ve gone through many “discovery” phases, where my curiosity drives me to focus on watching a particular genre of movies for an extended time (horror, noir, b/w ’50s sci-fi…). Over the past few years, I’ve been obsessed with European horror, drive-in, grindhouse and exploitation movies from the ’60s-’80s. I’ve gone through periods of focusing on the work of directors like Jean Rollin, Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, Mario Bava,…
