AND SO THIS IS NEW YEAR’S, but what have you done? Another year older… (apologies to John Lennon!)
2025 was an exhausting year for me, both emotionally and logistically! I did 16 book-related signings and appearances, which kept my calendar busy, not to mention my usual spring and fall pinball conventions. I also joined a pinball league (the B-League – I even have a jersey – I’m “NightFlip”!) and started playing almost weekly in pinball tournaments at various places mostly in the Fox Valley area, so I have probably been out of the house more this year than since before COVID (I’ve worked from home since March 2020). For the pinball curious, my International Flipper Pinball Association ranking profile is here.
Here are just a few of my pinball moments from the year, including our League, some nights where I made tournament finals, a visit to Arcade Legacy in Cincinnati, and Pinball Expo and my visit to the Stern Pinball Factory:
There were a lot of good things to be thankful for in 2025, but also a lot of endings.
Overall, this year seemed to mark the end of civility, at least in the United States. I don’t care which side of the political spectrum you fall on, 2025 seemingly brought out the absolute worst in people, and as we enter the 250th “birthday” year of the U.S., I can only think that if this nation is going to survive another 50 years, let alone 250, we really need to learn again how to “put a cork in it,” grow up and get along.
Despite the demonification of Liberals and MAGA followers by each other, we are all more the same than different. Americans have been falsely led into an “us or them” mentality, ruthlessly driven by the divisive current administration which can’t seem to make a public statement about literally ANYTHING without calling some person or some group names. And it’s not healthy for anyone. I won’t go on about that other than to say this year really disappointed me to my core; I honestly thought we were were better and more evolved as a society than this. It feels like civilization is literally crumbling as the playground bully/Neanderthal came out in everyone.
Personal Endings
In more personal endings, this was the last year of my 50s. I’ll turn the big 6-0 in March. Entering what is most likely the last 20-25% of your life is a sobering thought. What do I want to do with these final years? And the deaths of my parents (both in their 80s) this year underlined that thought.
In May, my mom died from pancreatic cancer, which ultimately had the positive impact of ending a 35-year separation between me and two of my sisters. (Our family has basically been polarized between mom and dad my entire adult life. They divorced in the ’80s and you had to pick sides – one parent or the other. I was the odd one out and stuck with dad ultimately).
In early November, my dad unexpectedly died of a heart attack. I’m sad that I didn’t get the chance to say goodbye, but it was good that he didn’t linger and suffer. And he has been “waiting to go” for years now. He really lost his drive and desire to do anything before COVID. He was 84 years old and had no wife or pets so… it was his time.
I’m the executor for his estate, so the past two months have been a series of learning experiences on what needs to be done when someone dies. (Not really anything I wanted to learn!) I have wrestled with AI agents on the phone more in the past 6-7 weeks than probably in the last 10 years combined! (NOT a fan!) Dad’s passing really pushed me to think about a lot of things (and brought up many questions that I’ll never be able to ask him now).
Losing both parents makes you stop and take stock of your own life. On just a practical level, after cleaning out some of his house, I’m acutely aware of how much “stuff” I’ve accumulated now, and I think 2026 is going to be a year of “slimming.” Both my gut and some of my collections.
New Beginnings
But for every Ending, there’s a Beginning, right? This year, for the first time since Shaun was a toddler (he’s in college now!) I got up on stage and played keyboards with a new band – The Hip Replacements. And even sang two songs!
Won’t say I was great… but it was a lot of fun to perform again, especially since a couple years ago, I would have said that that part of my life was dead and buried and would never happen again. But from last fall through to this fall, I practiced every couple weeks with a group fronted by Lexi Zehren, who sang on a couple of my original song demos recorded in the 90s. And we finally got on the stage at an Irish bar in November.
Also new for the Eversons 2025, a baby entered our flock… Dusty the cockatiel!
After our last cockatiel, Stormy, died in 2024, I wasn’t ready for a long time to raise another baby. But we have always had a cockatiel in the house, so this past spring it was time. We met Dusty at Bird is the Word and decided our house had been without the joyful spirit of a cockatiel for too long.
And Dusty has turned out to be the most mischievous and loquacious of all the birds we’ve had over the past 40 years. He’s been a treasure these past few months and slowly become the best friend of Kiwi, our 33-year-old cockatoo. If I take Dusty out of the office where Kiwi’s cage is, they both start yelling bloody murder.
New Beginnings in Books… and an Award!
2025 started with the longest road trip (11 hours) that I’ve taken in years. I was part of the first Dark Drafts Festival in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Housed in one of the country’s oldest continuous functioning breweries (which supposedly is haunted), it was a weekend of more than 40 horror authors hanging out. Some of them drinking Everson IPA – the brewery put my name on a West Coast IPA for the weekend, which was pretty damn cool.
Pix and my travelogue, which included a couple stops at Brian Keene’s Vortex Comics, are here.
Last January I also got to participate in the Music Box Theatre’s January Giallo program of films — I had a book table in the lobby next to my friends at Severin Films for two of the four nights and hawked copies of my giallo books, Five Deaths for Seven Songbirds and The Bloodstained Doll, which was a blast.
In other book news, in March, The Evil Cookie Publishing released my novella co-written with Polish author Tomasz Czarny, Raising Malphus. It’s an over-the-top horror tale that takes place in the same world as my Covenant novels. It’s also the first time I truly co-wrote something someone – I did the outline and then we wrote it round-robin style and both edited each other’s parts.
And in May, my fifth full-length short story collection, All Triggers, No Warnings, came out from Cemetery Dance. I’ve wanted to work with CD my entire writing career, so that was a big notch for me. It includes my best short fiction from the past decade since my last collection, Sacrificing Virgins, and a couple originals and rarities. And Kealan Patrick Burke made a phenomenal cover for the collection.
In August, while I was sitting at my booth at Flashback Weekend, I found out I won a Splatterpunk Award at a different convention in Austin, TX!
Living Death Race, my first novella from The Evil Cookie Publishing, received the award at KillerCon. I knew it was nominated, but never expected to win!
I was bummed I couldn’t be there to accept it, but I had already paid for my booth at Flashback Weekend and that’s my “hometown” show that I’ve attended for almost 15 years so it’s like a family reunion every August. I couldn’t miss it.
Finally this fall, NightWhere was released in a translated edition in the Czech Republic by Carcosa, which previously issued a translation of The House by the Cemetery a few years ago. My sixth novel has now been translated into German, Polish and Czech!
This was in the works for a couple years and it was awesome to see it finally released.
There is even now a NightWhere Spotify playlist for the novel, which offers a setlist of both the classic goth and more modern dark club tracks that you might hear if you got one of those special invitations to “Come in and Sin.”
Things I Read, Not Wrote
Okay, 2025 was one of the worst years in reading for me in the past decade. Not because what I read was bad… because I basically didn’t read anything over the summer and into the fall.
I literally only got through five books. I never get through a lot of books in a year, but I’m usually close to a dozen – one a month.
Not this year!
But… I did read a couple of great ones. Brian Pinkerton‘s The Perfect Stranger hit me right between the eyes. One of the best books I’ve read in a long time, this sci-fi / horror / thriller was awesome.
I also really loved Dan Franklin‘s short mermaid horror novel Down Into the Sea, which will wring your heart dry.
Both books are highly recommended.
Things I Watched
I caught seasons of Star Trek’s Strange New Worlds, Only Murders in the Building and Tim Burton’s awesome Wednesday. Just now starting the final season of Stranger Things.
As for films… I watched nearly 100 movies this year, according to my tracking spreadsheet (I may have missed tracking a few, but it’s around 100 either way).
Not surprisingly, Horror had the lead as a genre in the things I watched, but there were a healthy list of Sci-Fi, Thriller, Giallo, Arthouse, Drama and Exploitation films in there. And even a handful of Documentaries, which is unusual for me. While films from the 70s-80s dominated my viewing (about 60% of what I saw), I actually watched way more movies from the last five years than normal, in part because we managed to get through a lot of the 2024 Oscar nominees in January. Here’s my breakdown:
1960s – 10
1970s – 38
1980s – 22
1990s – 2
2010s – 1
2020s – 20
I try to plug star ratings in when I watch things, so I remember what I really liked, and this year a dozen films hit the 5-star “LOVED IT” rating. Most of the 5-star films were rewatches since I’ve gotten a lot of 4k Upgrade discs to old favorites in the past year, but 2024’s Oscar Finalist Emilia Perez was a new film on my 5-star list, as were two horror films from this year — Weapons and Sinners. Rewatches of horror classics Daughters of Darkness, The Blood Spattered Bride and Dario Argento’s Deep Red and Opera retained my utter love as did Russ Meyers’ SuperVixens and Radley Metzger’s The Image. And I discovered a new film I will definitely be revisiting —The Punishment — a 1973 French film released by Mondo Macabro.
Other things I really enjoyed: I finally watched Bernardo Bertolucci’s classic and controversial Last Tango in Paris (1973), Roman Polanksi’s The Tenant (1976) and Late Night With the Devil (2023), which I totally loved for its ’70s throwback vibe. I also really liked last year’s Oscar winner Anora.
Where I Was…
Before my 11-hour road trip to Dark Drafts in Pennsylvania in January, I hung out at January Giallo at the Music Box in Chicago for a couple nights. And after a busy January I did my usual Spring and Fall HorrorHound convention visits to Cincinnati, went to Comicopolis in Lockport, IL, Fan Expo and Flashback Weekend in Rosemont, IL and also went to Spooky Frog Bookfest a couple times in Milwaukee.
I also went to Kalamazoo, MI for the annual spring Pinball At The Zoo event and Knox, IN for the Beyond The Book fest. And I spent a week in New Orleans this fall on a business trip. So I put a few miles on the odometer! Here are a few pix from various book events this year!
The Eversons didn’t do a family vacation this year, but we did go to a friend’s wedding in Dallas / Fort Worth early this summer. And we made many trips to Iowa City to see Shaun perform at college concerts.
I did have a personal getaway over the summer. My son’s apartment in Iowa City was vacant for the summer and I really wanted to go back to Iowa City to see one of their Shakespeare in the Park performances (I saw one two years ago there).
So… in July I drove out to Iowa and stayed in Shaun’s apartment for a few days. I got to see a great outdoor performance of Romeo and Juliet, and then hung out another couple days to catch Steve Earle perform at the Englert Theatre there, which is a quaint spot in downtown campustown that I’ve wanted to see the inside of since we first explored Iowa City almost 3 years ago.
While I was there, I got to check out a couple of new breweries in Iowa (big fan now of Le Claire’s cozy Green Tree Brewery on the Mississippi River) and did a little writing on my new novel, The Witching House (which I’m just in the process of finishing up this week). I did a full blog post about it, but here are a couple pix:
What I Heard…
I saw a ton of concerts this year, some of them on my extended “80s Revival Tour” with Brian Pinkerton. (We started seeing a lot of 80s act shows over the past couple years together.) We even got to meet Lene Lovich!
You can hear/see snippets from a bunch of the shows I saw on my YouTube Channel, but here’s the list of bands I saw (and a photo of me at the OMD show with Warwick and Dove from Ghoulish Mortals:
Andy Bell
Belly
Death Cab for Cutie
Fabio Frizzi
Frontline Assembly
Gary Numan
Lene Lovich
Nitzer Ebb
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark
Psychedelic Furs
Shaun Cassidy
Steve Earle
Voices of Rock radio (featuring John Elefante, Kevin Chalfant and Fran Cosmo from Kansas, Journey and Boston.)
And that’s a wrap
It was a non-stop year that ended with me having my ring finger in a splint for two months from a torn tendon and us doing an emergency furnace replacement two days before Christmas Eve. Crazy right to the end.
I’m looking forward to spending the next few days doing next to nothing! And then on Monday… well… time to see what 2026 has in store!
Until then… Cheers!
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