Winner of the 2008 Stoker Award!
This collection of horror comics contains two of my stories: Canus and Rue Morgue High
Purchase the second issue of Icarus, which contains my poem "Vampire Bridegroom" and an amazing vampire story by Lee Thomas
Unspeakable Horror is a proud member of the League of Tana Tea Drinkers. Click the icon to explore this fascinating league of horror bloggers!
 Bartholomew Of The Scissors #4 (of 4) Price: 3.59 |
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 Bartholomew Of The Scissors #2 Price: 3.59 |
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 Vincent Price Presents #7 Price: 3.19 |
Unspeakable transformation...On April 16th (the four-year anniversary of this site) UnspeakableHorror.com is transforming into ScaryFairyTale.com, a new website that features the twisted, horrifying fairy tales of Chad Helder; in addition, the site will include a blog that explores fairy tales and the horror genre.
My name is Chad Helder, and I create disturbing little works that spring from the dark crevices of the horror genre: fairy tales, poems, flash fiction, and other literary oddities that fit somewhere in-between (including some stories for comic books). Please feel free to explore the blog, read some comic books, and purchase some of the books I am proud to have worked on.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 07:59PM Here is a new interview with me over at Haunted Happenings PDX (my hometown horror website)--it's the ultimate website for Horroregonians!
In the interview, I discuss Queer Horror, my history with horror, and a bunch of the exciting things that are happening in 2010.
Friday, February 26, 2010 at 07:37PM I just watched an installment of Post Mortem with Mick Garris on Fearnet. Garris interviews monster-making legend Rick Baker. I had the great pleasure of meeting Mick Garris at the Stoker Weekend last June, and in this new Fearnet show he has a wonderful, easygoing interview style. It's a very informative and interesting piece about the career of Rick Baker, whose work I have loved for years (ever since I saw Thriller on MTV)!
Watch Mick Garris interview Rick Bakter: Click Here!
Friday, February 19, 2010 at 07:17PM I'm very excited to be going to Crypticon Seattle this June 18th-20th. I will be a guest at the Creator's Edge booth (sponsored by Comic Evolution) where I will be signing Bartholomew of the Scissors and promoting my new fairy tale website, ScaryFairyTale.com (launching April 16th).
I'm really looking forward to seeing Chuck Messinger from Comic Evolution--he has been an amazing supporter of Bartholomew from the beginning (Comic Evolution sponsored a limited edition printing of the first issue of Bartholomew). In addition, it will be great to meet everyone and see the new comics from Creator's Edge, the new comic book press born out of the Comic Evolution store.
And I can't wait to see the amazing Doug Jones, whom I had the great pleasure of meeting once before at the Stoker Weekend in Burbank last June.
Check out the Crypticon website, and I hope to see you there!
Find out more about the Creator's Edge guests!
Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 11:42AM Here is a press release from Dark Scribe Magazine:
LONG ISLAND, NY, February 9, 2010 — A master of otherworldly suspense and a literary fiction darling have taken top honors in the 3rd Annual Black Quill Awards, as winners were announced today by DARK SCRIBE MAGAZINE, the virtual magazine “dedicated to the books that keep readers up at night.”
Chicago-based author Gillian Flynn snagged the coveted Editor’s Choice award for DARK GENRE NOVEL OF THE YEAR for her sophomore effort, DARK PLACES, while veteran dark scribe Dan Simmons took Readers’ Choice honors in the same category for DROOD, his historical reimagining of the last years of Charles Dickens’ life. Simmons was nominated in the same category in 2007 for THE TERROR.
The Black Quill Awards were handed out in (8) categories honoring works of dark genre literature – horror, suspense, and thrillers – from both mainstream and small press publishers. While six of the awards recognized literary efforts, two of the awards recognized important aspects of book publishing and promotion: cover design and artwork and book trailer production — a growing marketing aspect of dark genre publishing. Peter Mahaichuk and César Puch dominated the BEST COVER ART AND DESIGN category for their work on Michael Louis Calvillo’s AS FATE WOULD HAVE IT for Bad Moon Books, while Calvillo himself took Readers’ Choice for BEST SMALL PRESS CHILL. Filmmaker JT Petty won Editors’ Choice for BEST DARK GENRE BOOK TRAILER for his work on the book trailer for real-life wife Sarah Langan’s AUDREY’S DOOR, while up-and-coming trailer producer John Palisano took Readers’ Choice in that same category for Gary Braunbeck’s FAR DARK FIELDS.
First-time nominees fared well in this year’s Black Quills, with Paul G. Bens Jr. taking top honors in the BEST SMALL PRESS CHILL category (Editor’s Choice) and Stoker Award-winner Lisa Morton scoring an Editors’ Choice nod for her editing work on MIDNIGHT WALK in the BEST DARK GENRE ANTHOLOGY category. Jameson Currier snagged an Editors’ Choice award for BEST DARK GENRE FICTION COLLECTION for THE HAUNTED HEART AND OTHER TALES, while David Nickle picked up the Readers’ Choice award in that same category for MONSTROUS AFFECTIONS. Editor Michael Knost took Editors’ Choice honors in the BEST DARK GENRE BOOK OF NON-FICTION category for the how-to compilation WRITERS WORKSHOP OF HORROR, while frequent Stephen King chronicler Bev Vincent earned Readers’ Choice honors in the same category for his THE ILLUSTRATED STEPHEN KING COMPANION. Elsewhere, Sarah Totton and Harry Shannon earned Editors’ Choice and Readers’ Choice nods, respectively, in the BEST DARK SCRIBBLE category. Totton’s short story “Flatrock Sunners” appeared in the UK print magazine BLACK STATIC, while Shannon’s “The Night Nurse” ran on the webzine Horror Drive-In.
Prolific genre editor Ellen Datlow – a double nominee this year – added a Black Quill Award to her lengthy list of honors for her editing work on POE: 19 NEW TALES INSPIRED BY EDGAR ALLAN POE. This was Datlow’s third nomination, following last year’s nomination for INFERNO: NEW TALES OF TERROR AND THE SUPERNATURAL and a second nomination this year for her work on the LOVECRAFT UNBOUND collection.
Nominations for the Black Quills are editorial-based, with both the editors and active contributing writers submitting nominations in each of the (8) categories. Once nominations are announced, readers of DSM cast their votes for their picks in each category. For this year’s outing, more than 3,300 votes were cast by the magazine’s readers. In a unique spin intended to celebrate both critical and popular success, two winners are traditionally announced in each category – Reader’s Choice and Editor’s Choice. Winners receive recognition in DSM, inclusion in press release materials announcing nominations and winners, a virtual icon to be used on their own website, and a handsome award certificate.
A complete list of all the nominees and winners follows:
Saturday, February 6, 2010 at 01:52PM 
Modoc instructs his vampire protegeMy Best Friend is a Vampire--I love this campy, super-cheezy vampire flick. I love the relationships in the film: the relationship between Jeremy and his best friend Ralph (the "best friends" of the title), Jeremy and his kooky parents, and most importantly Jeremy and his vampire mentor Modoc (played with wonderful charm by Rene Auberjonois, whom I once had the great please of seeing speak at a Star Trek convention). Interestingly enough, the love interest subplot between Jeremy and the androgynous Darla Blake is the flattest relationship in the whole movie. For me, the relationship between Modoc and Jeremy is the real heart of the movie.
The movie is also notable for its gay subtext and its quasi-progressive message about vampire otherness.
Once adorable young Jeremy gets bitten by the vampire seductress Nora (a "getting laid" moment very typical of 80's teen flicks), a shadowy stranger begins following Jeremy and lurking outside his bedroom window. The stranger turns out to be Modoc, a charming and nurturing vampire mentor who dresses in wonderful 1987 style and drives a cool car. Here I must admit that I have a huge crush on Rene Auberjonois in the movie. I remember this actor from Benson, which I always watched as a child, and I never dreamed I would find him attractive, but there is something sexually enticing about the scene when Modoc shows up in Jeremy's bedroom to explain to Jeremy that the teen is now a vampire. It makes me fantasize about Modoc showing up in my bedroom when I was a teenager. Just like Jeremy, at first I would be alarmed, but I don't think I would have put up quite so much resistance.
The cover for the DVD releaseThe primary gay subplot of the movie stems from this mentor relationship between Modoc and Jeremy. First, his mother hears Modoc's voice in Jeremy's bedroom, so she knows Jeremy is secretly keeping a man in his bedroom, and then Modoc picks up Jeremy for school. When Jeremy's parents see stylish, handsome Modoc drive away with Jeremy in his fancy car, and they see how Jeremy begins to behave strangely as he transitions into the "alternative lifestyle" of being a creature of the night, they assume that Modoc is Jeremy's new boyfriend and that their son is gay. This part of the film is quite clever and funny--especially the scene when the parents are both reading pop-psychology books about what to do if your son is gay.
Also, Modoc gives Jeremy a guide to being a vampire, a book which refers to being a vampire specifically as an "alternative lifestyle." It is very easy to understand why Jeremy's parents mistake vampireness for homosexuality because the relationship between Modoc and Jeremy is full of gay cues.
Here I must go on a fantasy digression. After Modoc reveals himself and offers himself as a vampire mentor to Jeremy, of course Jeremy puts up all kinds of resistance, and then he pursues his dream date with Darla Blake. I like to fantasize that instead, Jeremy leaves the window open for Modoc to join him again in the bedroom to instruct him in the "ways of the vampire." There's also a wonderful scene between Modoc and Jeremy on the roof, and I imagine them embracing one another under the moonlight instead of saying goodbye. Even at the end of the film, Modoc appears again and extends an invitation to Jeremy to accompany him into the world of the vampire night, but stupid Jeremy chooses to stay with his girlfriend in high school--what a dummy! Modoc is quite simply a dreamboat!
Also, the scene when Jeremy "comes out" to Ralph as a vampire, Ralph's response is very similar to a homophobic response. Instead of finding out his best friend is gay, Ralph finds out his best friend is a vampire, and the response on Ralph's part seems almost interchangeable.
Cute Young Vampire JeremyIn the final chapter of the film, Jeremy's parents reveal to Jeremy that they know the truth, and they accept their son as a homosexual. Very disappointingly to me, they are quite happy and excited to find out that their son Jeremy is not gay, but a vampire instead, which sort-of undermines other progressive messages of the film.
Most prominently, there is a quasi-political message about the vampire hunter, very fittingly named McCarthy. Clearly, McCarthy's Van Helsing zeal for killing vampires is portrayed as paranoid witch-hunting, and he get his comeuppance when he is turned into a vampire--so now he must accept the otherness in himself that he demonizes in the vampires, and of course this realization happens instantly in a nice tidy conclusion, but it does have a happy little moral that I appreciate, despite the fact that Jeremy chooses banal, straight high school normality when he could have run off with charming, mysterious Modoc for a sweeping gay romance. Maybe Jeremy will come to his senses. In the meantime, I am leaving my window open for you, Modoc!
Monday, January 18, 2010 at 06:52PM Queer Horror has been around for a long time in various literary forms, but the 2000s (or the Aughts) proved to be a landmark decade for the emerging subgenre, bookmarked on one end by Michael Rowe's Queer Fear, and on the other end by the release of Lee Thomas' In the Closet, Under the Bed (on the very last day of the decade, in fact) and I want to share some of the major highlights of the decade from my vantage point. If you have additional Queer Horror landmarks to add, please comment on this posting.
Before the 2000s, the film Gods and Monsters brought the concept of Queer Horror to the popular consciousness in 1998, winning Best Adapted Screenplay at the Academy Awards (Clive Barker was executive producer). The release of this movie was the first time that the horror genre and queer theory came together in my mind (in a conscious, concrete way). Before that Anne Rice enthralled readers with homoerotic vampires, and gay vampire erotica existed as a popular gay genre. Most importantly, Clive Barker had established himself as a master of the horror genre over previous decades, and I would venture to say Queer Horror would not exist without his seminal literary efforts. But my history of Queer Horror in the Aughts begins with the landmark release of Queer Fear, published by Arsenal Pulp and edited by Michael Rowe, in the year 2000. This book started a new chain of events for the literature of Queer Horror.
With the release of Queer Fear, the Queer Horror genre diverged from its origins of vampire erotica and became a more clearly defined branch of the horror genre. Michael Rowe's introduction to the book also established a new tradition for gay horror authors: sharing childhood stories about how the love of horror and the awareness of queer identity become wired together. Before Queer Fear, Michael Rowe also co-edited some collections of gay vampire stories, but I believe it was the release of Queer Fear that concretely established the literary subgenre of Queer Horror. I see the defining difference as this: Queer Fear splices together literary horror with the political underpinnings of Queer Theory established in works like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet. I'm not saying Queer Fear was the very first example of Queer Horror, but I am saying that Queer Fear was a cultural moment that established Queer Horror as a defined subgenre. In 2002, Rowe followed up with a second anthology called Queer Fear II, and this collection won the Lambda Award, which provided additional recognition of the emerging genre.
Queer Fear edited by Michael Rowe
Queer Fear II edited by Michael Rowe
A personal digression: in early 2004, I worked at a large independent bookstore in Bellingham, Washington; around the time that I discovered Rowe's Queer Fear books along with the horror collection in the Bending the Landscape series, I attended a group reading of authors on tour from Harrington Park Press. The group included Trebor Healey, Dan Boyle, Jim Tushinski, and Marshall Moore. After the reading, I was speaking with Marshall Moore, and I asked him what he knew about Queer Horror; he told me his next book had a monster on the cover--it turned out that he had written a collection of stories called Black Shapes in a Darkened Room, which was about to be published by Suspect Thoughts Press the following fall, and this collection contained Queer Horror stories. For me personally, it was meeting Marshall Moore and learning about Black Shapes that really started my interest in the Queer Horror genre. In the spring of 2006, I started this website and blog, and I began writing about Queer Horror. Almost immediately, I started to meet writers in the genre, including Rick Reed, Vince Liaguno, Lee Thomas, Steve Berman, and Michael Rowe--he allowed me to reprint his introduction to Queer Fear for the launch of the website.
From my perspective, the most significant Queer Horror literary events of the decade stem from the creation and subsequent demise of Greg Herren's Haworth Positronic Press, an imprint of Haworth and tied to Harrington Park Press (also a Haworth imprint). Before the creation of Positronic Press, Herren also edited a collection called Shadows of the Night: Queer Tales of the Uncanny and Unusual, which (along with Queer Fear) offers a significant contribution to Queer Horror. In fact, this collection includes one of my all-time favorite gay vampire stories, "Waiting for the Vampire" by William J. Mann. Also like Queer Fear, it includes an amazing lineup of queer writers. Under the editorial direction of Greg Herren, Haworth's Harrington Park Press published some of the best queer literature of the decade, including the authors from the reading I mentioned earlier. In the fall of 2006, I conducted an email interview with Greg Herren on this blog. This is some of what he had to say about Positronic Press:
One of the reasons we've decided to go with this imprint is because there are some really fine writers out there who can't find a publisher because of their queer themes or characters. The standard industry maxim seems to be 'if its queer and not about vampires, we don't want it.' I am interested in all forms of horror--but I want well written, literate books with strong plots, well developed believable characters, and interesting originality. If you want to do a vampire novel, don't give me warmed over Anne Rice. Give it a new twist, make it fresh and original again. I'd love to see stuff about the occult, witchcraft, curses, etc.
From my perspective at the time, this appeared to be the biggest event in the history of Queer Horror, an imprint that would specialize in gay horror and other speculative genres. And their first publications did not disappoint. Steve Berman's Vintage not only launched Haworth Positronic Press, but it also stands as one of the greatest Queer Horror novels of the decade. For me, Vintage was an electrifying read--it showed all of the promise of Queer Horror. In addition, I also heard that Lee Thomas (more about him later) had also signed with Positronic for a collection of short stories. And then--before it had a chance to gain momentum--Positronic Press was gone. Haworth had been acquired by another company, and the new parent company ditched the gay and lesbian imprints. Suddenly, all of these titles, including Berman's Vintage, Thomas's forthcoming collection, and titles like Marshall Moore's Concrete Sky and Max Pierce's Master of Seacliff were all out of print.
Vintage by Steve Berman
Shadows of the Night: Queer Tales of the Uncanny and Unusual edited by Greg Herren
Fortunately for Queer Horror, Steve Berman's Lethe Press rescued titles like Vintage and M. Christian's The Very Bloody Marys by reprinting them after the abandonment of Haworth's GLBT imprints. In addition to rescuing these lost titles, Lethe Press also began Wilde Stories in 2008, a yearly anthology of the best gay speculative fiction that includes work from top gay horror writers. And near the close of the decade, Lethe Press launched Icarus Magazine, which also offers Queer Horror and speculative fiction.
However, I believe Lethe Press' most significant contribution to the decade of Queer Horror is the release of Jameson Currier's The Haunted Heart in the fall of 2009. These stories exemplify the best of Queer Horror and contain significant offerings in the great literary tradition of the ghost story.
Here is a blurb from Vince Liaguno on this collection:
Jameson Currier's The Haunted Heart and Other Tales expands upon the usual ghost story tropes by imbuing them with deep metaphorical resonance to the queer experience. Infused with flawed, three-dimensional characters, this first-rate collection strikes all the right chords in just the right places. Equal parts unnerving and heartrending, these chilling tales are testament to Currier's literary prowess and the profound humanity at the core of his writing. Gay, straight, twisted like a pretzel--his writing is simply not to be missed by any reader with a taste for good fiction.
The Haunted Heart by Jameson Currier
Vintage by Steve Berman (reprinted)
Alyson is a major cultural icon in the world of gay publishing. Before 2006, the publisher had some forays into horror (most notably Hal Bodner's Bite Club in 2005--they also published erotic vampire novels by authors like Michael Schiefelbein); however, Triptych of Terror: Chilling Tales by the Masters of Gay Horror was a milestone because it announced Alyson's recognition that Queer Horror (they call it Gay Horror) had arrived. I appreciated their selections as the "Masters of Gay Horror": John Michael Curlovich, Michael Rowe, and David Thomas Lord. All three novellas follow in the tradition of Queer Horror established by Queer Fear, diverging from the roots in erotica.
However, the most important component of Triptych of Terror is the inclusion of Michael Rowe's In October, which is one of the greatest works of Queer Horror ever written. This novella brilliantly captures the terror of bullying and gay bashing and creates a sympathetic, tortured young protagonist who makes desperate choices.
Here is an excerpt from Vince Liaguno's review of this novella:
Rowe creates a masterful work with In October, embracing the novella format like no writer in recent memory--so well as to fashion a thoroughly satisfying story. His depiction of Mikey’s teen angst is dead-on, uncannily capturing the emotional loneliness and physical torments that mark the high school experience certain to resonant with every reader--gay and straight alike--on some level. From the beautifully tender and believable scene in which Mikey admits his homosexuality to a receptive Wroxy to the harrowing roadside gay bashing that leads him to seek out otherworldly intervention, Rowe brings the reader into the experience with a remarkable ability that few writers today possess. It is no small feat that Rowe can make us care so deeply for the characters and a testament to his ability as a writer that he does so within the concise format of an 100+ page novella. In October is a deeply-felt metaphorical homage to the horrors of coming out and an unsettling depiction of the straight world in which we do it. Rowe’s tale of teenage anguish and loneliness is an exquisitely told cautionary tale, rich in visceral images of horror and the erotic.
Triptych of Terror by John Michael Curlovich, Michael Rowe, and David Thomas Lord
Ever since I started my website in 2006, I was watching Lee Thomas' career--he had already won the Bram Stoker Award for his first novel, but I was waiting for another major novel that really established him as the brightest star in Queer Horror. And then he did it. Dust of Wonderland is a masterpiece. Here's an excerpt from my review:
Lee Thomas' Dust of Wonderland presents a complex portrait of a family divided by the identity crisis and turmoil of the protagonist, Ken Nicholson. Like Straub's Ghost Story, the past is back to haunt the present. For Ken Nicholson, this past involves his bizarre relationship with a sinister figure named Travis Brugier (definitely a shadow figure in the Jungian sense of the term)...In Dust of Wonderland (a true Queer Horror novel in the sense that it is written for a gay audience), the horror of the story, the mayhem unleashed by the powers of Travis Brugier, reflect powerful cultural anxieties about the collision of "queer lifestyle" and a traditional "family lifestyle."
Dust of Wonderland by Lee Thomas
In the fall of 2007, Vince Liaguno, author of Literary Six, launched Dark Scribe Press. The first project for this small press was to create a new anthology of Queer Horror tales in the tradition of Rowe's Queer Fear. Vince invited me to join the project as co-editor, and we read submissions from October of 2007 to May of 2008. We selected horror stories from the most prominent writers in the subgenre, many of whom are mentioned in this post, as well as discovering a bunch of new voices in Queer Horror. The most significant aspect of this milestone is the fact that the Horror Writers Association awarded this anthology the prestigious Bram Stoker Award. Of course, as co-editor this was profound on a personal level, but it was also culturally significant that the Horror Writers Association validated the Queer Horror genre by including this anthology and awarding it the Stoker.
And then, to follow up this Stoker win, Dark Scribe Press released In the Closet, Under the Bed, a new collection of stories from Queer Horror superstar Lee Thomas (released on the very last day of the decade).
Here is Jameson Currier on this collection:
Like every master craftsman of horror, Lee Thomas is weirdly inventive, with an arsenal of tricks and techniques up his sleeves and a universe of creatures, ghouls, ghosts, spirits, and body shifters to unleash on his characters, and readers of his new collection of short stories, In the Closet, Under the Bed will reap the rewards of this explosively talented writer. These stories are monstrous and thrilling and sexy and disturbing. But what makes them truly remarkable and fantastic is their distinctive milieu gay men battling supernatural forces with dizzying results. Lee Thomas is not only defining the genre of 'queer horror' with his new collection, he is setting its gold standard.
The release of In the Closet, Under the Bed is a fitting culminating event for the decade of Queer Horror.
Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet
In the Closet, Under the Bed by Lee Thomas
IM by Rick Reed
Black Shapes in a Darkened Room by Marshall Moore
Bite Club by Hal Bodner
Literary Six by Vince Liaguno
One of These Things Is Not Like the Other by D. Travers Scott
Pumpkin Teeth by Tom Cardamone
Please offer your own milestones of Queer Horror by commenting on this post!
Friday, January 15, 2010 at 10:59AM In the upcoming year of 2010, I am most looking forward to the remake of the Wolfman with Benicio del Toro and Anthony Hopkins. For me, the original Wolfman is a touchstone of the horror genre--not to suggest that it achieved cinematic excellence, but it did achieve far-reaching influence. There are many things that I love about this film: the two-legged anthropomorphic werewolf, which is like a half-transformation (I love the feet), as opposed to the four-legged werewolf variety; the corny but lovable performance by Lon Chaney, who created a sympathetic monster torn apart by the duality of the werewolf; the wonderful performance by Maria Ouspenskaya as the grim gypsy woman--who also brings the iconic werewolf rhyme to life with dramatic fluorish; and the clash between old world superstition and psychology as Talbot's father tries to make logical sense of the werewolf curse (also ushering in a new obsession on psychology in the horror film).
Of course, at this point I have only seen the trailer for the new version, but I am very optimistic about the new film, despite rumors of a troubled production circulating around the internet. No matter what, it's going to be fascinating to see how the filmmakers have re-imagined the classic film for a contemporary audience.
Gleaned from the trailer, here are some of the things I am most excited about:
;)
Rick Baker is in charge of the werewolf transformation. Hooray for that. The evolution of the werewolf transformation is one of my favorite aspects of horror movies, and Rick Baker is the master behind the groundbreaking transformations in American Werewolf in London and Michael Jackson's Thriller. It will be exciting to see how Baker responds to the original hokey transformation with all of the new technology at his disposal. A lot of recent digital werewolf transformations are uninspiring and downright fake-looking (no suspension of disbelief), but I suspect this will not be the case with Baker's work in this film.
It appears the filmmakers are taking the subtext about psychology from the original and expanding it into a major component of the plot, and I think this will be fascinating, especially what appears to be scenes that show abusive techniques of the past--techniques that attempt to "cure" with methods more akin to an old-world witch trial.
Also, I love to see Anthony Hopkins and Benicio del Toro act, so I am very excited to see how they portray the father/son relationship in this new version. In the original version, I find the father/son relationship to be a lot more endearing than the love interest subplot, so I'm hoping they do that relationship justice as well.
Here's hoping there is as much thoughtful storytelling and filmmaking craftsmanship as I'm expecting in the new version of the Wolfman--at this point I'm very optimistic. Click here for the trailer!
Saturday, January 9, 2010 at 04:13PM Tuesday, January 5, 2010 at 08:59AM I was working at a newspaper in Loveland, Colorado on the day in 1999 when I heard Stephen King was hit by the van. Until that moment, I didn't know how important he was to me as a literary inspiration and as a pop-culture figure. I was truly disturbed to think there might not be anymore Stephen King. I'm very thankful he recovered from the van accident, and now a little over ten years has passed since that accident, and his career and literary contributions since then have been very significant and fascinating.
For Christmas this year, I received a 4-pack DVD of Stephen King movies, including Creepshow, Cat's Eye, Dreamcatcher, and Dolores Claiborne. I watched all four this week, and I also started reading Under the Dome (I'm about 250 pages into it), so I've had Stephen Kind on my mind all week, which has led me to ponder why he is such an important literary inspiration to me.
Going back to my childhood (Carrie was accepted by Doubleday about a month after I was born), Stephen King was the ultimate writer. I loved riding my bike to the mall, either with my friends or by myself, and I always went the pet store (I had a whole menagerie of pets at home) and the big B Dalton on the corner. What I remember most about that store was that Stephen King seemed to haunt the store. I remember the large Pet Sematary poster hanging on the wall, and that scary, surreal kitty-cat on the poster terrified me (I was about ten when that book came out). For weeks I would go to the mall and look at the gigantic tome of IT, freaked out by the cover art and amazed at the massive size of that book. In my mind, Stephen King was a Titan in the world of books, but the books were also forbidden, full of frightening things like gruesome death and evil. Even though I was fascinated by Stephen King for years (I remember his American Express commercial!), always inspecting the cover every time a new book was released (and what an awesome gallery of cover art), I never actually read a book until Junior High, and the first book I read was Thinner. Now I can barely remember the book, but I remember the experience of reading it, and I was riveted.
Despite my fascination with King, I have been moving through the books slowly over the years, sort of an odd selection of his titles here and there (one of my all-time favorites is Bag of Bones, but I still haven't read IT, and recently I loved reading Blaze--like a twisted Of Mice and Men). But now as I'm reading his new tome, more than ever I have an understanding of the Stephen King style--his signature use of third-person interior monologue, his quirky use of language and pop-culture references, and his unique vision of human nature and human madness. And I know that I love it more than ever.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009 at 05:53PM Last night I experienced an extremely vivid and disturbing nightmare (move vivid and disturbing than normal).
I was back in high school at leadership camp (a camp I attended in Maine with the other officers of the student council back in 1990--I was the Vice President). The dream took place in the dormitory at the camp--a long corridor with multiple rooms, and each room contained three or four beds for the campers.
In the dream, the camp was on an island (I blame Harper's Island for this nightmare, and Vince's book!), and a group of the campers planned to try and escape the island on a raft because everyone knew the slasher would be back to kill again tonight. The slasher had killed one person each night. He always used the same modus operandi: he left the murdered body tucked neatly underneath the covers of the bed--nicely composed in a mummy pose with a gray plastic sheet between the body and the bedspread so the bloodstains didn't soak through. If you pulled back the sheets, you discovered a horror show beneath--total mutilation like bloody Jack himself.
I wanted to escape with the group on the raft, but they already had too many occupants, so I agreed to remain behind with the others. Everyone was totally freaked out, and we all gathered in the hallway of the dorm. All of the campers were smoking pot and drinking beer in the hallway, trying not to think about the slasher who might show up at any moment. We found a bunch of candles for subdued lighting and tried to remain calm, but at any moment I expected the slasher to appear to claim another victim, and I was terrified it might be me tonight.
I walked away from the group and decided to call Tshombe at the end of the corridor. While talking to Tshombe on my cell phone, I realized that the whole thing was probably just a dream and I didn't need to be afraid anymore. All I had to do was wake up and the whole terrible ordeal would be over.
I felt a lot better and I hung up the phone. When I returned to the dorm corridor, all of the fluorescent overhead lights were on and everyone was gone. As I walked down the hall, every door was open, and inside every room I could see beds--each bed with a murdered teenager tucked neatly beneath the covers, each bed with the gray plastic sheet peeking out from beneath the covers. I knew it was total bloody mutilation beneath the gray plastic sheet.
I looked all around me--I knew the slasher would appear at any moment.
Then I woke up.