Crime and Popular Culture
How to Write Fiction about True Crime
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If you are going to write a sensational, news-worthy crime story into your fiction, you have a few models for how to proceed. First, there is the Gone Girl…
Memory, Place, and Hauntings: On Toronto’s Seedy Seventies-Era “Sin Strip”
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In the late 70s my family emigrated to Toronto and stayed for two years. In those days, downtown was notorious for its Sin Strip. Four blocks concentrated on Yonge…
The Enduring Appeal of Murder and Mystery: A Brief History
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“Thou shalt not kill,” commands the King James Bible— without, as opponents of capital punishment like to point out, riders or qualifiers. Curiously, this translation of an injunction in…
Queen of the Supermarket
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There’s a wonderful world where all you desire And everything you’ve longed for is at your fingertips Where the bittersweet taste of life is at your lips Where aisles…
A Cultural History of the Erotic Thriller
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The strip mall video rental store was an emporium of illicit dreams. Its doorway in the small town where I came of age, located in between candy store and…
Spooky Shenanigans for Halloween
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I’m such a sucker for holidays. I love to completely immerse myself in a theme: holiday decorations, holiday meals, holiday baking. As soon as the leaves start to turn…
6 Thrilling Reads That Blend Folklore and Horror
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From tales told around the campfire to major literary classics, there’s a reason we turn to folklore when we want a scary story with staying power. Stories from mythology…
Lately I’ve Been Dressing For Revenge: What Taylor Swift Teaches Us About Genre Fiction
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I used to say I hated Taylor Swift. The year was 2008. I was a poor grad school student subsisting on cheap slices and dollar Bud Lights, the latter…
Note to Self, and Other True Crime Fans: These Tragedies Are Real
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The scene couldn’t have been written any better. It was the middle of the night and a father bolted upright in bed, hearing noise downstairs in the kitchen of…