Essays
The Girl and the Faun: Eden Phillpotts, His Crime Fiction and His Strange Relationship with His Daughter Adelaide
.
“No biography or autobiography is true, because no one in his senses tells the truth about himself….Whoever wants to know me can find me in my work.” –Eden Phillpotts…
The Gilded Age: On Invention and Excess
.
“We don’t have a choice in the matter, Mr. McAllistar, we must go where history takes us.” In the HBO Gilded Age series, these were Bertha Russell’s brave words…
James Ellroy Reveals the Real Reason He Writes
.
“A literature that cannot be vulgarized is no literature at all, and will not last.” Frank O’Connor laid it out. He wrote the words at the cusp of the…
Joyce Carol Oates on Women and the Roots of Body Horror
.
Of mythological figures of antiquity, none are more monstrous than harpies, furies, gorgons—Scylla and Charybdis, Lamia, Chimera, Sphinx—nightmare creatures representing, to the affronted male gaze, the perversion of “femininity”:…
Dorothy L Sayers and the Thirty-Foot Drain: Searching for Peter Wimsey
.
Dorothy L Sayers was my gateway author to the world of crime fiction. I’d read the Sherlock Holmes stories earlier on, but that superlatively singular creation of Arthur Conan…
The Cowboy as Detective: Finding Charlie Siringo’s West
.
When Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid finally came to my boyhood mall, I saw it three times, wondering in the dark about the unnamed lawmen chasing the Wild…
From Punchline to Protagonist: Black Horror and the Monsters Who Hunt
.
There’s something fascinating about horror. The darkness that hides darker monsters. The creaks and gore and jump scares. The jokes. The unearthing of fears. Whenever I’m in the mood…
It’s All Relative: Horror’s Worst Families
.
Have you ever seen those Progressive Insurance commercials about becoming your parents? Would you be surprised if I told you they inspired a horror novel? Specifically, my new novel…
The Writer as Magpie
.
I am not the kind of writer who finds every plot twist, detail of setting, and character description in my imagination. I am like a magpie when it comes…
Bigfoot Is in the Woods, Our Hearts and Our Nightmares
.
What pop culture figure of the 1970s had his own board game, guest-starred on “The Six Million Dollar Man” and terrorized backwoods campers with his screams in the night…