Essays
The Girl and the Faun: Eden Phillpotts, His Crime Fiction and His Strange Relationship with His Daughter Adelaide
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“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 (quoted in Reverie, 1981, by his daughter Adelaide Ross) “Mr. Phillpotts has always avoided personal publicity like the plague.” —Plymouth Western Morning News, 6 April 1921…
The Gilded Age: On Invention and Excess
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“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 to Ward McAllister on the night Thomas Edison flipped the switch to electrically light up the New York Times Building. McAllister had expressed a qualm about…
James Ellroy Reveals the Real Reason He Writes
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“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 20th century. Said words prophesied the hard-boiled novel. Hard-boiled scorched its artistic debut on February 1, 1929. Dashiell Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest, hit bookstores. Hammett’s…
Joyce Carol Oates on Women and the Roots of Body Horror
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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”: the female who in her physical being repulses sexual desire, rather than arousing it; the female who has repudiated the traditional role of submission, subordination, maternal…
Dorothy L Sayers and the Thirty-Foot Drain: Searching for Peter Wimsey
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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 Doyle did not lead me any further. Holmes was unique, existing in his own universe, and there he remained. Not so with Sayers and Lord Peter…
The Cowboy as Detective: Finding Charlie Siringo’s West
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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 Bunch outlaws around the West, the drumbeat of their horses’ hooves drawing Butch’s exasperated line, “Who are those guys?” One who chased the gang, I would…
From Punchline to Protagonist: Black Horror and the Monsters Who Hunt
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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 for a campy, scary movie, I’ll go for a man-eating shark or a haunted house, or any of the Scream movies. For the longest time, it…
It’s All Relative: Horror’s Worst Families
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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 BLACK SHEEP. It wasn’t so much the commercials themselves that got me thinking, but the message behind them. Are we destined to become our parents? Can…
The Writer as Magpie
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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 to developing a story, shamelessly borrowing from and building on whatever I see and hear. Here’s an example. As I was beginning to work on the…
Bigfoot Is in the Woods, Our Hearts and Our Nightmares
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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 and his skunky smell? You know him, you love him … Bigfoot. In the 1970s, Bigfoot was a pop culture thing that kids were unduly worried…