Genres
Why Horror Fiction Matters for Telling Indigenous Stories
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I’ve been consuming horror films and books from perhaps a too young age, though it’s worked out fine for me. It’s been a formative genre for me as a writer and a person. I started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer when it premiered, when I was eight years old, and it was long my favorite…
16 Spooky Novellas by Women and Nonbinary Authors
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What makes a spooky novella so satisfying? You might as well ask why a raven is like a writing desk. (The answer, of course, is that all three things remind me of my own mortality.) All riddles aside, the novella is, at best, a slippery beast. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association defines it as…
Dann McDorman on Exploring Literary Hijinks and Meta Mystery
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While mysteries can usually be trusted to compel the reader within the first chapter or even the first few pages, it’s rare for them to hook us from the first paragraph. But West Heart Kill, Dann McDorman’s clever debut, achieves this with intriguing tongue-in-cheek confidence. The book opens with the protagonist, detective Adam McAnnis, sitting…
Finding Inspiration for Mystery Fiction in Soap Operas
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What JR, Alexis, and Domingue Taught this Mystery Writer One of the best compliments I’ve received from readers about the Lady Mystery series is that each mystery unfolds like an episode of television. The vivid nature of the storytelling, the feeling that you’re in the room watching the events happen, is high praise for a…
James Reich on Indie Publishing, Taking Risks, and the Beauty of Melancholy
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In 2017, I read the novel Patricide, by D. Foy. It’s a brutal and challenging book, full of ungodly sorrow and heartbreak. It’s the kind of book you can’t read before bed because it’ll make sleep impossible. But it’s also a beautiful and tender piece of work. I was curious who would publish such a…
How the Intensity of Female Relationships Leaves the Door Open for Horror
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Picture it: Woodstock, Georgia, 1988. I’m at a sleepover party. We’re eating pizza and watching The Amityville Horror and probably drinking Ecto Cooler and jumping around on Pogo Balls because the eighties were wild like that. There are four other girls and one mom hanging out in the living room, braiding each other’s hair, and…
A Murder of Poets: Or, the Inescapable Connections Between Crime Fiction and Poetry
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“Murder will out…” –Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales Poetry and pathology. Verse and victim. Meter and murder and mayhem. Poetry and crime fiction seem to go together like, well, rhyme and reason. Crime novelist and CWA Diamond Dagger winner Martin Edwards has been quoted as saying that the pair share “the importance of form…
90s Horror-Thrillers Created a New Generation of Would-Be Detectives
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For two now-distant decades, horror movies were less about whodunit, and more about how-the-hell-do-they-stop-this-guy? In 1978, Halloween burst onto the scene, followed, two years later, by Friday the 13th. By the time Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street hit screens, moviegoers couldn’t get enough of the jump-scares, and the unsettled sleeps that inevitably followed.…