For the weekend, anyway. And, I’m thinking this is my third time in the Midland Reporter-Telegram? I showed up once when I was about twelve, though I cannot begin to suspect what for. Oh, no: maybe it was for Old Settlers Days in Stanton. And maybe it was the news, not the paper. I was cutting cowchips with my knife, to win the big (throwing) contest. Which, I did, but not that year. Anyway, MRT is also the first place I was ever published. I was about twelve then as well. My littl…

For a long time I’ve been in a Kirk/Picard situation with myself, regarding Ginger Snaps and The Howling: which do I like best? And, I know, what about An American Werewolf in London, Dog Soldiers, Bad Moon. They’re all good and vital, and contributed important stuff, but for me, it’s always come down to Ginger Snaps or The Howling. And I usually settle on The Howling, as it’s got a much stronger ending (much longer franchise tail as well).

But now, man…

mix Buzzfeed‘s “23 Things that Prove Society is Doomed” with Salon‘s “War & Peace on the Subway: How Your iPhone is Saving Literature,” then angle it through my publicists’ rose-colored glasses, and you end up with something a lot  like:

1. Sitting together and reading still counts as socializing:

2. It’s considered polite not to read over your date’s sho

Wasn’t a clutch of eggs important last time around as well, for Godzilla? It’s cool. I mean, it shows Jurassic Park influence—’nature always finds a way’—but more than that, it suggests that in order for us to keep these science-fiction monsters believable, we’re having to apply biology to them. We’re giving them life cycles outside their brief, usually-tragic rampages. In the case of this Godzilla, though, it actually feels a lit…

The trick in adapting a novel—or anything—for the screen, it’s not about being loyal to every line or faithful to each scene exactly as it happens on the page, it’s about identifying the beating heart of the novel, and then finding a way to get it on screen such that the final effect can feel the same. Jim Mickle’s Cold in July does exactly that with Joe R. Lansdale’s novel Cold in July, a book readers have been celebrating now for twenty-five years. Afte…

I can’t figure why exactly slashers and musicals are something that’s been tried now twice. Once here, and once in Don’t Go In the Woods. I mean, Nazis and zombies, that just makes sense. But I can’t figure out what slashers and musicals share, exactly. And, maybe it’s not slashers in particular, even. We’ve already had Cannibal: the Musical, haven’t we? Maybe horror is just something we like to see strained through the musical…

My second or third year teaching, somebody caught me in a hallway, asked me my thoughts on how detective fiction’s put together. And, listening to myself answer—of course I’d been reading noir and p.i. and crime and thriller forever—I realized that I only knew detective fiction as a reader, not a writer. And I say ‘only,’ but not to diminish. Rather, to highlight that how I learn about a thing, it’s by doing that thing. So, dissatisfied with my …

Okay, I need to be writing chapters of a novel, but, to keep my brain from melting, I slip out from time to time for a movie. And I got zero time or fingerstrength for rigging a proper review together, but, man, I did dig this one. Also, the world may be lucky that Jim Jarmusch chose to drop this movie now, instead of twenty years ago, when Sandman was in full swing. I mean, Gaiman, he gothed the world up, and there’s still remants and vestiges of that, which is all cool and great. Bu…

1.) There’s about fifty jokes to make with that title. None of which will be made in this list.

2.) Put The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity in a jar, let Carrie (also 1974 . . .) shake it while Samara watches, and you’ve pretty much got The Quiet Ones.

3.) There was me and two other dudes there on opening day for it. Which bums me out: it’s horror, world. Also, though, I said to a class a few years ago, “So you’re all there for the midnight FD3 …