Every year when I cobble together some best-of-the-year list from half-remembered this and that, I always end up remembering stuff from the last few months instead of the whole year, and feeling like that’s all unfair. So, in an effort to work around that, and trusting that I actually come back and LOOK at this in five months, but mostly because I’m just now thinking of it, here’s my favorites so far:

Comic Book:

Everything here is just working so well: the wo…

For the first time ever, I kept a running tab of the best of every month:

• for January
• February
• March
• April
• May
• June
• July
• August
• September
• October
• November
• December

It’s not everything I read/watch/listened to. Just the stuff I dug.

And? I had this big idea that I’d peel back through all those, dither and negotiate about which is actually my favorite whatever of the year. But what I’m right-now finding? I like to remember better, on the idea that if it was good, …

This idea looked like so much fun that I had to steal it, title and all, from Sean Munger (click here for a pic of him and me and some dude named William Nolan).

Also? I’ll try not to steal all his, even though we share the same span of years, and probably had the same Crüe patches on our jackets.

Also also? I should maybe say: I’ve only ever seen two movies at the theater for seven nights in a row. The first was Exorcist III. The second was Scream. So in those two years, I think I …

The yellow book’s padded onto a few cool year-end lists, looks like. I’ll update this, should any more turn up. And, thank you thank you to everyone, for believing in werewolves. Me too.

Tor’s 16 Best Books of 2016 (so far)  |  BookRiot’s 100 Monster Books  |  25 Summer Books  |  Bustle’s 12 Summer Reads  |   Shotgun Logic Top 5 (so far)  |  Best Books of 2016  |   Another Best of 2016  |  Dasrupa  |  Aqueduct (Jeffrey Ford)  |   Tim Meyer  |

Best movie’s a hard call, especially as I’ve yet to see The Eyes of My Mother or Nocturnal Animals or Moana or Kubo and the Two Strings. Also? I doubt I’ve seen just all that many of the award-contenders either. But I did luck into a few good theaters/iTunes rentals/Netflixes:

Television of course is the one the whole world loved, then the usual (superhero) suspects, then a couple that should surprise no one, then a Netflix stumbleupon that was amazing, an

This is the best horror I’ve seen since—since Deathgasm, I guess. But Deathgasm was playing it for laughs. This one, it’s out for blood. And there’s gallons of it. What I dig about it the most? It’s not the Holes setting, it’s not that the main guy could be the fire-kid from Sky High (really, he’s Michael Pare in his Eddie and the Cruisers days), and it’s not that this feels like “Danny Zuko” goes to reform school, and S…

‘Tis the season for lists, yes? And mine at this time of year, they’re always skewed by my terrible recall—the books and films &etc that just happened always seem to get higher billing. Still, in an effort to be even-handed, I did scroll back a few places, just to refresh, refresh (that’s a story joke) (which is hilarious), and here’s where I land, more or less. This time with pictures, and, yes, this time including books by friends, because, I mea…

Four or five days late, but, you know, I was finishing a novel. So. Three of my best reads from 2014 weren’t actually 2014 books, as it turned out: John Scalzi’s Redshirts, Jeff Lemire’s The Underwater Welder, and Megan Abbott’s Dare Me. But, from 2014, it’s got to be Lev Grossman’s The Magician’s Land, Matt Kindt’s continuing MIND MGMT, Tod Goldberg’s Gangsterland, Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style, …

Back in the late nineties, I’d see Stephen Dixon stories all over and flip back to his author bio at the end of the journal or whatever not because I didn’t already know it, but for the rush: it always said he had some three hundred stories published. I had maybe six at the time? Three hundred was an amazing, impossible, never-get-there kind of number. And I’m not there yet. This isn’t that post. Though I did just total up my stories from print- and e-mags a…

• Best line, by far: Samuel Jackson’s SNAKES ON A PLANE one, here
• Best monster kill: that last one in FEAST
• Best justice: in the bathroom stall at the end of HOSTEL
• Best subtitle: “[Zombies Panting],” from SLiTHER
• Best remake: THE HILLS HAVE EYES
• Best prequel to a remake: TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: THE BEGINNING
• Best tanning bed death(s): FINAL DESTINATION 3
• Scene you (I) most wanted to look away from:¹ either that rib-splitter early on in SAW 3 or Jigsaw̵