If you had to list the demographic attributes of the sort of friends I have, these probably would not be among the characteristics you'd suggest: Southern, Jewish, radical (yet Zionist), "of a certain age", pro-smoking, pink-drink-drinking, NASCAR-watching, oft-married, and deceased. And yet, that's Kelly Goldberg.

I met Kelly via the Horror Writers Association, which in the early years of the 2000s was undergoing a bit of an identity crisis. It was a professional association for a professional field which, to be blunt, no longer exists. No major publisher has its own dedicated horror line, and the horror that is published is generally published as something else (fantasy, SF, thriller, ... (more…)

THE GREAT BETRAYER



The best novel of dark fiction this year is The Traitor by Michael Cisco. In a world much like our own, in a history much like that of Europe during the great revolutionary year of 1848, two men with the power to eat spirits stage a rebellion against the constraints of everyday life. One man, Wite, become a pure force of nature. The other, Nophtha, allows himself to be captured and explains his betrayal in a journal full of delirious sentences and wild circumstance. Here's a taste:



I will die and die and die but I am ready, I'm going stronger than I came, I will die spitting the saliva of my outrage at them, moreover coughing the bloody pieces of my testament at ... (more…)

Here at Fearzone.com, we are not bound by such silly rules as "Only review work that was published this month." Good thing too, as the book I'd like to write about this month, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, is from the 1680s-1700s. This compilation of 104 short tales, some of which are under a page in length, are as varied as they are wonderful.



The tales were compiled by Pu Songling, who was a very minor civil servant. Unluckily for him, he wasn't a great test taker, and spent nearly fifty years trying, and failing to move up the next rung of China's labyrinthine civil service. He was fairly well-connected, regardless, and spent perhaps twenty years collecting and refining these ... (more…)

And we are back! Hello, horror fans. I'm Nick Mamatas and this is my column on reading, "Please Kill Me." Once upon a time, it was published in the now-defunct webzine Fortean Bureau. The archive of that site is still online, so do check it out. As this is a horror site, I'll be shifting the focus of the column away from science fiction and toward the scary stuff, but in this inaugural edition I've decided to meet everyone halfway with a mystery.




Warren Ellis is a famed writer of comics, some of which have been great (Planetary), and some of which have been tedious exercises in wish-fulfillment and public masturbation (Transmetropolitan). His first novel, a Bukowski-cum-Chandler-cum-... (more…)