Month: January 2024


  • Review of 1988 TV remake of “I Saw What You Did”

    Some of my first viewings of classic horror movies of the 50s and 60s (I’m talking about flicks like “Them” and “The Blob”) occurred because of a TV show that played on Sunday evenings in Honolulu where I grew up. I can’t remember the program’s name, but it was hosted by a talking skull (that…

  • No Humans Required: Exploring the Possibility of Computer Generated Fiction

    I hope to soon do a deep dive into my contrarian thoughts on the topic using AI to write novels. (Short version: the tech isn’t there yet but I’m not opposed to the idea in principle.) For now, I’m presenting a (lightly edited) reprint of an article I did several years ago at the blog…

  • My horror novel “What Waits in the Shadows” is now at Amazon

    Just in case it’s not clear from the numerous other places on this site that I’ve announced it, my horror novel “What Waits in the Shadows” is now available at Amazon.com. (Kindle eBook format only right now; paper coming soon.) I plan to blog a bit about the writing process etc. later but for now,…

  • The Three Investigators, Forgotten Heroes of Horror?

    Lately I’ve been questioning what got me interested in the horror genre.  Was it the numerous Alfred Hitchcock suspense films like Rebecca, Rear Window and Vertigo my mother took me to when I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s? Was it reading collections of ghost stories like The Dynamite Book of Ghosts and…

  • Superman, Spider-Man and the Pursuit of the Perfectly Pure Protagonist

    Complaining about readers is not a wise pursuit for a humble author who desires an audience, and I acknowledge that one could read the following as doing exactly that. In my defense, I’m not so much complaining as observing a trend. What trend? That of readers celebrating protagonists who are morally pure, and condemning protagonists…

  • Describing Emotions in Fiction

    Note for readers: This post is a reprint (with a few updates and edits) of a blog post I did for the web site Tuna for Bernadette in 2013. Despite the piece’s advanced age (ten years is like a hundred in blog years), I feel it holds up, and the approach it details is one…

  • Interview at “Book Notions”

    It was a blast to be interviewed at the web site Book Notions about my upcoming novel “What Waits in the Shadows” and horror writing in general. Click here to check it out!