My Gateway to Horror: Edgar Allan Poe
I’m not sure when I first got my grubby little hands on a copy of the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe. But I do remember curling up with that battered black paperback and being delightfully scared in a way that Nancy Drew just couldn’t quite deliver. From “The Pit and the Pendulum” to “The […]
Se7en: The Ultimate Bro-mance
Se7en (1995) written by Andrew Kevin Walker and directed by David Fincher, featured an all-star cast including Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Kevin Spacey. Some horror buffs consider Se7en to be one of the best genre movies of all time and are still up in arms that the movie never took home any […]
Clarice’s Quest: Silence of the Lambs
Based on the book by Thomas Harris, Silence of the Lambs starring Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster is one of my all-time favorite movies. I remember watching the infamous basement-night-vision-goggles scene for the first time. At that time, night vision goggles weren’t readily available online, and my teenage self had definitely never seen anything remotely […]
Will Graham: The Psychopath We Love to Love
“One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind.” Red Dragon by Thomas Harris It’s been quite a few years since the first time I read Red Dragon by Thomas Harris. And in the intervening years, the entire franchise—because the Hannibal Lecter story is indeed a […]
The Sculptor by Gina Fava
Or “Why All Authors Need a Good Editor” (Also why is the only book on our list by a female author so technically terrible that it hurt me to read it?) This book should have been over in Chapter 1. It’s not often that I come right out of the gate on a book […]
The Church of Dead Girls by Stephen Dobyns: The Effective Use of Imagery in Horror
It’s not every day that I have my cake and eat it too, but The Church of Dead Girls by Stephen Dobyns was a delicious combination of my two favorite things—horror and gorgeous imagery. Dobyns starts strong with a brilliant prologue that describes the Church of Dead Girls. The prose is stunning and so well-crafted […]
American Psycho: The Unlikable & (Possibly) Uninteresting
“He’s the boy next door, aren’t you honey?” “No I’m not,” I whisper to myself. “I’m a fucking evil psychopath.” American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis was published in 1991, both shocking readers and drawing rave reviews from critics. The movie, starring Christian Bale was released in 2000 and has become a cult classic. So […]
Psycho by Robert Bloch: Motif of Light & Darkness
“I think perhaps all of us go a little crazy at times.” The first time I watched Psycho, I was in college, and I’ll never forget the infamous shower scene. That handful of seconds is scorched into my memory in stark black and white. So perhaps that the filter that I unconsciously brought into Robert […]