For You, Dear Stranger
This guy Bill McClintock does the most insane song mashups and they all somehow work as (a) catchy songs (b) eye-watteringly funny gags
I mean just for starters, behold this mashup of The Pointer Sisters’ “Neutron Dance,” Metallica’s “Master of Puppets,” and Megadeth’s “Symphony of Destruction.”
An unpopular camp worker is horrifically burned in a teen prank, then returns years later to kill other camp teens with garden shears. Endangered cast includes a wonderfully charismatic Jason Alexander, Holly Hunter, and Jean-Claude Van Damme’s lady friend from Bloodsport.
Of note: this was written by the young Weinstein brothers, which makes the typical pervy teen-boy behavior feel even pervier.
Predictably derivative but has some excellent Tom Savini kills and works terrifically as 80s slasher trash. I really like it.
In youthjuice by E.K. Sathue, a woman embraces a plum job at a luxury beauty company and enjoys the rejuvenating effects of a miraculous new moisturizer. Beneath the surface—of her skin, her employer, and her life—is festering horror.
“youthjuice” is to beauty what “Cujo” is to dogs. You’ll never look at skin cream the same way again.
I read an article about Septology, the 800-page novel cycle that sealed the deal on Jon Fosse winning the Nobel Prize for Literature last year. It’s about art and death and God, and it’s full of doppelgängers and strange, mystic smears of reality. You can’t tell if the protagonist is remembering things or hallucinating or actually experiencing supernatural events.
I decided to read it and bought the set. But I wasn’t sure I was ready to begin. I wasn’t in the mood. Or I was so in the mood it scared me a bit, like I suspected the book would affect me existentially and maybe I just wanted to read something lighter next.
Preparing for a train trip to NYC last month, I wondered if I should bring the first volume or something else. I ultimately decided to bring it, and I started reading volume one on the way down. Fifty pages in, I looked up and experienced an eerie rush of coincidences.
The book is set on a snowy night in western Norway. Looking out the train window, the Hudson River landscape was similarly wintry with fresh snowfall. I had my AirPods in with an album by Arvo Part, a mystical composer from Estonia, which is pretty close to Norway. The passenger in front of me was an elderly man working on sheet music, which felt like a visual echo of what I was listening to. To my left, another passenger had his laptop open with a map of Norway on the screen. And then I remembered the most incredible thing.
At home the night before, I was checking my weather app and, for no particular reason, found my fascinated by the global wind currents. I followed the visualization of a strong current from New York across the ocean, and eventually zeroed in on an especially strong current that was curving into the coast of western Norway. I even checked the forecast of a city that was almost precisely the setting of Septology. But at the time, looking at the wind, any connection to the book never crossed my mind or influenced my decision to bring it with me.
The snow, music, sheet music, laptop map, and wind current all hit me in the span of 60 seconds. And I thought, yep, I brought the right book.
In Ghost Girl by Ally Malinenko, a young girl in a remote town confronts sinister hounds, parental abandonment, school bullying, a Mephistophelian principal, and a genuinely creepy mud-and-moss woman that appears in her house.
I don’t read a lot of YA. After reading the brutally adult Our Share of Night, I had to adjust my receptors to properly experience a story full of (and I mean this in a good way) youthful innocence and dark delight. My receptors worked just fine. I loved it.
The third of three totally bonkers Ken Russell movies I watched on The Criterion Channel.
Altered States: a scientist obsessively explores his psyche with exotic drugs and sensory deprivation, briefly regresses into a proto-human ape guy, and keeps pushing his luck until things REALLY go off the rails.
The second of three totally bonkers Ken Russell movies I watched on The Criterion Channel.
The Lair of the White Worm: a young Hugh Grant and some rural chums fight a pre-Christian fertility god in the form of a huge phallic snake. Fx so cheesy they’re rapturous.
Here’s the book deal announcement for my new horror novel, coming in early 2025 from Hell’s Hundred (part of Soho Press).
I’m thrilled to be part of Hell's Hundred, a new horror fiction imprint from the venerable Manhattan-based publisher Soho Press!
My novel OUR WINTER MONSTER will be their first 2025 release.
Read their super-entertaining announcement at Publishers Weekly.
And here’s their luscious, blood-red catalog of upcoming titles.
