Just now, I created a facebook page for the Art of Horror at https://www.facebook.com/slatterysartofhorror. Drop by, check it out, and friend me. Posts from this blog should feed automatically to Facebook as well as from my Twitter account.
Today my short story “Dream Warrior” was re-printed by Fiction on the Web. Many thanks to Charlie Fish and his team for selecting this, one of my favorites of my own stories.
Fiction on the Web sums up the story beautifully: Phil Slattery’s powerful revenge epic about a man who visits his Mexican grandfather for spiritual guidance after a violent crime results in the death if his fiancée.
The story was published this morning and so far I have received two comments on it:
I agree with Mike, this is a rite of passage, complex and rich with significance.The cultural invocations are vivid and intense, the work of a writer in his/her full stride. The future for Miguel, who knows? The readers interest is fully engaged with what is to come….. Thank you,
Ceinwen
Check out the story when you have the chance.
“Dream Warrior” was originally published by “Sorcerous Signals” in 2013.
Thoughts? Comments?
Just now, I finished pasting Stephen King’s famous quotation on the three types of terror into my page on “Thoughts on Horror from the Masters” and I remembered that yesterday I was trying to remember the quotation, but could only recall a vague impression of it. Thinking on that impression now, I think that it was just as valid and true a one as the one by Mr. King, but simpler, more compact, and easier to remember. The concept is (I’ll refine this a little for the sake of clarity):
The three most common types of horror are: suspense (knowing someone runs the risk of decapitation at any moment), terror (seeing him/her being decapitated), and disgust (watching the head roll down the stairs).
I don’t think this idea should replace Mr. King’s by any means, but should probably be viewed as a simplification of his rather lengthy statement.
There are also probably a hundred more different flavors (i.e. variations of the sensation) of horror but these are the three that seem to me to be the most common, at least in movies and other popular media.
Thoughts? Comments?
I am now seeking a publisher for a collection of my short stories that have been published to date and also one for poetry I published back in the 80’s and 90’s. If anyone familiar with my works has a recommendation for one or both, I would love to hear it. All my published prose is listed on my Published Works page as is most of my published poetry. However, I do have a lot of unpublished poems I would like to include in the poetry collection for a total of about 80-90 poems. Of course, I have several as yet unpublished short stories that I can include in the short story collection, if I need to beef up the word count for the collection.
Please contact me via this website, if you know of a potential publisher or if you are a publisher and might have an interest in publishing my works.
I just got the word that the wonderful folks at www.throughthegaps.com will re-print my story “Shapeshifter” in about a week. This is the third of my stories to be published by them in about a month. “Shapeshifter” is about a alleged werewolf sighting in France in 1601 during the height of the werewolf trials. I think it says something about human nature. The story was first published in 2003 by Ascent Magazine (www.ascentaspirations.ca). Please drop by Through the Gaps to add to their site visitation and readership.
This morning I have been going through all the daily updates I have been getting from Goodreads, but have not read. Here’s an interesting one.
“I am fated to journey hand in hand with my strange heroes and to survey the surging immensity of life, to survey it through the laughter that all can see and through the tears unseen and unknown by anyone.” –Nikolai Gogol
Goodreads notes: “Novelist and playwright Nikolai Gogol (born March 31, 1809) feared being buried alive. When his grave was exhumed, his body was lying face down, giving rise to the rumor that the author’s greatest fear had come to pass.” I read some of Gogol’s most famous works as an undergraduate and loved them. I need to re-read them just for the sheer pleasure of reading them. Gogol was an eccentric Russian (though born in the Ukraine) author/satirist of the early nineteenth century and is best known for his unfinished novel “Dead Souls” about a man who travels through the country buying up the dead. He is also known for his short stories, particularly “The Nose” a fantasy about a nose that detaches itself from its owner one day and takes on a life of its own and “The Overcoat”, a story about an impoverished government clerk (copyist, if I recall correctly), whose prize possession is a beautiful overcoat and who comes back from the dead to find it. He was known for being a satirist, rather than a writer of horror, but a few of his most famous works verge on what might be termed ghost stories or fantasy as can be seen above. He is a master author, however, and his works bear checking out no matter what your preferred modern genre is. Wikipedia has this to say about his style:
D.S. Mirsky characterized Gogol’s universe as “one of the most marvellous, unexpected – in the strictest sense, original[28] – worlds ever created by an artist of words.”[29] The other main characteristic of Gogol’s writing is his impressionist vision of reality and people. He saw the outer world romantically metamorphosed, a singular gift particularly evident from the fantastic spatial transformations in his Gothic stories, A Terrible Vengeance and A Bewitched Place. His pictures of nature are strange mounds of detail heaped on detail, resulting in an unconnected chaos of things. His people are caricatures, drawn with the method of the caricaturist – which is to exaggerate salient features and to reduce them to geometrical pattern. But these cartoons have a convincingness, a truthfulness, and inevitability – attained as a rule by slight but definitive strokes of unexpected reality – that seems to beggar the visible world itself.[30] The aspect under which the mature Gogol sees reality is expressed by the Russian word poshlost’, which means something similar to “triviality, banality, inferiority”, moral and spiritual, widespread in some group or society. Like Sterne before him, Gogol was a great destroyer of prohibitions and romantic illusions. It was he who undermined Russian Romanticism by making vulgarity reign where only the sublime and the beautiful had reigned.[31] “Characteristic of Gogol is a sense of boundless superfluity that is soon revealed as utter emptiness and a rich comedy that suddenly turns into metaphysical horror.”[32] His stories often interweave pathos and mockery, while “The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich” begins as a merry farce and ends with the famous dictum, “It is dull in this world, gentlemen!”
Thoughts? Comments?
Good review: Clive Barker ‘The Scarlet Gospels’ Advance Review. As you can see in my comments, the review sounds fair, honest, and straightforward. Also, I enjoyed his comments on Barker’s other works. Unfortunately, I have read only The Hellbound Heart and Books of Blood, but I want to read the others as soon as I can dedicate the time to each. However, I already have a couple of dozen works on my “to read” list including those on my Goodreads “to read” list. It is unfortunate that Mr. Barker may be going through a down period, but many, if not most, authors and artists of all types do. What is important is how long the down turn lasts.
Check out the cool covers in this article from the folks over at Rare Horror. These remind me of ones I see going through those second-rate, family-run, second-hand bookstores that you find in side streets and back alleys (if you are lucky enough to find ones with the covers intact and not torn off): 5 Awesome Horror Book Covers.
I picked up a copy of the latest issue of “Cemetery Dance” this evening and read the Stephen King short story “Summer Thunder”. This is a very interesting piece. I won’t spoil the ending for you, but the story is about a man, his dog, and his neighbor, who have survived a nuclear holocaust and are slowly succumbing to radiation poisoning.
This story was quite different from the other Stephen King stories I have read (which have been quite a few, though not all by any means). There is no supernatural factor in the story. There are also no twists or surprises. The story maintains the same pace throughout, just as the protagonists face the same things day in and day out until they die.
I would classify this story as horror-tragedy, because, even though it has very little of the blood and gore normally associated with the horror genre, it definitely has a horror “feel” to it, but that horror is subtle and understated. “Summer Thunder” sets up a tragic scenario and the horror finds its basis in watching these people suffer through no fault of their own. They were not involved in starting the war in any way; that was done by world leaders thousands of miles away. These are the common citizens, the “Everymen” that normally populate King’s works as protagonists, and who must pay the horrific price for their government’s actions. That is the tragedy and that is a large part of the horror.
What is also horrifying about the story is not the action described in it, but the scenario it describes, because this scenario is definitely one that could literally happen to each of us, should our government and/or other governments decide for whatever reason, to push the proverbial button. Each of us can (or perhaps should) see ourselves as the main character, who will be forced to watch his or her world disintegrate after a nuclear apocalypse.
That concept alone should be enough to bring the true horror of this story: that this scenario is, and has been for a long time, a real possibility for each of us.
Thoughts? Comments?
Guest Blog: ‘The Raven’ – Nevermore.
Interesting article, though I tend to disagree with his descriptions of what was going through Poe’s mind when he wrote this. Though I am not a skeptic, I tend to be skeptical when someone tells me in effect “yes, that is what he says, but this is what he meant…” Poe definitely hyped the bejeezus out of the poem (and his ego) by calling it the best poem ever written, but as for the rest…who knows?
Thoughts? Comments?
Here’s an interesting article for those writing a story and are trying to find a way to negate a cell phone. You probably won’t want to use these (that runs counter to being creative), but these methods may point you in the right direction: http://mentalfloss.com/article/56842/7-creative-ways-modern-horror-films-get-rid-cell-phones.
Tonight I updated my page “The Lexicon of Horror” with ghoul, goblin, horror, Malleus Maleficarum, and oppression.
For a change of pace I thought that for tonight’s blog, I would simply post a few digital images I created from photos using Photoshop a few
years back One is called “Death Calls the Tune”. I made it from a photo I took of a fiddler at a Renaissance fair. The second is called “Dancing Through Hell” and I took the photo on which it is based at the same fair. If I ever get the time again, I may make some more.
The last is more suspense than horror, though I can imagine it could be the setting for something horrible going on inside the bar. It is derived from a photo I took of a bar in Tokyo in 1995. The woman is a silhouette of a statue into which I inserted a public doman photo of a woman’s face, reversed it, and then did some more Photoshop magic.
I am selling these on a few products you can find in the Little Shop of Horror, but I don’t mind if you use these downloaded from this site so long as I get credit for the original image, and, if you would be so kind, please tell me where you use it. I just like to see what uses people put my works to and how they are received.
Comments? Thoughts?
I happened across an excellent roundtable on Horror History 101 at the Horror Writer’s Association (http://horror.org/horror-roundtable-16-horror-history-101/) today while at lunch. Check it out. It has a great panel of experts and a wide-ranging discussion of the great horror writers of the past from the beginning of horror with Horace Walpole up to Lovecraft and more.
I have been surfing the net over lumch and ran across this site with 16 fun very, very (micro?) horror stories. Check it out: http://www.dumpaday.com/random-pictures/funny-pictures/short-horror-stories-will-send-chills-spine-16-pics/. Here’s the first one as a quick sample (all were submitted by “Jon” on January 28, 2015):
“Growing up with cats and dogs, I got used to the sounds of scratching at my door while I slept. Now that I live alone, it is much more unsettling.”
Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher 
quite literally a rite of passage, mystical and with an interesting payoff, one which Miguel may have to reckon with in time. some very good writing and characterisation.
well done
Mike McC