Tag Archives: horror

Changing Things

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This is a cross post from my Substack, where I’ll be posting more often.

I’ve been away from this place for a couple of months. I’ve been sorting things out in my head. It’s about deciding what way I’d like to take my writing.

It’s been a long time coming to get to this point. I love writing. I love writing what I enjoy reading. Let’s skip the BS and get to the nitty gritty.

Hello, I’m Brian. I’ve published horror novellas, short stories, and I have a story in the Utah Horror Writer’s Anthology for 2025.

I love horror stories. I love the darkness of the story. I love watching the movies and reading the books. But I’ve found my love of another genre, thrillers, has more pull with my writing and with who I am.

I watched a lot of horror as a kid. I was left alone often as a kid, as were most Gen X kids. I spent that time watching horror movies. I have the fondest of memories of watching Scanners for the first time only for my father to tell me not to watch it again. I did anyway.

I didn’t read horror until I was older. Horror books didn’t interest me. The movies always did. The first horror book I read was Four Past Midnight by Stephen King. I liked the stories in it but it didn’t hold my attention like other stories.

I spent quite a bit of time at the bookstore. My parents divorced when I was in third grade and I dove into books.

I owe my love of books to my father. He took my sister and I to the bookstore on his weekends. We’d get home and sit for a few hours and read, then dinner, and whatever movies we’d picked up at the video store.

I used to fault my father for only letting me read what he read. I read Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising in sixth grade and move of Tom’s books afterward.

I have fond memories of those books and I read many in that same genre.

My father didn’t let me read what I wanted to read. It always had to be the Tom Clancy style books.

I hated not reading what I wanted and took to hiding books in my closet, comics too.

I’m looking at 50 in few weeks. I love reading and watching horror but find that I’m not that good a writing them. My horror stories have sold less than my thriller, Disunion By Force. Which has sold 46 paperback copies and 51 digital copies.

Disunion is my best seller and it’s not even close. I’ve sold copies in Australia, France, Serbia, UK, Norway, New Zealand, and Germany, besides what I’ve sold in The States.

I’ve sold copies of my horror mainly in The States, but a few overseas.

I’ve realized that my thrillers are more popular and because of that I won’t be writing horror for a while. It’s less about sales and more about enjoyment and the process. Writing horror feels difficult. I’ve taken time off because I struggle writing horror.

My thriller writing comes easily. I’m able to outline, choreograph a beat sheet for an entire novel in a matter of days, but horror doesn’t come that way.

Every day feels like a challenge. Every time at the writing desk is hard.

I recently returned to a thriller novel I put away only to bust out 2,000 words without blinking. I’ve never been able to do that with anything horror related.

I love the horror community online. They’ve helped me figure out where I should put my focus.

I have plans for the next couple of years. I’ll be submitting my current project to agents. I’ve never submitted my thriller novels so I’m leery of it. I have plans for them regardless. I have 4-5 novels on deck in the next few years. I’ll be working on them.

If I don’t see ya, good afternoon, good evening, and goodnight.

Review for Kill Your Darling by Clay McLeod Chapman

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Every parent thinks about what they’d do if they lost their kid. When they’re babies, we worry about whether they’re breathing in their cribs. When they’re toddlers, they get quiet in their rooms. We run to their room, and they’re usually asleep in a pile of toys or stuffed animals.

We lose sight of them when they get older, and we walk around the store. All the thoughts run through our heads. When they get to be teenagers and start driving or hanging out with friends, hell, in America, we worry about them not coming home at the end of the day because of a shooting.

That latter part is an everyday worry for me.

: SPOILERS AHEAD :

In Clay’s story, he takes the idea of losing your kid to violence and does a masterful job of following Glenn, our protagonist, through the stages of his life. Also, through the stages of grief.

Glenn feels the police have failed him and his son in discovering how he was killed.

His boy was left in a dirty, empty lot as a teenager.

Over the years, Glenn has done research and called whichever detective was assigned to the cold case, but he had a breakthrough when his wife urged him to join a writer’s group.

Glenn writes a story about his son’s death and how he believes it happened.

When he presents the story to the writer’s group, it begins a fracture in a community he believes hid the truth of what happened to his son. Glenn learns he didn’t know his son as well as he thought.

The heartwrenching ending for this book is brilliant, and I believe it captures the book well.

Glenn is looking for one last connection to his son. He finds it in writing the book but also in learning the truth about his son’s death.

It’s a magnificent ending, and as with all of Clay’s books, it will pull on your emotions.

I finished this book at work, and while it was a slow day behind the bar, I had to keep myself from crying.

We all think about how we’d handle the loss of our kids. Clay orchestrates a great story about loss, grief, and understanding that once our kids get older and have their own lives, we don’t know who they are.

We try to understand them as they grow older, and the best we can do is be there for them as they move through the world. Listening to them is essential.

Review for House of Bone And Rain by Gabino Iglesias

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Gabino is one of my favorite authors. I’ve taken a few of the writing classes he’s offered. I’ve read Coyote Songs, Zero Saints, and The Devil Takes You Home.

He’s not just a fantastic writer but a nice dude. He cares about the writing community, and his legendary tweets and TikTok posts about writing and some of the shady operators within the community reflect this.

I knew very little about this book going in. I try to do that for many reasons. I only knew the author. I received my copy from the publisher via NetGalley.

I remember the people I hung around with in high school, the crazy things we did, and the stunts we pulled, and I’m glad there is no video footage.

This book is about that. It’s about, at least to me, the brotherhood we take into adulthood.

We meet Gabe. He has a girlfriend, Natalia, who wants to leave Puerto Rico. He has friends Bimbo, Tavo, Paul, and Xavier. This is his brotherhood. These people he vouches for, fights for, and will do anything for. If someone messes with one, they mess with all of them.

This quote struck a chord early on: “We’re all sad animals looking for something to lift us out of the mud we lived in and make us think being alive was worth it.”

There’s something about Gabino’s writing that pulls the reader in. I’ve never been to Puerto Rico, but with his help, I know what it feels like to walk the streets and know if going to one part of Old San Juan will cause problems.

Bimbo’s mother, Maria, dies just before Hurricane Maria makes landfall. This is all intentional. They take it upon themselves to find out who killed her. This brings us into the realm of Dante. It’s a spiral of epic proportions as this group descends into the abyss of murder, mayhem, and death.

The storytelling and the connections to all the religions that make Puerto Rico the place it is had me feeling like I was back in American Gods as Shadow took his steps.

We followed these men and this brotherhood through the various belief systems within Puerto Rico. It was a learning experience and fascinating. This book is as brutal as Gabino’s others, but there’s a point to it, as with The Devil Takes You Home.

The darkness within Devil Takes You Home emerges in the House of Bone and Rain, but its brutality is never for show. You know that there’s some truth to it. There’s a reality to it. Gabino never does his violence for show.

When the bodies start adding up, and the brutality takes a turn I wasn’t expecting, the reality of it is as with this quote from the book: “You don’t need a huge army to take over the world; you need three or four crazy motherfuckers who really love you and are will to do whatever had to be done.”

This is what this book is about—showing up for those who need you.

Gabe realizes this too late.

There are some things in this book I can’t put in a review because of spoilers, but Gabino has written another banger.

I pre-ordered this in April, long before I could read it. He’s that good.

I’m looking forward to reading other’s reviews and having someone to discuss this book with.

Review for I Was A Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones

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My first Slasher was Halloween. I was 10. My mom rented a couple of movies from UHaul—yes, you could do that at one point—and I watched them repeatedly.

My older sisters were teenagers, and I was left to my own devices. My younger sister was too small to watch it, and I knew that after the first time through.

I remember the opening scene vividly. Michael stalked around the house. His mask went over his face, and he stabbed his sister.

The reveal of him being a kid blew me away.

Moving forward in time to the following parts of the movie, I loved it. It’s still one of my favorite horror movies.

I always wondered what made Michael that way. Rob Zombie’s version touched upon this, which I loved.

Stephen does something with this creation idea in I Was A Teenage Slasher. It’s not what you expected; it certainly wasn’t for me. I struggled to read this early on. I needed help understanding the connections or the placement of certain story aspects. When it all came together, I was blown away by all the connections.

I’ve read many of Stephen’s books, but his Mapping The Interior is one of my favorites.

I’m halfway through the final book of The Lake Witch Trilogy. I had to set it down to finish book reviews.

Stephen crafts a story with Slasher mainly about a loner, maybe a bit of an outcast, like Jade in the Lake Witch Trilogy. Having read the book’s acknowledgments and seeing how personal Slasher was to him, I liked it better. He pulled a lot from his growing up in Texas. His acknowledging that made me think about my own writing and how I put bits of myself into it.

I felt a kinship with Tolly Driver. I know what it feels like to be an outcast. I was an outcast for most of my childhood. We moved around a lot. I attended five different elementary, three other middle schools, and three different high schools. I know that’s a little for some. I was the new kid/outcast most of the time. I learned to make friends quickly.

Knowing how Tolly felt being at parties and having others treat him differently and the reasons that come out in the story(spoilers) made me like him more.

He wants friends. He wants his classmates to like him, but instead, they shun him. His desire to be liked by someone leads him to be at a party. That’s where the story actually starts.

We see Tolly being with his friend Amber; then it takes a turn I wasn’t expecting. This event is sad to watch/read? Stephen’s description is so amazing that I felt I was watching it.

What happens is the birth of The Slasher. Stephen takes all of the things in the movies and makes us see what it’s like behind the mask. From the small things, quick movement, the ability to open any door to the more significant things, the indifference in the killer’s eyes, and the ability to withstand any physical punishment, it’s these things that really capture the idea of the book. As a fan of these types of movies, Stephen does this masterfully.

I can’t give things away, but it does take a turn. The brutality of a Slasher movie is front and center in the kills. It stands out as the work of someone who loves the genre and takes care to make it feel natural to the reader.

Stephen is at the top of his game in this one. If this is a standalone, it’s one of Stephen’s best.

Review for Horror Movie By Paul Tremblay

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I write my reviews a bit differently than other writers. I try to find a comp book. I beat myself up while reading this one over it. Then, toward the end of the book, it hit me.

I read Grin Of The Dark By Ramsay Campbell a few years ago. I came to my horror journey late, and it was the first book of his I had read. It’s a weird book about a man searching for a film he remembered. It is a story about a clown who once existed. As most of Mr. Campbell’s books do, it takes some dark and surreal turns.

It’s still one of my favorite books. This trope of found footage is done all of the time in books. Kiersten White’s Mister Magic does it very well. That’s also one of my favorite reviews.

The Horror Movie feels like a bit of The Blair Witch, maybe some of Hell House LLC and other found-footage books and movies. But Mr. Campbell’s book was my first introduction to this in a novel, at least where it’s done well.

I often looked back at my memories of Grin Of The Dark when it clicked. It’s done so well and has a different take on the sub-genre that it blew me away.

I said on Threads, “You all are not ready for this book.” I stand by that. Having read all but two of Paul’s books, this felt different. Maybe he was experimenting a little, testing a few new things. It’s nothing like Cabin or Head Full Of Ghosts.

I feel this is Paul Tremblay trying out a few new things. I can’t get into them without spoiling so much of a great horror novel. The found-footage aspect of this story isn’t so much in your face as it is in Mister Magic or movies like Blair Witch or Hell House LLC. It’s a more subtle take on the genre itself.

I was uncomfortable a few times while reading it. That goes to the author’s ability to craft such a fantastic piece of art.

It’s an uncomfortable story about a kid who experienced something terrible while filming a movie when he was younger. The story then revolves around that kid working on a remake/reboot of the film that was never finished. Some aspects of the story are out there. It’s a great story, and I’ll purchase one on day one.

Paul is one of my favorite authors, and while not all of his books have hit it out of the park for me, this one did.