Orrin Grey's Blog: Shovel Murders & Monologues, page 3

Bat Appreciation Day

Today is Bat Appreciation Day and, to mark the occasion, I thought it might be fun to share a player character option I created for use in the 5th edition of the world’s most popular roleplaying game.

I’ve always loved bats and I’ve always loved goblins, so smushing the two together just made sense. The result is batlin, a player character option I cooked up mostly as a practice exercise while I was working on Iron Kingdoms: Requiem.

Maybe someday I’ll get some art done for them and actually release them somewhere but, for now, and in honor of Bat Appreciation Day, enjoy, and feel free to use them in your own games if you see fit.

BATLIN

No one really knows for sure where batlin come from. Some say they were created long ago by a powerful wizard who wished to create minions for his subterranean lair. Others suggest that the batlin are an underground species of goblin, or that they came pouring in from another realm through some kind of planar rift. Even among the batlin communities that dot the underground, the stories of their origins vary, though many of them pay homage to a deity called Leutog who, they claim, carried them here on its wings from a plane of everlasting darkness.

A Life in the Dark

Most batlin live in the endless caverns that honeycomb the world, dwelling in the dark places where their unique senses make them particularly well-adapted to thrive. A few of their number have established colonies on the surface, where they are most commonly found in sub-tropical climes, though batlin have been known to make their way into cities all over the world. When encountered in their own underground communities, batlin tend to survive on a diet consisting almost exclusively of mushrooms and insects, both of which they raise in elaborate farms within the colony. Those batlin who have made their homes on the surface have often adapted to the eating of fruit, though no one has yet encountered a batlin who eats any kind of meat except insects.

Small but Industrious

Capable of vicious attacks to defend their territory – life below the ground can often be harsh, after all, and resources scarce – batlin sometimes accrue an undeservedly bad reputation among adventurers. In fact, they are industrious workers who enjoy a communal existence where everyone in the colony works, contributes, and shares alike. Because of their usually quick thinking and the ready availability of ingredients and compounds to be found below the earth, many batlin have taken to the practice of alchemy, and those that trade with the surface world often sell the fruits of their labors in city markets. Because of their relatively short lifespans and the dangers of their subterranean homes, batlin tend to have large families, and most members of a batlin community view the rest of the colony as their extended clan.

No Roost Like Home.

Most batlin colonies that are established underground make use of small networks of existing caves, with defensible dens that provide enough room for individuals or families to have semi-private living quarters. In some instances, batlin either modify or fortify these caves, while in others they have been known to build domed structures on cave floors or even walls and ceilings. Perhaps most unusual, for those from the surface who have, through whatever happenstance, made themselves companion to a batlin adventurer, batlin – like common bats – sleep by hanging upside down, their clawlike toes gripping branches, cave ceilings, or bars installed in their homes for just that purpose.

Communal Magocracies

Whether because of some underlying truth to the rumor that batlin were created by powerful wizards or simply by dint of the fact that magic helps make life underground a whole lot easier, batlin colonies tend to place a high value on spellcasting abilities. In general, batlin communities tend to be matriarchal, and those with the aptitude for magic often rise to positions of especial prominence and respect. Virtually all batlin colonies act as communal living spaces, however, and anyone who acts against the perceived good of the community – be they mage or matriarch – can be overruled by the rest of the colony at any time.

Not All Wings

Superficially, batlin resemble humanoid bats. They could easily be mistaken for bat-faced goblins were it not for their leathery, batlike wings. Like the more mundane bats that thrive in underground caves, batlin’s wings do not sprout from their backs, as those of many winged humanoids do, but instead act as their arms. When not in motion, a batlin can wrap its wings around itself like a cloak simply by folding its arms in front of its body, and they tend to move with the loping gait of a grounded bat, using their arms as well as their legs for ambulation. Perhaps due to their different size or body shape, most batlin cannot truly fly, unlike common bats, but their wings enable them to glide across short distances.

Batlin Traits

Your batlin character has the following traits in common with most other batlin.

            Suggested Ability Score Increase. Your Dexterity score increases by 2 and your Intelligence score increases by 1.

            Age. Most batlin live difficult lives in the dark places beneath the earth. They mature quickly and seldom live more than 50 years.

            Languages. Batlin do not appear to possess a unique language of their own. You speak Common and one other language of your choice, usually that of a nearby settlement.

            Size. Batlin are usually around 3 feet tall and often appear shorter due to their hunched posture and tendency to walk using their wings. Your size is Small.

            Speed. Your base walking speed is 30 feet.

            Echolocation. You have blindsight within 60 feet as long as you aren’t deafened. You also have darkvision, allowing you to see in dim light within 120 feet of yourself as if it were bright light and in darkness as if it were dim light. You discern colors in that darkness only as shades of gray.

            Glide. While most batlin can’t actually fly, your wings allow you to glide short distances. When moving up to your normal speed, you can move over changes in elevation, pits, chasms, traps, or other hazards or obstructions that extend no more than 5 feet above the level of the ground, so long as you move at least 10 feet in a straight line. This movement ignores penalties from rough terrain.

            Shelter of the Dark. Even those batlin who live on the surface are typically nocturnal creatures, at home in the darkness. You have advantage on Dexterity (Stealth) checks when in dim light or darkness.

Batlin Feats

The following feats are available exclusively to batlin characters:

Improved Foraging

Thanks to their unique diets, batlin are capable of surviving in conditions that many others would find inhospitable, at best. Increase your Wisdom score by 1, to a maximum of 20. When you attempt to forage for food and water, you find twice as much as you normally would. If you are underground, you have advantage on your Wisdom (Survival) check to forage.

Wings that Work

The wings of some batlin are more highly developed than those of most of their kin, allowing them to take to the air. You gain a flying speed equal to your walking speed, but you cannot use this flying speed if you are wearing medium or heavy armor.

You Have Seven Days

I promise that, here at least, this is the last you’ll hear from me about this subject, but you have only seven days left to vote for Glowing in the Dark for Book of the Year (Nonfiction) at the Rondo Hatton Awards!

Voting is easy. All you have to do is click that link and then send an email to the award administrators listing your votes. You can vote in every category, but you don’t have to. If you just want to cast your vote for Glowing in the Dark, you can easily do just that.

As I’ve made abundently clear by now, I would really like to win this award for any number of reasons. The idea of winning awards loses some of its luster once you’ve been active as a writer for a few years, but the Rondos are a special exception for me, simply because I believe so strongly in what the awards are intended to represent – the celebration, preservation, and scholarship of classic horror cinema.

(And, let’s face it, I’d really like to have a bust of Rondo Hatton of my very own.)

There’s no other award that it would mean as much for me to win but, even if Glowing in the Dark doesn’t make the final cut this time around, it will have been an honor to have made it this far, and I hope to have lots more books in the future that might one day be in the running.

Voting closes on April 20, so if you haven’t yet cast your vote, there’s still time. And while I promised that this was the last you’d hear on the subject on this here blog, you can rest assured that there will be an absolutely obnoxious amount of posting about it on social media for the next week. And, should I actually win, the celebrations will be legendary, and I will share the festive spirit with all of you who helped to make it possible!

Notes from Underground

“The audience knows the truth. The world is simple, miserable, solid all the way through. But if you can fool them, even for a second… then you can make them wonder.”
—The Prestige (2006)

Before we get to today’s big news, I want to take a moment to remind you to please, if you are so inclined, go cast your vote for Glowing in the Dark for Book of the Year (Nonfiction) at the Rondo Hatton Awards! Voting is open to everyone, and only goes until April 20, so help me get a Rondo bust of my very own!

For those who prefer my fiction writing, however, today’s post is for you!

Yesterday, Publishers Marketplace broke the news that Word Horde will be publishing my newest book later this year. Notes from Underground: The Hollow Earth Story Cycle is something that has been in the works for a long time, and it’s a departure for me.

Rather than a typical short story collection, Notes from Underground is, as the subtitle implies, a cycle of linked stories that all share certain elements of setting, theme, and mythos to create what the publisher calls “a linked story sequence of cosmic horror and masterful strangeness.”

The earliest of these stories was written as far back as 2015, and most have seen print in other places in the intervening years, including at Nightmare magazine and in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year, to name a few.

Even if you’ve read six of the seven stories contained in Notes from Underground in their original publications, however, there’s still a treat in store for you – a brand-new novelette that helps to tie the stories together, in which the exhumation of a magician’s grave reveals an empty coffin and sets his widow off on a quest of horrific discovery.

As the title suggests, the seven stories in Notes from Underground all deal – some more directly than others – with the Hollow Earth. It’s a subject that has always been fascinating to me, and I drew from many sources of Hollow Earth fiction and lore to create my own metaphysical take on the idea for this ambitious series of linked stories, which you’ll be hearing more about as the book draws closer to publication.

The result is something unlike anything I’ve ever done before, so I hope you will join me on this new excursion into the dark. Due out from Word Horde later this year!

“What’s the matter, don’t you like it?”

Born in 1894, Rondo Hatton suffered from acromegaly, the symptoms of which set in during adulthood and gave him the unique face that he used to play heavies and monsters in a handful of movies before his untimely death in 1945. He is probably best known for playing “the Creeper” in a pair of Universal shockers released the year after he passed: House of Horrors and The Brute Man, the latter memorably featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Hatton has since become something of a genre icon, lending his unmistakable likeness to everything from the Lothar character in The Rocketeer to a comic book detective called The Creep to, allegedly, the classic Creeper character in Scooby-Doo – who is, not for nothing, my favorite Scooby-Doo villain.

He has also been immortalized in the form of the Rondo Hatton Awards. Since 2002, these awards have been administered by members of the Classic Horror Film Board to honor significant achievements in classic horror and monster film fandom, research, restoration, and preservation.

You can see, then, why this is the award – of all awards out there – I most want to win. And not just because the prize is a miniature bust of Rondo Hatton himself… though that certainly doesn’t hurt.

This year, I’m one step closer to that goal. Glowing in the Dark, my new book on horror film from Word Horde, is on the ballot for the Rondo Hatton Awards!

You can see the full ballot here, where you can also see that I’ve got a lot of competition. That’s where you come in. Voting is by email, and anyone is eligible to vote. Simply follow the instructions on that page and you can vote for as many categories as you want – or just cast your vote for Glowing in the Dark, if you’d rather, although I definitely recommend some of the stuff in other categories.

In fact, while I’ve got you here and I’m already stumping for votes, here’s a few more I’ll toss out: The new Blu-ray of Cat and the Canary from Eureka is basically a miracle release, and absolutely has my vote for both Best Blu-ray and Best Restoration. For Best Independent film, I cast my vote for the genuinely sublime The Vourdalak, though if you want a dynamite write-in, I recommend They Call Her Death.

Short film is even easier, as Jack Paterson’s wonderful “The Curse of Dracular” is just an absolute delight. Again, if you want a top-notch write-in, I recommend “Mansect.” (Ironically, no relation to the manga I just posted about.)

Then there are a couple of other areas in which I have a personal interest. My friends from the Classic Horrors Club podcast are up for Best Podcast, while the newly-launched Spooky Magazine – which recently featured my short story “Candles Burn Blue” in its second issue – is up for Best Magazine.

But honestly, just go, vote your conscience, vote in as many (or as few) categories as you like, go through the ballot, look up stuff you’ve never heard of, have some fun! Just don’t forget to also vote for Glowing in the Dark for Book of the Year – I want that Rondo Hatton statue!

“Perhaps mummies are like cocoons waiting to hatch.”

In Koga Shinichi’s Mansect (1975), a bug-obsessed loner begins a grisly transformation into a humanoid insect – or an insect-like humanoid. If you think you can more or less imagine where this is going, you’re probably wrong.

“[S]tanding with Umezz Kazuo as one of the pioneers of shojo horror manga,” according to the biography provided in the back of the Smudge reissue of Mansect, Koga’s most famous work is probably Eko Eko Azarak, and his surprisingly gruesome and macabre stories have been “cited as a central influence by many horror manga authors, including Ito Junji and Kojima Miyaco.”

I haven’t read any of Koga’s other manga, but the weirdness and viciousness of Mansect definitely feels like a precursor of both Ito and Hideshi Hino, the latter of whom was already working when Mansect was first published, so I can’t speak to possible influence.

Instead of the expected variation on George Langelaan’s “The Fly,” which was adapted into the film series of the same name starting in 1958, Mansect is a story of body horror at once intimate and strangely apocalyptic. The suffering of Hideo, the eponymous “mansect,” takes on the proportions of echoing all of human frailty, expanding to include and affect disparate and seemingly unrelated characters, musings about mummies, bizarre ailments such as “cutaneous horn,” and more.

“Our society may be plagued by numerous unidentified diseases and disorders,” as the story’s closing narration avers, “but viewed from a longer perspective, are not diseases and mutations the very drivers of human evolution.”

While a fascinating and extremely worthy addition to the Smudge line of manga reissues, Mansect is not quite as directly geared to me, personally, as UFO Mushroom Invasion. But one relatively minor thing really caught my attention while reading it. Though Mansect may not directly reference the Langelaan or Kurt Neumann version of The Fly, the manga is littered with visual nods to the horror films of the early 20th century.

Some of these are obvious and direct. Speculation about mummies is accompanied by a panel depicting a famous image of Boris Karloff from Universal’s The Mummy (1932). Others are more oblique. As Hideo’s transformation first begins, he catches a glimpse of his face in the mirror that reflects early film villains, including Lionel Atwill’s disfigured sculptor in Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933).

A depiction of a patient suffering from “cutaneous horn” echoes Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera. Perhaps the most striking of all of them, however, is one of the forms that Hideo’s transformation passes through, what a neighbor girl refers to as “Big Brother.”

Though ultimately more horrible, Big Brother could have stepped right off the screen of The Creature Walks Among Us (1956). Notably, while the previous Creature from the Black Lagoon movies dealt with the gillman as an “orphan of time;” an evolutionary cul-de-sac that broke off from an earlier bridge between “terrestrial and marine life” and became fixed there, unchanging throughout the centuries, The Creature Walks Among Us sees the gillman surgically altered into a new, air-breathing creature by a scientist who is obsessed with changing humans to better survive in inhospitable environments such as outer space – subjects that are also echoed in Mansect.

Seeing a shojo artist like Koga Shinichi referencing these early American horror films is fascinating on its own merits, but the ways in which the themes of these films, which reflect the torment of their monstrous agonists, also reinforce the subtexts of Mansect adds another layer of satisfaction to what is already a striking, haunting, and gruesome masterpiece.

My only complaint is that Mansect doesn’t include the same sort of detailed appreciation and bibliography of Koga’s work that previous Smudge releases have boasted, so I can’t page through them and daydream about being able to read these other bizarre and horrific manga.

[EDIT: It seems that I posted prematurely. No sooner had this gone live than I saw a post from translator Ryan Holmberg explaining that their license for Mansect did not allow them to include any add-ons in the actual book, and that the essay that would normally have been there – an appreciation from Okubo Taro – is instead housed on his website and can be read in full here. Day saved!]

“Perhaps mummies are like coccoons waiting to hatch.”

In Koga Shinichi’s Mansect (1975), a bug-obsessed loner begins a grisly transformation into a humanoid insect – or an insect-like humanoid. If you think you can more or less imagine where this is going, you’re probably wrong.

“[S]tanding with Umezz Kazuo as one of the pioneers of shojo horror manga,” according to the biography provided in the back of the Smudge reissue of Mansect, Koga’s most famous work is probably Eko Eko Azarak, and his surprisingly gruesome and macabre stories have been “cited as a central influence by many horror manga authors, including Ito Junji and Kojima Miyaco.”

I haven’t read any of Koga’s other manga, but the weirdness and viciousness of Mansect definitely feels like a precursor of both Ito and Hideshi Hino, the latter of whom was already working when Mansect was first published, so I can’t speak to possible influence.

Instead of the expected variation on George Langelaan’s “The Fly,” which was adapted into the film series of the same name starting in 1958, Mansect is a story of body horror at once intimate and strangely apocalyptic. The suffering of Hideo, the eponymous “mansect,” takes on the proportions of echoing all of human frailty, expanding to include and affect disparate and seemingly unrelated characters, musings about mummies, bizarre ailments such as “cutaneous horn,” and more.

“Our society may be plagued by numerous unidentified diseases and disorders,” as the story’s closing narration avers, “but viewed from a longer perspective, are not diseases and mutations the very drivers of human evolution.”

While a fascinating and extremely worthy addition to the Smudge line of manga reissues, Mansect is not quite as directly geared to me, personally, as UFO Mushroom Invasion. But one relatively minor thing really caught my attention while reading it. Though Mansect may not directly reference the Langelaan or Kurt Neumann version of The Fly, the manga is littered with visual nods to the horror films of the early 20th century.

Some of these are obvious and direct. Speculation about mummies is accompanied by a panel depicting a famous image of Boris Karloff from Universal’s The Mummy (1932). Others are more oblique. As Hideo’s transformation first begins, he catches a glimpse of his face in the mirror that reflects early film villains, including Lionel Atwill’s disfigured sculptor in Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933).

A depiction of a patient suffering from “cutaneous horn” echoes Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera. Perhaps the most striking of all of them, however, is one of the forms that Hideo’s transformation passes through, what a neighbor girl refers to as “Big Brother.”

Though ultimately more horrible, Big Brother could have stepped right off the screen of The Creature Walks Among Us (1956). Notably, while the previous Creature from the Black Lagoon movies dealt with the gillman as an “orphan of time;” an evolutionary cul-de-sac that broke off from an earlier bridge between “terrestrial and marine life” and became fixed there, unchanging throughout the centuries, The Creature Walks Among Us sees the gillman surgically altered into a new, air-breathing creature by a scientist who is obsessed with changing humans to better survive in inhospitable environments such as outer space – subjects that are also echoed in Mansect.

Seeing a shojo artist like Koga Shinichi referencing these early American horror films is fascinating on its own merits, but the ways in which the themes of these films, which reflect the torment of their monstrous agonists, also reinforce the subtexts of Mansect adds another layer of satisfaction to what is already a striking, haunting, and gruesome masterpiece.

My only complaint is that Mansect doesn’t include the same sort of detailed appreciation and bibliography of Koga’s work that previous Smudge releases have boasted, so I can’t page through them and daydream about being able to read these other bizarre and horrific manga.

Hope You Have A Strong Heart

“Our fathers and ourselves sowed dragon’s teeth / Our children know and suffer the armed men.”
– Stephen Vincent Benet, “Litany for Dictatorships”

Times have been hard for a lot of folks, and there are many reasons why the immediate future looks bleak. I’m worried about a great many things – some of them very real, others probably somewhat fanciful. I don’t know what to do next, and I don’t know where to turn, except towards one another.

What I do know is that I have to keep doing what I do. Not because it’s an act of resistance, not because art will save anyone (myself included), not even because I don’t have any real choice, but because, as Stephen Vincent Benet says in the poem I quoted above, “a man must go to his work.”

I’ve been a full-time freelance writer for over a decade now. Like it or not, my livelihood is tied up in my stories and essays about weird monsters, cheesy movies, ghosts and goblins, and anything else someone will pay me to write about.

Over the last few years, I’ve seen my industry suffer in various ways. I’ve known lots of people who got laid off from jobs at major publications, seen other publishers struggle against a rising tide of “AI” slop. I’ve lost some clients because they simply went out of business, others because they were bought by bigger companies, laid off their editorial staff, cut costs to the point where they no longer paid enough to make writing for them worthwhile, and on and on.

The fragmentation and enshittification of social media has led to a massive shift in how authors and artists have to hawk their wares – a shift that we haven’t yet felt the full repercussions of, I’m very sure. For now, I’ve made a comfortable home at Bluesky, where I get more engagement than I ever did on any of the other platforms, but who knows how long that will last?

I’ve also been trying to put together some other alternatives. I’m on Discord, if you know where to find me there, and I’m working on setting up a newsletter. I’ve also started a Patreon where you can follow along as I write about old monster movies. I’m still tweaking the pricing tiers and there are some future elements coming hopefully soon. And, of course, you can always find me at this here website.

I’m a regular contributor to Weird Horror, Signal Horizon, and Unwinnable, and a more irregular contributor many other places, as well as movies editor for Unwinnable’s sister publication, Exploits, if you ever want to write about movies for an extremely token sum.

I recently kicked off a new column at Signal Horizon, where I’m writing about gimmick films, midnight spook shows, and the links between the two. It’s a subject I’m very fond of, and I’m looking forward to exploring it across the coming months.

Other projects are in the works, but these things take time. Recently, I finished a new short story for the first time in a few months, which was a good feeling, even if now I have to do the revisions on it, which is a less good feeling.

Ultimately, though, freelance work is simply thinner on the ground than it used to be and, like so many people, I’m feeling the pinch. If you’ve got a project that you think I would be well suited to, get in touch and let’s talk about it! You can see some of the work I’ve done at my Muckrack.

This is only partly a lament about the state of freelance writing in 2025, though. It’s also a post about solidarity. Things are tough all over, for reasons that go far beyond the economic, and I know so many people who are suffering, many of them much more than I. These are the times when we have to try to be there for one another when and where we can.

I don’t always know what that looks like, but I know that it will take generosity, determination, and solidarity. Wherever we’re going, we’ll only get there together.

“You are about to go on a journey into terror! Hope you have a strong heart!”

“It Is Too Much For Any Man – Living Man Or Ghost. Leave Me To My Books.”

I love Hellboy, and Hellboy is where I first learned to love the work of Mike Mignola, but Hellboy is not my favorite thing that he has done. My favorite things by Mike Mignola are the odd little stories that he wrote and drew to accompany The Amazing Screw-On Head & Other Curious Objects.

Here, more so than anywhere else, Mignola’s many gifts expressed themselves at their most eloquent. His surrealism, his humor, his pacing, his many and varied literary and artistic influences – from folklore and classical literature to the pages of yellowing pulp paperbacks.

By the time The Amazing Screw-On Head & Other Curious Objects saw print, Mignola was no longer drawing the Hellboy books and the various attendant volumes that had spun out from them – at least, not mainly. A wide array of other artists had taken up residence in the world that he had created, even as Mignola himself quietly withdrew from it.

That withdrawing took the form of Hellboy in Hell – arguably Mignola’s magnum opus, the culmination and extrapolation of much of the world he had painstakingly built over two decades.

While obviously tied to the universe and events of Hellboy in ways that the stories in Other Curious Objects were not, Hellboy in Hell also sampled from the same techniques and approaches employed in those stories in ways that Mignola’s Hellboy never really had before – creating a bridge, of sorts, between the Hellboy stories of old and the lands unknown that Mignola was about to explore.

Bowling with Corpses & Other Strange Tales from Lands Unknown feels a lot like the fulfillment of a promise. As of this writing, I have only read it once, and it is a book that will be a subject of study to me for years to come, so I can’t say for certain how it stacks up against the highest highs of Other Curious Objects, but I can say this: It feels like Mignola has arrived at the place he has been traveling toward for years now.

Who knows how long the stories from Lands Unknown will continue? Mignola says that he already has at least two more collections of them in the works, and Ben Stenbeck – probably my favorite non-Mignola Mignolaverse artist – has said that he will be working on stories from Lands Unknown as well.

What I know is this: I have pored over the pages of the tiny handful of stories in Other Curious Objects probably more than any other in my entire life up to this point. When I was a kid, I used to read those Crestwood House monster books and lose myself in the black-and-white stills from movies I had never heard of, let alone seen. Each one felt like a gateway to a world of imagination. Like an entire story – indeed, a plethora of stories – just waiting to be told.

Every panel in Other Curious Objects felt like that to me – and every panel of Bowling with Corpses feels the same. In this book, Mignola has distilled countless dreams and nightmares, inspirations and insights from throughout his career into something that feels at once familiar and unique.

“For all those writers who transported me to lands unknown way back when,” begins Mignola’s dedication in the front of the book – and Bowling with Corpses by itself is enough to transport me and countless other writers and other artists of the future to an infinite array of lands unknown for who knows how long to come.

All the News That’s Fit to Print

Just a couple of days into 2025, but already a lot has happened that I should probably address here.

In my year-end wrap-up, I mentioned some new projects that would be coming to fruition, and some of those have already begun. Unfortunately, the end of 2024 saw the conclusion of two of my ongoing columns. Something Weird on TV, which covered, well, weird horror on TV, drew to a close after several years at Signal Horizon, where I had written about such titles as Friday the 13th: The Series, Tales from the Darkside, Monsters, Tales to Keep You Awake, Beasts, and Hammer House of Horror. At the same time, my Horror as Folk column, which covered folk horror through the lens (primarily) of Severin’s All the Haunts Be Ours boxed set, also wrapped up at the end of the year.

However, January 1 saw the launch of a brand new column at Signal Horizon, one that I’m very excited about! In an essay original to Glowing in the Dark, I explored the link between midnight spook shows of the ’40s and ’50s and the gimmick films of William Castle. The Dark Seance will be a continuation of that exploration, as I examine the history of the gimmick film, its connection to the Blackouts (or Dark Seances) of the midnight spook shows, the parallels between stage magic and the movies, and much more.

The first installment is already live, and I hope you’ll join me for this weird and far-ranging discussion in the coming months.

One column that is still going strong into 2025 is my regular Grey’s Grotesqueries as part of Weird Horror from Undertow Publications, the latest issue of which is currently up for pre-order, and which will include my column discussing weird little guys, from illuminated manuscripts and medieval gargoyles to Gremlins and beyond.

Various factors have also encouraged me to do a “soft launch” of my new Patreon. Orrin Grey Meets the Monsters is something of a return to form for me, as it has a similar remit to my old Vault of Secrets column at Innsmouth Free Press, which was eventually collected into the books Monsters from the Vault and Revenge of Monsters from the Vault.

Which is to say that, Orrin Grey Meets the Monsters will see me writing, each and every month, about a classic (or not-so-classic) vintage horror film from prior to 1975 or so. There are several free samples already up on the page, along with a sort of mission statement.

The idea here is to create a source of recurring income that is more under my control. Seismic shifts in the industry have seen me losing several regular clients over the past year or so, and I’m looking into ways to create steady income streams that aren’t as reliant on the whims of a publisher (or, as is often the case, a publisher’s investors), by instead appealing directly to fans.

For now, Orrin Grey Meets the Monsters will include one essay per month that’s only accessible to paying members, as well as some other tiers and options as I put a few finishing touches on things behind the scenes and the “soft launch” becomes more official. If we get enouch subscribers to generate $200 per month, that monthly essay will become a biweekly one, so subscribers at every level will get twice the value.

The first few free ones all happen to be about vampire movies, because Mark of the Vampire (1935) is where I started my Vault of Secrets column all those years ago, and I happened to have recently received Blu-ray copies of I vampiri (1957) and The Vampire (1957) and The Vampire’s Coffin (1958) around the time I was putting this idea together. But I will be covering a wide range of horror, thriller, and monster movies over the coming months, with the only restriction being that they will all be from before 1975, and most from before 1970 – my particular area of both keenest interest and personal expertise.

Last but not least, I mentioned on social media that I closed out 2024 with a reprint sale, and I’m happy to say that it has already gone live. My story “In the Blue Room” was originally published in Spoon Knife 8: Smoke & Mirrors back in May, and it’s now been reprinted in The Dark, where you can read it for free. Though if you like it, or anything else The Dark is doing, I encourage you to support them by buying the issue.

“In the Blue Room” is a story about a Pepper’s ghost illusion that goes horribly wrong during a college production of Hamlet. Like spook show Blackouts, Pepper’s ghost illusions are another one of those weirdo topics that I’m passionate about, and I had a lot of fun writing a story about one.

I think “In the Blue Room” does a decent job of explaining the basic idea, but if you want to learn more about Pepper’s ghosts, there’s plenty of cool writing about them online – including instructions on how to make them at home! I’ll also be touching on them in a future installment of The Dark Seance.

That’s it for now but, as you can see, 2025 is off to a busy – and hopefully promising – start! If you enjoyed anything that you read here, like any other freelance creator, I appreciate your support in whatever form it takes. Talk about my work, signal boost, buy my books or request them at your local library, subscribe to my Patreon… anything and everything helps me to make more stuff like this!

Mary Shelley Didn’t Invent the Gothic

Yesterday marked the 207th anniversary of the original publication of Mary Shelley’s immortal classic Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, which makes today a great time to both celebrate its legacy and clear up an apparently persistent misconception about the novel’s role in the development of the gothic as a genre.

For those who, like myself, are not great at math, 207 years means that Frankenstein was first published (anonymously) on January 1, 1818. It was famously conceived by then-18-year-old Shelley during a stay at the Villa Diodati, where Mary and her future husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, were visiting Lord Byron during the “Year Without a Summer” in 1816, when the region was locked in a volcanic winter by the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora the year before.

It is not exaggeration to say that Shelley’s subsequent novel struck the worlds of imaginative and gothic fiction like the lightning bolt with which it is inextricably associated, and there are compelling arguments to suggest that Frankenstein was, for all intents and purposes, the first science fiction novel, published a decade before the birth of Jules Verne, and most of a century before Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or even the earliest novels of H. G. Wells.

On New Year’s Eve, I made a jokey (if not inaccurate) post about the horny underpinnings of the gothic genre, partly as a jab at some of the breathless reactions I’ve seen to Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu from critics who really should know better. It became the first thing I’ve ever had go viral on Bluesky.

As with any viral post, it got a lot of responses. Some were people agreeing or signal boosting, some were people helpfully restating what I had just said, some were people clarifying or furthering the discussion, and more than a few were people adding some variation of “the gothic genre was created by a horny woman” – usually referring to Mary Shelley, sometimes by name, more often by implication.

Which is where that misconception I mentioned comes in. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein may be a pivotal work in the gothic canon, but it’s far from the first. By the time Shelley was born in 1797, the gothic novel was already going strong, and when Shelley wrote The Modern Prometheus, she was already consciously doing so in the shadow of a robust gothic tradition.

Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto, which is widely considered the first gothic novel, in 1764, more than 30 years before Mary Shelley entered the scene. Like any genre or subgenre, the gothic did not emerge fully formed from nothing, and it has obvious forebears and precursors that make pinning down a patient zero difficult – but if there is one for the gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto is probably it.

(I am by no means a Walpole scholar, but I do know that he never married, and there has been considerable speculation as to his sexuality, with certain biographers describing him as asexual or “a natural celibate.” So, while the gothic genre may not have been “created by a horny woman,” it’s entirely possible that it was codified by a gay or ace man.)

By the time the second edition of The Castle of Otranto was issued in 1765, Walpole had addended the subtitle “A Gothic Story,” meaning that, though Otranto may have been what solidified the gothic into a genre, the building blocks were already familiar enough, even by then, that it could effectively be used as marketing terminology.

Between the publication of The Castle of Otranto and the 1818 release of Frankenstein, numerous other gothics, both classic and forgotten, swept in to fill what was a burgeoning demand. Books such as William Beckford’s Vathek and Mathew Lewis’ The Monk would likely have been at least familiar to Shelley by the time she wrote her magnum opus.

Indeed, if there is a woman (horny or otherwise) who has any claim to the title of inventor of the gothic, it would more likely be Ann Radcliffe, whose novels, especially The Mysteries of Udolpho, fairly defined the genre during its boom period in the 1790s.

So popular was the form during that period that Samuel Taylor Coleridge complained, in 1797, that “I am almost weary of the Terrible,” describing a spate of books he had covered for the Critical Review in which “dungeons and old castles, & solitary Houses by the Sea Side & Caverns & Woods & extraordinary characters & all tribe of Horror & Mystery, have crowded on me – even to surfeiting.”

By the time Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, the gothic had become so mainstream that it was now a subject of parody, as can be seen in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, released that same year.

Shelley’s novel may not have invented the form, therefore, but it was one of several works published early in the 19th century which helped to give it a new credibility, leading to a second boom in gothic novels and stories heading into the Victorian era.

I am no historian, and there are more knowledgable people than myself who have written at much greater length and far more insightfully on this subject. The history of the gothic and how it intersects with horror fiction and film more broadly are fascinating topics, and well worth study and exploration, for anyone who has an interest.

On the 207th anniversary of the publication of her most famous work, none of this is intended to diminish or detract from the vital and transformative influence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Rather, it is a celebration of – and maybe a gateway to – not only her landmark contributions to the form but also a deeper exploration of the tradition in which she was working, and the ways in which she both explored and reshaped it for the future, and how relevant they still are, some two centuries later.