Orrin Grey's Blog: Shovel Murders & Monologues, page 67

Umbercaer

Everyone who knows me is at least familiar with Reyna Sparby, one of my best and oldest friends and the talented artist behind my "author photo" and the design of my website. She's been working for awhile now on a secret project that I've been waiting eagerly to share with all of you, and today the website for it went live!

Umbercaer is going to be a series of web comics and illustrated narratives set in an underground world full of strange creatures and glowing things. The first page of the f...

Mike Mignola Day

Today is Mike Mignola's birthday, which gives me a perfect excuse to post about this new Criterion release of Cronos, with a Mike Mignola cover and new commentary tracks and a short film and a high quantity of awesomeness all around.

In honor of the occasion (or so I choose to believe), I finally received my copy of The Amazing Screw-On Head and Other Curious Objects last night. You'll have to wait (with bated breath, I'm sure) for a full accounting of it, but the first thing I did upon receiv...

Compliance with Internet Code 6624k

No excuses; I've been criminally negligent in my signal boosting of late, and a lot of cool stuff has gone on without me linking to it, which violates some kind of unspoken Internet code of conduct. So, without further ado, here's some cool things by some cool folks:

First off, the excellent S.J. Chambers has a short story about gargoyles and Innsmouth Free Press's own Silvia Moreno-Gracia has a new story up at Fantasy Magazine.

Next, Jesse Bullington and Jason Heller put together an array of z...

B-Sides

Here's something that won't surprise anybody: I love old horror movies. The Universal ones, the Hammer ones, the Vincent Price ones, the other ones. I love them for all sorts of reasons, but one of the big ones is because they inspire me so much.

What's perhaps a little more surprising is that, in spite of how much I love the Draculas and the Frankensteins and such, it's often the lesser-known ones that inspire me the most. Maybe it's because their contents have been assimilated into our pop c...

The Condition of an Essay

I promised yesterday that I'd talk a little more about my essay at Strange Horizons, so here I am. Some time back, I made this post, which I said at the time was as close to a manifesto as I was ever likely to get. I was very surprised and very flattered to be asked to expand that post into a more substantive essay for Strange Horizons, and the result was The Condition of a Monster: A Personal Taxonomy of Supernatural Fiction, which is even closer to a manifesto. It's also one of my proudest ...

Strange Horizons

I'll post more about this tomorrow (I'm just dropping in for a few minutes today between things), but I wanted to point out that my essay on supernatural fiction has now gone live at Strange Horizons! Woooo!

More later.

Exclamation Points!!!

About a week-and-a-half ago, I submitted an entry to the open call for micro-submissions for the Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities over at Jeff VanderMeer's blog. Not long afterward, I got an email from Jason Yarn, an agent at Paradigm, who said that he'd seen my entry and really enjoyed it. We emailed back and forth a couple of times, and this weekend he gave me a call.

We hit it off. He was really nice, he talked about all the right stuff, and he really seemed to get what it is I'...

Dick Clark vs. the Weekend

I had a busy but exciting weekend in which I did lots of stuff, most of it not very interesting to the outside observer, some of it temporarily secret. But I did also see Rock Hudson Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and I enjoyed it.

It's weird. I feel sort of like I'm treading some unacceptable ground by saying that. Scott Pilgrim feels sort of the same way The Dark Knight felt when it came out, like it's not OK to say that you just liked it. It either has to have rocked your face off, or you hav...

The Hawkline Monster

While doing some research for a project I came across a synopsis for The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western that I felt needed to be reproduced here for posterity. (The synopsis is from The Encyclopedia of Weird Westerns, in case you're curious.)

In 1902 Oregon, the twin Hawkline daughters hire professional gunmen Greer and Cameron to kill a monster that lives in the ice caves beneath their Victorian mansion. The monster has transformed its creator Professor Hawkline into an elephant-foot...

The Thirteenth of Friday

Whenever Friday the 13th rolls around I always feel like I should do something to celebrate it, but I never can figure out what. So here I am, not figuring out again.

I've been busy. My brain is apparently incredibly efficient at turning even good news into stress. If I could find a way to convert that process into energy I'm sure we could stop relying on fossil fuels or something. It's been hideously, painfully, oppressively hot here, which hasn't done wonders for my mood all week. I cleaned ...