Macro Monday Carves Out Your Head And Puts A Candle In It

Above, you will see two pumpkins. The first (left) is mine. The second (right) is my 6-year-old son’s pumpkin. I call the one on the left: 2017. I call the one on the right: IGNORANCE IS BLISS.

Anyway, hi!

Not much to add here this week, except I’m going to info-dump a bunch of horror stuff into your faceholes — right now, as I type this, we await the first domino to fall in MUELLER TIME (spoiler: turns out, it was Manafort and not Hillary Clinton, gosh, who knew), but I thought we’d stare at something else, something more primal, something more HALLOWEENIE.

Here are my top ten horror movies.

I think.

I mean, this list changes moment-to-moment, but it’s what I plastered on Twitter the other day, and it’s what I’m gonna stick to here and now:

1. JAWS

2. THE THING (John Carpenter)

3. THE SHINING

4. IT (2017)

5. DEVIL’S BACKBONE

6. GET OUT

7. HELLRAISER 2

8. LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (original)

9. THE EXORCIST

10. NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET

It’s an imperfect list, because it misses some great flicks: the original Hellraiser, or The Descent, or The Orphanage, or or or.

But that’s the nature of lists.

Here, too, are some of my favorite horror novels, though these are in no such list, of preference, because it’s honestly too damn hard —

Swan Song, Robert McCammon (seriously, I re-read this massive epic horror novel once every 3-5 years — it’s harrowing and beautiful, also just read anything he’s written)

The Three, Sarah Lotz

The Shining Girls, Lauren Beukes

Misery, Stephen King

Lost Souls, Poppy Brite (though bonus points for the most wonderfully vile novel I’ve ever read, Exquisite Corpse)

NOS4A2, Joe Hill

My Soul To Keep, Tananarive Due

The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty

Rosemary’s Baby, Ira Levin

Head Full of Ghosts, Paul Tremblay

Hammers on Bone, Cassandra Khaw

Last Days of Jack Sparks, Jason Arnopp

Watchers, Dean Koontz

The Drive-In, Joe Lansdale (read everything Joe Lansdale, tho)

Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton (shut up, is too a horror novel)

Monster Island, David Wellington

And that’s just like, the teeniest sampling.

Curious to hear yours, both movies and books.

Also, I’ll do the shameless self-promo shuffle, because ultimately I think what I write — despite their labels — ends up being horror as much as not.

If you want some scary business, get you to these two books:

Blackbirds (young woman can see how you’re going to die by touching you; print | ebook) or Invasive (futurist consultant to the FBI learns about a killer who is using genetically-modified skin-cutting ants as his weapon; print | ebook).

And as a reminder, today and tomorrow are the last days to get the MEGA ULTRA WHOADANG BUNDLE for $10 — use NANOCTOBER as the coupon code and get eight writing books and two novels. BUY IT NOW OR BE THROWN INTO HELL’S FURNACE

OKAY BYE