Tales for Those Who Can’t Sleep
I watch a lot of movies [brief pause for murmurs of shock to subside] and I read a lot, but I don’t actually read a lot of novels. Last year, I made a conscious effort to read more of them, and largely succeeded, reading some 16 or so novels in 2023, including Silver Nitrate, Clown in a Cornfield 2, Project Vampire Killer, The City of Unspeakable Fear, Scarewaves, Escape from Grimstone Manor, and Deephaven, among others.
Mostly, though, when it comes to reading prose fiction, I prefer to read the same thing I prefer to write: short stories. I’m less likely to consume short stories in other mediums, however. I watch movies but rarely watch short films, for example. That said, in the early weeks of 2024, I have been surrounding myself with some top-notch short form horror in other mediums, without even really meaning to.
Three years ago, I started doing a column called Something Weird on TV over at Signal Horizon. The idea was that I would watch an entire horror TV series from start to finish, and cover it episode-by-episode over the course of a year. I began the series with Friday the 13th then moved on to Tales from the Darkside and Monsters.
When discussing what to do for a fourth year of the column with my editor, I wanted to go in a different direction, so I proposed doing more than one series in the course of the year, and tackling some titles from overseas, beginning with the classic Spanish anthology series Tales to Keep You Awake.
I’d never actually seen Tales to Keep You Awake before, but I picked up the Blu-ray when Severin released it, because I like oddities, and I’m particularly infatuated with ’60s horror and, perhaps especially, black-and-white ’60s TV horror. And so far, Tales to Keep You Awake has been an absolute pleasure to watch. It will keep us busy for the first half of the year, and then I’ve got some other international surprises in store.
Around the same time that I started watching Tales to Keep You Awake, I also happened to dig into the early horror comics of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. In large part, this involved reading the Horror! volume of the Simon & Kirby Library, but I also came across Kirby’s 1971 single-issue magazine Spirit World, which features some similar material and also some of my favorite art that Kirby has ever done.
As is the case with much of the best horror from the ’60s, these tales are often presented as either true or “could be” true, and told directly to the audience from the POV of a learned individual of some sort – providing a nice echo of the introductions to the episodes of Tales to Keep You Awake done by Narciso Ibanez Serrador, themselves a conscious nod to similar introductions by Alfred Hitchcock and Rod Serling.
The results have been invigorating and have simply reinforced my conviction to read more short fiction in 2024. My resolution (as it were) last year was to read more novels and nonfiction books, at least one per month. I’m still planning to do that in 2024, as well, but I’m also making it a point to read more short stories, without necessarily feeling like I have to read the entire book in which they are contained, with a goal of one short story per week in 2024.
Hopefully, all these tales will also prove to be beneficial to my own writing. Even if they’re not, though, they’re bound to be good for the soul.
