Making a List
There are still a few days left of 2024 but, for all intents and purposes, the year is at an end. It has been a tumultuous one, both in the world and for me, personally, and 2025 doesn’t show signs of being the restful respite that we could all probably use.
What’s been going on? Well, quite a lot, of course. My newest book came out back in October, for one thing. Glowing in the Dark is something of a departure both for me and my publishers at Word Horde, as it collects some of my best nonfiction writing about horror films, rather than my short stories – marking Word Horde’s very first nonfiction publication!
I’m also actively campaigning to get Glowing in the Dark onto the Rondo Hatton Awards ballot, so if you’re so inclined, head over to the Classic Horror Film Board and help give it a nudge.
As has been the way of late, while I have been very busy writing, I didn’t actually publish very much fiction in 2024, though I’m quite proud of some of the stories I did place. March saw the publication of “Marcella” in Euroschlock Nightmares from editor Jonathan Raab and Muzzleland Press – an anthology that made the preliminary ballot for the Stoker Awards.
The eighth installment of Spoon Knife brought my story “In the Blue Room,” which features a college production of Hamlet and a Pepper’s ghost illusion. And, last but not least, the fall issue of Spooky magazine featured my story “Candles Burn Blue,” about a haunted VHS board game.
I published a lot of nonfiction over the last year, however, including writing no less than four regular columns and numerous movie reviews for various publications. There are too many of those to list, but one that I am particularly proud of is a piece about Lilo & Stitch and mental health that I wrote for Unwinnable.
Unfortunately, a couple of those ongoing columns that I mentioned will be drawing to a close at the end of this year, but I’m happy to say that some (hopefully) interesting phoenixes will be rising from the ashes, which I’ll post about more when the time comes. (It will be soon.)
I continued to co-host the Horror Pod Class at the Stray Cat Film Center, where we showed and discussed such flicks as Mad Love, Puppet Master, Matango, The Resurrected, and others. I’m very pleased that the Horror Pod Class will be continuing in the new year and also that I have grown increasingly involved in Analog Sunday, hosted by Elijah LaFollette of Magnetic Magic Rentals, which will be moving to its new home – also at Stray Cat – in January!
A lot of other things happened this year. My beloved cat passed away. I worked on another Iron Kingdoms RPG book for Privateer Press – who were subsequently sold to Steamforged Games. The industries in which I work saw tumultuous upheavals, and so did my day-to-day life, enough so that I was forced to ask for a little help online, a request to which people responded with humbling generosity.
But I’m not here to write about all of that. The end of the year is for making lists, so let’s get to it…
At the time of this writing, I have watched over 250 movies so far in 2024 – and I will no doubt watch a few more before the year is truly out. Of those, 175 were movies that I was watching for the first time. My biggest month was May, when I watched a massive 29 movies, 22 of them for the first time.
As always, I’ve done a roundup of favorites on social media, and you can see my 24 favorite first-time watches of the year at Letterboxd. For that list, I’m counting The Cat and the Canary (1927) as a first-time watch, even though technically I had seen a very crappy transfer of it years ago. Seeing the restored version really was like seeing it for the first time, and it was a revelation.
Even if Cat and the Canary didn’t count, Paul Leni’s The Last Warning from the following year is every bit as dynamic, and could just as easily have taken my top spot. Rounding out the top five are The Devil’s Hand from 1943, which is probably my actual favorite new discovery of the year if Cat and the Canary doesn’t count, as well as Roland West’s 1926 version of The Bat, Snapshot (1979), and either Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964) or one of two movies called The Ghost of Yotsuya from 1959.
I saw a lot of good stuff this year, though, and making that list of 24 was a matter of cutting stuff out, not finding stuff to fit in. I also saw a surprising number of good movies that came out in the course of the year, though few of them were the usual suspects. Which movie was my favorite of the year seems to vary from moment to moment, but it’s usually one from a roster including The Vourdalak, Stopmotion, Cuckoo, and They Call Her Death.
My quest to get back to reading more continues and, at the time of this writing, I have read 65 books in 2024 – which happens to be the same number that I read in 2023, though odds are I’ll finish at least one more before the year is out. Of those, my favorite read that came out this year was definitely UFO Mushroom Invasion by Shirakawa Marina, which was reprinted as part of the new Smudge manga line that is one of the most exciting publishing developments of the year – at least, in my opinion.
In addition to books, I undertook an experiment to try to read at least one short story per week every week of the year. The rules were that I had to read one each calendar week, I couldn’t read a whole bunch in advance and “bank” them for later. I’m happy to say that the experiment was mostly a success. I only had two “missed” weeks in the entire year and, on average, I read more like two stories per week, to bring my total short stories read this year in at 102.
Of those, only a very small number were from this century. Most were from sometime in the early part of the 20th century. I didn’t keep tabs on favorites, but most recently I read all of the stories in The Night Wire and Other Tales of Weird Media from the British Library’s Tales of the Weird line.
There is, of course, one other category in which I always pick a favorite each year: monsters. And while I have some hesitation about which movie might be my favorite of the year, where monsters are concerned, there’s no question whatsoever. The puppet vampire from The Vourdalak stands head and shoulders above any possible competition.
And that’s the high points of a year in the rear view mirror. As I said, there’s some hopefully exciting stuff still on the horizon, so stay tuned as we head into a truly terrifying (not for any of the good reasons) 2025…
