Monday Late Notes

Horror writer JF Gonzalez, a friendly acquaintance of mine, and a much closer friend of people close to me, has died. Brian Keene has a great appreciation of him here. I always wonder about the mainstream horror guys who started publishing in the late 1990s. If only they were all fifteen years older, they would have been huge! In the same way Poe was born to early to be a best-selling writer, Jesus and others were born a little too late. Jesus did have a couple of mass market books with Leisure, including a super-extreme title that, when I flipped open a random page, involved an infant being torn apart while its mother watched, but he had a lot that was more my speed as well. Check out The Corporation. I especially valued his knowledge of Weird Tales and other old pulp magazines. His column in Lamplight will be missed, at least by me.


Phantasm Japan got a neat little review in Japan Times. It's a capsule review, so worth just presenting the whole thing here:

To outsiders, the overriding image of Japan is of some fantasy land, a place that is impossibly real. However, it’s restricting to place the 20-some works in this book under the single genre of fantasy; fantastical or not, Japan offers perplexing perspectives and gargantuan horizons.

Thus “Phantasm Japan” collects creepy stories about ghosts and demons, science-fiction thrillers and a revenge tale with a strong feminist tone. With titles such as “The Last Packet of Tea,” “Those Who Hunt Monster Hunters” and “Thirty-Eight Observations on the Nature of the Self,” it’s clear that nothing about Japan is black and white: Editors Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington let you know so.