As Halloween approached again, I learned the hard way that the old cliché you hear about the one-year anniversary of a loved one’s death being hard is dead-fucking-on. I’d be out grocery shopping or running errands and for brief instants I could swear I could see him. Someone would catch my eye and something about them – the set of their mouth as they perused a menu; or their gait; or a turn of phrase, like “a couple three” – would remind me of my father so strongly that for a dizzying moment I felt the uncanny sense that he was somehow there. When I got a letter from the Cremation Society a few weeks before Halloween telling me that “the anniversary of a death can stir up many emotions all over again and may come when you least expect them,” I thought to myself “no fucking shit,” and threw the thing in the trash.
(more…)Tag: horror
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Horror Fiction Book Review – “Tender is the Flesh,” by Augustina Bazterrica
This book is some sick shit. It’s possibly the most fucked-up book I’ve ever read…..And I mean that in the best way possible.
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Horror Fiction Book Review – “Burnt Offerings” by Robert Marasco
“Burnt Offerings” by Robert Marasco is a 1974 haunted house novel that supposedly influenced Stephen King’s 1977 horror classic “The Shining.” I haven’t seen ay first hand verification by King himself that Marasco was an influence, but for what it’s worth, he lists “Burnt Offerings” in the Appendix to his non-fiction book about the post-World War Two horror genre, “Dance Macabre” (which is a must-read for any horror fan). He even asterisked “Burnt Offerings” in his Appendix, which denotes that he believed it to be “particularly important” to the genre.
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Spirits – a horror story (Part four of five)
Before I called 911, Eli and I went through what we would tell the police. It was an accident. Grandpa tripped and fell. Daddy tried to help. They questioned me and Eli separately, but whatever the boy had seen, he told them the right thing. He was a good boy.
I put him to bed, then went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I vowed to prove my father wrong, to be a better father to Eli than my father had been to me. That Eli would never become like him. Like me. Alcoholism had plagued my family from time immemorial, like some ancient curse. But it would stop here.
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Horror Fiction Book Review – “The Final Girl Support Group,” by Grady Hendrix
I read and thorougly enjoyed “Paperbacks from Hell” and “My Best Friend’s Exorcism” by Grady Hendrix a few years back, so decided that I’d read his most recent book, 2021’s “The Final Girl Support Group” this Halloween. I was not disappointed.
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Spirits – a horror story (part three of five)
By the end of that October, I was back up to drinking a handle every three days. I’d stock up every time I went out to buy my father his cases of rum, then stash my extras in the basement, concealing them in the laundry room’s darkened alcove. I didn’t want to give my father the satisfaction of knowing that I was juicing almost as heavily as he was. When I’d finish a bottle, I’d hide it in the bottom of a laundry basket full of Eli’s clothes and bring it downstairs, switching it out for a new bottle and stashing the empty in the darkened alcove. Then I’d smuggle out the empties early in the morning on trash pickup day, while my father was passed out and before Eli woke up.
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Spirits – a horror story (part two of five)
Over the next few days, I tried my best to make the place habitable, enlisting Eli for help. We filled up garbage bag after garbage bag of empty rum bottles and moldy old microwave dinner trays. For the glasses full of cigarette butts, I had Eli hold out a colander, through which I’d dump the yellowish water, then we disposed of the waterlogged butts in trash bags.
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Horror Fiction Book Review – Doctor Sleep, by Stephen King
As one of my favorite blogs recently said, the golden age of Stephen King is the age of thirteen. I was a huge fan from the ages of eleven to fourteen, and devoured his early work. I recently re-read a few of his earlier works, including “The Shining,” so when I saw that its belated sequel, “Dr. Sleep” (the latter was published in 2013, or 36 years after the publication of The Shining), was on sale on Kindle, I decided to give it a whirl. I’d say it was a mixed bag.
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Spirits – a horror story (part one of five)
It was bedtime when my six-year-old son Eli whispered, “Daddy, I think your daddy is a ghost now.”
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The Dirty Kids – The Finale
After the service ended, they drove back to Spencer’s apartment. As soon as they walked in the door, Sal collapsed facedown on the bed and began to snore. Spencer sat at his kitchen table for a few minutes, then left Sal sleeping and headed over to the library. About an hour after he arrived, Spencer felt his phone buzz in his pocket. He dug it out and saw a text from Sal. All it said was: “Gotta go.”
“Hold on a minute” Spencer texted back.
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