When you’re an author of fantasy and horror, and you live in a small town like Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, it’s inevitable that you get requests like the one I recently received from our library director, Jessica: “I have a spooky question for you.” She presented me with a badly-faded microfiche printout (see above) of a news story from 1909, about … Read More
Guest blog: Steve McHugh on Changing Times
My friend novelist Melissa Olson put me on the track of Steve McHugh. He’s the author of the Hellequin Chronicles series, about an immortal sorcerer who still battles evil in the modern day. I asked him to talk a bit about how he chooses the flashback scenes for the novels, which jump back and forth through time, much like the … Read More
Genre respect and the NYT
It’s an ongoing issue that genre fiction–mystery, science fiction, fantasy, romance, horror–is somehow less important than so-called “literary” fiction. That involves forgetting that in many cases the disposable genre fiction of yesterday (Jules Verne, HG Wells, Edgar Allen Poe, HP Lovecraft, Louis L’Amour, Jack London, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler) has become the acknowledged classics of today. [frame align=”left”] [/frame]Still, it’s … Read More