A Curated List of Exorcism Movies

There are more movies about exorcisms that any one person could ever possibly see; I know, because I’ve watched a lot of them during the years I worked on my upcoming novel Dandelion (pre-order here). This is a modern genre, too; it started in 1973, with the release of the grandaddy of them all, The Exorcist, so there are no … Read More

The origins of Dandelion, part 2

Read part 1 here, and a sidebar post on the music of Exorcist II: The Heretic here. In a Washington Post story about J.D. Vance’s run for office, I first encountered the term ruin porn. lf you’ve read his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, you’ll know what the term means: a tour through ruined rural America, where everything that once thrived is … Read More

Sidebar: Ennio Morricone, Magic, and Ecstasy

This is an addendum to my earlier blog about Exorcist II: The Heretic. One of the best things about that unholy mess of a movie is the score by Italian maestro Ennio Morricone. And one of the best things about his score is the track “Magic and Ecstasy,” used mainly in the trailer I posted in my last blog. But … Read More

The origins of Dandelion, part 1

In the summer of 1977, I saw a movie that would change my life. No, not that one. I mean, yes, I saw Star Wars multiple times, and my first published byline was a review of it that I wrote for a small-town paper. But I’m referring instead to Exorcist II: The Heretic. I was 14 that year, spending the … Read More

So, like…where have I been?

So some of you might wonder why it’s been four years, since 2018’s The Fairies of Sadieville, since I’ve had a new novel out. What could I have been doing? There’s a few answers to that. In the summer of 2018, I lost both my mother and my ten-year-old son. The double-whammy of losing both my past and future within … Read More

Raney and the road not taken

****Trigger warning for racism.**** I’ve had one legitimately wealthy relative: for the sake of this, we’ll call her Aunt A. She was my godmother, and since she never had any children of her own, she a) saw me as a substitute, and b) had no idea how to relate to a child. She’s the reason I hate squash to this … Read More

“A Slight Hint of Lackadaisical Summer Torpor”: John Hartness on Writing and Publishing Southern Horror

Everyone knows the giants of southern literature, because they’re also giants of literature, full stop. William Faulkner, Walker Percy, Harper Lee, Robert Penn Warren, and so forth are perennials in lit courses and high school English classes. When it comes to horror, though, there isn’t the same respect. New England gets Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft, but names like Manly … Read More

What’s in a Name? Well…

A lot of times, my novels will be catch-alls for everything I find interesting about a particular topic. Burn Me Deadly, for example, deals with dragons, and Blood Groove with both vampires and 1970s culture. Usually by the time I finish, I’ve burned out my intense interest in a sort of positive exorcism that gets the obsession out of me … Read More

The Importance of the Right Feel

There’s an element of storytelling that’s seldom discussed, even more seldom taught or mentioned in reviews, because for the most part it’s objectively unquantifiable. It’s a story’s feel. And it’s become for me the barometer of pop culture properties that pass through many hands before reaching the public. I first became aware of it thanks to Batman. In 1989, we … Read More

The toughest girl in the Valley of the Dinosaurs

Since my daughter, age 7, is obsessed with dinosaurs, we’ve gone through every permutation of them we can, from the spectacle of Jurassic Park to the kaiju pummeling of Godzilla to the head-scratching WTF of Land of the Lost. And from my own long-ago childhood, I dredged up the Hanna-Barbara one-season wonder Valley of the Dinosaurs. In my memory, I’d … Read More