She pricked herself on a thorn,
No, on a needle,
No, on the sharp pieces of a
broken promise.

Carefully unbutton her blouse,
pull aside her bodice.
A tattooed rose
blossoms on her snow
white breast,
a brier drinks from
her heart.

A dark prince placed
the rose upon her. Whispered
golden promises of red
red roses.
His thorn, buried deep,
binds her.

Encased in
the bramble of his lies,
staked by his
pretty garden thistle,
she never wakes,
never dies,
forever dreams
of black red roses.

A violent thunderstorm, a cop killer on the loose, and an army of genetically modified, giant fire ants; put them all together and what do you have? The Red Empire, the titular tale of Joe McKinney’s short story collection, The Red Empire and Other Stories. Here we follow a number of different characters including a recently widowed young mother and her daughter, the latter temporarily blinded after undergoing a cornea transplant. There’s the aforementioned cop killer who, while being transported to prison, is set free due to a set of very fortunate circumstances.

No aphorism of Horace
perhaps, but still

cousinly and
in wide practice

ever since fiat lux
and the tungsten

armies of Thomas
Edison began

to spread the net --

not so much a banishing of the darkness

(the sun would never
allow this),

but a taming
or domestication

of its wavelength,
making the night seem

less worrisome,
less viral, less filled

with menace.

Not that we could
ever completely forget

on any tribal level
what the night once

meant to us, our ids
are too stained

for that. Hence, why
ghosts and the other monsters

have simply followed us indoors,
to the artificial dark

of the cineplex, while
astronomers and other

predators have largely
moved on to digital realms,

where light and shade
are tallied in 1s and 0s

and black holes
(the milk-carton children

of the cosmos) are seduced
more by algorithms

than lost puppies. And while
Death itself (the ultimate

expression of starless skies)
has been delayed

or offset by Apollonian
advances in modern medicine,

this too is artifice, like
the wearing of sunglasses

at night. We must therefore
take heed.

Even as the world's albedo
grows, to turn

our back on the oldest scourge
in our history,

to put it at technical remove,
thinking this somehow

makes us safer, may be to
our own peril.

Or as Horace never wrote:
Carpe noctem ne nox te carpat.

Seize the night, yes.

Just be careful
lest it return with a vengeance.

I recently picked up The Asphyx in its most recent re-release form—on Redemption DVD and Blu-Ray—for a combination of reasons, not the least being that I had (mostly) unwittingly referenced its central concept in my novelette “each thing I show you is a piece of my death” (co-written with Stephen J. Barringer), by dubbing the image supposedly found burnt into a murder victim's eye after death an “asphyx”.

Stephen Graham Jones is one of those writers I’ve been meaning to read for a while now but haven’t for one reason or another. I guess it comes back to that whole too many books (and authors), too little time thing. So when I was offered a chance to read his latest, Zombie Bake-Off, for review I jumped at it. Was this the book that would put Mr. Jones on my not-to-be-missed list? Only one way to find out...

Sometimes, even in this meta-saturated genre of ours, things just go right. Absentia, funded by Kickstarter and shot in fourteen days on a hand-held hi-res digital camera which also takes video footage, was conceived less as “a horror film” than as an excuse for writer/director Mike Flanagan to work with and showcase his favourite group of friends/actors, one of whom also happened to be his massively pregnant wife. According to the DVD's documentary feature, no one involved seems to be a horror buff, so the scenario's trope-o-meter is not exactly cranked up high.

Please be my kind of pure.
Black as dead blood sweetened with sour goat cheese,
moldy as bread gone blue.
I love you, I do, I do,
please, touch my bloated soft bellybutton,
Be my kind of pure.

When I’m passing through,
I want to consummate with you,
on our wedding day,
on dirty sheets,
yeah, when I say I don’t, I do.
Don’t lift my veil of silence, oh please,
do kiss my deadly urges.
I love you, I love you, I do do do do.
Be my kind of pure.

The bouquet of roses sings off key.
Oh, please, rip them from my head,
dance with broken feet on the blue stair case.
When the red zombie violin screams a tune of
I love you, your heart emerges,
I feel it, Oh god, the band plays dirges. I do, please.
Be my kind of pure.

So why review a book that came out two years ago; a book that was reviewed―with exemplary accolades, and a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly―by any number of excellent publications and individuals; a book that won the Ditmar, Australian Shadows, and Canberra Critics Awards, and was shortlisted for the Aurealis?

Maybe he just meant to take her
along the coast, to show her
clouds reflecting soft and tremulous
on the surface of the water
like someone's breath on your ear.
But the sun and the tide
were too low so he waited with her
on the beach until dusk
when the light settled on the ocean
gentle as a hand across a knee.

Like most things in life, fiction is a mixed bag. Weird fiction even more so.

I've never really understood why the term "bizarro" fiction took hold when discussing weird fiction, but there you have it. Maybe the genre hit puberty and decided it needed a new name. Seems appropriate enough given that a lot of bizarro fiction is rooted in the deeply sexual―by way of Dadaist storytelling (if you can't just go with a title like Carlton Mellick III's "The Haunted Vagina" you're just not having enough fun with your life).

In this start to a brand new mystery series, horror and mystery veteran Simon Wood takes the traditional amateur sleuth approach by introducing young race car driver Aidy Westlake in his novel Did Not Finish. On the eve of a race in a small regional British circuit, Aidy overhears thuggish driver Derek Deacon's threat against his teammate Alex, who's a much better (and dangerously aggressive) driver and likely to win not only the race but the circuit championship. Fact is, just about every driver has heard Derek's threat by race time, and ignored it as a typical bluster.

She writes her name on the sole of her husband’s foot each night. At first, she would do it when he was awake and he would smile at her, gather her into his arms, promise, “I will never forget you,” and then smother her with kisses. It was nice while it lasted.

After a time he just laughed at her and promised, “I will never forget you,” and kissed her. That, too, was nice while it lasted.

A year later, he just shook his head at her and repeated, “I will never forget you,” and then she had to smother his face with kisses to get his brow to unkink.

When reviewing a vampire novel, it would be all too easy—and rather tempting—to begin with a lengthy diatribe railing against the current state of vampire fiction, how that damned Stephenie Meyer and her sparkling blood suckers have dragged the genre down from the rather elevated status it once enjoyed. Fun, yes, but not entirely true. The genre had, in fact, found itself riddled with cliches long before The Twilight Saga came along.

She lives in a house surrounded by white teeth. The sound on the roof could be rain. A dragonfly nearing a gas station where the attendant smokes while pumping gas is an omen, an assurance that dragons will return, their scales a rattling subway train, their wings a flapping carnival tent. They will strike, as lightning once did, at the earth’s mantle, breaking it to reveal a molten core, waking bears from hibernation. No one will be able to sleep, but we’ll survive, she tells us, the skulls of newborns will still fuse, people will find themselves on volcanic land masses surrounded by unopened boxes. And the rain’s hard knuckles will beat us down. The signs are all around us.