New Story in Fireside Magazine!

I'm kicking off June with a brand new story at Fireside Magazine.

"Gender Reveal Box, $16.95" is a Horror story told through an ad. Ad copy is a rich space to tell weird stories, since most don't read them in the first place. It'd been too long since I'd written a story in an unusual format. I missed what flash fiction can let you explore.

Here we're exploring a revolutionary new product: a box for gender reveals. It seems benign at first, but hints about what the product actually contains, and what it does to anyone who witnesses the revelation, start to clue you in that something's wrong here.

It's great to have this drop during Pride Month. It's definitely the most chaotic story about gender I've written.

You can read it for free right here.

Essay on Bloodborne is live at AbleGamers

AbleGamers is a wonderful charity with a mission to make videogames accessible to everyone. They work both through technological advancement and advocacy. I've been an admirer of them for quite a while, and this week I'm proud to have published an essay with them.

The essay, Bloodborne: At Home in an Ugly World, is about the peculiarly robust disability rep in FromSoftware's Bloodborne. The game is deliberate gruesome and grotesque, and so you'd expect it to have a few particularly ugly disabled villains. Instead it has a fleshed out world where disabled people appear in every corner. That means many of them are your enemies, but they are every bit as normalized as abled enemies. I'd never experienced this feeling before. I felt like I belonged in the fictional world because it said I could be as monstrous as anyone else, rather than that I was specifically monstrous.

I want to thank editor Brian Conklin, who worked with me on the essay. He's one of the friendliest editors I've ever met.

You can read the full essay for free on the AbleGamers site at this link.

The Halloween List: Thelma, Annihilation, and The Endless

Previously: Pyewacket, The Meg, and Hold the Dark.

Today I have three winners for you. Helping get the taste of Hold the Dark out of my mouth are three masterfully made movies, and two of the best Cosmic Horror films ever made. After years of people wishing for anything close to In the Mouth of Madness, we got both Annihilation and The Endless in the same year. And yet I'll come across as ungrateful and say that as much as I enjoyed them, it's Thelma that stuck with me the longest.

Thelma (2017) 

Somewhere between Carrie and The Omen lies Thelma. This Scandinavian movie follows a young woman who’s going off to university for the first time and discovering herself – and discovering that something is wrong with her. Over the course of a superb slow burn we learn about strange events that happened during her childhood, and how her parents insisted on quietly doing nothing about them. It seemed to work at the time; those events seemed to stop.

Those events aren’t repeating, and with them seemingly safely in her past, Thelma has a chance at a life. She goes out to party, meets a girl she immediately crushes on, and starts to become an independent person. There are hours of class, and she has to deal with jackasses for the first time, but she’s adapting. It’s the beginning of a promising life, one interrupted by sudden seizures and nightmarish delusions. These things are starkly different than what we learn happened in her childhood.