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The Steampunk Aesthetic
Earlier this month, I was a panelist at the Wild Wild West Steampunk Convention in Tucson, Arizona. During the convention, I had the opportunity to sit on a panel with K.W. Jeter, the man who coined the word “steampunk” in a 1987 letter to Locus Magazine. In the letter, he spoke about fantasies set in…
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Did I Write That?
Let’s talk about the subconscious mind and its effects on writing fiction. I’ve studied and practiced the art of fiction writing for a short time: four years, two months, and four days (4 to 8 hours per day, most days.) That’s a lot of hours. About two years ago I phoned my ‘favourite reader’, and…
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Terror of the Gut
Bantam paperback foldout cover. Artist unknown. For a long time now I’ve held the view that between HP Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, it was Howard who was the consistently better writer. The operative word being “consistently”. At his very, very best, HPL probably outshines REH — but not by much. And it may be…
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A Little Horror
Welcome to the web, fans of darkness. I come before you today to offer a decided change of pace. You see, a good number of column-inches have been presented here of late, touting the work of the late H.P. Lovecraft, the father of Cosmic Horror. I’ve enjoyed the work of the Master, and have commented,…
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Cosmic Horror Without Lovecraft?
Cosmic Horror without Lovecraft. Hm. Yet that is what someone on Twitter proposed in response to my previous post. So I asked myself how about sword and sorcery without Robert E Howard? Or Sword and Planet without Edgar Rice Burroughs? Nah. Not possible. When a writer is responsible for creating or defining a genre or…
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Suspending Death
Only two of my grandparents were alive at my birth and both of them had passed away by the time I was eight years old. My dad suffered a heart attack and died when I was just thirteen. I’d give anything to have more time with any of them. Because of this, it’s perhaps no…
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Cosmic, or Lovecraftian, Horror
Cosmic horror is largely, if not solely, the creation of HP Lovecraft. Of whom Stephen King said he “has yet to be surpassed as the Twentieth Century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.” There are certain themes that differentiate Lovecraft’s brand of horror from other horror subgenres. Let’s take a look at some of…
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Poetry & Horror
POETRY & HORROR or Poe & Lovecraft My name is Dr. Thomas Davison, and I love poetry. Have you ever noticed that in our western culture, we tend to identify ourselves with our careers? When meeting or introducing someone, we usually include that person’s job in the introduction. For example, “This is Tom; he is…
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Writing a good twist.
If you enjoy reading a tale with a good twist, as much as I do, you’ve probably wondered how the writer did it. To me, a good twist changes the story, and I believe readers love it when you do that. Is it possible to “engineer” this kind of a twist repeatably? Maybe it is.…
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A Woman’s Place…
Allow me to update an old proverb for the twenty-first century: A woman’s place is in a horror story. And I suppose it always has been. Back in the beginning, in the days of writers like Poe, Stoker, and their contemporaries, her function was either to die to demonstrate the awful nature of the beast,…
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