The Night Guest by Hildur Knutsdottir Book Review
It’s always a pleasure to find a “one-sitting” book; the kind of book where I can sit out on my back porch and immerse myself in the author’s world for a few hours, experiencing the whole story from beginning to end. Each plot point and note remains fresh in my mind as I follow the…
Hampton Heights Book Review
The tongue and cheek subtitle of Dan Kois’s Hampton Heights is, “One Harrowing Night In the Most Haunted Neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,” which for this reviewer set an expectation for an unserious romp through streets and alleyways rife with all manners of ghosts and ghouls. The cover art of the US edition features some red-eyed…
The White Guy Dies First Book Review
I am far from an expert on the relationship between the horror genre and people of color, but I do have an interest in the topic ever since reading The Ballad of Black Tom, Victor LaValle’s take on the atrociously racist Lovecraft story The Horror at Red Hook. That novella opens with a startling dedication:…
1938
There is little to no room for nuance on social media. Social sites are a catch-all for interaction, entertainment and distraction. They are, by design, for snippets and quickly digestible things. Yet, as is human nature, we still use them to make social or political points that usually beg for more details than a tweet…
3/∞
By the reckoning of every top google search result, the appropriate gift to celebrate a third wedding anniversary is leather. They each, seemingly copying and pasting from each other, explain that the leather anniversary marks the time when a marriage has reached its first stages of strength. Leather is durable and long-lasting while still being…
Columbus
This is not necessarily a space for political writing. It’s not not a space for it either. But we still try to keep it apolitical in a bid to focus on writing and rhetoric and, increasingly, our own lives. Inevitably, however, there’s going to be crossover. Today’s blurring of the apolitical lines is spurred on…
A little weird, a little wild
I had my friend Jean and three strangers all packed inside my beat-up Subaru and was driving somewhere out in the middle of nowhere on a dirt road in southern Arkansas. One of the guys shouted directions at me, struggling to be heard over the music and the manic conversation. Jean asked if I had…
On “The House of the Nightmare and Other Eerie Tales”
My grandmother and I never really got to talk books. She had a lasting legacy on my life in many other ways. She introduced me to coffee (mostly milk and sugar in a tiny “collectable” Arkansas mug), helped connect me to my Comanche heritage and was around for plenty of play dates. But we just…
Brown Sugar and Spice
Last week my friend and co-founder of this blog, Payton, texted me about relaunching the website. He emailed me a link so that I could sign in as an admin and I could claim my old writings that he had imported to the new site. Since he was the only admin at the time it…
A little writing about my Grandad and the music of John Prine
The first time I heard John Prine was while working at a used media store in Wichita, KS. Every month we were required to go through the mind numbingly boring task of taking inventory of everything in the store and solving any discrepancies. The one thing that made this job bearable was loading up the…
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The Barberry Writers 