the words and worlds of John Robinson
Have you ever been struck by a completely random thought? Just in the middle of the day a thirty-odd-year-old memory pops in your head because you hear or see something? It happens all the time to each of us and it happened to me not so long ago. In one of the hallways where I …
The first novel of modern mainstream adult fiction I ever read was Stephen King's Cujo. I was eleven years old and my mother bought it for me on the last day of the fifth grade. It was a paperback and the cover was red. Everything before Cujo was comic books, Poe, Irving, Mary Shelley, Robert …
I knew I wanted to write in July of 1987. I didn’t know it consciously at the time-- it took a while for me to really catch on to what my brain was doing. I was ten-years-old and I was at the Capri Twin Theater to see RoboCop. It was probably too intense and graphically …
“Who wants a library full of books you've already read?”-- Harlan Ellison, Angry Candy Not so long ago, I bought a new bookcase. We needed one-- between my son and I (mainly me) our books were overflowing the available shelf space. I bought a nine-cube thing that more than suited our needs. With it, and …
Last weekend, Sunday morning to be exact, I woke early. It was my day off from work, my son was with his mom for the weekend and, being left alone to my own devices, I felt like being lazy. I didn't really want to write (I know, it's a cardinal sin) and I was not …
I've made it a point with Curio Macabre to only talk about things I like: the artists who have inspired me and those works which have influenced me, no matter how small the degree. I don't want to spend time talking about things I don't like-- life's too short for that kind of stuff. I …
Does Ira Levin get enough credit? Not just as a horror/thriller writer, but as a great writer overall? Think about it, when was the last time someone said, "Oh, I really love, or like, Ira Levin and his work," in reference to being asked their favorite authors or novels? When was the last time he …
On a routine morning, a man reads the front page of the newspaper and is reminded of his time as a student, eight years previously, at New Sharon Teachers' College. Those were the days when a strawberry spring descended before a severe cold snap afflicted the region. It brought with it thick nights of fog, …
I’ve never been scared by an Easter themed, or Easter set, horror movie. Honestly, I’ve not seen a good one, or one which was even remotely interesting, other than Critters 2: The Main Course (it’s amusing). Most have been played for laughs and are bottom-of-the-barrel, no budget affairs. The one movie that did scare the …
I've been reading quite a few short stories lately. One of the more interesting, and entertaining, ones I read was Annie Proulx's "The Blood Bay" from her 1999 collection, Close Range: Wyoming Stories. Proulx is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Shipping News, and for "Brokeback Mountain", which can be found in Close …
