Forgive me for the following moment of blatant self-promotion (as my fellow writers, artists and entertainers know, it goes with the territory). If you're looking for a last-minute gift idea for any gorehounds, or splatter fans, on your Christmas shopping list, give a thought to the recently published anthology, from HellBound Books, Madame Gray's Vault …
It’s Not Dark Yet…But It Will Be Soon
If I've quoted Ray Bradbury once, I've quoted this line from Something Wicked This Way Comes a thousand or more times: First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys. And it's not just rare for boys or girls or creatures of the night. A friend of mine said recently that Halloween is …
Charlie Watts 1941-2021
Charlie Watts, drummer of the Rolling Stones since 1963, passed away, at age 80, on Tuesday, August 24th. I am still sad and in shock. I discovered the Rolling Stones when I was thirteen-years-old while packed in a minivan, with my family, driving through Memphis on our the way to Branson, Missouri, for a summer …
Frying Fish With the Irons In the Fire
Over the next few weeks my posts are gonna be spottier and a little more sporadic than usual (not that I have any kind of set routine). Through my own machinations, I have become rather busy. I have a couple of larger projects in progress, one of which I, hopefully, will have finished by December. …
‘Had we but world enough and time…’
The title of this article is from Andrew Marvell's poem, To His Coy Mistress. It was published in 1681. I guess even in the 17th Century time seemed to rush by whether you were just living your life or waiting for your lady love to give you some attention. We still have the same amount …
The View From the Cherry Tree by Willo Davis Roberts
While attending Harris Middle School, I didn't spend a lot of time in its library. It wasn't a strange phase or anything, I just rarely found much of anything I wanted to read on its shelves when I did visit. Everything felt lame and aimed at children. By the time of grades six through eight …
Continue reading "The View From the Cherry Tree by Willo Davis Roberts"
Penrod by Booth Tarkington
Boyhood is the longest time in life for a boy.from Penrod Several years ago, several summers in fact, my brother and I (he a teenager, me near to being one) happened to see the midday movie on WZTV Channel 17, the premier local syndicated station in Nashville. The movie was On Moonlight Bay (1951). One of …
The Endless Summer of ’83
Officially, school ended for my son on May 21st. Much to the chagrin of his eight-year-old heart, I enrolled him in his school's summer learning camp (a four-week program, four days each week) to review material skimmed over, or omitted, due to Covid-19 closures and restrictions. He's had fun in the program, although he refuses …
Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey
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 …
Influences, Part Two: The Teen Years
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 …