I'm off to the parades in a little while (please, God, don't let it rain on poor Oshun again), but in the meantime, if your life has been bereft of goofy horror-writer lulz lately, there are some fine ones to be found here.

I managed to sneak in a couple of hours online while Chris was having lunch with a friend today (his computer died a few months ago, and since he left the Delachaise, he's constantly doing business on mine). I'm still not completely caught up with my friends list, but I'm on page "skip 675." I have enjoyed getting reacquainted with all of you.

Exchange from horror_novels (yes, I belong to this community; I didn't just go trolling for mentions of my name):

COMMENTER: I was a Poppy fan but her works seems to get way too predictably homosexual. It's almost like she's compelled to put in a gay male in every story.

ME: I know just what you mean. I love Stephen King, but it's almost like he feels compelled to put straight people in everything he writes.

Seriously, do people think about the shit they say? 99% of fiction and all other entertainment celebrates heterosexuality (not to say "shoves heterosexuality in your face," though that's how I often feel), but when an author writes mainly or exclusively about gay characters, he's repetitive. Or "predictable," if you like. I suppose I'm predictable in pointing this out too, but substitute "black" for "gay" in that comment and see how it sounds. For that matter, a vast percentage of fiction is about white people, and when a black writer tries to move outside the "African-American fiction" niche, he's frequently told that his book won't sell because "black people don't read horror [or whatever genre he's working in], and white readers won't read about black characters."

Whether my work is any good or not is ultimately up to the reader, but I do not give a shit for the reader's default expectations.

For my own part, I've been reading a lot of William Goldman. Though I fell in love with The Princess Bride when I was 13 (Inigo Montoya was my secret boyfriend), in general I have tended to write Goldman off as too slick. While I still find some of his verbal tics annoying, he's witty and good at dialogue and has a gift for creating compelling characters; whether you like them or not, it's hard to close the book without learning what happens to them. I will, however, say unabashedly that his early novels are pretty terrible. They also tackle Weighty Modern Issues (well, they were modern in the mid-sixties, anyway) such as Genuinely Good-Hearted Girls Sleeping With Married Men and Whether The Homosexual Can Lead A Truly Happy Life. Some (Boys and Girls Together) are compulsively readable in spite of themselves. Some (Your Turn to Curtsy, My Turn to Bow) are not. He's a fine example of a hard-working writer who may never be great, but who improved his work tremendously by writing a lot. (I even enjoyed Tinsel, a novel of Hollywood intrigue and scandal, and I hate everything about the movie business.)

Our oldest cat Boo, aged 14, hasn't been looking or acting well and is going to the vet tomorrow. This will probably mean some expensive bloodwork at the very least, so I finally got off my ass and put up some new eBay auctions: a first edition of Lost Souls with a pencil sketch of Ghost (my first-ever portrait of him, as best I can recall); a first edition of Drawing Blood; a copy of The Seed of Lost Souls; and a copy of the ever-rarer Wrong Things.

Another arrival in today's mail was a package from Wildside Press containing three recent issues of Weird Tales. I don't know why they came -- perhaps John Betancourt in yon faraway tower still spares a stray, fond thought for me -- but I don't mind; they look to contain some pretty good reading, and there aren't nearly as many Darrell Schweitzer stories as I remembered from the '90s.

HOWEVER.

One of the copies is their 85th Anniversary Edition (congratulations). In honor of this, Weird Tales has compiled a list of "The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years." The nominees were collected, apparently, via a readers' poll.

Making such a list is a thankless task, and I can only add to the thanklessness.

I can say very honestly, whether you choose to believe me or not, that I would neither want not expect to be on such a list. I would probably find it vaguely irritating if I were on the list. Personal noninclusion is not a problem.

BUT.

Any such list that includes Tanith Lee, Cirque du Soleil, and motherfuckin' Björk, but does not include Ramsey Campbell, is a sad and scurrilous joke.

And that's all I have to say about that.

I've been in the mood for horror lately. I find that I'm not even averse to the idea of writing it again at some point, though I know exactly what kind of stupid shit I'd have to listen to if I did ("Poppy Z. Brite has returned to her roots!!!"; "I knew she'd find her TRUE CALLING again"; "She expects us to welcome her back after she dumped on the genre? [no I didn't -- PZB] Fuck her!"; etc.), and publishing a horror novel at this point would probably make it even harder to market any future Liquor novels, which I do hope to complete someday.

I thought for a while that I was done with writing horror, because I believed -- perhaps foolishly -- that I'd written out most of my personal darkness. Obviously, post-2005, that is no longer the case. I don't think I'd ever write a "Katrina horror novel" (or even read one), but before August '05, I had grown to be a fairly happy (if somewhat cranky) person. Now, obviously, I have a whole new supply of shit to work through. I don't think this can only be done via the horror genre, and I'm not even sure that's what I would want from a temporary return to horror; I kind of miss the fun of it, the over-the-topness. I started writing the Liquor books because horror had stopped being fun for me, but now the Liquor books are all bound up with what happens to the characters and the city next, and I'm not sure I want to go there yet.

Even if I did write another horror novel, it would probably disappoint a lot of my old-school fans because it definitely wouldn't be my old brand of "Goth horror." I know approximately as much about Goth culture these days as I do about quantum physics, and I believe it is both disrespectful and hopelessly lame to try to write about a subculture that isn't an important part of your life. But as a friend pointed out after reading an earlier version of this entry (I've just edited it to add this paragraph), "Whether you do or you don't, you'll be doing it for you, so fuck everyone else's opinion ;)" I might phrase it a little more politely, but he is correct that I'd primarily be writing for myself, as has been the case with all my fiction in any genre.

I'm thinking most of this out as I write, so it probably doesn't make much sense. What I really meant to write about was the contemporary horror I've been reading, most of which has come from the drugstore racks. I'm happy to see horror in the drugstore racks again; they seemed to be almost devoid of it for a few years there. And I thoroughly enjoyed Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box, Scott Smith's The Ruins, and Brian Keene's The Rising. But this caveat obviously needs to emptor a bit more assiduously. Last night I started reading a horror novel I'd bought a few days ago. I won't name it or its author, since I didn't read enough of it to decide whether it was good or bad. It began with -- I kid you not -- nine pages of blurbs, most of them by the kind of authors whose names you only know from horror message boards, if at all. Next I discovered that it was the third book in a trilogy, which always annoys me when it isn't mentioned either on the cover or in the back-cover copy; if I'm interested enough to read a trilogy, I'd prefer to read it in order. And despite the author's note claiming that the books could be read as stand-alones, I realized twenty pages in that I had no idea what was going on and did not care enough to keep going back and checking the author's detailed summary of the first two novels. On top of all that, it turned out to be a werewolf story, which also wasn't mentioned in the back cover copy. I don't dislike werewolves as much as I do vampires, but it's unlikely that I would willingly choose to read about them.

Not all of this is the author's fault, of course. I know as well as anyone how little control authors sometimes have over how their books are marketed. (Despite the fact that Liquor reviewed and sold extremely well, the Three Rivers publicity department seemed at great pains to hide the fact that Prime and Soul Kitchen had any connection to it.) And, as I say, caveat emptor. However, even if I was too lazy to flip through the book and notice all these unappealing qualities before paying my $6.99, I should have been warned off by three bone-chilling words on the cover: STOKER AWARD WINNER. I don't mean that St(r)oker winners automatically suck; some fine books have won the award. However, I've seen enough Strokers go to crappy books by tirelessly campaigning authors (no reflection on this particular book; I know nothing at all about the author) that I cannot consider it any sort of valid recommendation. I know the current HWA crew really wants to change that perception, and I wish them luck, but I gotta say it hasn't happened for me yet.

Anyway, yeah. Horror. It's still cool. Selah.

If you want help from me, you have to catch me during those rare moments when I'm feeling warmhearted and socially conscious. Today I took the battery out of my doorbell and am relaxing in my house ignoring the various knocks on the door. I've learned that I have to do this every couple of weeks or I will grow to hate my neighbors. I wish life wasn't so difficult for them and I try to make it better when I can, but I cannot be the neighborhood ATM or taxi service. Also, fairly bad sciatica today.

Rereading The Circus Fire by Stewart O'Nan. That's all I am going to do today, read and maybe put up some eBay auctions later. I've added a novel to my Dine'n'Die list, The Long Lost by Ramsey Campbell. I thought I'd read all of Ramsey's work, but I missed this when it saw U.S. publication in 1994 -- as I wrote to Ramsey last night, I was up to plenty of no good at the time, importing Chinese-Canadian slaveboys, meeting Courtney Love, and the like. Anyway, it's a remarkable novel that contains possibly the single most chilling scene I've ever read, which unfortunately I cannot tell you about since it would be a major spoiler (though whoever wrote the Tor dustjacket copy doesn't seem to have worried about this -- if you get the otherwise-very-nice U.S. hardcover edition, read the book, not the jacket copy).

The Death By Food list goes well. I'm going to limit it to one story per author. Here are the possibilities I have so far:

- Roald Dahl, "Lamb to the Slaughter"

- V.C. Andrews, Flowers in the Attic (not a good book, but an oddly compelling one, and one that is important to me because when I encountered it at age 12 or 13, it was the first thing I'd ever read that made me realize, "I can already write better than this." An important moment in the life of every young writer.)

- Michael McDowell, The Amulet

- Stephen King, Thinner or "Gray Matter" (I considered "Survivor Type," but decided it wasn't the food that killed him so much as the serving technique)

- Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

- Alan Moore, From Hell (at least one of the prostitutes is already dead from Dr. Gull's laudanum-painted grapes by the time he mutilates her)

- William Hjortsberg, Falling Angel (maybe -- I need to drag out my copy and see if the death-by-gumbo scene is in the novel as well as the stupid-but-undeniably-visually-appealing movie version, Angel Heart)

- Ramsey Campbell, "The Trick" or "The Enchanted Fruit"

... as well as several reader suggestions that I've not read or haven't read in so long that I barely remember them, but will try to track down. Sounds like I've got some good reading ahead of me.

My friend Henry just sent me an e-mail I'd prefer not to think too much about, but cannot seem to shake from my mind -- something about a live gatorlet in ovo in Jacques-Imo's alligator cheesecake. To me, it already tastes as if there might be one in there. He also offered an excellent alternate last line to the Kay limerick: "And she died destitute yesterday."

Thanks to a brilliant suggestion made by prime_liquor member and self-proclaimed "English drunken bum" sistercarrion, I now have my horror list idea: Horror Stories Containing Deaths By Food Items, e.g. Roald Dahl's "Lamb to the Slaughter" or Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle. All suggestions are welcomed, but I only want short stories and novels, not movies, TV shows, or any other non-written medium.

Ezekiel did his first shed last night. Eye scales, check. The skin came off in three pieces, but wasn't flaky enough to make me worry about his humidity levels. I realize this paragraph may make absolutely no sense to readers who aren't reptile fans. Ssssssssssssssssso ssssssssssssssssorry. I've tried to take some pictures of him, but my digital camera simply isn't up to the close-up task; all I get is a long shiny blur. I'd love a new camera, but cannot currently justify the expense what with the various large family medical bills that have come floating along on an alarmingly regular basis lately.

Antediluvian Tales -- if not my last book ever, then my last one for some time -- goes to the printer next month. I've just seen a very nice Publishers Weekly review, but am not sure whether I'm allowed to quote it yet. At any rate, I will mention that it favorably singles out "The Feast of St. Rosalie," which makes me happy since I think it is one of my three or four best short stories and no one has ever previously paid it the slightest bit of attention (which is what you get for publishing things as limited-edition chapbooks, I guess).

I've been invited to contribute to The Horror Book of Lists, co-edited by Del Howison of Dark Delicacies Books in Burbank, one of my favorite bookstores owned by two of my favorite people. The lists are supposed to be clever things like "The Top Ten Horror Films Where the Black Guy Lives" or "The Top Five Strangest Historical Halloween Traditions." I'd like to do one, but so far I've not been able to think of a single idea; I can't think of a time when my imagination has felt less fertile. I made myself a Post-It note about the invitation so it will be in my face every time I use the computer and I'll have to either think of something or regretfully beg off soon.

Apropos of nothing much, but amusing: Occasionally someone still accuses me of being a "crazy cat person," as if expecting me to defend myself. It's like walking up to RuPaul and saying, "Fag!", or calling Hunter S. Thompson a druggie and expecting him to sue you for slander. "Yes, and? Your point is?" I don't know how well I fit the stereotype -- I'm not single or lonely, I don't knit, and I sure as hell don't have a fortune squirreled away in my mattress (though if I did, I might well leave it to the SPCA when I died) -- but surely I have enough cats to make that irrelevant.

I've been reading more horror than usual lately, which I like -- not that I like everything I read, but it's nice to be back in touch with the genre after feeling estranged from it for a while. I still don't feel any urge to write more than the odd horror short story here and there, but what I want to read doesn't always have a lot to do with what I write; I'm reading almost purely for entertainment these days. Last night I finished my contributor's copy of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16 (not the same copy I'm selling signed on eBay; that one is unread and pristine). Standouts for me included stories by Neil Gaiman (his two contributions bracket the book, one lighthearted and funny, the other so disturbing I had to start a new book before going to sleep), Ramsey Campbell (always), Christa Faust, Kelly Link, and Jay Russell. Tim Lebbon's piece was beautifully written, but suffered from its Casper Milquetoast narrator, its biting-on-tinfoil antagonist, and one of those vague endings that make you think maybe you're not smart enough to figure out what the author meant to happen. My absolute favorite piece in the book was Lisa Tuttle's "My Death." I don't know or care if this long story qualifies as "feminist horror," but it was an utterly absorbing and intriguing tale.

Please God, don't let these long johns have had this huge hole right over the buttcrack when I wore them to the grocery a few weeks ago. I knew I should have listened to Chris when he told me they were obviously underwear and weren't fit for the public.

I am jonesing mightily for daube glacé. The hell of it is that I only knew about it for a month or so before the storm, and now you can't get it. I mean, obviously I've known about daube glacé for much longer than that, but I didn't know they made it at Langenstein's or how addictively delicious their version was. My friend Kenneth got me hooked on it when I took him to a doctor's appointment one day and we stopped by Langenstein's afterward. That was in July, and I think I had already eaten six or eight packages by late August. Now the Langenstein's people say the lady who makes it isn't coming back until at least March, maybe longer. I've looked at a couple of recipes, but I think they are beyond my culinary capabilities, and Chris, the selfish, puling underwear-declarer, refuses to even attempt it. Tonight I wrote a horrible kitchen accident involving daube glacé into Waiting For Bobby Hebert. I didn't even realize I was going to do it; I was just frustrated.

I'm a little perturbed, though not entirely surprised, by the fact that (judging from the first 30-odd pages) this novella seems to be at least in part a story about how Rickey rubs people the wrong way. Because it appears to take place in a slightly different universe from the rest of the Liquor stories, I'm not at all sure whether he has undergone the same process of honing and growth he did in Soul Kitchen. Time will tell, I suppose.

Today's mail brought my contributor's copies of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, which reprints "The Devil of Delery Street." For my money, Stephen Jones' anthologies are the only best-horror books currently worth reading, though I do wish he'd stop doing the year-end roundups if they're going to be so incredibly slapdash. I'm in a position to know that "Caitlín R. Kiernan's novel Murder of Angels was a haunted house novel set in Birmingham, Alabama, in which schizophrenic musician Niki Ky heard her dead lover calling to her from another world" and "Poppy Z. Brite and Christa Faust's Triads was a fix-up novel that involved two Asian boys and a vengeful ghost" are characterizations of these books so inaccurate as to verge on the bizarre, and that "The Feast of St. Rosalie" is neither horror nor a novella; it makes me wonder how many weird-ass mistakes are in here that I don't know about. Also, the mere fact that there exists a book called Swamp Witch Piquante and Scream Queen Bisque (Over A Bed of Rice) makes me want to rip my eyeballs out of my head, burn them, grind the ashes into submolecular particles, and shoot the whole mess off to that new planet beyond Pluto. No big deal, though, as most readers probably just skim these roundup deals or ignore them entirely, and the stories themselves are almost always good.

Nick Kaufmann neatly sums up why many horror readers call anything written in a non-meat-and-potatoes style "pretentious," but can't explain just what the author is pretending: they don't really mean "pretentious," they mean "uppity."

I think I've heard the work of every horror or horror-related author I've ever admired described as "pretentious" at one time or another, but the word never made sense to me. What was the author supposed to be pretending? Now it all comes clear: it's shorthand for a writer rising above his or her assigned station, which, if you write horror, is presumably the station where the short bus stops.

I'm not as appalled by the "I just read for entertainment" crowd as some are. I do too, sometimes. I understand the concept of wanting to read something comforting that doesn't make you work terribly hard. However, I don't understand why, for such a large percentage of readers, "entertaining" seems to mean "big, dumb, splashy, and formulaic."

Nobody ever sent me any Vegemite, or if they did, I didn't get it, and now the big jar I bought in Cairns is empty.

Jamie Langolf of Insidious Reflections, who once asked me in an interview what Rickey and G-man would think of Brad and Angelina, has written a review of The Devil You Know stating, "Poppy Z. Brite has been known to state (sometimes nearly militantly) that she is NOT a horror writer, that she no longer has any interest in writing horror fiction." It's not a bad review -- you can read it on the book's Barnes & Noble page if you want to -- but I doubt I need to tell you that I did not say this. After going through such massive changes with my career over the past several years, why would I be stupid enough to make an absolute statement -- militant or otherwise -- about what I will or won't write in the future? I have said I don't foresee writing any more horror novels, but that's about as "militant" as I've gotten. Sometimes I think horror people are looking for a reason to be pissed off at me (even as they still put my name on the cover of their magazines to publicize said interview), and this depresses the hell out of me. And the fact that "Sometimes I think horror people are looking for a reason to be pissed off at me" sounds like one of the statements a paranoiac would check off as "true" on a personality inventory test depresses me even more.

Dispatches from Tanganyika was selected as Author Blog of the Week at Horror Reader, a "relatively new site devoted to horror fiction (past, present, and future)." So all you "Oh, don't call her a horror writer" people can suck my left one.

Somewhat better. I think Chris Rose and I are devolving in much the same manner, though. I haven't lectured anyone on littering yet, but most of the time I have absolutely no clue whether I'm behaving appropriately. Not that I was ever all that great at it, but I feel as if I've lost all my gauges. I'm not sure if it would be a good idea or a terrible one for us to go out drinking together.

As well, the Times-Picayune ran a nice obituary for Mr. Joe Casamento today. I didn't realize he had been born above Casamento's and lived his entire life in that spot. If ever anyone shouldn't have been displaced by that damnable storm, it was Mr. Joe.

Got a cool e-mail from Angie M, which I hope it's OK to reprint here -- I'm a little gun-shy about quoting people in the wake of accidentally causing someone to change their entire journal name (well, I don't know if I was the only cause, but I know my actions didn't help and it made me feel awful. Still, for the record, if you e-mail me about something regarding the blog and/or my work, I do reserve the right to quote it here unless you specifically ask me not to. And if you're unpleasant -- though hardly anyone ever is -- I might do it anyway). This one's about my newish Subterranean Press chapbook, Crown of Thorns:

Dear Doc,

I care about your NBA talk, too. Keep an eye on the Bucks this year!

Also, I think I'm one of those people who didn't really understand "Crown of Thorns." If you care to give me a hint that'd be neat, because I was intrigued by the story.

I have crushes on Steve Nash and Rasheed Wallace.

Love,
Angie

I replied:

Angie, thanks for caring. Steve Nash is hot, I admit it, except occasionally when he looks like an alien.

I'm afraid I am not much for explaining my work, giving hints, etc. If the story didn't work for you, no worries -- I hope there will be others that do. Alternately, you could join one of my LJ communities and start a discussion about it -- people actually talking about my work on those things would be quite a novelty!

PZB

And then Angie wrote back:

I couldn't find it again, but I think you mentioned in your journal (which I love to read btw) that you hoped people would like "Crown of Thorns" but you didn't think many people would actually 'get' it. I'm paraphrasing there, or maybe I made it all up. But even if I don't know what your intentions were with it, it definitely worked for me in my own way (and most importantly, I guess). I was just curious.

Thanks for the reply - it made my day. No need to reply to this one, I know you're busy!

I bet Steve Nash and Sam Cassell came from the same pod.

Angie

POD!!! I love it! I bet they did. (And by the way, I think Sheed is pretty hot too.)

The reason I worried that many readers wouldn't "get" Crown of Thorns wasn't because I felt I'd been particularly mysterious, deep, or oblique with it, but because only two of my five or six initial readers seemed unmystified by it, and they were both writers who have on occasion been accused of crypticism (crypticness?) in their own work. Perhaps this means I should have shelved the story, but I felt I'd done what I wanted to do with it and I just didn't feel like sticking it in the filing cabinet. (Besides, then I wouldn't be able to truthfully say no when those little horror magazines come sniffing around saying, "We can't pay much, but we thought you might have some old work you'd never placed," as if I'm just going to say, "SURE!!! HERE YOU GO! Take this ancient piece of crap from my files for free!" In truth, I did do that once, with the late, unlamented online zine The Spook, and the editor thanked me by stiffing me for a piece I did not intend to give him for free.)

Anyway, the thing is, I don't mean to sound all divaesque by saying "I'm not much for explaining my work, giving hints, etc" -- I simply don't have any clue how to do it. The only way I have of "explaining" the work is by writing the work. If it's not in there, then I didn't know how to say it. There's no answer key I'm holding back -- "Dr. Brite's stepping on the gourd symbolized X." I will say that Crown of Thorns felt like a very intuitive story for me, one I was very much feeling rather than thinking my way through, and if your intuition doesn't work the same way mine does, then the story might not make sense to you. It's cool. Give it some more thought, and if it still doesn't make sense, blame it on me, not yourself. I don't accept that the writer has many "responsibilities" other than to do the best work he's capable of, but he is undeniably responsible for making himself clear, and I may not have done that in Crown of Thorns.

Or maybe I just don't know how to write horror anymore, and that's OK too. I know I went on and on the other day about how you can call me a horror writer when I'm writing horror, but in truth, I suspect I am pretty much done working in the genre, though I certainly wouldn't resist a horror tale if it grabbed me by the throat and said, "Write me!"

It's nice to be mentioned in a review by a cool horror chick like Staci Layne Wilson. It's not so nice to see yet another snide remark about "don't call her a 'horror writer,' please."

You know what? You can call me a horror writer. Just do it when I'm writing horror, OK? When you're reading Crown of Thorns or Lost Souls or Exquisite Corpse or Wormwood -- and please note that one of these titles was written within the past year -- you can call me a horror writer as many times as you like. When you're reading Prime or Soul Kitchen or "The Working Slob's Prayer" (the story in the anthology reviewed by Wilson), it would be kind of stupid to call me one, because I'm obviously not being one. I really wish we didn't have to keep going over this again and again, class, but it's evident that some of you still think I believe "horror" is a dirty word and will attempt at every opportunity to deny that I ever wrote any, so we will continue to review the material.

The other night Chris and I were back at my mom's house (we got slightly hooked on West Wing while we were there, and drove back to see the big Vinick/Santos debate) and I caught the end of a 60 Minutes interview with Neil Armstrong. He said, "No, it doesn't bother me that people will always think of me as 'the first man who walked on the moon,' but you know, I'm doing other stuff now. A person wants to be known for his whole ledger." I can't say I identified with this, exactly, since I've never done anything as huge or important as walking on the moon, but I kinda knew what he meant, and I loved his use of the word "ledger." A person keeps that ledger his whole life. It kind of sucks if you're on page 400 and people still think you're the person back on page 23 -- or, worse, if they say, "23 was the best page ever! You should write it again!" I don't get anywhere near as much of that as people seem to think I do -- the main reason I get asked about it in interviews and such is because I ranted about it so much in the first couple of years I was keeping this blog. Even so, the ledger does exist and you like to think that people will stay up to date with it. Your feet might not have touched the moon in 35 years, but then again, there might be places a lot more interesting than the moon.

You know, if truth be told, I'm not even sure horror is the best genre in which to explore one's inner darkness. No, that's not quite what I mean: potentially it is, or at least it's one of them. The best horror fiction absolutely does plumb the darkest, weirdest parts of its author's psyche, and it touches unexplored parts of the reader's psyche too. However, I think there's a great deal of horror fiction that doesn't honestly explore much darkness at all. This may be changing with the emergence of several talented and freaky young writers, but in my day (sonny), horror was mostly a very conservative genre. Even the so-called splatterpunks were pretty conservative at their core, with the exception of David J. Schow, who only coined the term as a joke anyway. There were (and possibly still are -- I confess I don't read a lot of new horror) a great many stories about nice people who were menaced by an Evil Force from Beyond and eventually, predictably vanquished it. There were a great many stories about some guy who picked up a chick in a bar and she turned out to be a vampire/serial killer/owner of a vagina dentata/fill in Scary Girly Thing of your choice, and killed him. There were a great many stories about sexy vampires, some of whom were in rock bands or dressed like they were. Plenty of people enjoyed reading these books, and I don't suggest that they shouldn't have been published or that they were all garbage, but I don't particularly see that many of them plumbed any real darkness, inner or outer. A lot of them simply did the literary equivalent of popping out at the reader and hollering "Boo!", which is fine, but ultimately: so what? There's a hell of a lot more "inner darkness" to be found in Carson McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter or Graham Greene's The Quiet American than in most of what you'll find on the Barnes & Noble horror shelf.

Hell, in my day, plenty of "hardcore horror fans" couldn't even deal with gay characters who weren't messily killed off by page 100.

And about that idea that I'm somehow betraying my city if I don't write a horror novel about the hurricane: After 9/11, I recall a spate of horror stories set on the airplanes, etc, and many of them were prefaced with unbearably pompous authorial comments like, "I was hesitant to publish this, but people told me it NEEDED TO BE PUBLISHED OR THE TERRORISTS HAD WON!!!" Yeah, you're really getting all up in Bin Laden's face with your story in a small-press horror zine. I don't want to come off like this if and when I write about the hurricane, but again, I don't see how I can avoid it. However, again, it won't be horror and it will be a Liquor novel. I want to see how the New Orleans restaurant community comes back from this, and I want to write about it. I don't expect it to be easy -- I might even have to PLUMB MY INNER DARKNESS -- but I do intend to do it.