“At times like this one feels, well, perhaps extinct animals should be left extinct….” I just read Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park for the first time, the 1990 novel that inspired the iconic Steven Spielberg film series. The film franchise, with its groundbreaking CGI dinosaurs and star-studded cast, has become so pervasive in the popular imagination it’s hard to imagine a time before T-Rex stalked the nightmares of multiple generations. But the source material is just as terrifying as the blockbuster films that came after. Jurassic Park draws on a long tradition of blending science fiction with horror to explore terrifying possibilities of the future and to warn about the dangerous consequences of misusing new technologies. Continue reading Jurassic Park and Sci-Fi Horror
Tag: horror
Review of Your Shadow Half Remains—More Pandemic Horror
Humans are not meant to live in total isolation. Many of us had just a small taste of this during the shutdowns in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. But Sunny Moraine takes social distancing to the extreme in their apocalyptic horror novella Your Shadow Half Remains, which came out last month. Continue reading Review of Your Shadow Half Remains—More Pandemic Horror
Review of Womb City—African Sci-Fi Horror
Would you give up your freedom to live in a world without crime? This is the basis for a futuristic Botswana in Tlotlo Tsamaase’s dystopian debut novel, Womb City, which came out earlier this year. With elements ranging from invasive microchips and AI-powered simulations to vengeful ghosts, this book straddles the line between sci-fi and horror, drawing deeply from the wells of both genres. Continue reading Review of Womb City—African Sci-Fi Horror
Review of I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me
The world of professional ballet can be cut-throat—literally. Jamison Shea’s debut YA horror novel, I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me, takes an unflinching look at ambitious young women in a highly competitive field and the hellish lengths to which they will go to achieve their dreams. If you like morally gray female characters who embrace their dark sides, you definitely don’t want to miss this book, which came out last summer. Continue reading Review of I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me
Review of Sunless Solstice—Christmas Ghost Stories
As my various posts over the years about Christmas ghost stories might suggest, I’m on a bit of a mission to bring this spooky seasonal activity back into fashion. But I’m not alone in my quest! The British Library has started publishing annual collections of haunting Christmas tales as part of their Tales of the Weird series. Sunless Solstice: Strange Christmas Tales for the Longest Nights, edited by Lucy Evans and Tanya Kirk, is the third such collection, released in December 2022. If you, like me, would like to start spending your Christmases telling scary stories around a fire, I cannot recommend these collections enough! Continue reading Review of Sunless Solstice—Christmas Ghost Stories
Review of Coffin Hill—Gothic Comics
“Wicked witch of Coffin Hill, buried in the woods and lives there still. Hide your face and close your eyes, if you see her you will die. Only the crows to hear you cry…” So goes the nursery rhyme at the heart of the Coffin Hill comics by Caitlin Kittredge, with art by Inaki Miranda and coloring by Eva de la Cruz. This comic series, published by Vertigo between 2013 and 2015, consists of twenty issues which have been collected in three trade volumes: Forest of the Night, Dark Endeavors, and Haunted Houses. With stunningly macabre artwork and a storyline that features black magic, bloody murders, and generational curses, this series is the perfect gateway into comics for any Gothic literature lovers. Continue reading Review of Coffin Hill—Gothic Comics
Review of Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror
Jordan Peele is one of my absolute favorite directors and I think his horror films are some of the cleverest and most thoughtful contributions to the horror genre in recent years. So when I saw his name on an anthology of short horror fiction, I knew I needed to pick it up. Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror, edited by Jordan Peele and John Joseph Adams, came out last month, right on the heels of another great horror anthology centering marginalized voices: Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology. Judging by the quality of tales in these two collections, this diversity of voices is definitely here to stay in the horror genre! Continue reading Review of Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror
#AScareADay Reading Challenge Reflections
I just spent the past month reading a scary story or poem for each day of October! This ambitious task was part of a reading challenge created by Dr. Sam Hirst, founder of Romancing the Gothic. I had such a great time last year participating in Sam’s inaugural #AGhostADay challenge, that I was thrilled when they announced they were doing a new challenge this October. While last year’s stories were mainly tales of revenants and hauntings, this year Sam broadened the focus to include as wide a variety of scary stories as possible. Subjects ranged from variations on classic vampires, werewolves, witches, and demons to more unique horrors like infectious fungi, primeval animals, and portals to other dimensions. You can see the full reading list of thirty-one stories for #AScareDay here. And check out the #AScareADay hashtag on (the platform formerly known as) Twitter or the #AScareADay feed on BlueSky to follow the discussion. Continue reading #AScareADay Reading Challenge Reflections
Review of Never Whistle at Night—Indiginous Horror
From “wendigos” to “Indian burial grounds,” the folklore and tragic history of North America’s indigenous populations has frequently been mined for inspiration and twisted to suit the purposes of horror authors writing outside of their own cultures. In recent years, however, we’ve seen a real rise in the number of indigenous voices within the horror scene telling their own stories. A new collection of short horror stories celebrates this surge of Native American writers: Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. This anthology, which contains twenty-six stories plus a foreword by Stephen Graham Jones, came out just last week, in plenty of time for spooky season. Continue reading Review of Never Whistle at Night—Indiginous Horror
Review of Silver Nitrate—Cursed Films
Don’t play with magic you don’t understand. You’d think this would be common sense by now, but there’s always some skeptic willing to treat mystic rituals like a game—to their own detriment. Montserrat and Tristán learn this lesson the hard way in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s latest horror novel Silver Nitrate, which came out last month. Continue reading Review of Silver Nitrate—Cursed Films