Here is another roundup of the best reads, podcasts, internet people + projects, and anything else I’ve discovered the past month. This month is a special spooky edition! All of the amazing art in this post was done by my incredible talented sister Abby!
Subscribe to my blog (in the footer of this post) or Substack to get these roundups in your email once a month.
Here are the past Roundups: April, May, June, July, August, and September.
Podcast Recommendations
1.) Stephen King, The Kingcast
The Kingcast is a podcast I discovered this year, exclusively dedicated to the work of Stephen King. They typically invite a guest on to discuss a specific piece in the King canon and cover things like what first got the guest into King’s work.
In this episode, the Kingcast crew got to interview the man himself. They discuss his long career, adaptations, and horror as a genre. Also, for any Austin based folks, the Kingcast team recently held a panel discussion at Alamo Drafthouse’s Freakfest, to kick off the world premier of the new Stephen King documentary King on the Screen.
2.) Joe Hill, Eli Roth’s History of Horror Uncut
This is a delightful interview with the author Joe Hill. This one covers horror in both writing and film. Eli Roth is the director / writer of Hostel and many other horror films. And Joe Hill is the son of Stephen King, and a fantastic writer. See more on Joe Hill below!
3.) Scott Derrickson + C. Robert Cargill, Post Mortem with Mick Garris
Rounding out the trio of podcast recommendations is this wonderful conversation with the director and writers of the new Blumhouse adaptation of Joe Hill’s The Black Phone. You also know Scott’s or Cargill’s work if you’ve seen The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Sinister, or Doctor Strange.
Reading Recommendations
As always, you can keep up with what I am reading here. This month, all of my reading recommendations are meant to creep you out and get you in the mood for Halloween!
1.) The Specialist’s Hat – Kelly Link
A creeping short story full or eerie details that case a clear spooky mood. The story involves the archetypical haunted house and a pair of “sensitive” sisters who experience things not easily explained. I loved this story because it played with the reader’s expectations of horror, and leaves the right questions unanswered, which allows your imagination to fill in the blanks. After I finished this one, I immediately wanted to try and write my own version of it.
Hook: In the attic of the old house, two sisters find a hat that their babysitter says belongs to “the Specialist”, someone who can mimic the appearance and voice of anything you can imagine.
2.) The Lottery – Shirley Jackson
A classic short story that slowly reveals itself. When you reach the end, it’s too late. Shirley Jackson is the author of the novel The Haunting of Hill House, the basis of the fantastic Netflix adaptation many people may have seen.
Hook: Once a year, every year, the whole town gathers for the drawing of the lottery. Winning this one might not be so good though.
3.) Best New Horror – Joe Hill
This story opens Hill’s collection of stories Twentieth Century Ghosts. It is delightfully meta but more importantly truly creepy. It has that eerie quality some Borges stories have, where you feel while reading it that you are a part of it. I just found out that Scott Derrickson, who directed the recent adaptation of Hill’s The Black Phone, has also optioned this story for the screen.
Hook: An exhausted editor of a horror magazine is sent a story that got the editor of the first magazine to publish it fired after public outcry. After reading the disturbing story, the editor seeks out its elusive author. Things get terrifying from there.
4.) The Garden of Forking Paths – Jorge Luis Borges
A classic Borges story that rewards rereading. This one isn’t horror exactly, but the mood it creates means it belongs here. I just learned that it was his first story translated into English.
Hook: A spy attempts to communicate to Germany the essential information he has uncovered about the location of an upcoming airstrike. He is forced to flee and narrowly escapes, eventually taking refuge in the home of Doctor Albert, who happens to be intimately familiar with the life work of the spy’s great ancestor: a novel and a vast labyrinth.
5.) The Reaper’s Image – Stephen King
This is pleasantly quaint knowing what Stephen King went on to write, but that is what makes it so fun. This early-career short story is full of cob-web imagery and dusty attic spookiness.
Hook: a collector of strange things seeks out a hundred-years-old mirror with a horrifying legend about it.
6.) The One’s Who Walk Away From Omelas – Ursula K. Le Guin
While not strictly horror, the ideas behind this classic short story are quite unsettling. What are we willing to ignore in order to personally flourish? This story imagines an extreme answer to that question. I am reminded of Margaret Atwood’s observation that within every Dystopia is a small Utopia, and within every Utopia is a small Dystopia.
Hook: Welcome to the city of Omelas, a seemingly genuine Utopia with a terrible secret its citizens are made aware of on their eighteenth birthday.
7.) The Black Phone – Joe Hill
This short story is the source material for the latest film starring Ethan Hawke in the role of “the grabber”. If you haven’t seen that yet, definitely check it out this month. The short story is smaller in scope than the film, but packs a memorable punch of realistic terror.
Hook: A part time clown named Al is kidnapping young boys. In his basement where he takes them, there is an antique black phone, long since disconnected. When Al’s latest victim, Finney, finds himself trapped in the basement, the phone begins to ring.
That’s all for this month. You can subscribe to my blog here (in the footer of the page) or subscribe to my Substack to get these roundups in your email once a month. Happy Halloween!
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