a free e-zine of horror art, poetry and microfiction
Familiar, by Jeremy C. Shipp, Ghoulish Press, 2024
This could best be described, I think, as cozy cosmic horror. I’m continually amazed by Jeremy C. Shipp’s imagination. Hard to review without spoilers, but if you find yourself transfixed by a desiccated eyeball in someone’s hand, you probably brought it on yourself.
To be honest, I was reluctant to start The Reformatory. I’d read so many good things about it, I was afraid it would fall short of its reputation. But Tananarive Due has never disappointed me yet. Characters to care about, in a suspenseful and heartbreaking story. Just to complicate things for the main characters, who already are dealing with angry ghosts, a psychopathic warden, and the Klan, they also have to manage well-meaning allies who don’t believe in spirits or who do believe in the fairness of the justice system. This book kept me up late at night turning pages.
Longlegs (2024), directed and written by Osgood Perkins.
Nicolas Cage gives the kind of high-amplitude performance you hire Nic Cage for. The movie is visually unsettling, and the script has intriguing elements. But the big twists are obvious ahead of time, and Longlegs doesn’t commit to its craziness. It tries to make sense, when it should embrace the nightmarish irrationality at its heart. If it did that, I might accept Carrie Anne’s odd dialect without wondering why she’s adding all those S’s to words. Entertaining enough to watch once, but not to rewatch.
Queer Little Nightmares: An Anthology of Monstrous Fiction and Poetry, edited by David Ly and Daniel Zomparelli; Arsenal Pulp Press, 3rd printing, 2024.
This is what small presses are for! Queer Little Nightmares is a collection of stories and poems for the monsters in all of us (especially the queer ones). Diverse in style and content, these works are both deliciously weird and grounded in emotional truth. Standouts for me include the stories “The Vetala’s Song” by Anuja Varghese and “Strange Case” by Eddy Boudel Tan, and the poems “Godzilla, Silhouette Against City” by Ryan Dzelzkalns and “Cryptid Cruising” by Avra Margariti. But they’re all worth reading.
Horror: A Literary History, edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes; The British Library, 2020.
This collection of essays surveys the horror genre in English and American literature from the 18th century to today. Sometimes the style is ridiculously academic, but the content is interesting throughout. Every chapter ends with a list of references and a “What to Read Next” section, making it a useful book to keep on hand.
This poem is in honor of David Lynch. Even though (or because) it’s written by a heteronym, I think it’s true to my own weirdness and dorkiness, and it was fun to write. I can’t think of a more fitting tribute.
Including a graphic version because the line breaks sometimes get messed up in online text.
Thanks for Meeting Me Here
In memory of David Lynch
A stone knife in a display case in a chilly museum,
a clearing in a forest of marble columns.
A clarity of itself surrounds the knife, invisibly.
Visitors see a blur of other. Outside, the rain too
has fallen a long way from home.
Grass, crabgrass, and purslane drink.
Soggy worms churn skyward.
The museum is a granite shrug.
The knife is the question.
The ripples that copulate across a puddle are another,
the guard’s blue shoes a third.
Clouds crumble to drizzle, dissolve a log to dirt.
Questions have no answers, only translations.
In the courtyard cafe
sits a boy with earbuds and a lazy eye. That acned head
will never be preserved in a glass case in a cold gallery
where people come on a Saturday afternoon for his face to show another,
then sit at round metal tables
questioning kombucha, quizzing perrier, interpreting wine.
What’s displayed never is translated. That’s the reason for the glass.
The visitor’s complicit in every case.
The owls around the museum, drowsing for moonlight—
Let’s try a thought experiment.
Let’s pretend they are owls. They’re smart enough.
Let’s consider over coffee how knife and owl are different
and we’re not.
— Basil Cartryte
2025-01-16
Recently watched: Poison for the Fairies (Veneno para las hadas), 1984; Spanish with English subtitles.
Horror in the same way that Heavenly Creatures is horror, and it reminds me a little of that movie, without the overt sexuality.
Orphaned Veronica lives with her invalid grandmother and a caretaker. Flavia, the daughter of rich, intellectually sophisticated parents, is a new arrival at Veronica’s school. Veronica pretends to be (or perhaps believes she is) a witch. Helped along by a coincidence or two, she convinces Flavia, and proceeds to manipulate her in increasingly sinister ways.
The main characters are children, and while adults play significant roles in the story, we rarely see their faces: they’re shown from behind, or from below the neck, or as silhouettes in the dark. The few exceptions are for effect, as when we see the face of Flavia’s piano teacher only after she dies.
I don’t know that I’d call this movie scary, but it is interesting, and worth a watch.
What’s going on with tiny frights?
I’ve decided to turn it into my personal horror blog. Posts will probably be infrequent, and I expect they’ll mostly be about what I’m reading, viewing, or listening to in the horror genre (or horror-adjacent material). I might occasionally post original writings or art. Zine issues and podcast episodes will remain available.
On Saturday, January 18th, I will be shutting down the tiny frights Facebook and Instagram accounts.
tiny frights is ceasing publication, and there will be no new podcast episodes.
Much gratitude to everyone who’s been a part of tiny frights. As much as possible, be safe and be well.
(I plan to keep past issues and podcast episodes online.)
tiny frights vol. 3 no. 2, Halloween 2024, is live! Read or download it from one of the following links:
As you might know, both The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times have been blocked by their billionaire owners from endorsing Kamala Harris for president.
tiny frights doesn’t have billionaire owners, or paying subscribers, or advertisers, or a huge following, so really, we’ve got nothing to lose.
So at the risk of nothing, and in the realization that probably nobody cares, tiny frights officially endorses the Harris/Walz ticket.
