Yesterday, I got to explain to a very nice (and probably very normal lady) on the phone that I needed a hotel room for the last weekend of the month because I was attending the Outer Dark Symposium on the Greater Weird. So that was fun. It also segues nicely into my announcing that I will be a guest at the Outer Dark Symposium on the Greater Weird, which is happening in Atlanta on Saturday, March 25!

If you’re interested in attending or just supporting the event, there’s an IndieGoGo currently in its final days, where you can also snag some cool stuff, such as a signed, personalized copy of The Cult of Headless Men along with some other fine, weird chapbooks via the (still available, for a limited time) Dunhams Weird pledge package!

That doesn’t provide a particularly good segue into my next topic, but whatever, I’m headed there anyway! Recently (for values of “recently” that include “back in October”) my story “Blackstone: A Hollywood Gothic” appeared in The Madness of Dr. Caligari, edited by Joe Pulver and from the fine folks of Fedogan & Bremer. It’s a story I’m happy with, and a publication that I’m particularly proud of, not just because it’s my first time working with Joe and F&B, but because The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a hugely influential and important movie for me, and one that I’m extremely grateful to get to play around with.

For those who’ve read my previous stories, the idea that the aesthetics of silent horror films play a big role in my work likely isn’t surprising, and probably no single silent film had a bigger impact than Caligari, with the possible exception of Murnau’s Faust. However, my story eschews the silent film milieu somewhat to instead tell the behind-the-scenes story of the production of a 1940s Poverty Row flick called The Corpse Walks because, to quote my narrator, “on Poverty Row in those days pretty much everything either walked or creeped, from monsters to gorillas to killers to cats to, in our case, corpses.”

I haven’t gotten a chance to read the rest of the tales in the book yet, but it’s full of amazing names in the field, and with such a rich, surreal, and classically weird source of inspiration to draw from, it’s hard to think that The Madness of Dr. Caligari isn’t full-to-bursting with winners. Copies are still available, so snag one today! And if you’re in the Atlanta area on the 25th, come on down to the Symposium to hear me and a bunch of smarter people talk about Something (or things) Weird!