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Collecting 14 short stories from the most enigmatic, strange and absurd mangakas’, “Comics Underground Japan” offers a brief look at some of the most diverse and unique talent the country has to offer. Featuring creators such as Ebisu Yoshikazu (“The Pits of Hell“), Suehiro Marou (“The Laughing Vampire“) and Kazuichi Hanawa (“The Early Years“) the anthology acts as an all star collection embodying the punk rock spirit of the independent creators.

“Comics Underground Japan” acts to showcase a diverse group of talent, both well known in the west such as Hideshi Hino and Suehiro Marou and more obscure creators such as Muddy Wehara and Carol Shimoda. While each creator’s work is notably distinct, the collection does tie the creators together in various ways. Notably, many of these artists came to prominence in the cult publication “Garo” which showcased alternative talent. As a result, the collection conveys honor...

Edited by Hans-Åke Lilja, Shining in the Dark: Celebrating Twenty Years of Lilja's Library is exclusive to Cemetery Dance Publications and will feature a Stephen King story that hasn't been released since 1981. We also have updated release details for The Similars, the final wave of films announced at Monster Fest 2016, six photos / details for The Orphanage video game, and a new trailer for Gremlin.

Cemetery Dance Publications' Shining in the Dark Anthology: From Cemetery Dance: "Shining In the Dark: Celebrating Twenty Years of Lilja's Library edited by Hans-Åke Lilja.

About the Book:

Hans-Ake Lilja, the founder of Lilja's Library, has compiled a brand new anthology of horror stories to help celebrate twenty years of running the #1 Stephen King news website on the web!

This anthology includes both original stories like the brand new novella by John Ajvide Lindqvist (Let the Right One In) very rare reprints like "The Blue Air...

It’s been too long, far too long, since we last delved deep into the world of American Vampire. We’ve been placated, sure. The excellent compilation volume, The American Vampire Anthology, was a perfectly terrific stopgap, with a wraparound story catching us up on what’s happening with badass vampire Skinner Sweet. But since writer Scott Snyder and artist Rafael Albuquerque’s long hiatus from the title (since January of 2013!), readers have been desperate to dive back fully into the dual histories of Sweet and Pearl Jones, American vampires. Finally, with this month’s Second Cycle, the time has come. That time is now 1965, firmly in the second half of the twentieth century. Pearl Jones is passing as a descendent of herself, planted on her family farm somewhere in rural Kansas. She’s got a secret there that speaks to the almost hippie-esque ethos of the time. It’s...

The idea of a self-contained community sealed beneath a huge dome enclosure has been the source of many fantastic tales – from the flawed future societies of Logan's Run to the paranoid horrors of Stephen King's Under the Dome, and even the wicked satirical spin of The Simpsons Movie – but not many people remember just how close one American city came to becoming a real-life example of this surreal scenario. Back in the late '70s, city planners in the small town of Winooski, Vermont (just north of Burlington) embarked on what they hoped would be a grand experiment: creating an enclosed, climate-controlled city beneath a square-mile dome, offering a futuristic solution to the town's weather and energy problems. Image: International Dome Symposium The plans brought major media attention to the town, with multiple contractors bidding for the work, and federal funds were appropriated to research the project. An architect...

Writing about Stephen King movies is always an interesting – if daunting – prospect. If one wanted to be a stickler about things, there are really only a few actual “Stephen King films”: from Creepshow to A Good Marriage, they’re listed under "Screenplays" on the “also by Stephen King” page at the front of most of the man’s books. But that’s limiting. Since Brian DePalma adapted Stephen King’s first novel, Carrie, for the big screen in 1976, the Stephen King Movie has been a genre unto itself, encompassing myriad directors, writers, mediums, and styles, all tied together by the fact that Stephen King wrote something that served as inspiration. Where the publishing history of Stephen King is fairly straightforward (with a few hiccups), the movie history is chaotic, because making movies is more complicated than making books. Deals are made, then broken. Screenplays are written and discarded. Budgets are cut,...

Some marriages are built to last. “The Ring,” unfortunately, isn’t. Stephen King’s short nonfiction is a fleeting thing. Throughout his years as a published writer, King has written dozens – no, hundreds – of thoughtful, contemplative, engaging pieces that have largely gone unread. He’s contributed scores of forewords and afterwords to other writer’s works, offering deep insight into the novels and stories by writers as diverse as Clive Barker, Jack Ketchum, and the brilliant Lawrence Block; by design, however, those forewords and afterwords are locked in the books they accompany. That elusiveness dogs King’s essays and articles first published in periodicals even more. When Castle Rock: The Stephen King Newsletter was still a going concern, important essays like “The Dreaded X” and “The Politics of Limited Editions” appeared... then disappeared. No one has collected old Castle Rocks, and those pieces have never been collected elsewhere. Ditto some...

“Sure you’re ready for this kind of responsibility, son?”

This is tragedy.

When we first learned about Afterlife with Archie, it sounded like high camp, a way for the squeaky-clean Riverdale gang to get its hands dirty with the latest pop culture trend. It hasn’t turned out that way, because writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and artist Francesco Francavilla understand that in order to make a horror story scary, you have to love the people in peril. Archie comics have existed since the early 1940s, and by the nature of familiarity, the creators don’t have to work hard to generate affection or sympathy for these characters; it’s already there, ingrained into our collective consciousness. It’s to Aguirre-Sacasa’s and Francavilla’s credit that they do work hard to earn that affection, treating Afterlife as a reader’s first exposure to these people.

Four issues in, and we...

“Sometimes being alive feels like a long game of chicken on a badly-lit road.” -- Michael Marshall Smith, from the introduction to Ps Publishing's Christine Love for Stephen King’s 1983 haunted car story has always seemed a little light on the ground. It’s not that anyone ever hated Christine; it’s just that the passion with which readers discussed classic novels like The Stand or The Shining or recent books like Bag of Bones or 11/22/63 seemed to pass Christine by. During King’s most popular decade, the novel failed to hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list (though #2 isn’t exactly a struggle for chart success.) Literary critic and King expert Dr. Michael R. Collings once referred to Christine as a “minor” novel, especially in comparison to the major statement of Pet Sematary, also released that year. Yet in the thirty-plus years since the book was published, Christine has become a cultural touchstone.

Since 1995 and their release of the Dean Koontz limited edition of Strange Highways, Cemetery Dance Publications has evolved into one of the premiere publishers of genre limited editions. They’ve become known for their sumptuous, oversized work – their massive release of Stephen King's It: The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition comes to mind – but one of the company’s most interesting projects is their Novella Series. These short novels always received the same care and attention as Cemetery Dance’s major publications: limited print runs, Smyth-sewn bindings, acid free paper, illustrations, and signatures by the authors. In recent years, Cemetery Dance has brought the aesthetics of their Novella Series to other higher-profile limited edition novella-length titles, like Stephen King’s Blockade Billy and The Dark Man and Peter Straub’s Pork Pie Hat and The Buffalo Hunter. Now comes the new limited edition of Brian James Freeman’s Weak and Wounded.

It’s still mid-February, and the East Coast of America is caught somewhere between Winter Storm Maximus and Winter Storm Niko, neither of which proved to be the Storm of the Century. The official first day of spring is over a month away; in the snowy doldrums of late winter, March 20th has never seemed further away. Yet the readers among us, trapped inside due to office closings and school closings and sick days, seem to sense a different sort of storm on the horizon. Stephen King’s novel, Doctor Sleep, remains a presence on the hardcover New York Times bestseller list, a full eighteen weeks after it debuted at #1 – a stunning success for a chart that seems to showcase King books briefly, then spit them out. This is an auspicious omen: despite the snow and the subzero temperatures, it feels as if the Spring of King has already begun.

We start with sequences of birth: a pregnant Hermione Lodge, the proud Hiram Lodge, promising a new home and a new life in Riverdale. It’s the past, the panels awash in telling sepia. Then, a mystical scene involving the aunts of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch; we haven’t seen them since issue #1, and not only does this bit of continuity lend verisimilitude to the expanded supernatural Archie universe, it also reminds us that we’re looking into the past. Artist Francesco Francavilla cleverly shades these panels in half-dark, half-light tones, keeping readers off-kilter. Suddenly, jarringly, we’re back in the present, and it’s death again. So much death. This is “Sleepover.”

We’re three issues into Afterlife with Archie, and the tone has entrenched itself. It’s grim, but not unrelentingly so: these characters were created as light comic archetypes, and it’s not hard for writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa...

The world of Stephen King publishing, which is always a weird and exciting place, has recently gotten even stranger. Starting next month, Stephen King’s popular 2009 novel, Under the Dome, will finally be released in mass-market paperback. Actually, make that paperbacks, plural – the book is divided in half; part one comes on February 25th, and part 2 arrives March 25th. Questions arise: why now? Why did it take so long? And is this just a cynical cash grab to capitalize on the overwhelming success of the miniseries? All fair questions, but the answers might be a little more surprising and complex than you’d think.

Publishing as a whole is different than it was even ten years ago. While the business of print publishing hasn’t fallen into fiery ruins as some predicted when King’s “Riding the Bullet” was the first eBook bestseller, digital titles have absolutely impacted sales of traditional books.

For as long as I can remember, I've been obsessed with monsters.

Horror comics are a big deal right now. Some of that can probably be attributed to the runaway success of Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard’s The Walking Dead – which was huge even before the television adaptation – and the fact that zombies in general are more popular than bacon. There are also recent Stephen King adaptations like The Stand and N., the ongoing Buffy the Vampire Slayer continuation of the TV show, Joe Hill’s Locke & Key, Brubaker & Phillips’ Lovecraftian noir Fatale, and “mainstream” horror comics like DC’s Swamp Thing and Animal Man. Heck, even Archie Comics has successfully launched its campy/scary Afterlife With Archie series in time for Halloween this year.

Indie comics aren’t exactly slouches in the horror arena. From early work like J.N. Williamson’s Masques to more recent homages like...

With 2013 almost behind us, it’s time to start looking forward to the future. By this time last year, Stephen King had announced two new novels for 2013 – Joyland and Doctor Sleep – but we ended up with so much more: The Dark Man, Hard Listening, “Afterlife,” “Summer Thunder,” plus surprises like an unfinished manuscript surfacing and King’s earliest fiction sale, “The Glass Floor,” being reprinted by Cemetery Dance. What’s in store for 2014? We’re in the same position we were in last year: two new books announced, and not much more. Still, 2014 looks to be unique in every sense of the word: for the first time since 2011, we have a year without any sequels. However readers felt about The Wind Through the Keyhole or Doctor Sleep, there’s something exciting about going into two new Stephen King novels completely blind. Well, maybe not completely. What do we know about these novels?...

Most mainstream readers had been waiting a long time for the two books coming out in 2013. Early the year before, news leaked that publisher Hard Case Crime would release a new book called Joyland as a paperback original, just in time for summer. Anticipation was cautiously high; reviews of King’s last book with the publisher, 2005’s The Colorado Kid, were mixed. Readers seemed far more eager for a book King announced way back in 2009; Doctor Sleep, King’s long-gestating sequel to 1977’s The Shining, was due to arrive in late fall. But beyond these splashy new novels, King was as busy as usual, writing and publishing at a frantic (some might say lunatic) pace. King launched the year doing something that was becoming a trend: unearthing long-buried work from the past and bringing it into the light. “The Glass Floor” first appeared in the sixth issue of Robert A.

[For anther perspective on this historic collection, read Blu Gilliand's review of Turn Down the Lights here.] In October of 2013 – mere months ago – editor Richard Chizmar spontaneously decided he wanted to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Cemetery Dance magazine with an anthology, and that he wanted to bring his friends in horror along with him. The fact that, in mere weeks, Chizmar was able to assemble a collection that included new work from writers like Stephen King, Jack Ketchum, Peter Straub, and Clive Barker, merely cements the ongoing importance and vitality of Cemetery Dance. Turn Down the Lights functions as both a celebration and a summation; aptly, quite a few of these stories are about endings, quiet and loud. Stephen King’s “Summer Thunder” kicks things off with a bleak slice of post-apocalypse. While King has been exploring the end of the world for six decades now – from 1969’s Stand prologue “Night Surf” to, most recently, 2008’s “Graduation Afternoon” – he continues to find new angles of interest.

In 2002, publisher Cemetery Dance released its first full limited-edition novel by Stephen King: From a Buick 8. It was a visual and tactile treat of a book, issued in three states, or versions: a “gift” edition, a limited numbered edition, and a 52-copy lettered edition, each one more sumptuous than the last. Bernie Wrightson’s illustrations managed to deftly capture the otherworldly strangeness of the creatures that emerge from the titular Buick, despite the fact that they are said to be indescribable. While it wasn’t the first book with Stephen King's work published by Cemetery Dance (that honor goes to 1998’s The Best of Cemetery Dance, which includes the reprint King story “Chattery Teeth”), it set a precedent. Later King publications – Blockade Billy; Full Dark, No Stars; It: The 25th Anniversary Edition; and especially the two Secretary of Dreams compilations – matched or surpassed what From a Buick 8 started,...

Cheryl Blossom is having a bad year. Over in the Betty & Veronica fairytale storyline, she’s been turned into the evil sea witch octopus from The Little Mermaid. In Life with Archie, the alternate-universe continuity that presents the Riverdale folk as young adults, Cheryl is struggling with breast cancer and the implications of ongoing healthcare. And now … well now, her quasi-incestuous schemes with her brother are about to be torn asunder by a bunch of townie zombies.

There’s a lot going on in Afterlife with Archie #2, with writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa working to not only forward the story, but also to deepen the world of this version of Riverdale. As in Life With Archie (in which the subtext beneath the squeaky-clean “Earth One” Archie universe surfaces to create real pathos and tension), here the subtext is used to shade the town’s hidden passions and terrors. Even before the bodies mount,...

Rarely has a title been so apt.

Brian Freeman’s short story collection Weak and Wounded plunges us into small worlds, in which people live desperate lives and struggle with impossible decisions. Loss permeates every page: these people survive the deaths of parents, children, spouses, and siblings, only to find that survival might be a fate worse than death. But the power in these pages comes not from what our protagonists suffer, but how they suffer it. How they continue to go on.

One of Weak and Wounded’s best stories, “Running Rain” kicks off this short collection on familiar ground. Recognizable horror settings – dark forests, raging rivers – present themselves early, but Freeman’s focus is on the devastated family at the center of the story. Only slowly do we learn the nature of their devastation, and just when we think we know what the story is about, Freeman pulls...

"This is how the end of the world begins…"

If readers needed any indication that Afterlife with Archie was going to be a different sort of Archie experience, that warning on page one – in horror movie font, dripping bloodily across a black void – is promise enough. From there, writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (2013’s Carrie) and artist Francesco Francavilla (The Black Beetle, and an incalculable number of pulp-style comic-book covers) waste no time getting into the story. A few trope-heavy establishment shots – a creepy old house, an owl with glowing red eyes, feet pounding the ground, panels awash in lurid red – set the scene for the devastating splash page: Jughead, clutching his bloody, dying dog, at Sabrina Spellman’s door, begging her to save his life.

From there, things go to hell, and quickly. Sabrina can’t save Hot Dog’s life … but she can try to bring him back to life.

Thirty-six years is a long time to go missing. It’s a long time to let ghosts accumulate, real and imagined. And it’s a long time to follow up on one of the most well-known and well-regarded novels – horror or otherwise – of the twentieth century.

It would be nearly impossible to consider a novel like Doctor Sleep without considering The Shining, both the book and the baggage that comes with the book. King’s 1977 novel has become a cultural touchstone, a sort of shorthand for the ultimate in horror lit. When sitcoms want to tell easy jokes about scary books, The Shining is what they reference. There’s also the not-inconsiderable behemoth of Stanley Kubrick’s unfaithful adaptation, a movie many people consider the best horror movie of all time (to King’s consternation, according to the afterword). Whether it’s fair or not, Doctor Sleep has a lot of history to contend with,...

First, some history: writer Scott Snyder had first envisioned the concept for American Vampire during a glut in the speculative fiction market, at a time when it was impossible to escape “sequels to Blade and Underworld and Queen of the Damned.” In an interview with Hans-Åke Lilja of Lilja’s Library, Snyder confessed to some frustration over this earlier incarnation of vampire: “All with that same look to them – the Matrix-style, sunglasses at night, leather trenchcoat, super-slick style, like they're going to some club that's too cool for you.” Snyder’s concept was to change the rules, develop an entirely new sort of vampire, a uniquely American species, as removed from the Old World vampires as possible. Vampires who can walk in the sun, for starters, or those that can be killed by ordinary means during the New Moon. Snyder and illustrator Rafael Albuquerque brought Stephen King along for the...

In 2011, I wrote a short little book called Chart of Darkness, which traced Stephen King’s career by delving into his long and record-breaking career on the New York Times Bestseller Lists. It was a fascinating book to research and write, in part because it’s a way to quantify popularity, and in part because charts, especially ones involving pop culture, are just kind of fun. King first made a splash on the paperback chart in 1976 when ’Salem’s Lot, his second novel, hit #1. In an article titled “Not Guilty,” published October 24, 1976 in the New York Times, King defends his right to having the #1 bestselling paperback in the country, arguing that popularity does not necessarily equal the lowest common denominator. “Accessibility,” he states, “cannot stand alone… the honest intent to do as well as possible — that has to stand at the base of any writing career.”

In 1977, King had his...

Jack Ketchum and Edward Lee are both masters of the erotic grotesque. Lee tends to go for the gut, figuratively and literally. His plainspoken approaches to sexual and body horror result in novellas like “The Pig,” which delves – deep – into the world of snuff porn, junkies, and bestiality. (Its sequel, “The House,” pulls some punches … but not many.) If you’re into the grossest of gross-out splatterpunk, Lee’s your man.

Walking the same forest but ending up in a different clearing is Jack Ketchum. His infamous The Girl Next Door is hard to read and impossible to put down, the epitome of sex terror that unnerves rather than grosses out. His recent work with Lucky McKee, I’m Not Sam, starts sane and grows unbelievably uncomfortable, the sexuality at its center is less vividly awful than that in The Girl Next Door, but arguably more repulsive.

Sometimes these guys write stories together.

Rick Hautala is one of the most prominent and celebrated figures in modern horror fiction. His short story “Knocking” is part of a Stoker-winning compilation for Best Anthology (999). Barnes & Noble singled out his own collection of short fiction, Bedbugs, as one of the most distinguished horror books of 2000. He is also the recipient of the Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award, which recognizes a living artist’s “superior achievement in an entire career.” Not that you’d know any of that reading The Horror… The Horror, Hautala’s striking posthumous autobiography. From the first pages, Hautala paints a picture of himself as an introverted, achingly shy man who revels in his failures and questions his successes. His admissions and revelations wallop the reader; immediately, we are thrust into Hautala’s most private thoughts, his most naked confessions. He struggles to find reasons for his personality, chalking at least some of it up...

The Rock Bottom Remainders are a weird idea. The concept of famous writers like Stephen King, Dave Barry, and Amy Tan getting together to form a mediocre rock band brings to mind your middle-aged dad and his drinking buddies declaring that they’re gonna get the old college band back together, someday. But it’s different than that, richer than that. The Rbr’s previous jam-book memoir, Mid-Life Confidential, went a long way toward explanation. One of the benefits of having your vanity band made up of all talented writers is that they have no trouble articulating what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. For some, it’s a way to try something outside their comfort zone; for some, it’s a way to connect with people who understand the unique problems of bestselling writers; and for some, it’s about discovering whether they can be good...

For nearly fifteen years, Stephen King has been mining his past to bring the world new stuff. In 2001, he gifted us with a continuation of his stalled 1980s project, The Plant. Blaze, a lost novel King wrote around the time of ’Salem’s Lot, was finally published in 2007 as a Richard Bachman novel. Years after swearing that no new short story collection would include old works, King included a lost story from the 1970s, “The Cat From Hell,” in his 2008 collection, Just After Sunset. Novel ideas King attempted and discarded in decades past emerged as 11/22/63, Joyland, and Under the Dome – the latter accompanied by an unprecedented online release of an early draft from the 80s. Recently, uncollected prose versions of two Creepshow stories – “The Crate” and “Weeds” (otherwise known as “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill”) – have made their way into Shivers collections, published by Cemetery Dance. Cemetery Dance Publications is at it again,...

Archie Comics has been pretty much insane lately. They introduced Kevin Keller, the first gay dude to get married in mainstream comics. They did an Archie Meets Kiss miniseries, in which Kiss cures Riverdale from being obsessed with boring vampires. Archie sort of had a baby with Valerie from Josie and the Pussycats. They have this whole ongoing comic called Life With Archie that has parallel storylines, and in each one Miss Grundy dies. Things are nuts. That’s when Eisner Award-winning artist Francesco Francavilla did his one-off variant cover for Life With Archie #23. Francavilla did some really nifty retro alternate covers for Archie Meets Kiss, and this one was even more kick-ass. He titled it AFTERlife with Archie, and boy was it full of zombies. Bad girl Veronica crawling out of the grave, ponytailed Betty shambling about, and Jughead reaching his arms out toward a living Archie, his crown tilted on his dead skull.

At first, he seems unsure. Hesitant, even. His voice is coming out metered, measured, and his reading feels more like recitation than performance. Then, something astounding happens: he hits dialogue, and everything ramps up. Voices, it seems, help Michael Kelly find his voice. For those used to listening to crime stories on audio, Kelly’s take on Joyland might be jarring. The narrators of Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder series, for example – Alan Sklar, William Roberts, Mark Hammer – explore every word as a threat, pummeling headlong toward finales composed of shock and sadness (only Block himself, on Eight Million Ways to Die, seems to get to the deep sorrow of the character). On the other hand, the more stately readings of both Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series (Michael Prichard, who has taken on Tom Clancy’s techno-thrillers with the same endearing seriousness as John Irving’s The World According to Garp...

Hell is repetition.

This refrain, from King’s surrealist slice of late-90s horror, “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French,” has become something of a thematic sticking point for Stephen King. Not that that’s a bad thing; King has long been interested in exploring motifs from every possible angle in subsequent stories until he’s exhausted them. See his series of “children with wild talents” novels, starting with Carrie and ending (for the most part) with Firestarter, or his exegeses on the process of writing, bookended (largely) by Misery and Bag of Bones. Recently, especially in his short stories, King has been concerned with mortality, repetition, and penance. The end of the Dark Tower series proper coalesced around these concerns, and King further explored them in the recent “Herman Wouk is Still Alive” and “The Dune.” “Afterlife,” however, seems to burble more directly out...

In a recent interview with Vulture, Joe Hill (along with his brother Owen King, who has written a terrific new novel called Double Feature, which isn’t horror but which reads like the best possible mash-up of John Irving and Nick Hornby, with a soupçon of William Goldman thrown in) discussed writing horror in the shadow of his father. While his previous novels, Heart-Shaped Box and Horns, worked to define Hill as a unique voice in horror fiction, “N0S4A2 has a lot of Where's Waldo? tricks with Stephen King. It was very intentional. I thought, Instead of running from the Stephen King stuff, I'm gonna run at it.” And boy, does he: there are more Stephen King Easter eggs in N0S4A2 than in any Stephen King novel since The Tommyknockers: deliberate references to Mid-World from King’s Dark Tower series, an interesting preview of Doctor Sleep,...

There’s a certain flavor to Stephen King’s 1970s novels that goes deeper than theme and tone and even feel, especially in the smaller, more personal stories like The Shining and ’Salem’s Lot and The Dead Zone. The books are certainly “of their time,” but it’s more than that: it’s a distinct spirit that’s difficult to pin down and even harder to describe. These books – as well as the Bachman novel Blaze, a relic from those early days – come from such a distinct time, place, and mindset in King’s career that the stories can’t help but reflect who and where their author was when they were written. Cheese aficionados and wine connoisseurs call this elusive essence terroir. At this late date, decades after those classic novels were published, it would be almost impossible to capture that exact flavor again, in a new novel...

Some books are held for pleasure, to paraphrase AC/DC, meant to be picked up, carried, engaged in. Novels are like that. Biographies, trivia books, collections of Chuck Klosterman essays, even historical exposés, provided that they’re written by accessible geniuses like Doris Kearns Goodwin or Sarah Vowell. Bibliographies are the other kind of book. You use them for research, or to corroborate dates and times if you’re writing a report or an essay or a thesis. They huddle like stuffy owls until they’re needed, and then they’re forgotten about again. They’re shelf books.

Usually.

The subject of Stephen King tends to bring out the playfulness in books you’d least expect. Justin Brooks’ new Stephen King: A Primary Bibliography of the World’s Most Popular Author, 2013 Revised Edition falls squarely into this category. Certainly its primary goal is as a reference book, and it...

Stephen King’s introduction to Robin Furth’s The Dark Tower: The Complete Concordance, says it all:

…her concordance was never meant to be published … but … I was aware of how good it was, how interesting and readable it was … [and] how valuable it might be to the Constant Reader.”

When the original volumes of the Concordance were released, in conjunction with the final three books of the Dark Tower sequence, they indeed proved interesting and readable and perhaps necessary. Initially intended for Stephen King’s private use, the Concordance provided a guide for those working to untangle the sometimes intricate web of Roland Deschain’s journey and history, something that laid out in plain terms what happened, who it happened to, and when.

King’s somewhat surprising publication of an eighth book in the Dark Tower series – 2012’s The Wind Through the Keyhole – necessitated changes – and here we arrive...

Companion books are interesting creatures. Part reference book, part resource guide, part overview of an important work or corpus of works, a companion book has to function as both an incisive look at the work in question and be accessible enough for new readers and the merely curious. Happily, Bev Vincent’s The Dark Tower Companion succeeds on all levels.

This is Vincent’s second book on the subject, following 2004’s The Road to the Dark Tower. A somewhat academic work intended for those well-versed in the series, Road cemented Vincent’s reputation as one of the world’s leading experts in Stephen King’s Dark Tower milieu. The Dark Tower Companion is the guide for the rest of the world, especially those Stephen King readers who have been touched in some way by King’s magnum opus through the references in his other work, but who have yet to...

Last summer, I was invited to write an entry for a reference book called Icons of the American Comic Book: From Captain America to Wonder Woman. I had just written a chapterbook on Stephen King and comics (Drawn Into Darkness; look for it at fine eBook retailers everywhere) and I was still gonzo on the subject, so convincing myself to take the assignment took no effort at all. I had been angling to write about Archie comics – learning that King loved Archie struck me as both incongruous and perfect – but that entry had already been taken. Then I noticed that no one had taken on Tales from the Crypt; I snapped it up faster than a dervish on a roller coaster.

The real-life stories I dug up about EC and the anti-horror comics hysteria were nearly as fascinating as the comics themselves. In 1954, Dr. Fredric Wertham published his book Seduction...

Stephen King has never shied away from politics. His college column, King’s Garbage Truck, mostly dealt with pop culture, but also tackled heady subjects like anti-war rallies and abortion. In 1970’s “A Possible Fairy Tale,” he outlined a 10-day plan for ending the conflict in Viet Nam. His 1984 article, “Why I Am For Gary Hart,” King stated boldly, “Ronald Reagan is a bad president and must be turned out of office.” Allegorically, King has tackled political matters again and again, most notably in The Tommyknockers’ concerns about nuclear power and Under the Dome’s barely sub-textual treatise against George W. Bush.

Which is why his new essay, “Guns,” is a little surprising. Released as a Kindle Single via his own publishing house, Philtrum Press, “Guns” absolutely touches on politics. Just past the illustration of the half-mast American flag on the cover, there’s discussion of Red States and Blue States,...

So … you fancy yourself a Stephen King fan? Think the term “Constant Reader” was invented solely for you? Feel confidant that you know his works inside and out?

Unless you’ve tested yourself against The Illustrated Stephen King Trivia Book, it’s all empty boasting.

This trivia book was originally released back in 2004, and has now been updated to include the works that came after that period. While the new material is plentiful, the book’s authors (Brian James Freeman and Bev Vincent) have wisely decided to keep the format the same – a format that’s designed to increase the difficulty of the questions exponentially.

You see, it would have been far too easy to divide the questions by specific subject matter - a section on The Shining, for example, which would include trivia about the book, the movie, and the television miniseries; or sections on Creepshow or “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption.

What fun it must have been to be a Stephen King fan in the 1980s! Stephen King was releasing new material at an exponential rate (twenty-two books between 1980 and 1989, most of which were bestsellers), King films were coming out left and right, the man appeared on the cover of Time in 1986, and an explosion of criticism centered around this relatively new author erupted. In 1982, the first iteration of Douglas Winter’s The Art of Darkness proved a watershed moment in King study, catalyzing the entire King criticism movement. George Beahm released what proved to be the most accessible book for a King dilettante, The Stephen King Companion. Starmont House, a small publisher known for their innovative works of serious Sf/Fantasy/Horror criticism, released no fewer than thirteen books on King.

Then things seemed to dry up. I say seemed to; King criticism has never really gone away. Many of...

Before 1967, Stephen King was not a professional author. Certainly he was a writer; according to his memoir On Writing, King had been writing since 1953, when he was six. He’d also been published, sort of. After a series of self-published works like People, Places, & Things (with friend Chris Chesley) and The Star Invaders, and stories in his brother’s newsletter, Dave’s Rag (Rush Call, Jumper), King placed stories (The 43rd Dream, Code Name: Mousetrap) in his high school newspaper, The Drum. He achieved his greatest success in 1966 with I Was a Teenage Grave-Robber (later published as In a Half-World of Terror) in the fan publication, Comics Review.

In 1967, however, King made his first professional sale. King’s short story, The Glass Floor, appeared in the sixth issue of Robert A.W. Lowndes’ pulp magazine, Startling Mystery Stories. Lowndes had made a name for himself in the realm of speculative fiction,...

Jack Ketchum has long made a name for himself by delving into the darkest regions of human sexuality. His first novel, 1980’s Off Season, was so horrifically visceral that its publisher, Ballantine, opted against a second printing (it was later re-published in an unexpurgated version in 2005). His novel Ladies’ Night, featuring several sequences of sexually violent women attacking men and boys, was initially deemed too graphic to publish. In Right to Life, a pregnant woman is kidnapped at an abortion clinic and is assimilated into slavery and torture. What may be his most harrowing book, The Girl Next Door, fairly revels in the depiction of a teenage girl repeatedly brutalized by her so-called caretaker … not to mention the reluctant good-guy protagonist. Ketchum rarely sensationalizes his violence, instead opting to simply report it: every demeaning act, every rape, every murder, simply is. His seeming inability to shy away from trauma is...

Just start at the beginning, and the rest will take care of itself.

Brian James Freeman’s fascinating novella, The Painted Darkness, is one of those rare gems you sometimes find in fiction that manage to effortlessly capture the strangeness of being young. Freeman’s five-year-old, Henry, immediately calls to mind any number of Stephen King’s fictional children, notably Danny Torrence in The Shining or the Loser’s Club in It. But there’s more than a hint of Ray Bradbury in The Painted Darkness – both Dandelion Wine and the darker Halloween Tree seem like inspirations, as does the Robert McCammon pastiche, Boy’s Life. Like the best of homages, though, young Henry’s story moves far beyond imitation, becoming a wholly unique creation under Freeman’s assured pen.

The Painted Darkness concerns itself with classic themes: letting go of childhood, the power with which we wield creativity, and the tricky nature of monsters.

We’re back with our largest Indie Spotlight to date. Today’s feature contains over a dozen indie horror items, including details on The Other Side and your chance to win a copy of City Under the Moon:

The Other Side: We’re sent dozens of short films to check out each month, but The Other Side really stands out from the pack. This short horror film is directed by The Santoro Brothers and it is apparent that they are skilled directors who are also true fans of the genre. The Other Side will be hitting the festival/convention circuit shortly, and we expect it to play really well with slasher and home invasion horror fans.

Synopsis: “When a fresh faced nanny arrives at her new job on a creaky farm in the English countryside, she is instantly caught up in the turbulent relationship of her employers. James is struggling...