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Book-wise, 2013 was a happy year. Not only did I have a new fiction collection released-The Oblivion Room: Stories of Violation, Evil Jester Press-but I read lots of worthwhile tomes of various types, including some brand-new 2013 releases. (I’m also counting very late 2012 releases here.) As I’ve done for the past several years, now that we’re ( Read more... )

A couple of years ago-May 11, 2011 to be exact-I posted a unique tidbit from my early writing life: my very first published story. Written in the summer of 1985 and entitled “Consummation,” it appeared in the Winter 1986 issue of one of the better horror small-press magazines of the period, 2AM, and I was paid the munificent sum of $15.50 for it. ( Read more... )

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Here's a chance to win an advance copy of The Oblivion Room and some other swag courtesy of Evil Jester Press, the book's publisher. Act now, the deadline is short. Here's the press release....

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Today EVIL JESTER PRESS announces an exciting, one-of-a-kind giveaway for Christopher Conlon’s The Oblivion Room: Stories of Violation, due for release ( Read more... )

Sometimes they can knock you out.

Voices from the past. Returned to you. And then just as suddenly stilled.

You didn’t know Olga Klibo, and that’s too bad. If you’d known her when I did, in the 1970s, and if you’d been a child too, as I was, you might have learned to love reading and books just as I did: by your weekly visits to the Buellton ( Read more... )

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Last year around this time (December 28th, to be exact) I wrote a column about my favorite reads of 2011, bemoaning the fact that while I had indeed read some great new books that year, they seemed to have been few and far between. In fact, part of my title for that entry was “Best of a Bad Year.”

What a difference a year makes.

I don’t know what ( Read more... )

Blood Relations: The Selected Letters of Ellery Queen, 1947-1950. Edited by Joseph Goodrich. Foreword by William Link. Perfect Crime Books, 2012.

Though mostly forgotten today, Ellery Queen is vividly remembered by mystery fans of a certain age. Queen’s detective novels had a long run, from 1929’s “The Roman Hat Mystery” to 1971’s “A Fine and ( Read more... )

Jack Gilbert died a couple of weeks ago-on November 13, to be precise, at age 87. His was a long and productive life, one devoted almost entirely to poetry; yet, as several writers have put it, he and his career existed practically “off the grid.” Eschewing the usual paths to power and fame in verse (no running an MFA program for him) and ( Read more... )