Blank Pages, Dark Screens, and Horror Dreams

I’ve struggled for a few weeks on this first post. I could say I’ve been busy (which is true), or I could say that I was intimidated by the self-imposed enormity of the responsibility. How the hell does someone who has never written a blog before actually start one?

In the end, the only truth that holds water is that I hadn’t allowed myself to just start writing. Let’s put that in a way that’s certain not to escape notice:

Just. Start. Writing.

It’s a lesson I’ve had to learn a few times throughout my life (okay, more than a few). The blank page is a terrifying concept. It contains emptiness. It is a void of creativity, a mark of one’s inability to, for fuck’s sake, get started on something—anything. It is a wall that hides, on its opposite side, the key to understanding, the road to success (self-described, yet ever elusive…isn’t that strange?).

I have always been a writer, though I haven’t always been a writer.

Let me explain. Briefly.

As a child, I loved fiction. And I loved horror. The fiction I loved in those days ran two gauntlets: 20th-century American literature and superhero comic books. Horror I enjoyed exclusively on film—or, to be more precise, VHS tape.

My reading at the time consisted of equal parts Hemingway, Mailer, Steinbeck, Faulkner, and Salinger. But it also included Larry Hama’s G.I. Joe, Jim Shooter’s Secret Wars, and Magnus: Robot Fighter, as well as John Byrne’s reboot of Superman.

While one could hardly have labeled my reading at the time as fringe, my film viewing, on the other hand, dipped very early on into waters of the weird and obscure. And this is where my imagination first took hold.

As a teen, I saw each of these movies at least a dozen times (likely more): Dawn of the Dead, Re-Animator, Friday the 13th Part IV, Evil Dead II, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Thing.

This was my first real exposure to genre, and I’ve never looked back. I have more to write about this, but that’s for another time. Maybe someone can remind me?

To be perfectly honest, my love of reading ebbed and flowed throughout my adulthood. Years passed when I mostly read comics. Sometimes I read little more than news or academic articles for my work as a language educator. Once, while living in St. Petersburg (not Florida) on a Department of State grant to train English teachers, I acquired a copy of Lucy Daniel’s Little Black Book of Books, a self-described chronology of the greatest and most consequential writings of the 20th century.

For reasons still unknown to me, I decided to read every book it lists. I made it to about the 1930s, but it was the first time I had read Bram Stoker, Sigmund Freud, Joseph Conrad, Frank Norris, Leo Tolstoy, Willa Cather, and Henry James.

My interest was certainly piqued, but this exercise had not generated enough energy to sustain itself beyond that overseas experience. After about a hundred books, I lost interest and dove back into films.

I developed a rabid interest in a handful of filmmakers who spoke to me in ways no one else could. George Romero taught me that America is definitely not the place we think it is. David Lynch taught me the same, but on a much more personal level. From Akira Kurosawa, I learned that big stories can teach us the smallest, most elusive truths. John Carpenter showed me that stories can have predictable conventions and still knock your socks off. And from Alfred Hitchcock, I learned that artistic vision can, indeed, be fully expressed within the imagination before ever being set to paper (or celluloid).

Little did I know that I would experience another wave of discovery in my forties when I watched my first Italian horror film…more on that later (much later).

Something happened to me in 2024, however. I’m sure the COVID-19 pandemic had something to do with it, the experience being a meat grinder for all who lived it (which was everyone). But I was also unemployed and at a professional crossroads.

So I started reading horror. Well, more succinctly: I decided to devour all the horror fiction I could get my hands on (does that qualify as succinct?). And now I can’t stop. In the 200 or so books I have read since then, I found something unexpected—though anyone who knows me would have said they saw it there all along:

I fucking love horror.

Now, I’m writing my first novel. I’ve had a couple of short stories accepted for publication.

And, most relevant to this blog post, I started a business with Vivian Nosti, another horror-phile with her own twisted, but equally fascinating, origin story.

It’s called The Capitol Horror.

Here you are. And welcome.

We have so much in store for you, and it all comes from that one mantra that, admittedly, I continue to struggle with:

Just. Start. Writing.

Let’s scare the living shit out of each other, shall we?