Happy harvest time, loyal readers, old friends and new visitors!
October is always the busiest month of the year for horror fiends, and my Halloween season this year is no exception. If you’ve seen my events page, you know I’ll be reading at such places as the Chatham University library and a PARSEC panel of horror writers, along with an outdoor session by the fire at the annual Seton Hill University English Club spooky story night. I’ll be co-organizing a meeting of the Pittsburgh chapter of the HWA at the Horror Studies archive at U Pittsburgh (our first face-to-face meet up since the pandemic hit). And I’m trying to sneak in as much bizarre and scary writing as I can between all that while teaching English full time. Busy, busy!
Speaking of teaching, I’m prepping a new undergraduate course in Global Horror for the Spring at Seton Hill University and couldn’t be more excited. Just putting the syllabus together is a blast, as I’m surveying the non-western world looking for classics and new horror stories and films with gusto. (I’m always open to suggestions of short stories or books, so feel free to add anything you’d recommend in the comments). Here’s a flyer that our wonderful Humanities School Assistant, Jessica Lohr, put together for me:
And there’s plenty more going on, with a few publications to announce too. I’ll be putting together a new Goreletter before Halloween that catches up with all this, and it might even include a new contest, so sign up if you haven’t already done so.
Before I sign off, I want to mention that I hit a milestone on twitter this month by gaining over 10,000 followers! That’s quite a few people reading my weird thoughts! Without announcing it in advance, I awarded a surprise gift of free Arnzen books to my 9999th follower (because that sounds so demonic to me), and the winner was Jeff C. Carter, author of the cool Halloween book, Cold Spell. THANK YOU Jeff, and everyone else who has been following my shenanigans on twitter over the past decade-plus. Jeff shared a photo of his free book prize perched atop pumpkins, which appears at the top of this blog entry!
HAPPY HALLOWEEN one and all! To celebrate, I’ve been posting a micro-story a day for the #TrickOrTweet2021 challenge. See twitter.com/MikeArnzen for more each day! Here’s a sample of two:
