Writer | Artist: Eric PowellPublisher: Dark Horse ComicsOfficial Site
There’s something about a little psychopath punching out a fortune-telling seal that just makes me laugh. And I’m not afraid to admit it.
If that (and it gets better – the seal tells fortunes by doing nothing but barking out “Ark!”) strikes you as funny, then you’re [...]

The always-excellent The Believer has a good interview with one of my favorite short story writers, Dan Chaon.
Check it out.
In it, Chaon says that he thinks of his stories as “ghost stories in which the ghost never appears” (a line he apparently borrowed from horror writer Peter Straub). It’s a great description of his work [...]

writer | artist: Sam Hitipublished by: La Luz comics
It used to be that the major small press/indie comics show on the East Coast each year was the Small Press Expo, or SPX, held each year in Maryland.
The East Coast indie landscape has started to shift in recent years, though, with the newly christened MoCCA Art [...]

2002/USDirector: Michael AllossoIMDB | Official Website
If there’s any genre and archetype that has been done, pardon the pun, to death in the last 10 or 15 years of cinema and fiction, it’s the serial killer.
Starting with psychos and slashers, moving through cannibals and their copycats, the serial killer has so dominated the landscape of [...]

A few things I want to elaborate on, but not directly within the context of my review.
1. I’ve no doubt that some people, those who don’t know me most likely, will read this review as being somehow prudish or overly sexually conservative. You’ll have to trust me that it’s not. I don’t mind nudity in [...]

By David J. SkalPublisher: Faber and Faber
All stories are woven out of well-known and easily identifiable archetypes, according to the story theorists out there. They tell us, in fact, that there are really only perhaps seven plots and maybe 30 or so characters and every tale told is just a variation upon these building blocks.
Genre [...]

By Katherine DunnPublisher: Vintage ContemporariesPublisher’s Page for the Book
Horror fiction is the hardest of all the horror media for me to keep up with. There’s so much of it, and even more than comics or movies, so much of it is bad.
I know the big names in the field right now, even if I haven’t [...]

Writer/Artist: Hideshi HinoPublisher: Cocoro Books/DH Publishing
One of the major side effects of the manga boom (manga being Japanese comics), along with bringing new readers to comics and revitalizing the medium for thousands of teenagers who would have otherwise abandoned it and left the comics industry barren and hollow in another decade, has been the widespread [...]

Writer: In-Wan Youn | Artist: Kyung-Il YangPublisher: TokyoPop
(this article originally appeared in Rue Morgue #35, Sept./Oct. 2003)
Island (7 volumes, from Korea) tells the story of an island called Cheju that is overrun with demons, though most people don’t know it, and those who find out almost never live to tell about it. To make matters [...]

2001/JapanDirector: Takashi MiikeIMDB
(this article originally appeared in Rue Morgue #33, May/June 2003)
While not strictly a horror movie, gore hounds will die for Ichi the Killer. Entrails abound, faces not attached to heads slide down bloody walls, and skin is eaten off fingers. Ichi, adapted from the Japanese comic of the same name, is a twisted [...]