Spooktober 2025 (and new zine!)

26 November 202526 November 2025 Francis BassLeave a comment

Alright before I get to the main event, I first have an announcement: I have a new zine out! “Map of the Lost City of Uatdan Wuchke” is an interactive fantasy story in which you, the reader, must draw the map. The zine includes a fold-out drawing surface for readers to use while they read. You can order it online on etsy, and I’ve also just added some bike goblin stickers to my etsy shop, if you’re interested in those.

Now, on to the spooky stuff! Every October I like to read a few horror books, and then review them all together in one post. You can see my previous spooktober posts here. This year I read:

Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr — I always expect multi-author short story collections to be a mixed bag, with some decent stories, some great ones, and some duds. But this book’s got no duds! The worst stories were just decent, and the best had me wanting to read more by their authors. The pieces encompass a great breadth of styles and genres, from blood-and-guts horror to lyrical ghost stories to gritty crime. It was also really fascinating to see so many takes on storytelling, with several of the pieces containing stories within stories. Here were some of my favorites:

“Hunger” by Phoenix Boudreau—a beautifully lyrical wendigo story which, three quarters of the way through, switches perspectives to become a kind of monster-of-the-week episode. Both parts well executed.
“Scariest. Story. Ever.” by Richard Van Camp—Much like Tenacious D’s “Tribute”, this is not the scariest story ever, but a story about the scariest story ever. The narrator wants to win a scary story contest, so goes to a storyteller to ask him for the scariest story he’s ever heard. The storyteller agrees to pass the story on, but starts by explaining how he came to hear the scariest story ever … wonderfully absorbing, layered, and sticks the landing. This one’s my favorite of the whole collection.
“Collections” by Amber Blaeser-Wardzala—a Native American English major goes to her lit professor’s party so she can schmooze a letter of recommendation out of her, and finds that the professor’s house is decorated with human heads. Real heads. No one else seems concerned. Collections.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who’s into horror or dark fiction—with any luck, you may find a new favorite author in there.

Spooktober 2024

15 November 202419 December 2024 Francis BassLeave a comment

A larger than life size skeleton posed with arms raised in front of an obelisk grave in the Woodlands cemetery in Philadelphia

Every year around October I like to read horror books and you can see all my previous posts about that here and this is this year’s post.

This year I had a couple false starts with some really insipid contemporary horror novels, so I wasted time on those and didn’t finish them, and only ended up reading one prose horror novel—a novella, actually, Low Kill Shelter by Charity Porpentine Heartscape. I also read the graphic novel A Guest in the House by E.M. Carroll, and I watched a bunch of movies, and I went to some graveyards, so I’m just gonna throw all that into this post too. Enjoy! 🎃

What I’ve Been Reading

Low Kill Shelter by Charity Porpentine Heartscape – A virus has spread across the world which turns its victims rabid, and causes canine-like changes in their jaws. But it hasn’t spread so thoroughly that society has collapsed—in fact, the world is still running along as normal. You still have to work. And everyone has given up on discovering a cure, even the companies supposedly funded to do that. The officially sanctioned cure now is just to execute the infected person.

The novella follows a man who is keeping his infected friend chained up in a closet in his apartment, studying him and trying to find a cure on his own.

This is quintessential Porpentine—a dead-eyed vision of the world which brings the grotesque and the banal smashing together, transgressive in a way that doesn’t feel like just a stunt, transgression as a by-product of probing deep into pain, discomfort, and rabid desires. The book excels in attitude, style, and narrative voice, but the plotting felt a little stilted. At a certain point it just starts going from one archetypal monster movie scene to another, and loses the extreme tension, the claustrophobia, the push-and-pull dynamic of the beginning. Overall I enjoyed it, but it lost its edge about halfway through.

What I’ve Been Reading, Spooktober 2023

18 November 202310 December 2023 Francis BassLeave a comment

The month of spooktober has passed, but autumn, the season of death, still surrounds us. So today I bring you reviews of the books I read this October. For the past several years this has been a tradition of mine, reading a bunch of spooky books around this time of year, though I’ve only made a post reviewing them all once. Hopefully from this year forward, that can be part of the tradition too.

Boy’s Life by Robert McCammon — Boy’s Life is narrated by Cory Mackenson, a middle-aged writer looking back on a pivotal year of his life growing up in the small town of Zephyr, Alabama. The book is divided into four main parts, each corresponding with a season, starting in spring and ending in winter. The year in question is the year Cory turns 12, and the year he and his father stumble upon a murder victim drowned in Saxon’s Lake, an old flooded quarry. That murder, and the mystery of the victim’s identity, let alone the killer’s, is the main throughline of the novel.

However, this book is over 600 pages, and it is not 600 pages of Encyclopedia Brown working one case. Instead, the book is composed of episodic chapters detailing various different adventures in Zephyr. Sometimes these chapters reveal a little more about the murder mystery, but usually they don’t. They often don’t even relate to one another, and they vary greatly in terms of tone and genre. One chapter is about a new kid in town who turns out to be a baseball prodigy; another is a monkey’s paw-esque story about the death of the family dog; another finds Cory abducted by a member of a moonshining clan. These chapters don’t really connect or build up to a larger narrative arc, aside from the arc of Cory growing up. Characters enter and exit like stage actors. They arrive, they play their part to a tee, and then they leave. Even Cory’s main group of friends really only shows up when they’re a central part of the chapter, but otherwise they have no involvement with the murder mystery or any other misadventures.

Because each chapter is so totally committed to its trope or theme or genre, McCammon never holds back. He gets to the good stuff right away, every time. The lake monster isn’t going to come back later, so the first chapter where it appears doesn’t waste time with just a little ripple in the water, or a half-glimpsed fin, no—the lake monster makes a full appearance and attacks Cory! Lots of the chapters feel like B-movies that have been fast-forwarded right to the climax. So instead of a tightly woven story where each thing leads to the next, you get a multigenre smorgasbord of all killer no filler one-off adventures. It’s a trade-off which I was happy to accept.

Free Fiction: On the Walk Home

31 October 201614 October 2017 Francis Bass2 Comments

Here’s a somewhat spooky piece of writing for Halloween, inspired by a thought I had while …

On the Walk Home
Francis Bass

My legs pound into the ground, leaden, burning.

I stumble. I stop.

I’ve never seen this place before. I don’t remember getting here. I don’t remember anything from this walk, I don’t know how long I’ve been walking, but I started for home at noon, and now it’s dusk. I’m on the side of a deserted highway, surrounded by unfamiliar, old, low buildings with peeling paint, and tall dark pine trees.

“…He has had a long day in court. I left him there with Vholes. You don’t like Vholes, I hope?”

That’s the audiobook of Bleak House. It drones in my ears.

I don’t know what part of the book this is. When I headed home from school, I was just listening to the first chapter, trying to get a head start on my reading for Tuesday.

A cold wind leaps up behind me and swoops over my shoulders and through my sweat-soaked shirt.

The sun is low, pumpkin-orange, gray clouds puffed in front of it. I look at the buildings, search them for some scrap of familiarity that might orient me. “Canaan Groceries” is beside me. It looks long closed, but there’s a faded blue pickup parked in front of it. A daycare squats across the street from me with a bleached sign bearing a rainbow and some illegible lettering. Not far ahead is an impoundment lot, filled with the rounded bodies of cars hunkering down.

Lights flare up and a car zooms past me on the road.

“… in her most genteel accents, ‘my executor, administrator, and assign. (Our Chancery phrases …’”

I tear my phone out of my pocket, and just as I do the audiobook stops playing, and a battery icon, empty, blinks on the screen. Then the screen goes black.

I stick my phone back in my pocket and twist around. The seat of my shorts is wet, my underarms are wet, the back of my shirt is wet, and its all cold in the wind. I hold my thumb out to the road stupidly, but there are no cars coming from either direction, just the fast disappearing red winks of taillights on the car that just passed. The only other motion is the pine trees, big dark furry sprouts walling in the highway, swaying. My arm aches after only a few seconds of holding it up.

I turn around and yank off my earbuds. I walk to the pickup in front of the grocer’s, but as I approach I see that the tires are gone, the thing is beached, stranded, ownerless, covered in dead leaves and pine straw.

I hear a car coming, and I run back to the street and hold my thumb out, but the approaching headlights just blast past me. I realize how dark it is now. The sun is just a few jagged scraps seen through fractal black foliage. Long shadows blend into one big shadow which spills across all the road and all the parking lots and all the trees. I start walking up the street, in the opposite direction from where I had been heading before.

My footsteps sound strange, out-of-sync. I stop for a moment, and quiet, crunching footsteps continue. I am riveted in place. My throat is dry. My eyes burn in the wind. I start walking again, looking straight ahead, into the darkness of the road. The footsteps are near me. I hear rubber soles squeaking. I fumble at my side, not looking down, grab my dangling earbuds, and put them into my ears. The footsteps start running, whapping the ground faster faster faster right toward my back with deafening crunching thunking sound blasting into my skull through the earbuds and I keep walking, don’t think, into the wind, into the dark of the set sun.

My legs pound the ground.

I’m in front of the door to my apartment complex. I reach for my keys.

“… has come up from her place in Lincolnshire (hotly pursued by the fashionable intelligence) …”

That’s the audiobook of Bleak House droning in my ear. I realize that I haven’t actually been listening to it. A warm wind blows past me, and I enter my apartment building, stepping out of the mid-day sun. As the door shuts behind me, I realize I don’t recall anything from my walk home. I left my classroom, started listening to the audiobook … it doesn’t matter. I’ll have to re-listen to those chapters, or just actually read them, tonight, since we have a reading quiz for them tomorrow. It’s a shame. I was hoping to get the reading done on my walk home so I could have the night free.

It sure sucks having Halloween on a Monday.