"I'm not in Minnesota -- what can I do to help?" A list of ideas!

Read 85 books in 2025. Find me on thestorygraph.com for list and ratings (@seandillon). #1 fav of 2025: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter Stephen Graham Jones @sgj.bsky.social Just... impeccable. Total home run. Recommend it in the strongest possible terms to anyone who loves horror.

Last read of 2025. This one has been sitting on my bedside table a loooong time. Interesting to me as a horror theater maker, but SO dry and academic.

Latest read. This one exists only digitally, and it is exciting both for being a collection of 35 stories by the new guard in horror fiction, and for heralding a new horror imprint from Tor Books. Like any anthology, some bits better than others. But all in all, a strong, strong read.

Latest read. Wonderful, but took me 2 years to finish. 100 2-page short stories? ADHD recipe for disaster. Very impressive though… manages to approach the idea of ghosts in 100 original ways, never finding a rut. In that sense, reminds me of Einstein’s Dreams… with more quantity and less depth.

Latest read. Vampire novella predating Dracula by a quarter century. And wowwy the sapphic subtext. Short and sweet, and very cinematic before cinema was a thing.

Latest read. Some nice, genuinely unnerving moments, but scattershot plotting, lax editing, and some very uneven audio reading and production choices lost me. Not my bag.

Latest read. I ♥️ book cover design. For about 5 years in my 20s, I considered going back to school for it. Confoundingly, this is the prettiest, most annoying book I read all year. Not room here to expound, but briefly: per this book, the book cover design world revolves around Peter Mendelsund.

Latest read. Of King’s work, not my favorite. That all the best stories have all had movies made of them since probably doesn’t help. Several of the remaining stories are just… so broad. Pretty amazing voice cast though.

Merry (Re)Xmas to all our amazing friends, and wishing you the best of all possible 2026s. Love - Sean, Mal, Arlo, and Peripety “Rippy” Dillon

Latest read. For a long time seemed like it was going to tip into the supernatural, the horrors here are all too real and human. A well-crafted keyhole into reservation life… at least that’s what it was for me, a white dude.

Latest read #2. Title might have ended “…at the Moth,” because it is very geared that direction (though generalizable). Struggled to finish - never managed to conceive the story of my own worth telling. The audiobook uses so many clips from actual Moth shows… how was this ever just a book?

Latest read. Loved her Lost Village last year. This one is also great. Seems to have a schtick: past narrative and present narrative grow together into one narrative as secrets unfold. Not at all sure I’d call it horror, but it had its tense moments.

While I’m sure accepting his legacy has been healthy for Joe, I miss the guy who was working hard to get out of Dad’s shadow. His stuff was so strange and lovely and NOT King-y. Still, Hill is a pleasure to read. Which is a good thing, since this is in a sense a 6-book series in a single volume.

Latest read. This was fine. Less focused on its theme than I was hoping.

Latest read. Didn’t work for me, a few ways. 1: distracting sound effects - let audiobooks be books. 2: it is stocked with annoying actors, a pet peeve. 3. It is really unsubtle… especially next to Jackson’s Hill House, for which it is an “official sequel.” Suffers deeply by comparison.

Latest read. For me, there are few things as edifying as having someone truly masterful and passionate about an art form walk you through their favorite art. And IMO, when it comes to short fiction, Saunders is one of the very, very best. I have a new appreciation for Tolstoy, Gogol, even Chekhov.

Latest read. Just what I needed this season. Wonderful horror artists, challenged for their takes on holidays themes, in short form and anthologized. Gets me so excited for a favorite project of mine, making its return in 2026.

Latest read. Book’s thesis: we’d often be better off subtracting from things rather than adding to them, but we’re psychologically (maybe biologically) predisposed not to. The irony? It is its own best example - this book could have been an article without losing much. But then nobody would buy it…

Latest read. This was good. I think I preferred my Chung horror without the sci-fi entree, but that’s just down to my taste. She is awfully good at writing about the horrors of the people (and non-people) at the margins.

Latest read. Same author as Between Two Fires, but very different. Common thread: CB clearly puts research into both historical settings and supernatural lore. Didn’t love the reader’s awkwardly put-on NY tough guy accent, which the excellent ending accounts for but doesn’t excuse. Still great.

Latest read. Currently working on a very long story or very short novella that centers on memory and its impacts. So this was disproportionately interesting to me. I do also appreciate how much of his own personality the author brought to what could otherwise have been pretty dry.

Each Xmas, we try to pick out a new ornament that is somehow emblematic of the year. I present… 2025. Life sure has thrown plenty of “lemonade-making opportunities” this year. Merry merry, all.

Latest read. Not sure exactly what to make of this one. Liked it, very much. Dark, original, lovely prose. But also felt like there is some Rosetta Stone to really *get* it thematically/metaphorically. And I am unstoned.

Latest read. Enriquez does a really nice job of exploring the dark dimension of S. American magical realism... more distinctly here than in Dangers of Smoking in Bed. Intimate, original, and VIVID. Really liked it.

Latest read. Tilted more self-help than I was hoping for. Biggest insight: avoid scheduling surgery for mid-afternoon, because that’s when surgeons hit their midday slump.

The MN Fringe hit returns! Dilly Dally’s award-winning Final Dress is back - TWO SHOWS ONLY! 9pm, Dec 6 & 20 at Strike Theater! strike.theater/shows (Details in the comments... Bluesky has a looow character limit.)

In Sept, a "friend" fuck-you/unfriended me for saying C. Kirk was fascist. Guess that endangers people? (He was already dead. And fascist). Wonder if he has the same bile at Trump/supporters for marking (alive) Dems for death for saying soldiers shouldn't follow illegal orders. (They should not.)

Latest read. Really liked the first 1/3 of this. Then we got to what was really happening, and it just didn’t interest me as much. Reminds me thematically of the show Dark, which I recommend unreservedly.

Calling it now: Jeffrey Epstein for TIME Magazine's Person of the Year

Latest read. The all-powerful child is a well-worn horror trope, but the author manages to squeeze a solid plot and some very evocative imagery out of it. Biggest complaint is that the protagonist is an annoying actor-improviser stereotype. The afterward leads me to believe that so is the author.

Latest read. Bryson is great at what he does. My only two complaints? He ends of disease and death, which left me unsettled. And he reads his own book… and as an American who spent most of his life in Britain, he doesn’t have an accent, but he DOES pronounce a number of words the English way. Odd.

Latest read. Sometimes I can’t quite get a bead on Sedaris. Surely one of the funniest writers alive. But as he writes about topics like his sister’s suicide, I sometimes feel like his blunt openness is just another facade to hide behind. He confounds me.

Latest read #2 More non-fiction. Very interesting, if oddly written. The same author, looking at the same topic - often using the same examples and anecdotes - but through a variety of different lenses. Felt kinda… recursive?

Latest read #1 My therapist is urging me to work more non-fiction into my reading, so I started here. Do I now understand Quantum Physics? Absolutely not. But I think I now don’t understand it a little bit better. A quick and wittily written read.

Latest read… sort of. Book seemed very familiar right away… about halfway through realized that yes, I had read this in the last couple years. Still: really wonderful, creepy, highly original stories. Struck by the way many of them don’t have an ending so much as just… stop.

Latest read. 4 novellas, 2 already made into films. My main complaint of King’s full novels is that they tend to sprawl. Not the case here. Delightful.

Latest read. Accidentally found myself reading a “teen chick lit” horror novel, but not mad at it. Nice character development, an original plot, and one of the least forced-feeling romance sub-plots I’ve read in some time. And well-read on the audio, which makes a huge difference.

Latest read. Enjoyed it. Past and present play out in parallel as a woman returns to a childhood home her father claimed was haunted and wrote a book about. Lots of questionably reliable narrators, creating a fun tension around whether it was indeed haunted or not, and the implications of that.