“I imagined life taking me all sorts of places. I never anticipated watching the winter sun rise near noon over the Yukon River from the secure ward of the Whitehorse General Hospital.” I wrote this in January after a psychiatric catastrophe. I hope it helps... open.substack.com/pub/nicholas...

Many complex emotions announcing that @cormorantbooks.bsky.social will be publishing Famous Blue. It's more 'literary' than my horror work, if that means anything, but I'm proud it's slouching slowly out into the world. Thank you to Natasha Mihell at @therightsfactory.bsky.social for all you did ❤️

Soft launching a substack. This is a short story I wrote last year for @tinybookcase.bsky.social with @benholroyddell.bsky.social and @nicorogers.bsky.social, writing to the prompt ‘Patrol.‘ You can find our whole conversation in Episode 186. Had a lovely time substack.com/home/post/p-... #horror

You can tell if a musician has any contemporary relevance because if they don't their Spotify bio will be a cross between a PhD thesis, a hagiography and a tombstone, and if they are it'll be some version of no broke loosers beep boop beep boop just here for vibes and n00ds of ur mom xoxoxo one love

Don't generally share reviews but thoroughly enjoyed this one from an old friend. Very insightful, very demure, very mindful substack.com/home/post/p-...

Opening with a quote from Revelations is a bad sign. It will never not be a bad sign. Revelations itself contains nothing but bad signs. It is itself a ur-bad sign, a meta-bad sign. Absolutely nothing good will ever follow a quote from Revelations, except perhaps The Man Comes Around by Johnny Cash

Finally watching The Last of Us. So far our hands down favorite characters are the structurally unbothered Indigenous couple they meet in Wyoming. Unbothered they were before the apocalypse, unbothered they doubtless were during, unbothered they remain, and will remain until the end of all bothering

You know they’re an English trad folk outfit because their name sounds like a Victorian ship chandler’s partnership and all of their songs are celebrating jobs they’d be fired from in less than twenty minutes

If it has multiple volumes and a table of contents, that’s not a birthday book. That’s a dossier…

Oh man, just flashed back to the entire concept of the hipster, remember when we thought that mattered?

Social media could only have been conceived, let alone used, by a society that has never known true repression. Imagine offering Soviet Bloc citizens free use of a keyword searchable permanent record of every random thought that's ever entered their heads? Nope, they'd say. Hard pass. Unsubscribe.

It's an odd thought to have under the circumstances, but just to be sure we're all on the same page, b/c it occurred to me tonight watching #ThePhoenicianScheme seeing no one else laughing... ...ALL of Wes Anderson's movies, without exception, are screwball comedies...right? There is consensus?

"Calm down man don't be hysterical they're not coming for you they're coming for the immigrants and the transes" "Are you saying this to reassure me? Am I supposed to be excited about this?" "No, but...you know what I mean" "It seems I do, yeah"

It figures an HRE candidate was going to win this year what with the War of the League of Cambrai. Pastyme With Gud Cumpanye was objectively a banger and the cloth of gold uniforms were fabulous but it doesn't matter everybody hates England so ZERO POINTS www.reddit.com/r/mapporncir...

Intellectually I can understand that men had motives to fight before nationalism, the French Revolution, and the Levée en masse, but I'll never understand it emotionally

This aged well enough

In what circle of hell is the first thing I learn about the new Pope that he once sent an admonishing tweet to JD Vance?

I firmly maintain that the Pierce Brosnan Bonds are the gayest Bonds and the fact that they’re so homoerotic and camp is why they’re the best of the crop Alexa send tweet mute replies

🎶No, no habemus papam, papam is a pope who won’t get no hab from me🎶 🎶Hanging off the truck bed side of his dead pope ride, trying to holler at me🎶

The Black Hunger is having some kind of promotion on Amazon, and it's going to be 15% off for the rest of May and the audiobook is going to be $1.99 Canadian! You could also, however, go get it on bookshop.org and support an indie bookstore instead! Looks like it's discounted there too...

The only thing I regret about leaving Twitter is that we effectively let Musk’s Nazi gangs chase us out of the forum. There I only saw Nazis ranting, and it was exhausting, but here I only see people I already agree with. Is all we’ve done create a new echo chamber? Should we be over there fighting?

Well that’s an honour

Multiple straight friends have reassured me over the past few months that they aren’t coming for me, they’re coming for the scary trans rapists. I’ve pointed out that this is a classic Nazi tactic. They didn’t put up posters of your Jewish neighbour. They put up posters of this guy, who didn’t exist

The thing I love most about this idea of America being totally ripped off for decades by basically every country on earth is that in order to buy into it you have to accept the premise that Americans are fundamentally, structurally stupid

Reading Last and First Men by Olaf Stapleton feels a bit like the sci-fi equivalent of reading the Bible. Lots of moments of realization, like “oh, that’s where this came from. Oh, that’s where that came from!” Essential cultural literacy reading for genre fiction. And hauntingly beautiful

Yes, Elon Musk and Donald Trump will fall out at some point. But the far more interesting question to me at that point is which of them will actually win when they do? 🧵

Review on the way, but this was really fun - a smart and immensely likeable protagonist and an adventure with twists and turns I'd never have guessed. Great scifi, thankyou @garethlpowell.bsky.social ❤️📚💙

Living as vassals to the American hegemon is waking up and trying to swim groggily through a cascade of dystopian horseshit and then reading an American paper that insists the real problem is how budget reconciliation is going to play in rural Georgia. And the worst part is they're somehow right...

I'm finding tariff an incredibly frustrating word to spell and type. I always, always think it has two r's

Currently reading The Black Hunger by @najpullen.bsky.social and it's such a vivid and evocative gothic horror treat. The sense of rising dread is so well done. I am eating it up, no pun intended. #BookSky

I note with concern that two of the most prominent movies I can cite to support my thesis that cinema is going through a revival after a long, dark period of cultural sterility and asinine Marvel bullshit, All Quiet on the Western Front and Nosferatu, are remakes of classics from the Weimar era 😅

Still a bop

One of the main figures of masculinity in pop culture today is the deeply uncool whiny guy who thinks he’s smart/powerful/etc (Elmo, Zuck) and I think part of what made Kendrick’s hit so big is that it puts a guy like that in his place

Nosferatu is an unqualified masterpiece; the definitive 21st century Dracula adaptation, the rare horror movie that transcends the genre to be a general classic, and the gothic horror I dreamed of as a kid but never thought would get made. An absolute North Star for my future writing aspirations too

behold! my stuff some folks whose work or presence online I find valuable in the horror or spec fic genres.

Or, as the Soviets called it, Samizdat

Hi new followers? Not sure where you all came from lol, but nice to meet you! Glad you're here. Here's an article I wrote about my novel and fascism five months ago that unfortunately is aging a little too well #horror #fascism #occult #ungern #TheBlackHunger crimereads.com/white-baron-...

Not to peddle my shit in the midst of a global crisis, but if you’d like to read: 🏳️‍⚧️ A book by a trans Canadian 🇨🇦 That’s set in Canada (Montreal) Please consider picking up Coup de Grâce 🥺

It's worth pointing out that the last time Trump tried to redevelop a piece of prime oceanfront real estate against the wishes of the people who lived there it was called Atlantic City and it didn't go particularly well for him

There are a number of personal, professional and health reasons why I can't post my thoughts on events and wade into political dIsCoUrSe on social media, but in case it needs to be said, my rage and terror and despair are as indiscriminate and overwhelming as yours. There is, however, always hope.

Features an excerpt from @najpullen.bsky.social’s The Black Hunger, which also sounds like a yes please sir for me. All the books coming out through Orbit’s new horror imprint this year are going to be 🔥 🔥 🔥

Hey authors, what's happening? Listen, the work you poured blood, sweat and tears into and were never adequately compensated for is needed by plutocrats to make them even richer by replacing what you do with garbage, so I'm going to need you to let them steal it by EOD, mmkay? #AI #Theft #EatTheRich

Mood open.spotify.com/track/5LPGZn...

Going all the way back to Magna Carta explaining to my husband what happens if Parliament doesn’t vote to supply the executive in March: “Babe, why wouldn’t you get paid?? We’d miss our mortgage payment!” “Well TJ, in 1010 Prince Yaroslav the Wise united the principalities of Novgorod and Kiev…”

BABIES you'll have so many BABIES FOUR HUNDRED BABIES 👶👶👶👶 www.montrealgazette.com/news/article...

On this day, in 2023, on the visit we got engaged, my partner insisted we go to Tesco's so we could buy the only beer, in the whole of England, that he actually wanted to drink #APartOfOurHeritage

Bob Dylan and Joan Baez: the OG Situationship #ACompleteUnknown

One depressing aspect of regular meditation is realizing how much of what's going through my head at any given moment is just garbage TV from ten years ago

I saw the Nosferatu trailer when we went to see the Dylan movie on NYE and squealed and squirmed so hard my husband had to physically restrain and shush me. Damn thing isn’t in theatre (singular) up here until the 10th. Is it as good as it looks?

Every time I hear Born in the USA I weep at the pathos of it, but I also rage internally against Ronald Reagan for having the audacity to use it as a campaign song. Like did no one on his campaign listen to the lyrics at any point? For months? Perfect encapsulation of American willful ignorance