​THE BEST FILM POSTER OF ALL TIME


I grew up in the ‘80s, so I have a huge nostalgic connection to the horror movies of that time. And the film posters, they just kill me. I could stare at them all day long. That said, it’s pretty much impossible to pick just one or two from the countless number of them. But if you put a kotton kandy gun to my head and I just say the first one that comes into my mind:

 Plus Killer Klowns is the perfect late-night summer movie, especially if you’ve got kotton kandy on hand.
 

THE BEST BOOK / FILM I HAVE WRITTEN

I think that writers should grow with each subsequent book. For that reason, I always feel that my newest work is the strongest. So by that logic I’d have to say my best book is my recent short fiction collection, Blacker Against the Deep Dark (Eibonvale Press, 2018).
 
I’ve never written a film (but would love to).

THE WORST BOOK / FILM I HAVE WRITTEN

Following the same logic as in my previous answer, I usually feel my earlier stuff is weaker than my recent work. That’s why I’m currently working on a third edition of my first collection. You see things differently after you’ve stepped away and come back to a book. You see all the things you would have done differently had you been writing/editing it at that time. Sometimes it’s easy to live with, and a “warts and all” mentality can be endured, but sometimes – for me, at least – you go back to something and realize you didn’t say – or say strongly enough – what you’d meant to say. And that’s when I think it’s okay to go back and tinker a little or a lot, until you get the experiment right. So for anyone interested in checking out my first collection, Experiments at 3 Billion A.M., I suggest waiting for the 3rd edition, due out early next year – I’ll have gotten it right by then.

THE MOST UNDERRATED  FILM OF ALL TIME


Again: so many…
 
The Isle by Kim Ki-duk. One of my all-time favorite movies.

Trollhunter. Best. Movie. Ever.
 
Also: every Tremors movie. Are there more fun movies than the Tremors movies? The Gremlins movies are amazing. But then they don’t have Graboids…

THE MOST UNDERRATED BOOK OF ALL TIME

The independent press world is filled with underrated authors/books so it’s tough to narrow it down to just a few. But more people should read Joel Lane. His collection, The Lost District and Other Stories, is great. Dark and sad and surreal and full of urban decay.
 
In terms of widely-known books, I’m amazed that there aren’t legions of fanatics worshipping at the altar of Stephen King’s novel, Revival. Or maybe there are and I just don’t know it. Obviously, it’s a hugely popular book, but to me it deserves to be in the company of his earlier classics. It’s that great. The ending – which evokes Lovecraft/Ligotti/Lane at their best – is just beyond great. 

THE MOST UNDERRATED AUTHOR OF ALL TIME

James Tiptree Jr./Alice B. Sheldon. Her collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever is one of the best collections I’ve ever read. I know she’s recognized as being an important author, but more speculative fiction readers should be shouting her name from the rooftops.

THE BOOK / FILM THAT SCARED ME THE MOST

Film:
 
It’s a tie between The Exorcist (because of the element of the unknown that lies at the heart of its supernatural horror) and Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer (because of the known/every-day aspect of it, the fact that this kind of horror exists today, and might be right around the corner). The latter is a tough watch, but an important one, I think. I feel sort of the same about David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and, to a lesser extent, Wild at Heart, though I love those movies and have watched them many times.
 
Book:
 
Jesus Saves by Darcy Steinke. Absolutely horrifying. A difficult read for the subject matter, but worthwhile; a bold and beautiful urban Gothic novel. Also, Night of the Hunter by Davis Grubb is one of the most beautifully written novels of sheer terror I’ve ever read. The scariest short story I’ve ever read is “Tell the Women We’re Going” by Raymond Carver.

THE BOOK / FILM I AM WORKING ON NEXT


I’m currently finishing the final draft of a novel. It’s an expanded version of the novelette, “Journey to the End of a Burning Girl” combined with the story “We Are All Lightless Inside”, both of which appeared in my previous short fiction collection, Blacker Against the Deep Dark (which was reviewed here on Ginger Nuts of Horror by Tony Jones – thanks again, Tony!)
 
I’m also working on finalizing the table of contents of a volume of my short stories being published by Fourth Horseman Press. It’s an anthology featuring the best stories from each of my collections, chapbooks, stories published exclusively in magazines and anthologies, as well as some unpublished stuff. It covers the 20-year period from 1999 – 2019.
 
I’m also serving as editor for a J.G. Ballard tribute anthology that will be published by Eibonvale Press, tentatively scheduled for release sometime in 2020.
 
And I’m just putting the finishing touches on a chapbook mini-collection due from Eibonvale Press at the end of July. It’s called Animals of the Exodus and will feature 4 new stories.
 
Beyond that…well, there are always more projects in the works. Onwards!

​From a man having a conversation with the shadow of a human being blasted into a wall by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, to a pastor giving shelter to the most bizarre individual to ever walk the Earth; from a secret group at war with the physical manifestations of disease that have run rampant for ages, to a pair of detectives trying to solve the mystery of a deadly otherworldly drug that legend says holds the power to open the gates to Paradise. These, and other dark and weird tales...

Today we welcome Kirsten to Ginger Nuts of Horror as part of our #HorrorBloggerTribe initiative, where we shine the spotlight on some of the other horror bloggers out there.  The endgame of this initiative is to create a tribe of fellow bloggers who like, share, and support each other.  

Don't be shy, come along and join us, if you would like to take part in this series of articles drop us an email, the horror blogging tribe is in the main part a really supportive bunch of people, together let's promote horror 

​“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

This wasn’t a hugely challenging question for 8-year old me. I’d known that I wanted to be a writer since I was old enough to talk and tell stories, to sit in my grandparents’ living room and write silly little haikus on the back of their newspapers. What I wasn’t prepared for was how my writing style would change over the next 10 years of my life.

I’m Kirsten from K. Smith Blogs,
writer/editor/procrastinator/graduate/general mess of a human being. Today, I’ve written a piece for Ginger Nuts of Horror to talk about how I got into horror blogging, plus the rewards (and consequences) of writing about it.

If you’ve ever taken a gander at my blog (I do encourage you to do so if you favour the weird and gory genres of film), then you’ll know that I write primarily about the horror genre, though I do tend to dabble in general hot topics on the film industry. What you may not know is that I never started out wanting to write horror: in fact, this is a relatively new line of work for me.

When I was an 8-year old, ready to take the world by storm with my clearly perfected writing style (I am already cringing at the countless grammatical mistakes I used to make), I knew I wanted to be a poet. I didn’t have the best childhood, so I lost myself in Plath, Baudelaire and Poe: if it was deeply disturbing, I was reading it. But when I wasn’t reading, I was watching horror films with my dad, films that I was definitely too young to be watching but revelling in the guts and gore of nonetheless. I believe my first horror film was Jaws (1975) around the age of 6-years old.

Horror was my escape. When I had a bad day at school, when I was sick, when I needed to get away from everything, I stuck a horror film on. If it was a bad day at school, it was usually a slasher. If I was sick, a body-horror. When it was escapism that I needed, my favourite horror films came out of the cupboard, namely A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and Hellraiser (1987): those two films are the epitome of my childhood introduction to the genre and I’ve watched both equally too many times to count.

I grew up, went to high school, college (back when that wasn’t mandatory, sorry, Gen-Z) and then packed up my bags and moved to Essex to study Creative Writing at university. I remember walking onto campus and thinking “this is it, this is where I become a real writer”, as if anything I had written up to that point didn’t count.

Uni was my first experience of networking, of coming together as a group of people and celebrating what we do: up until then, I didn’t have any writer friends, nor did I know anybody that cared very much for reading (with the exception of my best friend).

When I received my BA, I was ready to be a poet. I’d been training four years for it, after all. And that is, of course, where I did a complete 180: as soon as I started my MA, I found a YouTuber named Ryan Hollinger, a man who produces critical video essays about horror films.

It was at this point that something clicked in my brain that for some reason never had before: I could combine my love of film and my skillset as a writer. I remember distinctly slamming my cup of tea down on the coffee table and yelling with frustration that I’d never even considered it. All that time and experience at university and not once had it crossed my mind to write about horror, let alone create a blog for it.

I repurposed an old blog from my college days and branded it K. Smith Blogs. I decided to private my old posts and delete a few because my writing has change drastically since I was 16-years old: my viewpoints had changed, my writing style differed, and I wanted to change things up. So, with that, I produced my first post and never looked back.

You might be wondering whether any of it is worth it, whether anyone would read your blog if you made one. My answer is always to say yes because, regardless of whether you get many hits on your content, you should always be writing for yourself. I am a small-time blogger, but I do aspire to be more: I hope to see myself in a few years writing content for a horror site fulltime, however, I know that it’s going to take a while to get there and I want to be producing content I care about.

I will say there are some highs and lows. Blogging, from my own experience and from talking to fellow horror writers, isn’t just an occupation: it’s an outlet. You can put important things out into the world, things that will be innately yours and relatable to others.
​
One of my best pieces of work this year was an article called The ‘T’ That Cinema is Missing, drawing attention to the lack of transgender representation in the film industry: it caused an absolute uproar in Facebook forums, igniting debates from different corners of the world. Admittedly, this was a difficult thing to witness, because while I was happy that my post was getting a lot of attention, it also meant that I had to deal with transphobes and people invalidating my viewpoint due to my lack of experience in writing for this industry. I don’t regret posting it, though, because it’s important: it’s always good to bear in mind that someone, somewhere, will always disagree with what you have to say, and that’s alright.