The earliest memory I have of a scary story is a nursery rhyme my mother told me;
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I had a lot of questions. Who was this old woman? How many children did she have? How could they possibly live in a shoe? Why did she beat them? I was fixated on this woman, this villain, and I did not even know what the word villain was at that time, but I knew this woman was very bad and very cruel. My mother turned the light off and I remember sitting up in bed not able to get this awful image out of my head, a wicked woman beating her little children, who were probably as little as I was at the time or smaller.
 
My parents raised me speaking English, even though their first language was Spanish. We lived in a German, Polish and Greek neighborhood and we were the first Puerto Rican family on the block in 1980. By 1990, the neighborhood was predominantly Puerto Rican and Mexican. While my parents primarily spoke Spanish, they still tried to read English stories to me. The stories they told me were a mix of folk and fairy tales from their upbringing in Puerto Rico in the 1940s or Little Golden Books and the like my parents would buy at the local grocery store.
 
We didn’t really go to the library much. My parents were too embarrassed to take us there, given their limited English. My parents tried their best in educating me, with their limited education. Both of my parents hold a 6th grade education. So, there came a point where they could no longer read books to me, because they would struggle. I can’t remember the name of the book, but there was a page with a duck wearing rain boots and my father stopped reading because he came up to a word he could not read, and maybe he was embarrassed or frustrated, but he just handed me the book and walked away. I later learned the word was ‘galoshes,’ and I felt so angry then that my father could not read it to me, but now I feel so sad, because he felt so sad in that moment.
 
Many writers have these wondrous stories of growing up and regularly visiting the library, voraciously reading library books, or having their parents purchase them books, and having bookshelves and bookshelves full of fantastical books. I had neither. My parents avoided interacting with the English speaking population as much as possible, because in looking back, I remember the mean comments they received in stores from clerks who did not understand them, the sneers, and the demands to speak up or speak English. So, there were no visits to the library for me or purchases at the bookstore.

My books came from my inner city public schools, schools with broken and limited budgets. Our books were decades old, with cracked and yellowed pages or covers missing. I remember many of our fiction books were from the 1950s or 1960s. I attended elementary school in the 1980s and high school in the 1990s. So many of the books I had access to were classics, Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Lord of the Flies, The Old Man and the Sea, The Grapes of Wrath, The Count of Monte Cristo, Beowulf, Of Mice and Men, The Call of the Wild, Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and many more. Then with horror, my introduction to the genre came through those classics as well, collections of Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and more.
 
So, I read whatever I could find in my failing schools, and the elementary school I attended was indeed ranked as failing, as well as the high school I attended with its 40% graduation rate at that time. My high school’s graduating class college acceptance and graduation rate within four years was probably in the single digit percentage range. So I was one of only a few that went to college and graduated within four years – armed with a limited literature background.

It was not until college, really, when I began to read more widely, mostly as a way to play catch up. For each book that was assigned as a required reading I found myself reading an additional two or three books, just to know the background and reference material that was a part of the greater and wider discussion. It was shocking to learn the books that fellow students in college had read when they were younger, about their frequent trips to the library and book stores and about the stacks of books they had at home.
 
It’s funny, for a long time I kept this massive Merriam-Webster dictionary with a broken front red hard cover that was given to me by my J.R.O.T.C. instructor. He had noticed how I enjoyed reading the copy he kept by his desk, turning to it in class and searching for new words, and at the end of the school year let me take that and a thesaurus home. This is how books came to me, they were given by teachers, or given away at the end of the school year, stacks that were no longer needed or relevant and I picked through them, taking home what I could carry.
 
Now, I surround myself with books, buying them up in a frenzy and hoarding them because I never had any growing up and I just can’t believe that they are mine and I can finally afford them. Like my college reading, I found myself playing catch up as well when I went on to complete an MFA in Writing. My undergraduate degree was in journalism and my first master’s degree was in research, but I still had that pull and need to read and learn more about reading and writing. I wanted to learn more about an area that had fascinated me so much while growing up – horror and mystery, and it was during that time that I gave myself a crash course lesson on modern horror reading and writing, reading the works of Angela Carter, Shirley Jackson, Anne Rice, Stephen King, Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury and many more.
 
It was also that time that I had the opportunity to return to some of the very first stories that frightened me, ones that were told to me, that didn’t require a book, but my mother’s memory from when she went to school so many years before – fairy tales. 
 
The love of reading touches you, and for many of us like me, once upon a time, I did not have access to books, but still, I found a way. Stories are so much more accessible now, with free content online. Still, I will ask you to know that there is a future horror writer out there, many of them in fact, and some of them will move along slowly, as I did, and some of them will need help along the way, finding books. So, I ask for your patience and understanding, and if you can I ask you to share your love of books and writing widely so that the future generation of writers and horror writers in particular can find the right words along their way.

When The Haunting of Hill House arrived on Netflix in 2018, it seemed everyone was talking about it. An honestly creepy horror TV series, loosely based on the original novel, with plenty of reasons to re-watch. And because it was on Netflix, it wasn’t just the horror community getting hooked by the story. And two years later, we’re about to get a second series, based on another classic ghost story, The Turn of the Screw.


With a mix of new cast and actors from the original series, Bly Manor, like Hill House, seems set to take core elements of the original story and do something completely new with them. Both books have had multiple adaptations filmed and put on screen, including the new The Turning, released earlier this year. But whereas film adaptions reflect the same storyline as the books, Netflix’s versions both give us new stories and new characters, while still retaining nods to the originals.


I have no doubt Bly Manor will up the creep factor – the dolls in the trailer alone indicate as much. But these two books are a really interesting pairing, with a few similarities despite the different periods in which they were written and set. Hill House was released in 1959, The Turn of the Screw in 1898, just two years after the release of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.


Both, of course, are about haunted houses. They feel representative of their time periods and settings, with Hill House penned by Shirley Jackson, an American writer, and The Turn of the Screw written by Henry James, an American who later became British, and set his novella in England. And Screw has all the marks of a classic English ghost story, including the framing technique, where a narrator reveals he is telling the story on Christmas Eve, ghost stories at Christmas very much being a Victorian England tradition.


They both use unreliable, female narrators, a governess sent to look after a pair of children at Bly Manor, a house lived in but haunted, whereas Nell in Hill House attends as part of an investigation into the abandoned home. As readers, we’re never quite sure if the ghosts are real. If they are, they target these two intruders, reinforcing the message they do not belong. Nell and the Governess are both young women, sheltered in their upbringing, with very romantic ideals. Both, it could be argued, also have mental health issues. Nell’s anxiety is threaded throughout, and if the ghosts aren’t real, these two women have created them, pushing them to the edge as they grapple with reality and fantasy, their experiences driving the stories towards their tragic endings.


Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House takes the core of the story but transfers elements onto a new tale. Three of the siblings are named after the group who investigate Hill House in the original story, with a fourth named Shirley in reference to the author. Yet the activity still seems to swirl around Nell, who retains the no longer used (for which this writer is grateful) shortened version of Eleanor, despite the modern setting. The older two siblings – Steven and Shirley – remain steadfast in their belief that ghosts aren’t real, and what they witness at the house is a result of their mother’s declining mental health. Although on screen it’s harder to achieve the ambiguity the book uses, we still have that argument raging between the siblings, driving a wedge in their relationships. And elements of the book still make it across, such as the spiral staircase Book-Nell is so constantly drawn to.


The characters are altered, modernised, giving new relationships and traits, but the central ideas remain.


So far, we’ve only had a glimpse of the new Bly Manor series, but already there seems the same elements from the first series, and the same sort of loose adaptation from the book. The ghosts are subtle, there’s a larger cast of characters, but the idea of a governess going to look after two children seems to still be the main plot. It’ll be interesting to see if the religious elements remain. Hill House felt like a battle for the family’s souls, each side represented by the parents. In The Turn of the Screw, the governess is fighting for the souls of the children, against the dark shades of the houses’ previous inhabitants.


The children in Hill House were innocent, ignorant, for the most part, of the darker side of the house. But Bly Manor already seems to be setting up a creepy child factor, pulling from the book, but like the ghosts, the nature of the children in the book is left up to the reader decide, and it would be great to have that ambiguity reflected in the series.


It's no surprise to see these two paired up, books separated by six decades but with similar themes. Bly Manor and Hill House are very different types of homes, but the two work well together, and it’s easy to see why The Turn of the Screw was chosen to accompany Hill House. What they have done with this more ‘English’ story, how they’ve adapted it, and whether it lives up to the first season, remains to be seen.

 
THE FIRST HORROR BOOK I REMEMBER READING


When I was in elementary school, the library carried The Great Illustrated Classics series. They had almost every one that was written, and they were my favorite books to read. Over a few years, I kept checking them out one by one, starting with the ones I really wanted to read, like Call of the Wild, but eventually the only ones left that I hadn’t read where the horror ones. The first horror novel I ever read was the Great Illustrated Classics version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
As soon as I started reading it, I started getting really creeped out by it, and started having nightmares, but it was so good I had to finish it.
 
THE FIRST HORROR FILM I REMEMBER WATCHING

The first horror movie I can remember watching was Jaws. I’ve seen a lot of debates about whether or not Jaws is a horror movie. On the one hand, when I think of horror movies, my mind goes more to movies like Halloween and The Shining. On the other hand, though, it’s got some of the most terrifying scenes in any movie ever made, and I can’t go swimming without immediately hearing the films score in the back of my head.
 
THE GREATEST HORROR BOOK OF ALL TIME

This is a hard question, since there are a lot of really great horror books out there, and my choice for the best switches pretty often. However, at the moment, I think my personal favorite is It, by Stephen King. Its just such a cool premise, a clown that feeds off children’s fears, and the characterization of the Loser’s Club is amazing.

The other aspect I like about It so much is how Pennywise is an actual character in the book. Instead of being treated like a random monster who has no thoughts or feeling, Pennywise is portrayed as more of an Arch Villain type character, who has a real grudge against the kids, and has his own unique personality.
 
THE GREATEST HORROR FILM OF ALL TIME

Halloween. There are some really terrific horror movies out there, but in my opinion, nothing comes close to the original Halloween. It’s just such a perfect example of building dread in an audience, without having to show excessive amounts of gore, but instead by slowing raising the tension. I also love how Michael Myers is portrayed. He is probably the only movie character where everything about him is iconic, despite the fact that he never spoke a single word.
Also, the score for the movie is amazing.
 
THE GREATEST WRITER OF ALL TIME

I honestly can’t answer this question. There are so many authors out there, that write so many different books that I love, in wildly different genres, that I can’t even come close to narrowing it down to just one.
 
THE BEST BOOK COVER OF ALL TIME

There are a lot of book covers that I love, like the cover for the original Pet Semetery, which has the artist drawn cat, or the cover for Jurassic Park, which looks amazing due to how simple it is.
However, in my opinion, the best cover of all time is easily Jaws. The image of the woman swimming, with the massive head of the Shark coming up from below is haunting, and in my opinion the most easily recognizable horror image of all time.
The other thing that makes Jaw’s cover so perfect, is how the title is at the top in massive letters, overshadowing the entire cover below it, once again making the woman look small in comparison, and furthering the sense of how massive the shark really is.
 
THE BEST FILM POSTER OFF ALL TIME

Also Jaws.
 
 
THE MOST UNDERRATED FILM OF ALL TIME

The Prestige, based on the novel by Christopher Priest. This movie isn’t really underrated, at least by the people who’ve seen it, but I do feel like it doesn’t get talked about enough. Even when people mention Christopher Nolan as a director, everyone seems to mention either Inception, Memento, or The Dark Knight. I feel like The Prestige deserves to be mentioned on the same level as those other films, just because of how perfect its foreshadowing and story its. Every time I’ve watched it, I see something I didn’t before, and that’s what I love in a movie.
 
THE MOST UNDERRATED BOOK OF ALL TIME

This is a hard question to answer, because I feel like most of the books I’ve read and loved are all highly talked about. However, I have realized that when talking about children’s horror, everyone gravitates towards Goosebumps, and for good reason. However, I remember reading a series when I was younger called the Baily School Kids, which I loved. It was about a group of school kids who kept investigating teachers that they thought were secretly monsters. It was a best-selling series when it came out, but I haven’t seen anyone talk about it in a long time, which is a shame.
 
THE MOST UNDERRATED AUTHOR OF ALL TIME

I honestly don’t know. There are so many great books out there that aren’t getting the audience they deserve, that narrowing it down to just one seems impossible.
 
THE BOOK / FILM THAT SCARED ME THE MOST

The answer to this question is actually not a book, or a film, but an episode of the TV show, Batman the Animated Series. The first episode of that show, On Leather Wings, features a transformation of Dr. Kirk Langstrom into the Man Bat, and as a child, it was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen. That was the first time I can remember being that scared.
Then, years later, my childhood fear came back in the video game, Batman Arkham Knight, when I tried to grapple onto a rooftop, and Man Bat jump scared me out of nowhere. To this day, that is still the most effective jump scare I have ever experienced.
 
THE BOOK / FILM I AM WORKING ON NEXT
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I am currently working on a new project, which carries over some of the same horror elements I used in Nightmare, but puts them in more of a crime thriller setting. I can’t reveal the title just yet, but I’m hoping to release it around this time next year.

Had it come back? No, it couldn't have. He had buried it for good. Or at least that's what Scott told himself. But what if it had? Was that why the scarecrow now watched him?
But the more Scott tries to ignore it, the more the evidence begins to pile up. So do the bodies. Because sometimes, the dead don't stay buried. Sometimes the monster survives.
As the bodies mount, and the secrets of his past grow more haunting, Scott must do whatever it takes to save his family. But what if by doing so, they find out what happened all those years ago? What if they realize what he did?
Scott learns that there is no escape from his own past, or the crows that have crawled out of it. He can only watch, as his life is turned into a living nightmare.

My mother never let me watch monster movies when I was a kid. She was afraid I would have nightmares. My mother was a perfectly nice woman, but I always suspected that she was not so much afraid that I would have nightmares—waking up in a cold sweat, terrified, and screaming out, “MOMMY! MOMMY!”—as she was determined to have an uninterrupted night’s sleep.

In any case (a case for a psychiatrist, most likely), I was not inculcated with a love of creature features in my formative years.

(I wonder if someone can be inculcated by an incubus? But I guess that’s off-topic.)

I never even saw the original Universal Pictures Frankenstein, which ran often on television on Channel Nine’s Million Dollar Movie in Los Angeles. Every other kid in my school got to see Frankenstein. And Dracula and The Wolfman and all their sequels. Nope, my mommy wouldn’t let me see The Mummy. She somehow was convinced that I was an impressionable, delicate child. But the biggest impression I ever got was from my elementary school classmates who thought I was a weird little kid because I didn’t get to watch weird little films and join in on their playground conversations about how neat Godzilla was, or how cool The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was. And forget going to the movie theater to see The Blob when I was nine-years-old and just one year away from a double-digit age, surely the entrance into adolescence.

I didn’t see the Universal Frankenstein until well into my adult years. Indeed, if memory serves (and memory has been a pretty sloppy server of late), I think I saw Young Frankenstein before I saw Frankenstein. Since then, of course, I’ve seen all the great Universal horror films—including Howard the Duck.

Frankenstein is my favorite because it’s so oddly beautiful in design. And because Boris Karloff was a better actor than Colin Clive. And Frankenstein’s monster is not really a monster, is he? I mean, he didn’t ask to be born—or rather, assembled and stitched together. He’s just looking for love in all the wrong places. I mean, a village in the Bavarian Alps? How many good bars could there be there? Of course, his “father” abandoned him, so why wouldn’t he be dysfunctional when it comes to love? On top of that, people are always stopping him and asking him to jump-start their cars. It’s the bolts in the neck you see…

Memory is serving up another course and has corrected me. I did get to see two monster movies when I was a kid. One by permission, and one by accident. Mother let me see Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. (Of course, they didn’t, because Dr. Frankenstein was nowhere to be seen. The Invisible Man was nowhere to be seen either, but at least he was in the movie.) Mother figured as it was a comedy, and Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were so silly, how could the film be frightening? But I fooled her. The film scared the shit out of me.

The other monster film was of a giant insect variety. But I did not know that when I saw listed in the TV Guide a film called The Beginning or the End, a film about the development of the atomic bomb in World War II to be shown on the late afternoon movie show. I asked mom if I could see it. She had no objections as WWII had been a big factor in her life, and she thought the film would be educational. So she exited to the kitchen to start preparing dinner as I turned on the TV. When the film came on it quickly became apparent that the TV Guide had made a mistake in their listing. For the film beginning to air was not The Beginning or the End about the making of the atomic bomb, but The Beginning of the End, about giant grasshoppers. The grasshopper growth spurt was caused by radiation, so there was that connection. But that didn’t impress my mother when she came out of the kitchen and saw the giant locusts rampaging downtown Chicago. I had seen so much of the movie already, though, that even she didn’t have the heart to make me turn it off. But she told me if I had a nightmare I was on my own. I don’t remember if I had a nightmare or not, but ever since then, I’ve been adamant about not eating chocolate-covered grasshoppers, firmly believing that two wrongs just simply do not make a right. 

So, given all this, what inspired me to write my latest novel, Creature Feature: A Horrid Comedy?

Well, it came from a simple question that occurred to me after a night of debauchery in a seraglio. That’s not true, of course, I just like typing those words. The truth is, I was probably in the shower. Alone, I hasten to add rather sadly. I find many good ideas come to one during a nice hot shower. But when you are in there alone, what the hell else are you supposed to do? Anyway, the simple question was—where do really weird ideas come from? (besides a hot shower). I mean, monsters, and creatures of the night, and blood-suckers, and really angry giant lizards or gorilla-like stompers of not-yet-paid-for cars, and big fat humongous insects that look down on people and say, “Gee, they look just like little bugs”? Not to mention demons from hell and zombies. So I won’t mention them. Especially zombies. I hate zombies. Zombies got no reason to live!

To answer that question without leaning on dark psychology, and to find an answer that might lead to some laughs, I wrote Creature Feature: A Horrid Comedy. Why a comedy? Well, with all the real monsters today in our real lives, monsters microscopic, monsters climatic, and monsters political, don’t you think we deserve a few laughs?