The Second Dispatch

Issue two of C.J. Dotson's Dreadful Dispatch

The Writing

I mentioned in my last newsletter that I had recently sent my first round of revisions for my debut horror novel, THE CUT, to my editor at St. Martin’s Press. I’m still waiting to hear back about those (which is what I expected, so I’m waiting patiently rather than in a state of anxiety about it or anything), and in the meantime I have begun the process of revisiting THESE FAMILIAR WALLS.

I wrote that book in the summer of 2020, participated in Pitch Wars with it, and queried it in 2021 (there are themes relating to the 2020 shutdowns in the book, and at the time when I was querying it was definitely still too soon), and I haven’t looked at it since then. Returning to the Hughes house and to my main character Amber’s head after a break of a couple years has been really fun. I am delighted to find that I still love this book, and I’m really pleased to be discovering places where I can improve the manuscript. In the couple of years since I set WALLS aside I have continued writing and I have continued embracing the horror genre, and I can see at once that WALLS is a great book and also that I am a better writer now than I was when I first drafted this one. Once I’m done revising it on my own I’m planning to ask around for some new beta readers, and maybe try to get one of the original beta readers who last read it nearly three years ago to take another look at it. Getting the chance to make it better and still get it out there in the world is thrilling.

Over the last couple weeks I have also found myself increasingly preoccupied by ideas for a subsequent book. The ideas are nearly driving me to distraction, and I’m on the very cusp of switching what my next project will be so that I can start diving into all these ideas… instead of the book I had been planning to write next and have already outlined... This is a fun problem to have, though, so I’m definitely not complaining!

Horror Chat

Twitter is all aflutter right now about cozy horror. (Well, that might be an exaggeration—Twitter does sometimes get all aflutter, this is probably more of a sporadic fluttering.)

I’m still navigating how I feel about the phrase. When I was querying THE CUT there was a while when the query trenches had me down and I worried that my horror novels wouldn’t cut it, and I had the idea to try something new. At the time I had not yet heard the phrase “cozy horror,” but I could see the “cozy” craze beginning and thought I would give it a shot (I’m not at all intending to take credit for inventing the idea of cozy horror, just that the idea came to me before I had yet heard of it elsewhere—I’m sure many people were having similar thoughts around the same time or a bit before I did). I came up with an idea I really liked and outlined it and started drafting and then I got an email requesting a call with an agent who wound up becoming my agent, and everything but THE CUT went on the back burner until my agent said it was ready to go on sub.

At that point I tried to return to my “cozy horror” idea, but some of the shine had come off the concept. I scrapped what I’d drafted and re-wrote a new outline, making some changes that got me excited about it again without taking away from the softer horror of this book than my other work. I intended to start drafting but had an unexpectedly short sub experience and had to set the outline aside in favor of more revisions for THE CUT and dusting off THESE FAMILIAR WALLS.

I’m nearing the point when I’ll be setting WALLS aside again and picking what to work on next, and my mind is torn between my cozy horror idea and the shiny new idea I mentioned in the section above.

And then I saw the tweet from an acquiring editor at a big publishing house, a tweet about loving cozy horror. And then I saw the ensuing discourse, both on twitter and in one of the writing community discord servers I belong to.

Back when I felt like I might be one of the pioneers of a new genre, I really liked the term “cozy horror,” but some of the arguments I’ve seen against the phrase are compelling, particularly that every example of cozy horror yet provided can be better described as either softcore horror or genre-blended horror.

I guess the rebuttal for that would be that “cozy horror,” if it exists, is an emerging subgenre rather than an established one, so there aren’t actually examples of it really out there yet.

Another argument I’ve seen a little since this conversation started boils down to, “I like writing horror-horror, I would never write ‘cozy’ horror” and I guess my answer to that would be a blend of good for you and a solid agreement with this tweet. More horror subgenres can only be better for horror as a whole.

So I can see why people might object to the term, but I suppose don’t really agree with their objections.

Even if I don’t feel strongly enough about the debate to get intense about it, I do think it’s interesting to watch the discussion unfold. Genre publishing has seemed preoccupied with “cozy” for a little bit now, and I’ll be keeping an eye on how it falls out. Either way, I’ll write the story I had planned for it sooner or later—and if the subgenre does take off I guess that’ll make the book easier to pitch someday.

Book Review—4 out of 5 Stars for The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher

I will try to avoid spoilers, so some parts of this review may seem a touch vague. Any mild spoilers that I can’t really avoid will be italicized so that readers may skip those sections if they want to.

Following her divorce, Kara (called “Carrot” by the two most sympathetic side characters) moves into a spare room her Uncle Earl has fixed up for her in his home—which happens to also be a tourist attraction called the Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities, and Taxidermy, mostly called the Wonder Museum, where Kara repays his hospitality by helping him run the museum and catalogue the wacky and sometimes tacky “exhibits” in his eclectic collection, a never-ending task in a place with no formal organization and a constant in-flow of donated “oddities” from Uncle Earl’s friends from afar.

When Uncle Earl needs to stay with his own sister, Kara’s mother, to take it easy following a knee surgery, Kara stays at the Wonder Museum to cover for his absence and continue her inventory of the objects within. She’s not long on her own before someone knocks a hole in a wall and Kara finds, on the other side, an impossible concrete hallway. Enlisting the help of Simon, the barista who works at the coffee shop next door (in the same building and also owned by Uncle Earl, who lets his tenants pay their rent in free coffee), Kara investigates the strange hallway.

What they find is another world, one which does not look horrifying at first but turns out to be deeply uncanny and terribly dangerous. Kara and Simon explore a little, but a deeply unsettling discovery sends them running lost into the strange world. They must learn what the perils are in that place, figure out how to avoid them, and find their way home before they fall prey to what hunts in that other place—and they must make sure if they do get home that they don’t lead anything back to our world.

First of all, this premise is like catnip for me. I love holes in things that are not supposed to have holes in them. I love the idea of going through one of those holes and finding someplace I’ve never been and never would have been (in the really real world that would be, what, some ductwork above the drop-ceiling in a school or if I ever get really lucky maybe a secret room, though I’ve never gotten that lucky yet). And getting to go to another world where the rules are different than they are here has been a favorite daydream of mine ever since I first read any of the Narnia books. From very early in this book I knew that this is the kind of horror scenario I would 100% fall for, which made it very fun.

One of horror’s eternal questions is “why doesn’t the main character just leave,” and I think that the character of Uncle Earl answers this question so nicely for Kara in The Hollow Places; he is sweet and kind but not without flaws, in a way that feels genuine and lets the reader really feel Kara’s motivation in making sure that whatever is happening to her can’t also happen to him. 

I also love the way that Kara’s divorce is presented in the book—her ex-husband is obnoxious but not some monster, the divorce was an upheaval but not riddled with drama. It struck me as a very realistic depiction of what many divorces must feel like. Painful, yes, but not horrifying in and of itself, and awkward in the often-overlooked way that painful things are often also awkward. It was a great setup and it was carried through the book really well, of diminishing importance to Kara as the events of the novel unfolded.

The sense of adventure in this book was really enjoyable (for the reader, it was clearly not an enjoyable adventure for Kara and Simon). There were parts, near the beginning, when I knew that I would have been reading with a touch of envy if I had somehow missed that this is a horror novel.

The characters were engaging and realistic. The ones who were meant to be likable were very likable and the ones who were meant to be unlikable were very unlikable, but never in a way that felt over-the-top or cringeworthy. Simon was so fun, and although Uncle Earl didn’t get a ton of page-time I love him. Kara was a relatable main character who I sympathized with throughout the book without feeling like she was an author insert or reader insert character. I also liked that the tension and adventure in this book were balanced with a thread of humor that felt very grounded in the kind of jokes and comedy I encounter on the daily on social media; it was a specific and realistic kind of humor that added so much to Kara’s voice on the page.

There were only a couple of places where I felt the narrative fell a little flat for me.

The first is that though the tension and the pacing were perfect and there’s no question why the characters were terrified, most of the book didn’t make me feel frightened. Tense, yes! Engaged, interested, eager to see what happens next, yes! But mostly not afraid. (This is why I gave it 4 stars instead of 5; if the book had actually frightened me it would have been a 5-star read for me.)

The second is that the revelation of the catalyst that led to the events of the book felt obvious to me. This is something I feel is worth noting in case others find this aspect of the book unsurprising as well, when I think it was meant to be something more mysterious. It’s not, however, something I would really hold against the book or the author—I often see things coming like this. 

For me, the strongest part of the entire book was the climactic scene (a little spoilery content coming) when Kara has figured out what caused the opening to another world in the Wonder Museum because it brings some aspects of that other world to ours, and the exhibits in the museum are all that allow her to survive, and the reason she works out for that during the final scenes in the book, was so well done. The tension of that climactic scene was the best in the whole book, the descriptions and visuals were so eerie and unsettling, and the main character’s best guess at an explanation at the end was so touching it actually choked me up a little bit.

Finally, I really enjoyed how the story was resolved—aside from being touching it also had just the right balance between explaining things and leaving some mystery, and it ended with the same thread of humor that ran through the whole story, without making that humor the focal point of the falling action of the book.

The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher was a really enjoyable read and I definitely recommend it.

Movie Review—2.5 out of 5 Stars for Evil Dead Rise

I will attempt to keep this spoiler-free. Any part of the review that might get mildly spoilery will be in italics so that anyone reading may skip those parts if they want to. So if you want to read fully-spoiler-free, skip any italics you see.

This is a movie that doesn’t feel, to me, like it needs a ton of explanation to set up the review. This movie is about a single mom and her three kids living in an apartment building, having a pretty ordinary evening except for an unexpected visit from the mom’s sister and a resulting touch of family drama. Their evening is interrupted when, while the kids are sent on a trip to pick up some pizza, a small earthquake opens a crack in the floor of the parking garage. Some ill-advised exploration of that crack leads one of the teen kids to discover a certain book that is not-not the Necronomicon fans of the franchise are so familiar with. And, you know, possession and horror ensue.

I had been looking forward to this movie for ages. I watched the teaser scene when that was first released (I normally don’t even like to watch a trailer for a movie I know I’m going to watch, but I was too pumped to stop myself) and I’ve been excited about it ever since. My husband and I went into this movie expecting a nine-out-of-ten experience.

Well, the first half delivered! The opening of the movie was fast and delightfully creepy, and I loved the title scene a lot. Skipping back from there to the day before leaves the filmmakers open to possibly make another sequel (not that the Evil Dead franchise really needs a door left open like that, honestly, as long as certain books aren’t destroyed then there’s always room for more deadites). Characters were well-presented, the pacing was spot on, and there were lots of nods to the originals. The chekhov’s shotguns were all well-introduced throughout the movie, and the way the book becomes discoverable—the way the crack in the ground seemed to be chasing the kids, the way the camera followed that crack as it grew—felt very authentic to the orignals. The body horror was great, the violence was just the right amount of over-the-top (there was even a scene with a cheese grater that made me look away!). I also loved the recurring theme of close quarters and tight spaces, from the architecture of the cabin in the intro sequence to the shape of the apartment building the movie takes place in to the nature of apartment-building-living itself. I think that too-close-for-comfort theme carried through with the characters, too, particularly the adult sisters and how they interacted with one another. The whole movie had a great “trapped in a small space with bad things” feel.

Also I loved the voice-only, not-Ash cameo by Bruce Campbell, it was a bit of fan service that wasn’t too in-your-face but still made me smile.

I did think, same as with the 2013 Evil Dead, that it was lacking the humor I want from this franchise. I pointed this out to my husband who answered, reasonably, that they can’t exactly pull off the slapstick literal-Three-Stooges-moves comedy of the 80s and early 90s in a modern film.

Still, the tragically-canceled series Ash vs Evil Dead (which I think warrants a revisit from me soon) managed to infuse the horror with updated humor in a way that I enjoyed on my first viewing, so I know it’s not impossible. And I could see that the filmmakers did manage to get some humorous (dark humor, of course) moments in there, a few well-placed pieces of camp that didn’t interrupt the tone or the flow of the rest of the film. One of my favorite scenes, for example, involved a peephole and made my husband and I both chuckle and flinch at the same time. I would have loved to have seen a lot more of that.

In the latter part of the film, though, it all felt…off. Super off. If it were anything other than an Evil Dead movie, I would say it seemed like the filmmakers were trying too hard to be shocking and trying too hard to top the gore of the first part of the movie. Because it is an Evil Dead movie, the impression I was left with was that they were finally trying to embrace the camp that made the originals so fun, but between having held back in the first part of the movie and having the actors continue to play it 100% straight, it really failed to hit the mark.

I also felt the lack of any ass-kicking. Part of the charm of the early Evil Dead movies was always Ash doing ultraviolence right back to the deadites. There was definitely gory violence being done to deadites in Evil Dead Rise, but it lacked the “here is the character who Kicks Deadite Ass” vibes that I wanted to see. Any time violence was done to deadites in Evil Dead Rise it felt reactionary rather than “here’s my chainsaw, here’s my boomstick, time to go out and kick some possessed-undead butt” (I don’t need this to be a literal chainsaw and shotgun, I just wanted the “arming myself to cause chaos on these monsters” feeling, and yes of course there was a chainsaw and there was a shotgun but they were incidental weapons meant to make fans go “ah! a chainsaw! ah! a shotgun! nice.”)

The movie ended pretty much how I knew it would, which is fine because 1- sometimes working with a formula is satisfying and 2- it’s hard for a movie to catch me by surprise. 

Overall, I went in wanting to love it and prepared to be pleased, and for part of the movie I was given the 9/10 experience I wanted, but by the end I think I’d call it probably a 5/10, and it’s not one I plan to revisit.

My Everyday Horror Inspiration

One of my favorite things about my imagination is the way my brain can turn anything scary. (This was definitely not a favorite thing about myself when I was a kid, it was definitely a big problem for me when I was a kid.) A fun thing, for me, is seeing or hearing something that isn’t scary and knowing right away how I could make it scary.

Spring has come, and summer is coming, to our new house—and unlike our previous home, our new area has a lot more flora and fauna than we’re used to. My husband keeps saying, wonderingly, that “this place is teeming with life,” and the more he says it, the more menacing it sounds. Remember earlier when I said a new horror novel idea keeps pushing its way into my thoughts? That phrase was pivotal in getting these ideas flowing. Teeming with life.

Also, now that the sun sets later, I’m in the living room more often when the sunlight comes through the window on our front door. The way the sun comes through the window throws what looks like a symbol on the far wall. Again, on its own it’s not scary. It’s kind of pretty! But when I look at it all I can think of is all the ways to make it ominous.

Gratuitous Pet Pics

We’ve come once again to the real reason you’re all here:

Look at Archer’s sweet face, who could ever say no to her about any single thing?

Jupiter is so luxurious!

Quick! Somebody get Noodles a salad she can look very displeased about.

That’s All For Now, Friends!

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