The Twelfth Dispatch

Welcome to the first anniversary of C.J. Dotson's Dreadful Dispatch!

First of all…

Wow, I’ve been making the Dreadful Dispatch for a year now! And so far I haven’t even missed an issue, look at me go. I hope you’ve been enjoying it so far, and if you have suggestions or ideas for improvements or anything you’d like to see more (or less) of, let me know!

The Writing

Last month I mentioned starting a new writing routine, drafting early in the mornings before my kids wake up and then in the afternoons when I’m home from work, revising a different project (either my upcoming debut, THE CUT, or other books I’m working on, depending on whether I’m in the “hurry up” part or the “wait” part of publishing’s eternal “hurry up and wait”). I said at the time that we’d see how it goes, and how it’s been going so far is really well, but I do think that it’s going to make revisions take too long, so for now I’m going to be less rigid about this plan than I had originally thought I’d be. At least until the start of next school year, when both kids will be in school and I’ll have a couple hours every day after work without interruptions, then we’ll see what the new writing plans will be.

In other news, I finished my first draft of my bakery horror book! (Turns out having the early access version of the sequel to one of my favorite video games come out was a real motivator to knuckle down and entirely wrap up the draft, so if I get too obsessed for a couple weeks it won’t wreck my writing momentum). I’m so pleased with the way the book turned out, and now, as I did with the campground horror book, I’m letting it sit for a little while before I start revisions.

In the meantime I’ve also cut some of those extra words out of the campground horror—I mentioned before either in this newsletter or on my Facebook page that I overwrote that by about 40,000 words. I’ve made small progress, cutting out about 2,000 words so far. I have a lot of small tweaks and revisions I need to make to that book, but I’m starting with this cutting process. It’s slow going so far, because there is less uninterrupted time in the afternoon than in the mornings, but as the weather gets nicer and nicer and I can send the kids out to play I hope this will go more and more smoothly.

On THE CUT front, I continue to linger in the limbo of “I have cool things going on but I can’t talk about them yet.” The agonized patience publishing forces on writers is something I’m pretty used to, but my poor mom is going to combust if she has to keep all of the exciting things secret for too much longer. I can say to keep an eye out for something cool in late June, and I will probably be able to be more specific about that in my June newsletter.

Goodness

I was reading Stephen King’s The Shining as a teenager when I had the realization that good horror needs to be able to evoke the whole spectrum of human emotions, not just fear, to really…uh…shine. The moment when Jack wrests control of himself back from the hotel just long enough to tell his son to run, and Danny doesn’t, that part is what did it for me. I still feel a little tug in my heart just thinking about that scene (especially now that I’m a parent).

It was also King who first made me pause and consider the important place goodness holds in horror. I’m thinking specifically of Irv Manders in Firestarter. He sees a man and a young girl hitchhiking and it rings a little alarm for him, so he pulls over to talk and feel out the situation. He’s still not sure, so he offers them a lift and then invites them home for lunch so that he can gauge the nature of the situation without having to get any authorities involved unless he finds that he has to. He offers support when he learns that Andy is not harming Charlie, and he stands up to the government agents when they come onto his land to take these two strangers away.

The most important thing, in my opinion, is that Irv Manders does this without pretention, without any notions of his own heroism, without needing or even really seeming to want to be thanked. Irv Manders is one of the humble, normal, good people that speckle Stephen King’s work.

I think it’s so important to see this kind of goodness—everyday goodness, unspectacular and mostly quiet and there, in normal people who are just living their lives. Reminding people that this goodness exists in our fellows is important in any media, but I think it matters a little more in horror. In the bad and frightening times, that’s when it’s easiest to forget that this human capacity for goodness exists, and also when we most need to remember it.

Another kind of goodness I want to talk about in relation to horror content alongside the everyday goodness is the kind to aspire to. I only watched Twin Peaks for the first time about a year and a half ago, and it captured my heart immediately. There are a lot of reasons for that—it’s an absolutely brilliant show on so many levels—but one of the biggest reasons, for me, was the aspirational goodness of Special Agent Dale Cooper of the FBI.

Coop is not perfect, and he has made immoral decisions in his past—decisions which he knows were mistakes and learned from. Imperfect or not, though, Cooper is good, and in spite of his job he sees the goodness in the people around him first, and in seeing their goodness he inspires greater goodness.

I legitimately believe that if everybody watched Twin Peaks and then went about their lives asking themselves What Would Dale Cooper Do, the world would be a markedly better place.

It doesn’t matter that to some degree, in the end, he lost. He couldn’t fix the world, but he made it better by being a force for goodness in it. If Irv Manders and characters like him serve to remind us that the people around us all have the capacity to be good, Dale Cooper inspires us to find that capacity within ourselves and empower it.

I was recently talking about goodness in fiction with a new friend, and they pointed out an aspect of this that I overlooked, and which I feel chagrined to have overlooked, and this is the hard-won goodness. The goodness that does not come naturally to someone, for whatever reason, but that they find and work to nurture within themselves. And, again, the ability to find this kind of goodness in the midst of the worst times is incredibly important.

Now maybe it’s just because I’m preoccupied with the first three movies in this franchise and re-watch them once every year or two (and maybe it’s because I only recently finished that re-watching), but the first person who comes to mind for me when I’m thinking of a character who is not easily inclined to be good but who, after facing adversity and trauma, finds a core of it within herself, is Gale Weathers from the Scream franchise.

Gale is selfish and self-obsessed. She pursues the truth about a wrongful conviction not because it’s the right thing to do but because she’s pretty sure she can use it to make herself more famous. But when push comes to shove, Gale goes into danger and saves other people’s lives at great risk to her own safety.

And then, yes, she backslides. She lets the selfishness win again. She profits off of the tragedy and she alienates the people who had begun to care for her. That is, in my opinion, part of what is compelling about the goodness in her. Gale Weathers has to work hard to maintain that goodness. It doesn’t come easily to her. But it’s worth working hard for—even when she fails and has to start again, it’s worth it. Seeing her character development over the first three movies is one of my favorite parts of that franchise.

(I did not expect, when I started writing a monthly newsletter, that I would wind up comparing Stephen King and Twin Peaks with the Scream movies, but here we are.)

These three characters are so different. The way they are good, the route it takes for them to get to goodness, their goals and their impacts on the world around them, are so different. But they, and characters like them, and what they remind us of—especially in difficult times—are so important. Finding ways to portray goodness in horror is, I think, vital.

Five Stars for So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison

I was super excited to be approved through NetGalley to read an early copy of So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison, coming 9/10/24 from Penguin Random House, in exchange for my honest review.

So Thirsty opens on mid-thirties, play-it-safe Sloane dreading her upcoming birthday, and finding out that her husband has arranged a birthday weekend away at a fancy cabin for Sloane and her best friend Naomi. On the night before her birthday, Naomi drags Sloane to a party that changes the course of their lives forever.

Just like with Cackle and Such Sharp Teeth, two of Harrison’s earlier novels, the nature of the horror creature is evident from the start of the book, made clear by the title and cover art alone. I love this for two reasons. One, already knowing “this is a vampire book” means I’m not starting the book out trying to see things coming before they happen, which lets me enjoy the book much more in the moment. Two, it allows Harrison to really play around with foreshadowing and setting the vibes even in the earliest chapters when nothing has gone wrong yet. The way Sloane feels about the sunlight, the way she avoids looking at her mirror, her worries about aging, and the way she personifies her own teeth at the end of chapter two, were all delightful. None of those little nuggets felt forced, they all fit smoothly into the character and the narrative, and they were all perfectly on theme from the start.

That foreknowledge and foreshadowing could have been a dampener on the experience of the moment in the book when things go wrong, but Harrison’s pacing is on point. Combined with that, when the violence finally happens it happens so fast, emphasizing the feeling of the brutality in a way that completely makes up for having known all along that it would happen at some point.

Another thing I enjoyed was the way it becomes clear pretty early that Sloane is unhappy with her life but clings to the familiar easiness of it. It also becomes clear that things aren’t quite they way they seem at first. Sloane hasn’t always been the play-it-safe girl and her husband’s reasons for sending her on this nice trip have nothing to do with a happy and solid marriage. This sense of things not being what they look like carries on through the book, with certain revelations coming fairly quickly (the beautiful stranger at the bar is not as human as he looks) and some unwinding throughout the course of the novel (the party girl best friend might not be as happy as she seems, either). One of the vampires has even changed his name at some point before the events of the story.

The next paragraph will have some minor spoilers. In the past I’ve marked those with italics. This time I’m trying out using bold/italics here to announce the coming spoilers, and I’ll use bold/italics when the spoilers are done, so that if anyone wants to skip spoilers you can start up again right at the next bold sentence. Let me know if you prefer this way, or if you think I should go back to the italics for my next review.

The thing I loved about that theme of things not being as they seem is that, once the nature of the vampires is revealed, that no longer really applies to them. Ilie and Elisa and Tatiana and Henry are exactly who they are. It may take Henry some time to explain his past, but he was up front with Sloane from the beginning about having what he considers a sad backstory in the first place. When he tells Sloane he will be honest with her, he is. And once Sloane and Naomi get through the initial difficulties of adjusting to a life as vampires, there’s a strong implication that they find within themselves the people they were before life wore them down, Sloane freeing herself from repression and risk-aversion and Naomi no longer compelled to try to outrun banality or mortality or both. The vampires are not perfect, and they’re not necessarily good, but they are true, maybe the only true things in the book, and I love that.

Okay, spoilers done. Continue reading the review spoiler-free from this point.

I really dig Sloane’s character and her voice. She felt real. Her specific backstory and current problems aren’t part of my experience but the way she handles them (or refuses to handle them) feels almost uncomfortably relatable—there’s something of a cautionary tale in Sloane as a character, and one that I think many women can relate to in some form or another. Harrison’s character writing is always strong, and her portrayal of women’s experiences and of the friendships between women always resonates deeply with me.

On a line level, I’m so into Harrison’s writing style. She deftly combines the moodiness of horror with modern vibes and turns of phrase that are often humorous or beautiful or thought-provoking or some combination thereof, and I am here for it.

And finally, the cherry on top of the whole experience of reading So Thirsty (and all of Harrison’s books, honestly) is that there’s this clear sense that she had fun crafting this book. When an author loves the work that they are doing, it shows, and in my opinion it really adds to the fun of reading that book. There’s a sense of real enjoyment and a genuine authenticity wrapped up in Harrison’s horror.

In conclusion! Five out of five stars for So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison. It comes out September 10^th, 2024, but you can preorder it now.

P-P-P-Pet P-P-P-P-Picturesssss!

Archer letting me snap a little glamor shot of her before I let her out into the yard.

Jupiter with the tiniest blep, cuddling a very unimpressed Noodles.

I accidentally kicked this little rock in the parking lot at work and then felt bad for it so I put it in my purse. What should I name it?

That About Wraps Everything Up!

I’ll confess, I didn’t realize this was my first anniversary newsletter post until I was typing it up just now, so I hadn’t planned anything big and fun for that. I’m using up all my “big and fun plans” juice elsewhere right now, anyway. (Again, keep an eye out for a little news in the June newsletter!)

If you enjoyed reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, please do!

Have a great month, see you in June!