Dreaming in the Land Beyond the Forest: My Visit to Dracula's Castle

[In honour of the 10th anniversary this week of my visit to Castle Bran in Transylvania—the public face of "Castle Dracula"—I'm reposting my essay "Dreaming in the Land Beyond the Forest," which was written from notes in my journal on May 9th 2004, and which first appeared (in a slightly different form) on Advocate.com that October, then in my essay collection, Other Men's Sons. I visited the castle while on a weeklong visit to Romania to the set of Seed of Chucky, for a series of articles that appeared in Fangoria in the fall of 2004.]

I’m writing this in the courtyard of Castle Dracula.

I’ve
 waited my whole life to write those words in a nonfiction essay.

The low westering sunlight slants down through
the distant, forbidding vista of the blue-green
 mist-shrouded Carpathian Mountains, edging the 
rough cobblestones and the stone-cut mullioned
 windows of the ancient castle with blood-tinted 
late-afternoon shadows that seem oddly patient, 
though somehow hungry.

Not bad, if I may 
say so myself. I like it. A little over-the-top, a
 little purple, but then again, horror fiction is one
 literary genre where a touch of the grape isn’t just forgivable, it’s actually encouraged.

The thing is, it
 happened. I was there. It’s nonfiction.

I wrote the above
 paragraphs on May 9, 2004, in Bran village, in 
Transylvania. They are paraphrased from some notes in my 
journal, written specifically for this essay, which 
would be crafted many months later.

My literary
 intention in writing them was to see if I could take the
 elements around me—the village, the courtyard of Castle Bran, the mountains, the sunset—and merge the 
journalist’s eye for detail with the horror
 writer’s inner eye for color and atmosphere 
through the power of imagination.

The facts are
 technically accurate: The sun was setting, the Carpathians
 were blue-green, the land is largely forgotten, and the soil 
of Transylvania has seen more bloodshed than most in
 Europe.

I was in search of answers—all of them 
journalistic and pertaining to the film I was there to
 cover for the magazine that had flown me halfway across the
 world.  None of the questions were about vampires. Whether
 the shadows seemed “hungry” or not is a 
matter of artistic vision, and since I wrote it, I am 
the ultimate authority.

That’s the magic of the
 writing craft, and one of the gifts of 
imagination—to bring a waking dream to life on
 the page.

If I say they
 were hungry, then they were hungry.

In the popular 
imagination, Castle Bran has become the de facto
 “Castle Dracula,” one of the seats of
 power of the 15th-century Wallachian prince, Vlad the
 Impaler, whose historical identity was the
 genesis of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, 
published in 1897. I first read it in 1971, when I was
 9 years old.

My mother started
 me on this twilit road with the grisly “bedtime
 stories” of the Brothers Grimm, replete with ogres
 and demons and ancient wind-blasted castles where 
witches dwelt. I graduated to British fantasy writers
 like Alan Garner, then to English ghost stories of the M.R. 
James school, and American horror comics. Laced 
throughout were the Christopher Lee Dracula films I
 adored, among the best of the Hammer Films oeuvre. I
 read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at our
 villa outside of Geneva when my father was posted to the 
United Nations there in the mid ’70s, learning 
early what I would later rediscover upon rereading 
Dracula in Transylvania in 2004—that 
there is portentous power in experiencing a writer’s
 work by reading it in the milieu in which it was set.

Nonfiction and
 essays have largely comprised my professional
 writer’s life to date, but I have managed to
 make horror fiction my avocation, not only with my own
horror fiction but with the Queer Fear anthology
 series, the first collections of horror stories to
 have gay protagonists and themes as a matter of
 course. I’m a proud member of both PEN and The
 Horror Writers Association.

Being a queer
 horror writer is a lot like coming out a second time. 
Readers, editors, and friends see you one of two ways: They
 either regard you as a spooky fellow whose 
predilection for things that undulate by moonlight is 
an amusing, endearing jape, or they see a massive
 incongruity between what they think of as your
 “serious” literary work—articles, 
essays, reviews, collections—and this weird shit you seem 
to love. I occasionally feel the pressure to disavow 
my horror work as literarily unserious, as though I
 couldn’t possibly be thought of as a serious
 writer if I didn’t.

Writing is either good writing, or it is
 bad writing. I don’t acknowledge the barriers 
of genre, and neither do the writers I most admire.

Horror, like desire, is a
 visceral emotion. Anything that makes a reader 
“feel” those emotions that society would
 rather leave behind closed doors is bound to make these 
prim worthies uncomfortable.

Back in May 2004
 I was on assignment in Bucharest for Fangoria, the
 American horror film magazine of record, for which I
 have been writing for nearly 20 years. My editor, Tony
Timpone, has become a great friend and confidant over the
 years, and since 1987 he has sent more fun my way than
 any journalist has the right to expect. I was covering
 the filming of Seed of Chucky, written and
 directed by out director Don Mancini and starring two
 gay icons, Jennifer Tilly and John Waters. A group of us
 from the production had chartered a minivan and
 departed from the Bucharest Marriott, an oasis of 
Eastern European luxury that bordered on 
vulgarity, to make the occasionally bumpy day trip 
“deep into the heart of Transylvania,” 
as Roman Polanski wrote in the screenplay of
 1967’s The Fearless Vampire Killers.

My fellow 
travelers were superb company. As difficult as it was to get
 into the “vampire mind-set” with the
 van’s radio playing Blondie’s “Heart
of Glass” and other great hits of decades past while
 we swapped film, travel, and boyfriend anecdotes, we
 did see genuine Transylvanian peasants with goiters,
 driving oxcarts; and gypsies and wild dogs 
everywhere—just like the movies—through the 
windows.

As we left 
metropolitan Bucharest, the land became flatter and more 
sparse, until we began to climb into the mountains. Great
 fields of dark earth gave way to soaring rock and 
black-green pine forests. The air grew cold and clear.
 Here and there we drove through villages where 
humble-looking wooden houses were interspersed with stern, 
rigorous municipal architecture. In the distance every
 now and then, we would catch a glimpse of a monastery
 or a sinister-looking castle jutting out from a
 mountain ledge sometimes—delightfully—shrouded
 in mist.

Given the loathing many Romanians feel for 
the co-opting and casting of their national hero Vlad 
the Impaler as a vampire horror staple, we kept the
 delight largely to ourselves.

Everywhere
 wandered the ubiquitous Romanian street dogs, mute victims
 of Ceausescu’s savage uprooting and forced
 diaspora of their owners.

When the late dictator
 appropriated the homes of ordinary Romanian citizens in
 order to use the land to construct what would later be
 acknowledged as grotesque monuments to his 
megalomania, families were forced to settle in
 government-owned city apartments that forbade pets.


Abandoned, the dogs are Romania’s
 “other” orphans. They interbreed and wander
freely along the treacherous roads by the tens of
 thousands. The ones that survive form a concurrent 
Romanian population to the human one. During my stay in
 Bucharest, a good day was seeing only one dead dog along the 
side of the road as I was chauffeured to the studio. A 
bad day would be nearly unthinkable to the average 
modern North American city dweller, especially a dog
 owner.

Midway thorough
 the journey our driver stopped the van and sauntered over 
to a group of gypsies standing in front of a store to ask
 them directions to Castle Bran. The gypsies suddenly
 became agitated, and an exchange of rapid-fire
Romanian exploded between them and our driver.

As we
 watched, our driver raised his hands and waved them 
away. The gypsies lurched after him, keening and 
wailing and crossing themselves. He jumped into the
driver’s seat of the van and slammed the door, 
locking it. Inserting the key into the ignition, he
 put the van into reverse, gunned the engine, and
 swerved away from the gypsies, who were by now spitting on 
the ground and glaring sullenly at our departure.

“What were
 they saying?” queried one of my traveling companions, 
turning her head and looking back. The whole spectacle
had been quite dramatic, and we were all by now
 aroused from our travel-induced torpor and quite taken
 with the entire passionate exchange.

“They are
 wanting money,” said our driver, manifesting the
 urban Romanian’s contempt for
 gypsies. “I have not given money. Gypsies 
angry.”

Nonsense, I said 
to myself with a private smile. They were saying,
“For the love of God, stay away from the 
castle!”

After an hour or 
so we parked, turned off the radio, and stepped out into 
the cold wind to stretch our legs. We stood on the edge of a
 desolate stretch of highway. The fields were dead and
 yellow, life not yet returned to them after the savage 
winter, and the Carpathian Mountains in the 
distance seemed cruel and implacable, though no less
 majestic for their cruelty.

I listened to the
 wind, closed my eyes, and tried to dream of Dracula.

For a moment, the
 world as I knew it vanished. I heard Jonathan
 Harker’s calèche clattering along the
 Borgo Pass through spectral blue fire on
 Walpurgisnacht, and the distant baying of wolves.

Then the dream 
vanished as quickly as it had come, reality closing over 
the dark obsidian stone of fantasy as surely as the surface
of a bright green lake.

And yet, later, the moment
 occurred again, this time after our arrival at the
 castle. With a sense of reverent pilgrimage, I split 
off from the group and went to explore the rugged, gloomy 
castle on my own.

Momentarily, blissfully free from tourists, I sat on a rough-hewn wooden bench in the
 courtyard and looked up. I closed my eyes and again
 summoned my waking dream of “the land beyond the
forest,” the Transylvania of myth and legend 
that I’ve carried in my head and heart since I
 was a very young boy.

“5
May.—I must have been asleep, for certainly if I had
 been fully awake I must have noticed the approach to
 such a remarkable place,” wrote Jonathan Harker
 in his journal, describing his arrival at Castle Dracula.
“In the gloom, the courtyard looked of considerable 
size, and as several dark ways led from it under the
 great round arches it perhaps seemed bigger than it 
really is.”

The sudden
 arrival of a clutch of hearty beaming white-legged German
 tourists in black socks and sandals wielding cameras snapped
 me out of my reverie. I opened my journal, made a few 
notes, then gathered up my things and went to join my 
friends.

Ultimately, it
 didn’t matter to me that Bran village had
 become something of a mitteleuropa “Dracula 
Disneyland” with peasants and gypsies hawking 
bread and cheese and everything Dracula-related to
tourists who were there to celebrate Stoker’s vampire
 count who never was.

Or that after 
visiting the tomb of Vlad the Impaler on the monastery 
island of Snagov a few days later, the “silver
 crucifix” I'd bought to commemorate the occasion
 began to glow in the dark—and not because of the 
presence of anything unholy.

No, what mattered 
is that, as I gazed across the fields at whose edge the
 brackish marsh water lapped the muddy shores of Snagov 
Island, I was able to remember the island’s
gruesome history, and its legends. Over the centuries 
it had been put to a series of grisly
 purposes—prisons, torture chambers, the site of 
monstrous impalements, many supervised by the
 inhabitant of that elaborate Byzantine crypt beyond the line 
of trees at my back.

I was able to
 close my eyes and see a storm coming in over the water, lightning flickering at the center of boiling, tenebrous 
clouds in a sky gone black and violent. Behind me, in
 my waking dream, loomed the rain-lashed medieval 
monastery that allegedly contained the last earthly 
remains of a fiend who many believed was immortal.

I found that even 
after I opened my eyes and blinked in the sunlight,
 Snagov Island was nowhere I would want the dark to catch me.

Plural identities, plural realities.

Imagination.

For a writer, they’re powerful tools. For a horror writer, they’re the air we breathe.

Before leaving
 Castle Bran that May afternoon, I ran my fingers 
lightly along the stone walls in tribute to the boy I was in
1971. I committed them to memory—again, not
 without a pilgrim’s veneration.

I won’t
 forget the feeling of that rough surface of Dracula’s
 castle beneath my fingers as the sun went down, or my
 rediscovery of the secret doorway in my mind that had
 swung inward with the soft click of memory.

I knew well the
 ancient thing that waited for me inside.

After all, I was
 nourished on blood.

Collinwood: My First Haunted House

Haunted houses are very much on my mind this evening as I pack for the World Horror Convention 2013 in New Orleans, a city I've wanted to visit since the first time I read Anne Rice's brilliant novel The Witching Hour, to which I lost an entire weekend in 1990.

Rice is an author whose gifts I have cherished since Interview With The Vampire first came out, but the book that made the list of my all-time favourite supernatural novels (and the list of my all-time favourite historical novels as well) was—is—The Witching Hour, which Rice set in her then-home on First Street. The notion of setting a story in one's own home had not occurred to me in 1990, and it struck me as a particular bit of witchcraft, for lack of a better word. And the book was (and remains) completely and utterly gorgeous.

Consider this description, from the first part of the novel:

"The doctor had never been inside an antebellum mansion until that spring in New Orleans. And the old house really did have white fluted columns on the front, though the paint was peeling away. Greek Revival style they called it—a long violet-gray town house on a dark shady corner in the Garden District, its front gate guarded it seemed by two enormous oaks. The iron lace railings were made in a rose pattern and much festooned with vines—purple wisteria, the yellow Virginia creeper, and bougainvillea of a dark, incandescent pink."

Inside, "[he] smelled that smell again of a New Orleans house in the summer, heat and old wood."

By the time Rice describes the inside, everything from the shadowed coolness to the scent of camphor and genteel rot had imprinted itself on my imagination, and the process of reading the novel had moved beyond the experience of reading it and well into the experience of living it. There are ghosts aplenty in The Witching Hour, as well as witches, of course, and more. But twenty-three years after first reading the novel, what has stayed with me more than anything else is the First Street mansion itself.

I will very likely take a stroll past the house while I'm in New Orleans in the same way I visited Hemingway's house in Key West in the 1980s (sweet-talking my way into a private tour at dawn, culminating an invitation to come behind the ropes to touch Hemingway's typewriter) but I suspect it'll be anticlimactic, because I've already been inside that haunted house, in my imagination, courtesy of Mrs. Rice's prodigious literary gifts.

The house on First Street may be my favourite haunted house, but it wasn't my first. And you never forget your first.

My first haunted house was Collinwood, the 40-room mansion from Dark Shadows, the American gothic television series starring Jonathan Frid as Barnabas Collins, the morose New England vampire who became an improbable teen idol, festooning the covers of Tiger Beat and 16 along the way. The series ran between 1966-1971, spawning two full-length motion pictures, a series of paperback novels, a 1990s series reboot, and culminating in the Tim Burton film version starring Johnny Depp as Barnabas. My thoughts on Mr. Depp as Mr. Collins belong elsewhere than this blog post, so we'll set them aside for now. 

Unlike my American contemporaries, I didn't come to this love via the television series, which I hadn't seen in April, 1972 when I first discovered the Dark Shadows comic book series from Gold Key.

I was ten, and that issue, complete with the cover image of a young woman being chased through Hell (never called that in the story, interestingly enough) by the dark suited man with the silver wolf's head cane was the most lurid, exciting, creepy thing I'd ever seen. I'd already been primed for a gothic imagination through the Brothers Grimm and the darker fairy tales to which I was as naturally drawn as other children are to bright colours and sunshine.

Barnabas was also my first vampire, but even as a later writer of vampire fiction, that wasn't the most important thing for me. No, it was the house itself, Collinwood, all 40 shadow-filled rooms full of magic and horror and every manner of ghosts. That, and the imaginative possibilities presented by the stories themselves.

"Hellfire" tells the story of a young Collins cousin, Constance, who survives a near-attack by Barnabas, who realizes he can't drink the blood of a member of his own family. It's never explained why, exactly, but ultimately it doesn't matter. There are bigger threats on the horizon, including a mysterious, hypnotic "hellfire" that appears suddenly in the house—a cold fire that doesn't consume, but eventually lures Constance Collins into "the Dark Pit," from which Barnabas must rescue her. The  hellfire appears because of the presence of evil. Not only is Collinwood a locus of evil, but Barnabas's presence itself is apparently evil enough to summon the hellfire.

I began to consume every issue of Dark Shadows I could lay my hands on. My friend Gordie Brown was a Dark Shadows fanatic, I discovered, and he had all the back issues. As I said, I still hadn't seen the series, but I was in love with the stories already. I knew the characters' names, I knew the locale, Maine, which seemed to me a magical, wondrous place of nothing but cliffs and mansions, rocky shores, vampires, werewolves, witches, ghosts, diarists and letter-writers—and this later preoccupation had already become mine, as I had begun keeping a journal of sorts at nine.

A few years later, we were living in Geneva, Switzerland in a gloomy old villa up on a hill on the outskirts of a country town. My beloved American babysitter, Nancy, a seventeen year old girl of seemingly impossible sophistication and glamour, gave me my first gothic romance novel, bringing my love affair with Collinwood to the next level with the great gift of Barnabas Collins and the Gypsy Witch. I barely remember the storyline, but I remember being riveted to the corner of the couch, bathed in words and colours and images, in a novelist's way that no mere comic book, however glorious, could ever have bestowed.

I was to learn in later life that "Marilyn Ross" (whose gothic novels I consumed by the gross, as my teenage years unfolded, at least 30 of the provided by my glamorous benefactor, Nancy) was actually a Canadian writer in the Maritimes, whose name was...Dan Ross. I wish that I had known then that boys could write gothic romances, and that Canadians could, too. But I was already in thrall to Marilyn Ross's books, not only the Dark Shadows series, but others, with names like Satan's Island and Phantom of the 13th Floor. But the Dark Shadows series was my favourite.

In a nearby town, my parents indulgently bought me an antique bamboo walking stick, after extracting a promise that I wouldn't hit my brother with it or poke anyone's eye out. In the early hours of the evening, I would walk the empty country roads under the moon pretending to be Barnabas, or pine in my room pretending to be one of the interchangeable series of governesses and gentlewomen in distress who seemed to wash up at the door of Collinwood as regularly as the tide.

More importantly, I began to crystallize a dream of someday writing books like these: moonlight book, all gaslight and stars and long, empty corridors full of shadows. I wrote what is now called "fan fiction" as a school project for English class: a "novel" of about five pages called Barnabas, Quentin, and the Silver Bat. As I recall, it was a good idea in theory, except for the slavishly aped Marilyn Ross-style writing, and characters that someone else had dreamed up, and the fact that it was five pages long. Today, no one would ever accuse me of underwriting, or minimalism, so perhaps I just hit my Jay McInerney period before hitting puberty.

But let me tell you, there was something to be said for writing it in an upstairs bedroom in a 150+ year-old Swiss villa near the shores of the same lake upon which was perched the Villa Diodati, where Mary Shelley had first dreamed of Frankenstein; something to be said for having one's own personal Collinwood, at twelve, in which to dream of becoming a writer.

A lot to be said, actually.

In the same vein, I read Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot in that house during a storm of Frankenstein-level intensity. I cherished the moment when the lightning flashed so brightly that the verandah furniture cast shadows on the wall across from me that seemed almost alive. The borders of children's minds are permeable. This is why they learn languages so easily, and retain them for life. Gothic imagery is it's own language, and those of us who write in the genre often learn it early, and it stays with us long after childhood. Indeed, it's a language we likely never completely forget.

As an adult, I've always cherished old houses.

Our house in Milton, Ontario, where we lived for six years, was over 100 years old. By the time we lived there, I was already a working magazine writer, though I was beginning to dabble in fiction, too. A vampire anthology I edited with Thomas S. Roche, Brothers of the Night, contains my story "The Dead of Winter," which was my experiment with what Anne Rice had so spellbindingly accomplished in The Witching Hour: using one's own house as a setting for a story. I believe it was haunted, too. An incident occurred in that house which provided the seed for my novel Wild Fell, a ghost story of sorts, which is coming out this November from ChiZine Publications.

Our present house in Toronto, on a shady, tree-lined street not far from downtown, is likewise well over a century old, part brick, part clapboard. I write in a gabled study  at the top of the house with a weathervane on the peaked roof. In the introduction to Queer Fear, I wrote of our house that, in summer, you can smell time sleeping in the cool, dim rooms: the smell of old wood, the chill of the odd, unexpected draft, the ghost of woodsmoke from the fireplace.

I've written both Enter, Night and Wild Fell here.

Writing Enter, Night, I was acutely aware of the degree to which Parr House, the mansion of the monstrous matriarch of the town of Parr's Landing, was an homage to Collinwood. This was also noted by my great friend, the novelist and distinguished Hollywood biographer William J. Mann. Bill was, like me, a child of Dark Shadows. At the same time, Parr House also incorporated vistas and memory-views of Villa la Muraz, the house outside Geneva where I lost myself in Marilyn Ross's world. And even though Enter, Night is about vampires, it's also about old houses and what they represent, and what they represented to me.

Among my friends I count some of the finest writers of dark fantasy fiction in print today. The source of other writers' inspiration is for them to share, or at least for another blog post. But I will say that one thing we all have in common is the degree to which where we're from informs the writing we do now—where we're from, and what we took from it. It's like that story of the blind men and the elephant. They all touched different parts of the same animal, but each envisioned a radically different beast based on the part of it they touched. That's at least part of the experience of writing life.

I'm now packed and ready to go. The car is coming for me at a very civilized hour, an hour that will have allowed me a decent breakfast, my essential coffee, and a romp with Beckett in the graveyard near the house.

I've already been warned about the weather in New Orleans—40 degrees Celsius (sorry, Americans, you're on your own, I've forgotten how to do the calculations.) I was in Delhi once, many years ago, and the temperature was something like 43 degrees Celsius, which made me feel microwaved. That said, I've been warned by my friend, writer-director Ron Oliver (who has a fun blog of his own, worth checking out) not to complain on Facebook about the weather every half-hour. Both of us agree, there's nothing more intrinsically Canadian, or maybe Ontarian, than talking about discussing the weather.

That said, if I don't return on Monday, or ever blog again, rest assured I've either gone Angel Heart, or downed in the humidity on Bourbon Street, pumped full of gumbo and liquor.

[Note: If you like what you see here at Forever October, please do follow us by clicking the link at the bottom of the page!]

One Of Those Evenings in the City That Take You Back

This evening I had dinner with my friend Matt at the Peartree Café and got caught in the rain on the way. I sent my friend Elie home with what I thought was a spare umbrella, but which turned out to be the only umbrella in the goddamn house. I got soaked running to the corner store, but I was able to buy a cheap one there and made it to dinner with Matt, looking only slightly like a soaked elderly racoon. Matt was very kind about it all. Matt and I met in the dog park some years ago, and a close friendship was forged from that initial meeting. He's joined us in Palm Springs for two Christmases, and I named the high school in Enter, Night after him. Tonight I told him that I had modelled the protagonist in Wild Fell, Jameson Browning, on him. He reacted with his usual kindness and grace, and I think he only very rarely wonders how he wound up with such a mad person as a friend. He's very, very cool.

After dinner, I did a run downtown to get some coffee from the Second Cup at the Eaton Centre. Yes, of course there's probably a closer one, but I'm a creature of habit, and that's where I get my coffee beans for the morning. It was one of those muggy, humid early-summer evenings in the city. I wrote an essay about those evenings many years ago called "Red Nights: Erotica and the Language of Men's Desire." It was reprinted in my second essay collection, Other Men's Sons. I'm sure every city has nights like those—sensuous nights when the humidity caresses you lightly, like strong hands with a gentle touch, but Toronto has a  dark blue bouquet of them in the early part of the summer every year. They make me feel 20 again, and not in any zippy, fountain-of-youth sort of way either. Simply that they tend to shift time around, shift the moment around so that it could be any moment, any time, any year, during any part of the life continuum.

The photograph above is of me at 20 when I was a student at the University of Toronto, dreaming of being a writer (a poet, in actual point of fact, God help us all.) The bracelet sitting on top of it was designed by Billy Martin, the New Orleans artist who wrote several brilliant novels as Poppy Z. Brite, but has now chosen to make his career in other artistic pursuits. I miss his novels, of course (who doesn't?) but his jewelry is exquisite. I would never have worn something that beautiful in 1982, even if I could have afforded it, but there we have it: past and present fuse on nights like these.

This afternoon, I went over the jacket copy for Wild Fell, bringing the whole anticipatory process a step closer to fruition. When I was downtown at the World's Biggest Bookstore (where I used to work, again, dreaming of being a writer someday) I looked the book up on the system. There it was. The new jacket copy hasn't been uploaded to the system yet, but it all looks mighty fine.

Back in the Saddle Again

2012 was a tumultuous one in our house. In addition to losing both of our Labrador retrievers within five months of each other, I also lost one of my dearest friends, Mark Braun, in a motorcycle crash in the spring. With the exception of an essay for Sharp magazine about the horrors of summer heat, I more or less put my writing to the side.

When the heart isn't in it—and mine was broken—what comes out is usually nothing worth reading. While writer's block is a stock-in-trade joke for non-writers, or for the very lucky writers who never experience it, it's no joy when experienced, especially when it's connected to great loss.

All of that said, I'm back in the saddle again, so to speak, so please bookmark Forever October again, if you haven't been patiently waiting almost twelve months to read the thoughts of Yours Truly.

My second novel Wild Fell is coming out in November 2013, and I'm already booked for my signing in Winnipeg that month. I'll be writing more about that book, and that process, and the writing life, in the weeks to come. Next year, Enter, Night is coming out in German from Random House. Very exciting for me, my first foreign book translation.

In a couple of weeks, I'll be heading to the World Horror Convention in New Orleans, a city I haven't yet visited, and one of the few southern cities in the United States I'd willingly brave June humidity
to visit. I'm looking forward to connecting with new friends, and reconnecting with old ones. More on that in the weeks to come as well.

Tonight, the rain is rushing down from the sky like a waterfall. I'm home from the book launch for The Empty Room by Lauren B. Davis, a great friend and a great writer, in the company of my great friends and editors Brett Savory and Sandra Kasturi of ChiZine Publications, my publishers.  Last week, I hosted a party here at the house in honour of Benjamin Percy, author of the werewolf novel Red Moon, which is positioned to be the thriller of the summer. The moral of the story being, if you can't always write, at least hang around writing friends. A gin and tonic never wrote a book for you, but it certainly takes the edge off a great deal.

Mid-July Book Shopping Interlude

I've been hard at work on two short projects I'll be writing about here in the next couple of days. In the meantime, since it was a bit cooler today (and my eyes were going Hammer-red from staring at my computer) I had lunch downtown and hit the World's Biggest Bookstore on Edward St. in downtown Toronto today. In addition to their always wonderful support of local writers, like yours truly...

...there's never a shortage of great books on sale to pick up for a song. I found this one today. This is the sort of marked down coffee table book that makes horror writers instinctively reach for their credit cards. I used to work at this store back in the mid-80s when I was getting started as a writer. You know how some bookstores just smell like bookstores? Well, this one does. Feels like home.

Keep cool, and stay tuned. I'll be back over the weekend with some updates.

Happy Canada Day/Happy Pride

Sunday is a day I like to lie in bed a little later than usual. I don't' sleep, but I do take my iced coffee in bed and usually throw in an easy-on-the-mind horror movie, for instance Dracula A.D. 1972.

The affection I feel for this brainless cinematic giggle, which was already a dated period-piece before the cameras were switched off during the filming, is one I share with my friend and colleague, novelist Rio Youers. He and I can toss lines from this movie back and forth with a dexterity that is Wimbledon-worthy. Fecund with clichés and improbability (the Scotland Yard cops discussing the possibility of vampirism alone is worth the price of the DVD) it's the ideal "don't talk to me, I'm not awake" sort of flick, and since the DVD player is in the bedroom, it barely necessitates movement.

Last night, I had dinner with friends. It was the perfect pre-Canada Day, pre-Pride evening--a traditional backyard barbecue in good company, with beer and wine aplenty, and lots of bookish gossip and good cheer.

When we called it a night near one p.m., I took a taxi back home. The CN Tower was lit up in rainbow colours, and there was a festive mood on the streets as Toronto prepared for the annual Pride celebrations, the city's biggest and most lucrative cultural event of the year. At home, I took Beckett around the block for a walk, then settled down for a long summer's nap (interrupted, naturally, hellishly early by Beckett, whose own schedule is sacrosanct to him, and by extension, his "forever family.")

This morning, between reading the Happy Canada Day and Happy Pride Day messages on Facebook, and swiping back and forth with BFF Ron Oliver, and checking Huffington Post Canada for its Pride coverage (and the always hateful, turgid comments from readers whose lips likely move when they watch television), I revisited London in 1972 via Dracula A.D. 1972. I love this movie the way one loves an old dog who was never completely "there," who farted and bumped into mirrors, but who was ever-present and ubiquitous throughout one's childhood. Christopher Lee is an actor whose brilliance shone through the material he played, whether it was good, bad, or mediocre. He was always Christopher Lee, no matter what the film.

Now, time to get cleaned up, hit the gym (via non-Pride Parade routes) and then come home and do some writing, as deadlines loom. Happy Pride (even if you're not gay) Happy Canada Day (even if you're not Canadian) and Happy Sunday (even if you're unlucky enough never to have seen Dracula A.D. 1972.)

What Are You Re-Reading This Summer? A Partial List

My second novel, due out from ChiZine Publications in the fall of 2013, is a contemporary ghost story. As I did with Enter, Night, I'm re-reading some classics in this particular genre, as well as some newer works that come highly recommended, and some personal favourites. Of course, during the writing of Enter, Night I plodded through the complete Jesuit Relations in addition to the cool vampire stuff, so this particular reading marathon is going to be a lot more fun

This (very partial) list includes The Mammoth Book of Victorian and Edwardian Ghost Stories (Richard Dalby, Ed.), The Literary Ghost (Larry Dark, Ed.) 50 Great Horror Stories (John Canning, Ed.), A Pleasing Terror,the M.R. James omnibus edition from Ash-Tree Press (a glorious, glorious, luxurious book to own), October Dreams (Chizmar and Morrish, Eds.), Northwest Passages, by the brilliant Barbara Roden, and of course, Peter Straub's classic Ghost Story. I posed the signed limited edition hardcover of Ghost Story from Hill House in this stack (it's one of my most prized possessions) but I'm toting around the paperback in my briefcase.

Susie Moloney's terrifying contemporary ghost story, The Dwelling, deserves its own review here, and will get one. There's a copy of The Haunting of Hill House around here too somewhere, or else Beckett's made off with it.

(Author's Note: My books aren't usually stacked up like this on my desk, nor are my owl bookends usually separated from each other, or perched theatrically on a stack of supernatural fiction. They've mated for life, like night-flying dolphins. The photo of my buddy Ian Rogers, whose short story collection, Every House is Haunted, will be read by all the cool kids this fall, however, is permanently installed on the edge of my desk. Truth in advertising, my friends. Truth in advertising.)

First Post: "Jesus, It's Hot."

Welcome to Forever October, my new blog. 

I'm Michael Rowe, a novelist in Toronto, Canada. I hope you visit it again soon, and often. You'll find a variety of information here about works in progress, the writing process, horror movies, the occasional book and/or film review, and a schizophrenic collection of glimpses into my life on and off the page, all broadcast from my office on the top floor of the old Victorian farmhouse in Toronto that the Ball and Chain, Beckett the Black Labrador,and I call home.

The world needs another "writer's blog" like it needs a hole in the head, so here's your hole in the head, dear reader.

Earlier this week, I received the news that Enter, Night is a finalist for the Sunburst Award, Canada's premier spec-fic book prize. Coming, as this news does, on the heels of the news, earlier this spring, that the novel is also a finalist for the Aurora Award, I'm feeling more than a little gobsmacked, and also quite humbled, especially considering the cut of the company of co-finalists in both prestigious awards.

The best part of these award nominations: my co-finalists. Hands down the best part.

On Wednesday of this week, I went to the ChiZine Reading Series at the Augusta House "resto-bar" on Augusta Avenue in Kensington Market, to hear my friend David Nickle (also up for both awards for awards for his novel, Eutopia) do a reading from his new novel, Rasputin's Bastards. And a week ago tonight, I had a party for my visiting American friend, Scott Bramble, the Cowboy, which was attended by Caitlin Sweet, whose novel, The Pattern Scars, is also up for both awards. Both Dave and Caitlin are ChiZine authors too,

In related news, Jesus Christ it's hot!

I'm just in from running some errands downtown, and I wanted to take Beckett out for a walk. I don't think the heat is good for a year-old black Labrador puppy out on a day like this. Picture the temperature of blacktop, then add a couple of bright eyes, a foolish smile complete with a lolling pink tongue the colour of an English rose, then wrap it in a black mink coat, and you have Beckett.

Poor Beckett, I think he's going to be in lying on my office floor for a bit longer with his chew-toys until the temperature cools a bit. At least he doesn't eat horror novels, though I could toss him a couple of "paranormal romances" and see if he has too much good taste to sample them.

I'm betting he does. Labs are classy that way.