Classic, unchained, spontaneous, passionate, European, vivid, real.

I’m gettin’ married in two weeks, just sayin’

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

I say it every time I write about comic books; they’ve been a near lifelong passion since my parents bought me Marvel Team-Up # 72 in the early summer of 1978. Spiderman and Iron Man in a vicious tag-team takedown of Tony Stark’s brutal nemesis, Whiplash. It was for the three-hour schlep down to Ocean City, Maryland. Even at age 8, I could whisk through books reasonably fast, since I’ve always loved reading. This however, my first comic book, was an earth-shattering experience, a game-changer. I was hooked immediately. I read it three times on the drive to OC, twice more on the way home.

Flashing forward, I have thrice built a massive comic book collection which I’ve twice pared down in sale, the first due to necessity when we were piss poor and in dire need of immediate cash to pay our bills during layoffs. As painful as having to sell my drum kits, congas, even my Eddie Murray and Cal Ripkin, Jr. autographed baseball. You do what needs must when you gotta keep the creditors off your tail.

I’ve worked in comics retail, at the very dawn of indie publishing juggernaut, Image Comics. I can still see those Youngblood, Shadow Hawk, Spawn, Savage Dragon, Wild C.A.T.S., Bloodstrike and Cyber Force comics disappear within an hour of store opening. You had immortal indie classics like Cerebus, Bone, The Crow, Tank Girl, Judge Dredd and Maus back then, plus a more mature audiences-driven Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles before they became Saturday morning kiddie pop couture. Image proved at a time when Marvel and DC were flinging a lot of dreck in the early 1990s there was a market to claim outside of the Big Two. Even if those early Image years had their share of thong-split spandex, clunky tech armor, basement curtain-sized capes and impossible hair poofs of the super-damned as much as Marvel and DC.

Thank the comics gods for Savage Dragon and Spawn, along with Stan Sakai’s samurai rabbit, Usagi Yojimbo. Sakai has long served as the model for independent artist-writer projects, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (with whom Usagi has mingled numerous times in comics, cartoons and action figure lines), starting in black and white comics before switching to color.

Sidebar, below is my copy of Usagi’s first issue run after his debut in the cult classic anthology, Albedo Anthropomorphics, signed by the man himself. Many people address him formally as “Mr. Sakai,” as I did when meeting this humble, generous soul. He doodled Miramato Usagi on this and another comic for me and he took a picture with me at the comic con, asking for not a single dollar.

Then there’s that indie powerhouse that could with their glorious takes on existing franchises like Aliens, Predator, The Terminator, Star Wars and later, Hellboy, Umbrella Academy, The Mask, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ninja Gaiden and 300. Before Marvel retained their publication rights to Star Wars (and now claiming Aliens and Predator), The Force was breathing for years indie-style. Tom Veitch and Cam Kennedy’s two Dark Empire miniseries remain longtime fan favorites and should be considered canon, in my opinion, along with Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire and Kevin J. Anderson’s Jedi Academy novel trilogies.

I’m talking Dark Horse Comics, the same house which ushered a sick and twisted redefinition of pulp noir with Frank Miller’s timeless Sin City. Like Image, Dark Horse launched their own brand of in-house superheroes as “Comics’ Greatest World,” which both caught on and flopped in the 1990s (though the label officially began in 1986), with X, Ghost and Barb Wire, the latter made into an atrocious action flick starring Pamela Anderson. Back in the day, their monthly anthology Dark Horse Presents was one to look forward to, mingling short comic stories between franchise-driven and original material.

It’ll take more than your constitution for me to further illustrate a historical outline of comic books, especially independent presses going as far back as Charlton, Gold Key and Eclipse to the newer brigade of Dynamite, Oni Press, Valiant, Scout Comics, IDW, Boom! Studios, Titan Comics, Top Cow and Vault Comics. Suffice it to say, there’s a plethora of independent publishers. Chances are, that new favorite outlandish, gangbusters movie or streaming show that’s become your new addiction is based off an indie comic. The Boys, need I say more? Only in reminder to never forget the zombie phenomenon of The Walking Dead began as an independently released comic, much as HBO’s intelligent response, The Last of Us, comes courtesy of the gaming world.

Spinning back, of course to Image, who are credited as renaissance kings for publishing original creator content. Here is a home where the writing and art gunslingers at Marvel and DC are pushing their own characters and series outside of the superhero realm. Though you’ll get some of those with Image as well, with a decided thumb bite from writers like Mark Millar and Tim Seeley. Millar has given us spectacular crossover hero legacies which you’ve seen in film via Kick-Ass, Wanted, Jupiter’s Legacy and The Kingsman, along with many other staple titles like Huck, Reborn, Hit Girl and American Jesus. It’s so vast, he’s now shaking his entire Millarworld up in a brutal free-for-all miniseries, Big Game.

I would be remiss without stating both DC and Marvel have made their attempts to popularize fringe material outside of their realms of super. Marvel once had Epic Comics, which leaned more towards hard sci-fi and otherworldly fantasy in the vein of Heavy Metal magazine. Anyone with a serious love of comics is already hollering “Vertigo!” at me, DC’s mature audiences side brand which, for me, saved comics in the Nineties via The Sandman, Hellblazer, Swamp Thing, V is for Vendetta, Preacher, Fables, Kid Eternity, 100 Bullets, American Vampire, Codename: Knockout, Lucifer, Scalped, Shade: The Changing Man and Punk Rock Jesus. Seriously, without Vertigo and Image, the independent comic would be the same as independent politicians; on the outs, no prayer of an outreach beyond a minor demographic nobody gives much cred. DC even gave Joe Hill (yeah, that Joe Hill) a stab at launching his own stable, Hill House Horror, and some damned intriguing miniseries emerged like Basketful of Heads, Daphne Byrne, Plunge and The Low, Low Woods outside of his acclaimed Locke & Key.

Deadly Class is one of comics’ instant classics which recently completed its run and had a brief fling as an adapted show on Syfy. Rick Remender said everything I ever felt, as a teenager and as a metal-punk hybrid, mostly metalhead. Though I never wanted an outlet for my anger as to join a school of assassins where the stakes are, indeed deadly. For all the comic books that have pushed taboos like Ferals, Faust, The Divine + the Wicked, Sex, Faithless and Sex Criminals, it’s Deadly Class and Brian K. Vaughan/Fiona Staples’ Dali gone intergalactic masterwork, Saga (probably the greatest indie comic of all-time) which showed me the true power of independent comics storytelling.

I like to say there’s a comic book for everyone out there and if you’re new and curious to the medium, by all means, dive in to The Big Two’s offerings, even with the rising cover prices. I’ll admit DC’s pricing has gone so wonky lately I had to purge many of their books off my pull list (as a major Batman and Batgirl fan I just can’t keep up, expense-wise), though Tom King just rebooted Wonder Woman last week with one of the most jaw-dropping plots in the Amazonian princess’ entire 80-plus year run. Tom King is like the horror mogul bearing the same last name, both inarguable masters of their craft. What Tom King has done on Batman, Mister Miracle, Heroes in Crisis, Strange Adventures and Batman/Catwoman is high literature. Marvel, I’m always swimming around in Black Panther, Moon Knight, Daredevil, Captain America, Thor, Captain Marvel, the X-Men books, Spidey and many others. I’m a lifer comics hound, so yeah, my collection is dominated by The Big Two.

I can rattle off a score of recommended independent comic series like Low, Nailbiter, Paper Girls, I Hate Fairyland, The Very Last Final Girls, Charm City, Local Man, Invincible, Red Sonja, Vampirella, Fatale, Chew, Indigo Children, Astro City, The Red Mother, Criminal, Grindhouse, Rai, Bloodshot, Witchblade, East of West, Black Science, Revival, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Kill or Be Killed, Wytches, Lumberjanes and damned near anything written by Ed Brubaker, Kelly Thompson (who writes the snappiest banter in comics, bar none) or James Tynion, IV, the latter of whom I will get to in a moment.

Even Archie comics have undergone transformation and reimagined in other domains, such as the modernized rebranding of the main Archie series as precursor to the Riverdale t.v. series. Then there’s the nutty but fun Archie Meets Kiss, Archie Meets the Ramones and the gleefully gonzo mash-up, Archie Meets Predator. Imagine, if you will, a clownish alterverse where Betty and Veronica have a 12-issue run-in with, of all things, Red Sonja and Vampirella. It happened. None of these shenanigans outshine the outstanding horror romp, Afterlife With Archie and its malevolent sister series The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, the latter being far more sinister than its live action Netflix interpretation. It’s a damn shame Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa got redirected with writing t.v. scripts and had to abandon these gems. I’m still holding out for their resurrections.

Here are a few more independent titles I’m flipped out for:

As I mentioned earlier, James Tynion IV is fire. I sat in on one of his convention panels for Boom! Comics and was happy I could contribute something he liked to the conversation. I came to Tynion’s work through the Bat comics and was blown away then. I heard so much talk in comic shops and online about The Woods, I couldn’t help but check it out. I came home from the same convention with the first seven trade paperback collections and went to the finish line. High school horror like you’ve never seen. I can’t spoil it by talking about it. Sheer genius. Then there’s Something is Killing the Children, one of the best horror comics of the modern age. Tynion’s fantasy epic, Wynd, is out of the norm for his regular work, but beautiful stuff. He recently did a 12-issue arc for DC, The Nice House on the Lake, which seems destined to continue, but holy shitballs, Tynion’s newest series for Image, W0rldtr33 is probably indie comics’ hottest ticket right now. Screw the dark web; Tynion’s Undernet is where the apocalypse will be staked. Each issue has gone to multiple printings, the debut issue already on its fifth.

My grandfather used to devour pulp, crime, military merc and western novels as I did by his side and in my bedroom with Stephen King and Conan the Barbarian books. Casca, Mack Bolan, Mike Hammer, Louis L’Amour were his jam and I used to sneak read some of these based on the scantilly-clad women on the covers of those bombastic, juicy paperbacks. Thus I became a fan of noir and pulp, and when you mash them together in Charles Adai’s Gun Honey universe, you get smart and sexy femme assassins who like their sex, absolutely, but tearing shit up gets their rocks off more. No doubt Adai took inspiration from G.G. Fickling’s pulp novel, A Gun for Honey, but he’s now wrapping on three miniseries under Gun Honey, which follows weapons expert Joanna Tan and now master of disguise associate Dahlia Racers in the current arc, Heat Seeker. There’s the promise of more, and I can’t wait. Adai owns the Hard Case Crime imprint, which has published one of my all-time favorite Stephen King novels, Joyland, along with The Colorado Kid and Later. Other HCC comics (in partnership with UK publisher Titan Comics) to check out are Peepland, Triggerman, Breakneck and Normandy Gold.

Let’s stay in the theme of noir and Titan Comics by flagging their Blade Runner line. Who better to thread the events between the original film and Blade Runner 2049 (regular readers of Roads Lesser Traveled know my devotion to these films) than the writer of 2049 himself, Michael Green? I can’t imagine the pressure Green must feel as he’s been writing 12-issue arcs for each decade leading up to Neander Wallace’s reign over the dystopian rape of organic life on Earth. We see and gain more sympathy for the replicant underground, who take a decisive stance through Blade Runner 2019, 2029 and now 2039, though nothing outdoes K and Joi’s sublime artificial romance onscreen in 2049 that rang deeper and truer than most human relationships. No Harrison Ford or Ryan Gosling. In this series, we follow a female Blade Runner, Aanna “Ash” Ashina, as she puts the pieces together of the fallen Tyrell Corporation on her way toward an inevitable confrontation with Niander Wallace’s “angel” replicant, Luv. Ash, considered the best Blade Runner of her time, has her own fall and learns the same level of empathy for replicant rights to co-exist as Ford’s Rick Deckard did. An impossible achievement, Michael Green deserves his own commendation to this esteemed franchise. Titan also released Blade Runner: Origins and a comic tie-in to the CGI show, Blade Runner: Black Lotus. The future is dead only in this world’s ecosystem.

Szymon Kudranski is a wunderkind. Artist, writer, letter and colorist. All in-house and all of it supreme quality. Something Epic is possibly comics’ answer to Ready Player One in the respect pop culture or facsimiles of pop culture run rampant in this gorgeous series which already seems to have a finish line in mind, but could rival Saga if left to play longer. Danny Dillon has a gift beyond gifts. He sees an entire world nobody else does. Imagination running wild in the free world. Kudranski breaks our hearts immediately as 14-year-old Danny is about to suffer tragedy as his mother (the only human on the planet who can believe what he’s going through) is dying of cancer. The narrative bleeds and we feel every lick of Danny’s pain through Kudranski’s elegant prose. Danny is an artist beyond his years, but his adult life has further reaching ramifications. He sees superheroes, monsters, cartoon characters, ships and fire, but it all bursts from a gatekeeper second world a rare few can perceive. Something Epic is setting up for something just that, as the older Danny has faced video game-like trials to claim his rightful place finishing left-for-dead creations of imagination to give them proper life. Just beautiful.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

Revolution Calling, the new novel from Ray Van Horn, Jr. coming soon through Raw Earth Ink.

Be there!

Gonna let FTF rest this week as I’ve just wrapped on my third horror short story in the past couple months titled “Secrets,” submitted for hopeful publication.

Before putting the final screws to this nasty little yarn, TJ and I sat on the porch last night and she fleshed out a fourth story with me, ready to start writing this weekend.

I am screaming with joy inside of me for all the recent explosive inspiration.

Come what may, so mote it be.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

It’s a King Thing and has been for 41 years. A Constant Reader since 1982.

I was just 12. In utter fascination of horror and Blade Runner. My grandfather used to sit and read pulp novels all day and he heard me say while reading one of his Casca novels, “Man, this would be even better with some horror like Stephen King,” since I was all giddy over Salem’s Lot, The Shining and Carrie when they came on t.v.

The next day at the grocery store, my grandfather bought me six of King’s novels right there at a card shop and bookstore. Changed my life forever.

And it can never go unmentioned that my dear, dear friend, Paulette, my very first friend in this world as I came out of the womb, has gifted me every King release since Pet Sematary for Christmas, a tradition she’s now extended with the works of Richard Chizmar.

A most righteous birthday to the Master!

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

You can’t teach it to the younger generations without giving them a hands-on experience. Going out of your house to a mega arcade, as was immensely popular in the 1980s, is far better than planting yourself indoors day-to-night with nonstop video game action. I know depending on your age, I’ve preached the gospel or committed heresy.

Sure, the graphics for video games today are 100 times better than the analog days of Atari, Midway, Namco, Stern and even the infancy years of Nintendo. One-ups to you, Gen Tech. The cinematic Red Dead Redemption II, Dying Light or any of the countless Call of Duty games annihilate Missile Command, Centipede and Galaga in game play and design. All the Mario games to evolve from Donkey Kong and the days of Nintendo Game Boy are marvels of the modern age, in particular those wacky fun, psychedelic Mario Cart games. A cool addiction.

Photo from the public domain

Not a lick of it, however, gives me the same giddy geekery of smashing the crap out of buildings as either a monster-sized wolf, gorilla or lizard in Rampage from the old days. The only video game in known existence to have given me the same therapeutic purging of a rough day being Simpsons Road Rage from the PS2 days, which is where video games for me stopped. A Friday night with some Chinese and SRR before a late-night horror movie or two could unwind the ruts as good as a Dethklok album later in life for me. Some friendly, thumb-spraining tag team duke outs on Tekken 2 were also gnarly, for that matter.

My kid, who was once very good at sports, and loved to hike with me, soon made video games his obsession as teenagers find their own path giving them verve. We’ve since been submitted to PS4, Xbox One and now PS5 in succession, and while TJ may have worked a stint for GameStop in another life and cheers on the boyo on when there’s energy to do so, I’ve lost most of my passion for video games. Call it overstimulation, a whiff of sour grapes, a bit of old fogeyism and hangover from so much cannonade and bloodthirsty desensitization. I say it inside my head over and over, other than the Lego video games (especially Marvel, DC and Star Wars) this shit just ain’t fun anymore.

To think Mortal Kombat was considered gruesome nearly 31 years ago. Child’s play compared to the spine-tearing, sinew-ripping, disemboweling bucket of gore it is today. 17-year-old Ray would’ve been champing at the bit like my kid is for tomorrow, the release of the newest MK mayhem, Mortal Kombat I. Yeah, video games are following the trend of comic books by constantly rebooting back to number one. Vonnegut was a fragging genius with his eternal shrug off phrase, “So it goes.” A lot more fun shaking one of the early day Mortal Kombat machines against a friend at elbow’s reach inside an eye-popping arcade than anonymously online where your opponent might be hacking your credentials to the digital bark, “FINISH HIM!”

So enough of the whining from yours truly about today’s video games. Before I come off like a crotchety old coot, I like the teenagers as much as the adults in Cobra Kai, and I impressed the young shampoo girl over the weekend while getting a haircut by mentioning the YouTuber Markiplier as we both talked about looking forward to the new Five Nights at Freddy’s movie coming out. My kid shoved both down my throat to the point of surrender and neither are a bad thing, I confess. Like today’s rap and hip hop; I cringe at most of it, but really dig Childish Gambino, Metro Boomin, Coi Leray, Shiloh Dynasty and 80purppp. I make a point to find what’s good as the times change instead of staying stuck in my happy place decade. Evolve or evaporate, as TJ loves to say.

But I digress. For all our mutual, sometimes awkwardly failed attempts to meet halfway at the generation gap as a family, my kiddo does have a firm appreciation for the history of video games. He loves my rattling about the day I was given an Atari 2600 for my 12th birthday and how old Atari units used to fry picture tubes of floor model televisions. All to the chagrin of parents from my generation, shelling out to replace Atari zapped color t.v.s, us teens banished with our joysticks and Atari paddles to an old black and white television inside our bedrooms. Necessity versus outright punishment.

Atari and later Intellevision and Colecovision gaming systems relegated to black and white may have sucked, but it kept a pervading familial peace when you had the need to blip, bleep, bloop and digitally Tarzan yell along to those early Activision classics, Pitfall, River Raid, Enduro and Seaquest. Black and white was and still is stellar for classic horror and noir movies, but I think of this whenever I see my kid freak out playing games and whacking his controllers in frustration. Try it and black and white, brah.

You’d never survive the experience, kid, though you got a snowy screen simulation of it at Timeline Arcade, this past weekend didn’t you, dude? After all these trips there, it finally sunk in with you. All things being relative, you do have it nicer and easier. My family’s house didn’t look like the retro assemblage of plywood walls and gaudy floral print sofas Timeline Arcade recreates like museum pieces (cough cough, ouch), but I knew many who did.

Getting on with it, I posit there’s a lot more pleasure to be had entering a vast, glowing emporium of machinery thrusting ambient digital animation in your face. Games you control with a stick and one to three firing and maneuvering buttons. You’re engaged far more against a machine forced into a standing position for most vintage arcade games, even those you sit in and subjected to senses assaulting gameplay. Heck, man, Pole Position back in the day put you into a seated position and while primitive today, it was one of the first video games simulating an actual car race you had to qualify for before you could continue on. All the quarters lost on that game alone, total Bummersville…

Retro arcades are popping up around the world as my generation gets older, a testament to our youth, where video games were as much as a social outlet as a place to test your might at a quarter a pop and let your worries free for as long as your skill level allowed. Kids went to arcades as much to shoot the breeze, date or summon the stones outside of school to ask for a date. I think of all the french fry and pizza grease we left on those joysticks for the next kid to groan at. Not so appealing in the post-COVID days, but hilarious in retrospect.

My son is so immersed in gamer culture he demands our audience more than a teenager should and he has for years. Yet, he knows the key to our investment of time watching him nefariously plow through zombies, drug runners, cowboys and enemy forces with maximum carnage is to suggest a run to Timeline Arcade in York, Pennsylvania now and then. As he did this past weekend. A smart lad, that one.

Both TJ and I are still masters at Galaga and I still clear seven or eight zones on Ms. Pac Man and I can still whip the crap out of insects with digital “arrows” on Centipede. Rampage, I still get the top score most times, though I was laughably pathetic hitting the transport button on the original Asteroids to repeated self-destructive folly. I took a picture of my hyperspace topflight “one of the top ten best” score of 40 for nyuks sake. Also laughing to myself had it been 1981, I would’ve been the same pissed-off rager my son is getting blasted by “camper” shooters in Call of Duty, Fortnite well before that.

That was when a pocketful of quarters was an Eighties’ kid’s treasure, his manna. Nothing stunk worse than nagging the piss out our parents for a ride to the local arcade (the totally rad, intergalactic fantastic Space Port being our idea of heaven) and blowing through our money in nanoseconds. If you couldn’t find friends to b.s. with, the wait for parent pickup could be interminable, especially in silent envy of those video game heroes of yesteryear hogging a machine on a single play. Bittersweet to think of today.

What’s great about Timeline other than recreating all that neon piping in certain spots is planting those old classics you loved, Frogger, Tapper, Tron, Karate Champ, Dig Dug, Dragon’s Lair, like sentries alongside a bunch of throwback video games you never knew existed then. Even those ’90s goodies, multi-player smash-up games featuring X-Men, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Simpsons. There are rows of pinball machines, hoop shooting games you can actually sink on repeat, Skee-Ball, a pool table, air hockey, even a station for the youngbloods with hand shaped chairs for them to lounge on. Those being plugged to Xbox and PS5. It’s the ultimate hangout, no matter your age.

Photo from the public domain

You pay $10.00 an hour for unlimited games, but Timeline offers a better deal at $25.00 for a day’s worth of play, and they have more than enough to keep you occupied until you tire out like my kid did after three hours of non-stop playing. Funny how he can go hours in a loafing bed-bound position. For all the griping I did earlier in this post, this was my thirteenth visit to Timeline (inclusive of their closed sister location in Hanover, PA), and I was nowhere near ready to quit.

I played like a madman, even with the opportunity to take a food break and come back later. I shot pool and played Star Wars games of the past, including the one from the Eighties where you blow up the Death Star over and over (still taking stupid pride in it) before sinking into the contemporary and supremely badass Star Wars Battle Pod. Talk about topflight, whew. You are there in that sucker.

I’m not gonna lie. Timeline Arcade hypes me every time we go. I may have lost my taste for newer games within a home environment, but I took TJ here on our second date and she whupped by butt at Time Crisis II and held her own on Rampage. We both giggled like idiots playing Space Invaders while reminiscing when we’d first done so in our youth. She loved it so much she insisted we take my son a week later. It was a fun and natural way to break a new woman into his life and we won’t ever forget that precious bonding moment. The photo set from that day is a bigger treasure than a pocketful of quarters.

NERDCORE!!!!

–All other photos by Ray Van Horn, Jr.

Back in 2006, I had the pleasure of having dinner with Geoff Tate when he was still in Queensryche. Very generous with his time, he gave me a lot of insight into the music industry back then while I told him how much of an impact Operation Mindcrime had on me.

Years later, I crafted a story with this album as my primary soundtrack. One that has nothing to do with Operation Mindcrime other than musical reference, but it was my verve, my marching rhythm and I can’t wait to share my novel, “Revolution Calling” with you later this year.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

Happy ’round the bend day and wishes for a good Rosh Hashanah to my Jewish friends and extended family.

I appreciate the love and support you all have been showing Roads Lesser Traveled, as the visit stats just keep on climbing. Corny, but so so true; you all are the reason I keep this thing going.

Here’s what I’ve got on my giddy little mind this week for FTF!

One: The NFL is back! I never like to say “football is back” at this time of year like most Americans do, since the Canadian Football League gets started while the NFL is still in training camp. Baltimore once had a CFL team, the Stallions, which went to the Grey Cup both seasons the league and won it the second time. Love the CFL, even those nutty one-point rouges!

It’s that time of year football fans take possession of their team like they’re the 54th man or woman on the roster. I’ve written a couple of essays about the “we,” “us” and “our” syndrome of osmosis football fans (on both the professional and collegiate levels) inject and project. Example, “We’re gonna kick your butts this week!” I’m serious. Watch the psyche of an entire city ride its hopes of weekly pacification upon the padded shoulders of their favorite teams. You can measure a city’s thermometer based on whether their football team won that week or not.

For NFL Week 1, the team I root for got stomped. Oh well, old me would’ve been raging and smashing the remote. New me is like, meh, see what happens next week, I’ve got a story to write. We had a family football party watching the Ravens look pretty sharp against the Houston Texas, while every Jets backer in the land is no doubt still in hangover mode from the season loss of Aaron Rodgers, predicted to be New York’s savior. Don’t give up yet on Zach Wilson, Jets Nation. It was a great season of Hard Knocks following those J-E-T-S Jets Jets Jets, and let’s give Xavier Gipson a huge hand for making the team with such a gracious smile on the show, then becoming Mr. Electricity in that OT shocker against Buffalo.

Two: As I take down the second half of Stephen King’s Fairy Tale (gotta get a move on, since Holly’s now on the market and heading my way for Christmas from my dear friend, Paulette), I’ve been reading a handful of hit-and-run novellas from horror writers W.H. Chizmar (son of Richard) and John Boden as I attempt to nestle into a family of writers in the genre.

After picking up John Boden’s Jedi Summer, I had a nice little distant chat with him and immediately pounced on Boden’s latest, Snarl, which just came out last week. Boden has a gift of prose unlike any I’ve seen in quite some time. I loved both of these books, but Snarl was next level genius in the vein of horror mogul Joe R. Lansdale with a haunted, guilt-ridden, highly vulnerable author protagonist nobody’s ever attempted. There’s beauty to find amidst the angst, ugliness and roundabout betrayals and that jolt of an ending, crikey. Keep your tissues handy.

Image courtesy of flylanddesigns.com

Three: I spent this week writing a baseball-themed horror story titled “Backdoor Breaker.” I’ll wait until someone picks it up for publication before talking more about it, but I will confess I needed four drafts to make it a true horror story, since my love of the game prevailed in the original draft. I’ll be seeking a home for “Backdoor Breaker” and oh yeah, did I mention I have a new novel coming out soon, Revolution Calling?

Four: This is as much to motivate myself as I usually do these fitness pictures to inspire others. I have focused so much on running the past couple months and those results paid off, for sure. It took TJ to remind me I was neglecting the rest of my regimen, though. Largely because I let three back pulls this year wreck my head.

Let’s face it, not every day is waking up like it’s a Godzilla day. Sometimes you wake up feeling like it’s a smashed Mothra day. Today, though, is most definitely a Godzilla day.

Five: In exactly one month, TJ and I will be married. Just sayin’

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

–Photo by Ray Van Horn, Jr.