Every tale in this anthology explores some shift into the unknown – from hidden dimensions to alternate realities to the haunting darkness, both without and within. With its unique blend of stories that journey through both familiar and alien landscapes, Portals, Gateways, and Doors is a must-have for fans of speculative fiction.
“The Screaming Key” by Lillian Csernica: Arthur’s casual evening with his eccentric friend Reggie spirals into a nightmarish adventure when a cursed key opens a door to a horrifying realm, revealing Reggie’s sinister plan to use Arthur as a guinea pig in a realm of terror and betrayal.
Please join me and the 17 other wonderful authors as we take you on some wild rides that will lift you up out of the ordinary world and into new adventures!
Hello again, ladies and gentlemen and all the nonbinary folks out there. I have been absent for a while due to health and family issues. Now it’s time for my comeback tour! I’m delighted to announce I’ll be appearing at BayCon 2024. It promises to be a fabulous event full of great panel discussions, a Dealer’s Room packed with great buys, and both the Masquerade and a Variety Show!
The Business of Writing and Publishing
The business of writing is daunting, with many paths leading to that first published work. Professional writers discuss their experiences beyond the craft of writing. The panelists will entertain questions from the audience on navigating the path towards success.
An overview of the dramatic changes that swept Japan once it opened its borders to the advanced technology of the West. The Meiji Emperor borrowed one million pounds sterling from Queen Victoria to establish railways in Japan. Building railroad and staffing the new steam trains brought changes that affected every Japanese from the Emperor himself down to the lone fishermen on the more remote islands and left the samurai class stripped of many of its privileges.
Can we Survive AI Assisted Disinformation?
We are already dealing with a cyberpunk level of disinformation swamping our channels. We now have AI available to to make the flood both larger and more convincing. How to we respond?
Noman’s Dog: The Fox in Folklore and Fiction
*”Well, Noman’s Dog,” said the troll. For they know the fox in Elfland, from seeing him often go dimly along their borders; and this is the name they give him.* — Lord Dunsany, *The King of Elfland’s Daughter* In Dunsany’s 1924 work, the fox who is a border creature, neither cat nor dog, who walks in twilight and who is wary of men and would not go near them… if not for the poultry.
But Dunsany’s fox is just one iteration of a creature that has thrived in fable as much as it does in the real world. Always skulking on the edge of stories, foxes have been tricksters and fools, seducers and scoundrels, heroes and knaves. In this panel, we’ll discuss these and other roles that the fox has played in folklore, how those depictions reflect real-world concerns of the people who tell them, and what masks, old and new, the fox has donned in fantasy fiction over the past century.
Favorite Steampunk Symbols
What are your favorite symbols of steampunk? What steampunk treasures have you been hunting for but have not yet found? Whether you create your own steampunk art, enjoy wearing or displaying the art of others, create steampunk stories, or simply love to curl up with a steampunk book and read—what about steampunk do you love best?
I am delighted to announce that I’ve written 200 pages of my new nonfiction book, Keep Getting Up. If you’ve spent some time following my adventures here, you’ll know my life is complicated. It’s not easy getting through my days. I have gone on doing so, so my friends encouraged me to write a book about how I keep on keeping on. Resilience. That’s the magic word.
Resilience is the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands.
American Psychological Association
Plunging into National Novel Writing Month with a nonfiction project was a challenge. This is my ninth year, and in all the previous years I’ve written fiction. What’s more, this nonfiction would be about me, about my daily life and its impact on my mental health. I have a psychiatrist who prescribes the medications for my clinical depression and insomnia. I see a therapist once a week for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. I rely heavily on their support to keep practicing the techniques that have brought me a long way toward resilience.
In order to create some structure for the book, I wrote out what could be termed a “trauma timeline,” a list of every single year of my life and any traumatic events that took place during it. For example, when I was eleven years old, my parents got divorced, which meant my mother and I moved to a new apartment. I had to go to a new school away from all the people I’d spent five years with in elementary school. My parents had no sense of self-restraint when it came to complaining about each other in front of me. That was a very rough year.
I am of an age now to have enough distance and perspective on life with my nuclear family. I can’t help laughing when I hear that term. More than once there was the emotional equivalent of a mushroom cloud rising above my house. My father was an alcoholic. My mother was a narcissist. My sister…. Well, the less said there the better. My brother is fine. Good career, wonderful daughter, a great guy. I’m the baby of the family, so the trickle down economics of passive aggression tended to hit me rather hard.
Telling my own story my own way is quite an adventure. Heaven only knows what insights await me as I go through the editing process!
TCL Chinese Theater, formerly known as Grauman’s Chinese Theater, is one of the most well-known landmarks in Hollywood. Like so many of Hollywood’s famous locations, it is said to be haunted.
The ghost most often associated with TCL Chinese Theater is Victor Kilian, a vaudeville performer who made the transition into motion pictures during the Golden Age of Hollywood.
In 1979, actor Victor Kilian was murdered in his apartment which was located one block away from Grauman’s Chinese Theater. He apparently had struck up a conversation with a stranger and they went back to Kilian’s apartment where it had been burglarized. The killer has never been caught, but the ghost of Killian can be seen on the sidewalk in front of the Chinese Theater where he is allegedly trying to find his murderer.
One night my best friend Pat and I were in Hollywood. We decided to go see The Last Samurai at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. The box office is at street level, then you take an elevator down to the floor with the actual theaters.
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Pat was already standing at the ticket window, which meant she had her back to me as I hurried down the hallway toward her. To my left stood the bank of elevators. A man and a woman were walking away from the ticket booth, about to get into the elevator going down. I called, “Hold the car!” Pat heard me and glanced back over her right shoulder, then turned to her left to walk toward the elevator. The two of us reached the elevator at the same moment.
There was no one inside. Pat looked at me. I looked at her. I described the man. She nodded and described the woman. We had seen the same two people. There was nowhere at all those two people could have gone other than into that one elevator.
Pat and I took the elevator down. When the doors opened, after a total of maybe fifteen seconds, we didn’t see anyone in that lobby. The doors for the individual theaters were far enough from the elevator that we surely should have seen the man and the woman before they stepped through one of those doors.
Ever since then I find myself hesitating before I enter an elevator.
I love classic ghost stories. They combine my love of history with my fascination for the supernatural. These are my favorite stories by ten of the very best writers of weird fiction. Some names may be familiar to you. I hope you will take a chance and explore the names you don’t recognize. There are few better ways to celebrate the spooky season than curling up under a warm blanket with stories that will give you a definite chill.
Horror movies are a long tradition in my family. Back in the 1930s, my grandfather worked at Universal Studios, home of the classic monster movies such as Frankenstein and The Mummy. I grew up on Seymour’s Creature Features and Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, along with The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits. Allow me to share with you my Top Ten Scary Movies.
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Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum — This gem comes from Korea and tells the story of the fateful night the crew of The Horror Times web series investigates an abandoned psychiatric asylum with a very dark past. If that sounds trite, believe me, this movie is anything but. I’m fond of paranormal movies from Asia because the cultural factors are so different from what we’re all used to here in the largely Judeo-Christian West. The intrepid explorers who go inside the asylum are directed by their leader who holes up in a big tent with all the computer equipment necessary for the livestream. There are some classic jump scares, but they’re mixed into many fresh moments. The story will keep you guessing right up until the chilling finale.
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21 Days — Jacob, his girlfriend Shauna, and his buddy Kurt pack up their ghost hunting gear and set off to spend twenty-one days inside and abandoned house that may or may not be haunted. Rumor has it that anyone living in the house for more than twenty-one days comes to a bad end thanks to the evil spirits there. One family faced such a disaster. Another family got out in time. Jacob thinks the local First Nations tribe is fueling rumors about evil spirits because the tribe wants their land back. Neither family will say a word about their experiences, so fearful are they of supernatural vengeance. A strong set up for Jacob & Co. having themselves boarded up inside the house so they can make the documentary that will lead to fame and fortune. The steady escalation of wrongness on the property makes for good tension and suspense.
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The Abominable Dr. Phibes — Vincent Price plays Dr. Anton Phibes, a brilliant but twisted man who blames his wife’s medical team for her untimely death. Dr. Phibes unleashes vengeance in the form of attacks based on the Ten Plagues of Egypt. This gets a whole lot weirder before it’s over. The art deco production design and Dr. Phibes’ own makeup must be seen to be believed. If you want to have your own freaky film festival, watch this plus the sequel Dr. Phibes Rises Again followed by Theatre of Blood.
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Creature From The Black Lagoon — A team of scientists go on an expedition to the Amazon, hoping to find the mysterious “Gill-Man” whose existence has been revealed by fossils of a webbed claw. They find the Creature, who wears one of the greatest suits in cinematic history. Released in 1954, this movie combines the classic story of Beauty and the Beast with the xenophobia of the time. I think I was in elementary school when I first discovered the Creature. I couldn’t understand why the scientists were bothering the Creature, taking the tramp steamer with its smoke and gasoline and oil into the waters where the Creature lived. My child’s mind already saw that as bad for the environment. I already wanted to be a marine biologist, so I was firmly on the Creature’s side.
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The Legend of Hell House — Based on the book Hell House by Richard Matheson, this movie is intense. A scientific paranormal investigation results in the investigators getting attacked, possessed, and exposed to at least two generations of nastiness. No way should I have seen this movie when I was still a kid. We’re not talking Mario Bava or Dario Argento levels of kink, but still. This movie exposed me to the kind of evil that can exist among both the living and the dead. (This is no relation to The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, aside from being in the supernatural horror genre.)
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Grave Encounters — Released in 2011, Grave Encounters was among the earlier movies about a team of paranormal investigators who lock themselves into an abandoned mental asylum for the night hoping to document the activity reported to arise from the evil doctor who experimented on his patients. I don’t think I’m giving anything away when I say the investigation does not end well. The story held my interest. The characters are worth watching, especially team leader Lance Preston, played by Seth Rogerson. The ending is hard to take, but it does deliver on everything leading up to it. The sequel, Grave Encounters 2, is also good thanks again to a strong performance by Seth Rogerson.
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Phantasm — To describe this movie at all is to give away some of the twists. If you know, you know. I found Phantasm really disturbing not least because it’s tricky knowing whether what’s happening onscreen is happening in the real world, in a dream, in another dimension, or another reality altogether. Beware the Tall Man and his silver sphere! Watching this movie will make you sleep with the lights on!
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Aliens — I’m not a big fan of science fiction or space opera, but I really enjoyed Aliens. I’ve watched it four or five times. I did watch the first movie, Alien, as well. Thanks to H.R. Geiger, the aliens raised the bar when it came to scary monsters. Sigourney Weaver as Ripley has become an iconic female bad ass. Lance Henriksen, that horror rockstar, does a great job in his role as Ash.
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REC — In Spain, a news crew riding along with a fire and rescue team enter an apartment building where the outbreak of an unknown illness leaves them sealed inside by the law enforcement and the military. As the infection spreads from person to person, the news crew starts piecing together the strange events tied to the building’s history. The actual source of the illness is one of the weirdest and most impressive plot twists I’ve seen in the zombie/found footage genre.
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Bad Ben — Tom Riley sinks all of his money into a house available at a Sheriff’s auction. Problems start right away, prompting Tom to have security cameras installed. This leads to the viewer seeing strange activity both inside and outside the house. Tom digs into the history of the property and finds a whole lot that’s bizarre. The suspense, the occult forces at work, and Tom’s own pragmatic approach to the problem is a lot of fun to watch. There are now eleven movies in the series. I found the first three are the best, but they’re all a hoot.
I have mixed feelings about paranormal investigation. Let me say up front that I am not a paranormal investigator. I make no claims to any form of expertise in that field. What I do know is based on reading a whole lot about the supernatural and related folklore around the world. I write and publish fiction based on fifty years of persistent fascination with things that go bump in the night.
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There are genuine investigators out there, people who have been trained in the scientific method along with the kind of investigative techniques used by law enforcement agencies. The most credible examples I’ve come across are Amy Allan, Cindy Kaza and Steve DiSchavi of The Dead Files, which has been running on the Travel Channel since 2011, now available on Discovery+. Whether or not one chooses to believe the results of their investigations, I think the show is worth watching. The variety of paranormal problems and the solutions suggested are based on solid research. All too often I’ve come across the recycled basics, the grab-and-go kinds of paranormal cliches that come from superficial research regurgitated by people who just parrot what they pick up from other amateur paranormal YouTube channels and don’t bother doing their own homework.
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Speaking of which, a case could be made for saying the most well-known paranormal investigation show is Ghost Adventures, headed up by Zak Bagans and his team. Their show premiered on The Travel Channel in 2008. Zak Bagans’ technique back then involved provoking the spirits with a variety of rude and stupid remarks. It’s in very poor taste to disrespect the dead and try to make money from doing so. I hated that, I hated Zak Bagans, and I hated the show. There was nothing to it, just a lot of leveraging the power of suggestion and the ghost hunting gizmos going off at dramatic moments.
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Let’s think about this. Suppose you were in mourning, spending every moment of every day trapped in the endless pain of your grief. You’re cut off from the life you’d been living, from the person or people you’d built your life around. The last thing you’d want to deal with is a bunch of TikTok wannabes running around the place you inhabit, badgering you with questions about private matters that are none of their business. They bring with them lots of cameras and sound equipment and all the gizmos favored by ghost hunters who are desperate for any kind of “evidence” that will get them more followers. I feel a great deal of sympathy for whatever spirits suffer this kind of onslaught. These “paranormal investigators” just keep nagging and poking around and trying to stir up trouble until they get anything they can construe as a response. If I was the ghost being exploited this way, I’d want to lash out just to give these jerks what they want so they’d pack up and go home.
The trouble is, they don’t just go home. They get on social media and tell everybody they got results, which brings even more mobs of wannabe Zak Bagans barging into the location with the same equipment and the same lack of genuine compassion. With this in mind, I was overjoyed to discover this excerpt of a stand up routine by comedian Matteo Lane.
In 1845, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a story that explored in fictional form concepts that would later be examined in the works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. The title of the story, The Imp Of The Perverse, has passed into the English language as a turn of phrase referring to self-destructive urges or behavior. Poe himself describes it this way:
“We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss—we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink away from the danger. Unaccountably we remain… it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height… for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it.“
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As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, when I was a teenager I had a strong curiosity about all things supernatural. I read a lot of books, both fiction and nonfiction. I watched a lot of movies, both documentary and total make-believe. All of this research and exploration churned inside my mind and gave rise to this poem, published by editor Emerian Rich on HorrorAddicts.Net.
I was raised Roman Catholic. When it came time for my Confirmation, I decided to leave the Roman Catholic Church. Confirmation meant making a commitment to act as an adult according to the Church’s dogma and practices. I told my mother I did not believe what the Roman Catholic Church taught, mainly because I couldn’t reconcile the contradictions between this God of love and mercy I kept hearing about and the really scary people who served him. In my parish, we had several fire and brimstone Irish Catholic priests, the kind with silvery hair and brick red faces who never smiled.
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Mom let me off the hook for Confirmation, but she didn’t give me any ideas about filling the sudden void in my spiritual life. Chaucer said an idle mind is the Devil’s workshop. He must must have known a few teenagers. I had an active mind, a strong curiosity, and a love of reading, so I started looking into subjects much better left alone. Back then I liked to watch horror movies, classics featuring Christopher Lee, Vincent Price, and Peter Cushing. I wanted to know where the filmmakers got their ideas for the monsters, sorcery, and strange occult organizations. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Lucky for me, my Holy Guardian Angel kept a lifeline attached to my silly soul and hauled me out of danger more than once.
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I mention all this to give you a context for what I was like when I plunged into the world of divination, or fortunetelling. A lot of those scary movies I’d been watching featured curses, omens, and ancient artifacts, even items that could help foretell the future. So I rushed right out and bought myself a Tarot deck. Being very much a traditionalist, I bought the deck created by Arthur Edward Waite along with his book on interpretation. Waite was a member of at least one of the occult organizations very prominent at the turn of the century when spiritualism was all the rage among the intelligentsia. The enormous popularity of séances, table-tapping, and Ouija boards prompted professional illusionists such as the great Houdini to debunk the frauds. I’ve met a lot of people who have really wanted to believe they were psychic. Many of them just wanted their dreams to be real. The problem with that kind of thinking is, you can’t have just the good dreams be real. The nightmares are part of the deal too.
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When I was in high school I worked in community theater as a stage or lighting technician. That meant I got to hang around backstage, be part of the magic of a live performance, and go to the cast parties. The show onstage was nothing compared to what I’d see at the cast party afterward. At one of these parties I brought along my Tarot deck and set myself up in a corner. This was not a smart idea. Trying to peer into the mysteries of the Infinite for people who are drunk and/or wasted on recreational drugs does not end well. Divination should not be treated like a party game, like one more cool thing to do after you have your face painted, but there I was, sixteen years old and so sure I knew what I was doing.
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A few people wanted to have readings done. The only one I remember clearly is the one I hope I never forget. An older woman wanted to ask the cards a question about a problem involving her daughter. I don’t recall the problem. I worked my way through the cards I’d dealt, watching the woman for her reactions. Fool that I was, I let my eagerness to please color what I saw in the cards and how I expressed the cards’ meanings. The woman went away with a smile that seemed a little too broad. I was bright enough to spot that, but totally blind to what caused it.
A man who’d been sitting nearby watching me do the readings asked me if I understood what I’d just done. He pointed out the way the older woman had asked the question indicated she’d already decided what her daughter should do. I worked so hard for her approval that I totally missed the trap and fell right into it. I’d given that woman the answer she wanted. Now she’d go to her daughter and tell her daughter what she should do. If the daughter had other ideas, Mom could back up her own opinion with the authority of my Tarot reading. I had given the older woman what could be called psychic leverage. That might cause friction and hidden resentments and who knows what other emotional and spiritual damage. The man who explained all this to me wanted me to understand that I had no clue how much responsibility went along with presenting myself as a fortuneteller. He was right. Even now, forty years later, I still feel ashamed for being so ignorant and arrogant.
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There just isn’t the kind of Better Business Bureau that would be really helpful in terms of knowing whether or not a given psychic is any good at his or her predictions. It doesn’t take much to learn how to become what’s known as a “cold reader,” where you can just look at someone an be able to tell him or her all kinds of personal facts about his or her private life. I can do it because I’m a writer and a trained observer. There’s nothing mystical about it. What also helps is the fact that people fall into a limited number of types. Once you identify the type, you can make several fairly accurate statements or predictions.
And then there are the people who are flat out grifters. Liars and cheats and the kind of people who will use private detectives or the on staff equivalent to do the legwork needed to find out a wealth of information about the client. People simply do not realize how much can be learned about them from the Internet. Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, all the blogging sites, they’re all sources of information that will help the phony psychic amaze clients and keep milking them for more and more money.
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Whether the psychic is legitimate or a con man, genuinely talented or a self-deluded fake, there is still the issue of responsibility. Clients come to psychics for all kinds of reasons. Hidden agendas are called that precisely because they’re hidden. What’s worse, the agenda may be hidden even from the client because of whatever emotional or spiritual baggage obstructs clear self-knowledge. The psychic can’t known exactly how the client will use the information the psychic provides. Just as I had no idea how that older woman might choose to manipulate her daughter with the “mystic insights” of my Tarot reading, so even the most honest and spiritually clean psychic cannot foresee all of the causes and effect.
I grew up on ghost stories, monster movies, Halloween celebrations, and books about folkloric beliefs all over the world. A cynical person might say all that would leave me predisposed to believe in the phenomenon I’m about to describe. I’d like to think all that research left me with the ability to separate what’s real from what’s only make-believe. My aunts and uncles talked about family ghosts with a mixture of pride and apprehension. However many ancestral ghosts might be haunting my father’s branches of the family tree, I defy them all to match the power of pure aggravation caused by my mother’s personal poltergeist.
Ever since I was a little girl, I can remember scenes of panic as my mother rushed around looking for whatever she’d lost that time. Just as we were about to leave for some big event such as a wedding or graduation, Mom couldn’t find her car keys. Didn’t know where she’d put her glasses. The paper with the directions on it had been right there a minute ago. She’d run all over the house looking in some of the unlikeliest places, coming up empty every time. Just when she was about to lose it completely, she’d check her purse or coat pocket or glove compartment or wherever she’d looked first, and there the item would be. Mom had simply overlooked it in her hurry the first time, right? That’s what my brother, my sister and I thought, but things began to happen that made that explanation less and less believable.
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The smart thing to do when Mom was in one of her “Where did I put that?” panics was to stay out of the way. After my brother and sister moved out of the house and then my parents divorced, that left me as the only witness. Mom would swear up and down she felt like somebody was hiding whatever she was looking for and doing it on purpose. Wasn’t me, that’s for sure. I’d be in just as much of a hurry to leave. I started keeping an eye on the items Mom lost most frequently: keys, glasses, purse, wallet, directions, and any special gifts we’d be taking along. Because I kept a close eye on these items, they often did not go missing at all. And then I hit that awkward stage between ten and thirteen, when I wasn’t a little kid anymore, but I wasn’t quite a teenager.
Why was this important? Some paranormal investigators believe the physical and psychological upheaval of adolescence has a corresponding psychic turbulence that might manifest as psychokinetic activity. Poltergeist activity has been shown to occur most often in locations where a prepubescent or pubescent child is present. If the child is removed from the location where the poltergeist activity is taking place, does the activity stop? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. As technology continues to develop, investigators get closer and closer to their dream of solid empirical evidence.
So who was causing the problem of the disappearing objects? Was it the poltergeist, some mischievous spirit who just happened to decide my mother made a good target? Was it Mom, running around like a chicken with its head cut off so much that she’d put something down and forget where she left it, so it seemed to vanish? Or was I the cause, directly or indirectly? I never hid anything of my mother’s, and especially not on a day when we needed to get somewhere on time. Did the stress Mom worked up over getting ready for a special event attract the poltergeist? Did all that uproar trigger the response in me that brought on the seemingly poltergeist-based phenomena? Or did the poltergeist come first and get us all wound up and nervous so we created a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Here comes the part that really freaked me out. There were a number of times when I watched my mother put an item into her purse or pocket, her closet or a drawer. Later on when she’d need that item, she’d call me over to look in the exact place she’d put it, and it simply wasn’t there! It’s not like Mom had reason to suddenly move the object, changing the pocket or drawer. Even the possibility of something falling out of her coat pockets was rather remote because my mother favored coats with deep pockets to prevent this exact problem. The point here is as long as my mother had been the one to put the object in its “safe place,” there was a definite risk of the poltergeist making it disappear. If Mom gave the object to me to put on the dinner table or out to the trunk of the car, then we stood a good chance of finding it where I’d put it. My teenage years with my mother were full of all kinds of stress, money and hormones and attitude and the fallout from my parents’ divorce. One of the few areas where Mom did have faith in me was her belief that I had some kind of ability to make the poltergeist back off.
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Unless, of course, Mom was behind it all, making those items appear and disappear. Was Mom having a good time, getting her laughs making me believe there was a poltergeist in the house?
I don’t think so. I can’t believe Mom would have put that kind of effort into a prank that went on for years, a prank that resulted in her freaking out a lot more than I ever did.
So the question remains. What kept making all those items appear and disappear?
I'm a professional writer living in Northern California with my husband and two sons. Fantasy in various forms is my reading and writing pleasure. I'm a history buff, a Japanophile, and I love to learn about language(s). I enjoy making jewelry, using natural materials such as wood, bone, semiprecious stones, and seashells. I collect bookmarks and wind chimes.
Hopes & Dreams: My Writing and My Sons