Tag: horror

Cloak, dagger, sword, sorcery (Sketches of the Week for Week 20 of 2025)

My son is into D&D and Magic and martial arts, so he sorta loved all of the sketches from this past week, which was all fantasy topics. He thought “Cloaked” was the standout, because the shadows gave it the best depth:

A pencil sketch of a cloaked figure crouched on a box.

He also liked the rightsized detailing on the “Herald of the Odd God” and the gesture of the man she struck down:

A pencil sketch of a robed female priestess She is dear-skull-headed, but otherwise nude, carrying a long staff as she strides toward the viewer.
Pencil sketch of a man kneeling on the ground, struck down by the staff wielded by the robbed priestess in the earlier sketch.

I also liked how this shaman wailing for her demon lover came out. The technique isn’t great—she almost drifts into Ninja Turtle territory, for godsake—but it’s really legible: It catches the eye from a distance, is easy to immediately read, and worth giving a second look. Honestly, should I really be asking for more? It’s sorta like last week’s deep sea diver: a reminder that composition and technique and artistry aren’t the goal on their own, but at the service of catching someone’s eye and making it worth looking twice.

This might be an extremely important short story to read right now

“In My Country” by Thomas Ha in Clarkesworld magazine.

As an aside, and totally unrelated to why this is an important story (and especially so right now), this piece both explains and perfectly epitomizes why I love the stories I love, and what’s missing from those I don’t love, for whatever that is worth.

Sketch of the Week: The Whole Damn Week! (Week 8, 2025)

My son insisted that every sketch from last week had a claim on Sketch of the Week. While I wouldn’t go as far as him, I’m not gonna lie: I was really pleased with this batch, esp. Monday (“Warrior”), Thursday (“Shadow Dancer”), and Friday (“The Terror of Jim Carrey”)

An open spread in my journal showing a week's worth of pencil sketches. These are a strong female warrior holding a staff and with one foot set on a box (Monday's sketch), a crouching swordsman ready to strike (Tuesday's sketch), the snowy ruins of the Ahmeek Stamp Mill in Michigan's far northern Keweenaw Peninsula (Wednesday), a ballet dancer arched back to just touch a wall, subtly mirrored by her pale shadow (Thursday), and a terrified and terrifying attempt to capture Jim Carrey mugging for the camera (Friday)

Monday: “Warrior”—This is based on a photo I found on Pinterest, a platform that I’m embarrassed to admit I’m really liking, as it’s proving to be a really good source of reference images. I love the strength of that pose! There’s a lot I failed to capture here—the original model is quite muscular, while mine is almost gaunt; the original pose has this nearly bone crushing hauteur, and mine is almost contemplative—but I was really pleased with the strength in her stance, and I captured that. She feels unmovable, like a dolmen. This is definitely the best all around drawing from the week, according to my son, who really liked the values and shadow shading.

Tuesday: “Swordsman”—Another Pinterest find. My son really loved the dynamism of the pose and the economic capturing of the back muscles. I went after it because I found the pose both interesting, but challenging to make legible.

Wednesday: “The Ahmeek Stamp Mill Ruins”—This is a real place near where my son goes to university. The reference was a photo I took when we were visiting him a couple weeks back, and the ruins were buried in about four feet of snow. He really loved the subject matter, and thought I captured it well. I disagree, but it’s such a mind-bendingly weird place, I’m pleased I did as well as I did. I’m planning to take another stab at it in a larger format, and hopefully with watercolor.

Thursday: “Shadow Dancer”—A benefit of Pinterest is that it’s sent me in new directions looking for reference photos. It had not dawned on my before to look for dancers, but Pinterest is full of photos of them from all sorts of sources, and dancers strike some incredible and gnarly poses; such great monster and eldritch being fodder! This one is more abstract and less eldritch, but I loved what her shadow was doing on the wall.

Friday: “The Terror of Jim Carrey”—I modeled this off of a relatively famous set of pics of Jim Carrey. It’s not a good drawing of Jim Carrey, and it isn’t even really a good drawing of the actual gesture he’s making, which is a sort of mugging cartoonish surprise. But jesus!, what I got on the page was arresting; it captures legitimate terror for me in a way I’m having trouble articulating. I find that tiny scribble so goddamned disturbing, I’m fascinated.

Highway Gothic (and its “Eldritch Serif” variant)

“Highway Gothic” is the informal name of the sans-serif typeface you see on American road signs:

Ice street signs showing the corner of Buckingham and Manchester

It’s formally known as the Standard Alphabets For Traffic Control Devices or the FHWA Series fonts. It was originally designed just after WWII, and optimized over time for legibility at a distance while traveling at high speeds.

I sorta love Highway Gothic. In part, that’s because I sort of love basic, sturdy industrial design; I’m the one guy who sorta loves the low-rent Brutalism of poured-concrete parking structures. But a big part of my love of that arises from the unintentional aesthetics that arise, for example, from the decay of that concrete smoothing to nubby rubble and rebar, or the way you can often see the grain of the plywood forms used to pour those Brutalist slabs.

Which brings us to why I have an especially tender spot for Highway Gothic:

I live in Michigan, where harsh weather and a poorly funded road maintenance program conspire to create an organically emergent “Eldritch Serif” variant of this sans-serif typeface. Here are a few choice examples from around town, where nature chose to add spidery tails and flourishes where man had specifically shaved them away, giving the letters subtle little horns and roots. The remind me of the tagin—little decorative flourishes or “crowns”—added to Hebrew letters in sacred texts, and signs of unrevealed truths; they are letters that are written, but we don’t yet know how to read.

We put up street signs; enthalpy and entropy add further signs of unrevealed truths buried in them. It takes brutal corners and straight lines, and grows roots and branches and tentacles from them.

The “Eldritch serif” variant of Highway Gothic is sort of my favorite thing, especially in the cold and gloom of Michigan winter.

Weathered street sign for Hill street.
Weathered street sign for Eisenhower street.

This is an especially gnarly one:

Weathered street sign show S. Main street to the right, and Ann Arbor-Saline road to the left

Sketch of the Week: Creep (Nov 14, 2024)

A pencil sketch of a j-horror-style female figure lurching toward teh viewer, long, stringy hair obscuring her face.

This week my son was entirely undecided; he liked everything. I was also pretty pleased, so here’s the full spread for the week:

A sketchbook spread with five sketches: a lake-side landscape with heaped cumulus clouds, an upset young woman sitting with her arms crossed, a meditating fat man, a lurching j-horror zombie-like ghoul woman, and a fleeing man looking over his shoulder.

I did the creep and her victim on different days, and wasn’t as pleased with how he came out, which is why he’s cropped out above. Both of those figures are based on reference photos from The Pose Archives, which I adore.

Tuesday is Yú in a scene from Karuto / Cult.

Monday is a composite of a stretch of beach north of Fisherman’s Island State Park (FUN FACT: most of it isn’t an island; it’s the lakeshore, and may now be entirely inaccessible due to climate change) with some cumulus clouds in my neighborhood. I’m not anywhere near where I want to be with clouds yet.

Wednesday is from a stock photo that’s been kicking around my phone for ages; I used him as a model for a six-limbed samurai squirrel back in June:

A pencil sketch of a squirrel-like warrior monk sitting cross-legged with its large, bushy tail forming a circle behind it.

The squirrel was part of a joke either with my son or with my mom and sisters; I can’t really recall how I got there. A lot of what I do is the result of off-handed jokes gone too far.

Sketch of the Week: Old Skull (Oct 23, 2024)

‘Tis the season! 💀

A pencil sketch of an old human skull.

My son really liked the depth on the skull, but his actual vote for this week’s Sketch of the Week was this one of Mr. Hori from the film Noroi: The Curse, noting “the expression … is incredible”:

A pencil sketch of a terrified Japanese man, Mr. Hori from the horror film "Noroi: The Curse"

I personally was unhappy with how I elongated the face; Mr. Hori’s face is fundamentally round, but my hand kept wanting to regularize him against Munch’s “Scream,” I guess 🤷‍♀️.

I do feel like I get at least close to the extremity of Mr. Hori’s terror in that scene. (The actor, Satoru Jitsunashi, is pretty amazing in that role; he totally makes the movie for me.) Here’s the reference image (more or less; I was working from several stills I grabbed from the movie, because his whole face wasn’t ever in frame at once):

A still image of Mr. Hori from "Noroi: The Curse"

Comedy is the Best Horror🎃

A lot of my favorite horror films are SNL digital shorts. I’ve been mulling this over for years now (in fact, I just spent the last hour writing about this from a craft perspective, a screed that I mercifully deleted rather than sending).

I think it all comes down to this: horror in film basically relies on four tools:

Jump scares are easiest, mounting dread takes the most time, and squick is often the best way to cash in or make a name for yourself. But it’s always the uncanniness I’m after in horror, that experience Freud described as abruptly seeing the “familiar and old-established” as strange and alien, thus giving the sense of revealing a deeper truth “which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.”

It’s the horrific uncanniness I love in these comedy skits. In part, this arises from what’s implied about the universe that the characters live in, all the stuff that’s outside the frame (e.g., Jason’s refrigerator, the pizza beast, the old woman across the street, that high school). 

But I think the key element—the thing that pushes this beyond “the familiar and old-established made strange and alien” and into the territory of “that which ought to have remained hidden being dragged up into the light” is the fact that the world we actually really live in—where I’m sitting and typing and you’re sitting and reading and we’re both watching these little 3-minute-gems—is also outside the frame.

The awful thing the characters in the movie are about to experience? It’s already happening here. Hell, it’s us. And we’re laughing.

For your viewing pleasure:

Looking for some spooºOºoky Hallow-Reads?🎃📖👻

I’m callously taking advantage of the Reason for the Season to plug some of my free-to-read/hear horror stories:

This Place Is Best Shunned

“This Place Is Best Shunned“—Allie and Rooster are heading down to Asheville for Rooster’s new gig, a cushy stint as artist-in-residence at UNC. Rooster is more of a con artist than maker of art, but Allie doesn’t mind, because he’s good-looking, charming, and values what she is: a girl with a keen eye for abandoned places and a knack for getting into them. But when they stumble upon an old backcountry church—the perfect backdrop for Rooster’s latest project—they discover that some “abandoned” places have a knack for keeping themselves occupied.…

Whatever Comes After Calcutta

“Whatever Comes After Calcutta”—It was late in the day when Lyle Morimoto saw the hanged woman and almost crashed his Prius somewhere between Calcutta, Ohio, and whatever the hell came after Calcutta. For hours he’d been sipping warm Gatorade and cruising the crumbling two-lane blacktop that sliced up the scrubby farmland of southern Ohio. He understood that he was not thinking clearly, but that seemed OK, since it also meant not thinking about his ear, or his wife, or Detective Jason Good, or the gun in the pocket of his suit jacket.…

The Slender Men

There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House

If you simply must purchase something, you might just as well purchase this (especially if you liked any of the above, because it’s all that and moooooore):

There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House—”Downtrodden architect Glenn Washington and his none-too-bright sidekick Lennie help a crooked real estate baron flip houses in downtrodden Detroit. A house comes up that is too good to gut for parts. Too good to be true. Waaaay too good. Thing is, nothing leads where it should — go through the front door, step out the door on the back porch. Best library ever. And why are the cops nosing around? Non-Euclidian architectural petty-crime adventure, and all that implies.”—Adrian Simmons, Black Gate magazine

Agustina Bazterrica’s TENDER IS THE FLESH: ★★★★★ would dine again!

(I do a fair bit of reading, which I track over on Goodreads. Trying to move some of that value over here, prior to the inevitable enshitification.)

Cover art for the English translation of Agustina Bazterrica's novel TENDER IS THE FLESH

This book is a little like heavy metal poisoning. Its impact is pernicious, deep, and likely permanent. You’ll be powerfully tempted to pigeon-hole this as an allegory (about world-wide overconsumption of meat, about climate change, about patriarchy, about the deadly tendency to humor wealthy idiots)—but, jeez, don’t. That’s just a defense mechanism, your brain’s white blood cells trying to contain and thus destroy an interloper. Don’t cop out like that. Just let the story fully in, let it blossom and consume you.

It’s really a helluva book. In many ways, this is the exact opposite of Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door, in that it blessedly lets no one off the hook.

For those interested in other art Dave compares favorably to heavy-metal poisoning, consider Merhinge’s film Begotten.

I should not have read Jack Ketchum’s THE GIRL NEXT DOOR (a zero-stars review)

(I do a fair bit of reading, which I track over on Goodreads. Trying to move some of that value over here, prior to the inevitable enshitification.)

This book was notorious when I was a kid for being so extreme and gruesome. Straight talk: it’s not that gruesome. Yes, there are graphic depictions of torture and sexual violence that are basically in the ballpark of stuff happening in conflict zones right now. That this really happens to real people is gruesome and outrageous; that some guy typed it up in 1989 feels trite.

Anyway, what really is truly extreme and gruesome in this book is its absolute moral cowardice. Ketchum sets up an interesting premise–not the sex torture of the orphaned girl next door, but the narrator’s (David’s) complicity, how he lets awfulness roll forward despite liking this girl, despite being a “good guy” and “All-American Kid” (echoes of King’s “Apt Pupil” there).

That premise is interesting, because it matches the vast majority of us: we’re good people, and we let bad things happen all over the world all the time.

The problem is that Ketchum pulls the punch. Inexplicably, he attempts to transform David into a hero in the final act–despite the fact that there’s no set-up for it, and Ketchum seems entirely incapable of pulling it off. That might be fine; it could still be a solid three-star book if David tried to play the hero, then faceplanted (as he does in the novel, as he must, because the situation is so hopeless), and Megan (the victim of these outrages and everyone’s leer, readers included) had poured her fury and rage out on him.

Instead Ketchum paints this kid–this coward, this bystander, this rapist-by-proxy and torture fanboy–as the hero, and forces Meg to be his forgiving damsel.

And it just makes me want to fucking vomit. It’s a mediocre book that’s only shocking if you’ve never read a newspaper’s international headlines. It’s an advertisement for never holding anyone accountable for anything–save for the victims; “What was she doing alone with those boys? What did she expect, dressing like that” and so on and so forth ad nauseam, ad infinitum, world without end, amen 🤮