I am not a curmudgeon, though looking back over my reviews of late, I wouldn’t be surprised if you thought I was. Just about every one of them has been negative at best, and often damning.

That wasn’t intentional; I read what I read and watched what I watched, and that’s how the wash came out. But I feel the need  to balance out the scales a bit, so this week I present a list of things I like that you might not be aware of. But first, a little more bitching by way of explanation.

Horror is a pretty large genre; it has something for every taste ( though that statement in this context can have some unpleasant connotations.) Now me, I prefer the creepy and unsettling. I have put off seeing Drag Me to Hell because I don’t much care for horror mixed with campy c0medy, or for that matter, anything mixed with campy comedy. Tales from the Crypt, Creepshow, Hercules, Xena, Tales from the Darkside all make me cringe, as do Roger Moore James Bond films and the Batman tv series. (I was only 12 when that show came on the air, and I hated it from the very first scene.) If these are the things you like, the following links will be of little to no interest.

So, with that in mind, and violating the rule that you never want to support your competitors, let’s start off with web comics:

from The Secret Knots, Copyright 2009 by Juan Santapau

The Secret Knots, written and drawn by Juan Santapau, is at the top of my list, and one of the most unusual strips I’ve ever read. Juan doesn’t post on a regular basis as far as I can tell, but there is a meaty archive for you to explore. There is no continuing narrative, each strip is complete in itself; the unifying theme is “things we do without knowing why.” The art is great, but it’s the story ideas that have me hooked. It’s probably a bit extreme to classify this as a horror strip, but it  is horror of a very sophisticated and refined sort, dreamlike and surreal, disturbing and provocative on levels far deeper than the visceral, a comic combining the sensibilities of David Lynch and Luis Bunuel with a gentler spirit. Don’t just read one, as the effect is cumulative. Juan lives in Santiago, Chile, but the strip is in English. (The accompanying illustration is only about a third of the actual ‘Music and Pie’ strip; don’t miss out on the rest of it, as  it’s one of my particular favorites.)

The Zombie Hunters by Jenny Romanchuk is a long-running, uh, zombie comic. It went up in 2006 and there are 200 pages in the archive, so you have some catching up to do. And you’ll enjoy every minute. Frankly, I’m kind of tired of Night of the Living Dead knock-offs, in comics and in film, but every now and then someone comes up with a fresh angle that re-ignites my interest, and this is one of them. Another thing I enjoy is watching Ms. Romanchuk’s writing and drawing techniques grow over the years. She’s also done some great tutorials on how she works. I was gratified to see that I’s developed a lot of the same techniques, but I still learned a thing or three. Be warned, this strip is rated R, for language, nudity, violence – the usual subjects.

Oddly enough, given what I just said above, I’m pretty fond of another zombie comic, Everyday Decay, by Derrick Ravey. Just about everything I said about Zombie Hunters applies here as well, except that there are only a paltry 132 pages to date. (Just kidding – both creators are obviously truly committed to their projects.) Like Zombie Hunters, Everyday Decay is also a chronicle of  the creator’s growth as an artist and story-teller. If you are as interested in process as I am, then you’re in for a double treat. (This comic is also rated R.)

And one newsstand comic that an LIM reader turned me onto, North 40 by Aaron Williams and Fiona Staples. The first issue is on the stands now. It’s off to a great start, Lovecraftian without being a pastiche (  I hate pastiches; why look at a painting by someone who paints like Monet, when you can look at a Monet?). I don’t buy that many comic books, but this one is going to be a regular for at least awhile.

(My pals, Eric and Bob, do the Boodachitaville strip. By no stretch of the imagination can it be considered a horror strip, so I can’t really mention it here….though I will note that some of Bob’s blogs are evocative of psychosis and paranoia:-))

There are  umpty-million horror websites and I haven’t had the time to explore the tiniest fraction of them, but there are a couple I check out regularly.

General Horror Sites

As far as HPL goes, I think most of the best sites are over there in my left sidebar, so I won’t dwell on them here (but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check them out.)

The Horror Mall is, in a good way, the Wal-Mart of horror sites. The link will take you to the Haunt, which is the forum section, but they have news, fiction, art, books for sale – you name it. Well, ok, they don’t have towels or automotive supplies or ‘Love Is’ figurines (though that last one is a kind of horror that probably deserves further exploration.) Anyway, you’ll find lots of writers and would-be writers, fans of all kinds of horror, from HPL to Herschel Gordon Lewis. Definitely a must.

Monster Rally is a carnival site, with daily updated links of interest. It’s a handy site for keeping up with blogs on horror fiction, films and fans, both classic and contemporary, and links to a wide variety of other blogs.

Grim’s Reviews is just what it sounds like, a review site. The reviews are short, concise and wide-ranging.

Cinefantastique and Fangoria are hardly unknown entities, but I include them here because, gosh darn it, I just like ‘em, even though Fangoria tends to rave about the kind of stuff I complained about above. Still, can’t be beat for the latest everything.

Yog-Sothoth.com is primarily about Lovecraftian gaming, but the real attraction for me is the podcast, which is where the link will take you. The conversations are fun, very unrehearsed (that’s a good thing) and informative. The current one has Dan Harms, who has made it his goal in life to crush with hard facts anyone who believes the Necronomicon to be a real book, is the interviewee. There are other items of interest, but exploring is half the fun.

Classic Horror Fiction

Project Gutenberg is a gift from the gods of the internet. Their goal (the Project’s, not the gods’s) is to put every out of copyright piece of fiction up on the web, and the amount of material is staggering. Most of it, of course, isn’t horror, but there’s more than enough to fill up your reading schedule for many cold, moonless nights.

Horror Masters is an even better deal, because of its obvious focus. Hundreds if not thousands of horror stories, from rather tame Victorian ghost stories to chillers like “Lukundoo.” The downloads come in uneditable, unprintable .pdf files which is a bummer if you prefer to print the story out and read it elsewhere, but there’s no better collection of classic horror fiction anywhere.

I’ll forego links for the following, as they are easy to find. These are some of my favorite books and movies, in no particular order. I didn’t include HPL because I think my regard for him and his work is rather obvious .

Books: Dan Simmons’ Carrion Comfort, Stephen King’s Thinner, Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Dweller in the Gulf”

Films: Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive, 28 Days Later; Night of the Living Dead (original),  Ju-on, Alien, The Entity, Val Lewton movies,  Nightmare on Elm street (the first one, anyway), Rosemary’s Baby, Horror Express.