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And so issue four ends in VIOLENT BLOODSHED.

There hasn’t been much in the way of bloodshed in this ostensibly horror-related series, has there? Which is odd, given my splatter-loving tendencies. We’ll fix that oversight in book two for sure.

As a kid I was deathly afraid of gore. Only red gore, though. Gremlins was my favorite movie and all the green glop in that kitchen scene never made me flinch. But the idea that a single a drop of red human blood might appear in a film would send my “fight or flight” reflexes into overdrive. And yet I loved monsters, so if a movie promised monsters, I had to try.

My parents didn’t keep a particularly close watch on my media intake in the 80’s. In fact, my father let me watch absolutely anything with him. (Still remember my mom, voice full of shocked disbelief, saying “You let him watch VAMPIRE HOOKERS?”) Thankfully for my squeamish little nerves, my father didn’t watch too much terribly gory stuff. But one night… oh man… one night when I was about eight or nine years old, a friend lent him a bootleg tape of A Nightmare on Elm Street. 

Not sure what my father’s thought process was on that one. (“Hmmm… No hookers in the title. Probably fine.”) Somehow I made it all the way through the scene where Tina gets gutted and dragged across the ceiling. Somehow my father made it all the way through that scene without turning it off, too. But once we got to the scene where Nancy falls asleep in class I was hit right between the eyes with the scariest thing I had ever seen:

I instantly fled the room, ran up to my bed, and started feverishly reading old Berenstain Bears books, as if an overdose of good wholesome Mama and Papa Bear could push out the image of blue, bloody, dead-eyed Tina before it fully set to memory. It didn’t work.

It would take a couple more years before I could stomach anything bloody. I refused to see RoboCop in the theater with my cousin because I heard it was gory. I sat outside the theater throughout an entire screening of The Running Man. I missed out on SO MUCH.

Until 1988, when another friend of my father’s brought over a tape of Evil Dead 2. He said it was really funny, which made it more palatable. I was willing to try again. It instantly became my favorite movie. I was hooked. I started looking for more gory horror comedies and fell into the Return of the Living Dead movies, Fright Night, and Peter Jackson’s early films. And honestly, once you’ve seen Bad Taste and Dead Alive, there really isn’t anything you can’t endure. Before long I didn’t need the comedy crutch anymore and was watching real horror. Eventually I made my way back around to my old nemesis Freddy Krueger. And I loved it.

There are still some types of horror I won’t do, but it’s not out of squeamishness. Torture porn is just a bummer to watch, and anything with real animal death is frankly criminal. But if a movie has a nice, big, cathartic head explosion? Sign me the hell up.

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Here we go! My favorite issue of Serenity Rose and maybe my favorite thing I’ve ever done. Probably not the best artwork in the series (or even the first book), but I still love the vibes. VIBES are everything.

And I still believe in what this issue has to say. This is the closest I’ve ever come to writing a manifesto. (You know, like the Unabomber!)

Please note the very sophisticated use of ca. 2004 Photoshop for that smeary cloudy sky gradient on the cover. And the thick black outline around Vicious, a popular stylistic motif at the time and one that I hope has well and truly died forever.

Let’s get into this!!

BACK TO THE PRESENT!

SIGNING ALERT: This Saturday right here in Pasadena, CA, at the venerable bookselling institution Vroman’s. I’ve been regularly haunting Vroman’s for over two decades now, so getting to do an actual event there is a Very Big Deal for me. I’ll be signing alongside fellow spooky people Moss Lawton and Justine Pucella Winans, and we’ll have a little discussion about spookystuff before the signing, too, so please come help fill up some chairs!

(DO NOT EMBARRASS ME IN FRONT OF MR. VROMAN.)

By the way, you’ve already heard me talk about how awesome Moss’ books are (get ’em here!), but I was sent a copy of Justine’s book WISHBONE and it’s fantastic, as well. Middle grade prose horror about a trans boy, his heroic two-tailed cat, and the most loathsome villain I’ve encountered in ages (think Dr. Moreau, but more Clive Barker-y). Awesome stuff!

NEXT WEEK: ANSWERS AND NOT.