Bev Vincent

The year 2023 is almost at an end and we’re staring down the barrel of 2024, which looks like it may be an “interesting” one, in the Chinese curse sense of the word. I find it instructive to listen to or read interviews from decades in the past (even stand-up comic routines) in which people talk about how terrible things are at the moment and I have to wonder When Will There Be Good News? (to purloin the title of a fine novel by Kate Atkinson. It’s all relative, isn’t it?

Didn’t go very far this year. We had a couple of vacations at our favorite rental house in Surfside Beach, once for each of our birthdays. The latter was a working vacation—we didn’t take time off from work and were at our respective computers during the daytime, but with the sound of the surf and the beautiful vistas in the background. I could do that again! While I was there, I reread The Stand for the first time in years and established a detailed timeline of the book for the short story I’d been invited to write for the Stand-inspired anthology edited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keen. We prepared most of our meals—although we had a few at the nearby beach-front restaurant—did a jigsaw puzzle (there were a dozen pieces missing from it!), and watched old shows on MeTV in the evenings.

I do have plans for a couple of trips in the coming days, including attending Chris Golden’s House of Last Resort Weekend in January. I don’t look forward to the travel part of these events, but I am looking forward to seeing people I haven’t been with in over four years.

I’m still writing every day, although my day job has been encroaching on my weekends this past month or so. I also decided to learn some Spanish and now have a 75-day streak on Duolingo. After living in Texas for over 30 years, I figured it was time.

Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of His Work, Life and Influences is now or soon will be available in eight languages (other than English): Croatian, Italian, Czech, German, Polish, Spanish, Hungarian and Japanese. It’s been a lot of fun seeing the book get some press in other languages. For example, the Czech edition is featured in the December issue of Pevnost magazine. Maybe I’ll be able to read the Spanish edition one day.

The English edition is still a #1 bestseller in the category of Horror & Supernatural Literary Criticism. It was also nominated for a Locus Award. There’s a “discount” edition available if you have an Ollie’s Bargain Outlet in your area—it has a different cover, which is kinda cool. Be on the lookout for news concerning a new edition that should be available in late 2024.

This was a good year for short story publications, with an even dozen appearing in anthologies and magazines. They run the gamut from crime to horror to science fiction to fantasy.

1. Life Saver, Still of Winter, February 2023
2. A Girl and Her Dog, Shortwave Magazine, Feb 8, 2023
3. Chapter 2, Sunny Pines (round robin novella), Cemetery Dance Publications, March 2023
4. The River Heights Ripper, Black Cat Weekly #84, April 2023
5. Crocodile Tears, More Groovy Gumshoes, Down and Out Books, April 2023
6. His Father’s Son, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, July/August 2023
7. Freya Goes Viral, Mirrors Reflecting Shadows, July 29, 2023
8. Grand-Père’s Last Transmission, Rhapsody of the Spheres, Third Flatiron Publishing, August 15, 2023
9. Jurisdiction, The Perfectly Fine Neighborhood, September 2023
10. Turning to Stone, Road Kill: Texas Horror by Texas Writers, Vol. 8, Hellbound Books, 2023
11. Gemini, Mickey Finn Volume 4, December 11, 2023
12. Helen Wheels, The Binge-Watching Cure III, Claren Books, December 16, 2023

I have several more in the queue for 2024 already as well (plus nearly another dozen in submission). I may taper off writing stories to concentrate on longer fiction next year. I have a very rough draft of “The Dead of Night” for Dissonant Harmonies II with Brian Keene and notes and a couple of chapters for a novel that I want to tackle starting in January.

In addition to a couple of columns and reviews at News from the Dead Zone, I published three essays this year:

• Graham Joyce’s The Tooth Fairy, The Stephen Kingdom BOO!k Club, October 30, 2023
• Facing Reality, Something is Going to Happen, EQMM, June 8, 2023
• The Long Walk: An Introduction in Three Parts, The Long Walk, Centipede Press, 2023

I did my regular year-end roundup for the next Stephen King Catalog/Annual from the Overlook Connection, too.

I also took part in several podcasts/interviews:

• Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla Palaver – Dark Tower Radio Episode 138 (November 20, 2023)
• Happy Goat Horror (October 8, 2023)
• The Cemetery Dance Interview: Bev Vincent Revisited (March 17, 2023)
• Constant Writers (February 22, 2023)
• Dark Bites (January 20, 2023)

Brian Keene and Christopher Golden announced (finally!) the anthology they are co-editing: The End of the World as We Know it – Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand. Brian has been hinting about this project for some time, under the code name Operation Walkabout. The list of invited contributors is quite impressive: Josh Malerman, Paul Tremblay, Richard Chizmar, S. A. Cosby, Tananarive Due, Alma Katsu, Caroline Kepnes, Michael Koryta, Scott Ian, Joe R. Lansdale, Maurice Broaddus and Wayne Brady, Bryan Smith, Somer Canon, Hailey Piper, Jonathan Janz and others, including yours truly.

Last month, when my wife and I were on a working vacation at Surfside Beach, I reread The Stand for the first time in a number of years. While doing so, I prepared a detailed, day-by-day chronology of the events in that book. King does a really good job of keeping track of the passage of time. I wanted to make sure my story blended in with the known timeline. My tale has been written and is now in the hands of the editors, awaiting their feedback. I had to pitch them my idea and they seemed quite happy with it. Hopefully they are equally happy with the end result.

King isn’t contributing a story to the anthology—nor are the two editors—but there will be an introduction from King. For those who’ve asked, this is going to be released by one of the big publishers, probably late in 2024. I haven’t heard that there will be any special editions, but it’s early days, so stay tuned!

On October 1, I pulled out a new moleskine journal and began writing “The Dead of Night,” the follow-up novella to “The Dead of Winter,” which appears in Dissonant Harmonies, a two-story collection from Brian Keene and me. I’ve added to it every day—some days more than others—and I’m up to 75 hand-written pages, which means I should probably think about wrapping it up fairly soon. I can only guess the word count. I figure it’s somewhere around 20,000 words. True to my mandate, I have been listening exclusively to the playlist Brian prepared for me, which you can find here. I have to say, the story has taken me in some surprising directions. I’m just thankful that each day, when I sit down to write, more of the story rolls out from wherever these things come from.

Other publication news:

My story “Turning to Stone” appears in the new anthology Road Kill: Texas Horror by Texas Writers, Vol. 8. It’s a monstrous mosh of fallen angels, prepubescent prescience, tempestuous incest, intergalactic blues, a Gulliverian massacre, cynophile racists, murderous rodents, a prehistoric Devil Head, the return of Bram Stoker’s forgotten hero, and so much more…featuring stories from Joe R. Lansdale, Emma E. Murray, Jae Mazer, Bret McCormick, Madison Estes, Chris Miller, James H. Longmore, Jonathan Louis Duckworth, Robert Stahl, Matt Micheli, Elford Alley, Iphigenia Strangeworth, Jacob Austin, R. L. Olvitt, Lawrence Buentello, Tom Bont, and E. R. Bills. And me.

I was interviewed by Kayleigh Dobbs in conjunction with the publication of The Perfectly Fine Neighborhood anthology, which contains my story “Jurisdiction.”

Recent TV series: Dear Child, a German series on Netflix that reminded me a bit of the Brie Larson movie Room, but only a bit. I watched Rose Red, which I don’t think I’ve seen since it first aired. Some really fine performances, although the square aspect ratio really makes it seem creaky and old. I’ve been enjoying the French crime series Lupin on Netflix, too. My wife and I have been watching old M*A*S*H episodes. We’re up to season 3 now.

I almost passed on The Boogeyman, but now that it’s on Hulu I checked it out and I quite enjoyed it. I don’t know why it took such a critical drubbing. I couldn’t get into the Pet Sematary prequel, though. It just didn’t work for me at all. My wife and I watched Flora and Son (Apple TV+) and The Burial (Amazon) with Tommy Lee Jones and Jamie Foxx, both quite good. I took a trip down nostalgia lane to watch Mr. Dressup: The Magic of Make-Believe (Amazon). He, Casey and Finnegan were omnipresent in my youth.

I finished A Better World by Sarah Langan and Thirteen At Dinner by Agatha Christie, and we’re almost to the end of The Longmire Defense by Craig Johnson. I’m also reading The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie, which I remember much better than the other Christies I’ve read lately.

Months go by in the blink of an eye. I could blog more. I should blog more. And yet there never seems enough time. It’s not like I don’t have news to share—there’s always something going on that I might consider newsworthy. And yet. And yet.

Like the fact that the German edition of my latest book, Stephen King: Sein Werk, sein Leben, seine Inspiration, published earlier this month, has already gone into a second printing. I have frequently heard from German fans of King’s work that books about King are rarely translated into German. This edition was done by a Swiss publisher and it is apparently selling quite well. The Czech, Polish, Spanish and Hungarian editions also came out recently, with the Japanese translation pending. I have the eight editions currently available lined up on a shelf and they make a handsome set, it must be said. I find it interesting that certain publishers have decided to put the title one way on the spine and others go for the reverse.

Some recent short story publications:

• “His Father’s Son” appeared in the July/August issue of EQMM.
• “Freya Goes Viral” is now available in the charity anthology Mirrors Reflecting Shadows
• “Grand-Père’s Last Transmission” was published in the anthology Rhapsody of the Spheres
• “Jurisdiction” is in the anthology A Perfectly Fine Neighborhood, out now.

My 2022 story “Death Sentence,” published in Black Cat Weekly #51 was one of the “Other Distinguished Mystery and Suspense” stories mentioned in the 2022 anthology The Best American Mystery and Suspense, edited by Jess Walter and Steph Cha.

My essay “Living in a Web of Mystery,” which appeared in the limited edition hardcover Reading Stephen King (2017) is becoming available again in a new value-priced trade paperback edition that will be out in November.

What else have I been working on lately? I turned in a draft of a short story to an anthology to which I was invited to submit. The anthology hasn’t been announced yet, but it’s really cool and I hope the editors like what I sent them. I currently have about a dozen other stories in submission, which is about the norm. I have a couple more I’d like to try to write before I turn my attention back to a novel I started a few months ago but have neglected in the interim. I’d also like to carve out some time to write a novella for Dissonant Harmonies II. Then, when I was working on an essay for a project that also hasn’t yet been announced, I stumbled upon a phrase that seems ideal as a short story title…all I have to do is figure out what the story is that goes with it!

We got our COVID shots on Friday afternoon, along with our flu shots. It was quite a mis-adventure. The closest pharmacy that had the Moderna vaccine was six miles away. That probably doesn’t sound far, but we’re used to going to the one that’s less than a mile away. We had a reservation for 4:15 pm but when we got there it seemed obvious that things weren’t going according to plan. There were a lot of people sitting around and standing around waiting. For some reason, my wife’s flu shot wasn’t in their system, so that required a lot of fussing around. Then, because of the unexpectedly high demand, they ran short of the Moderna vaccine and had to get more out of the fridge, which meant a long wait for it to come to room temperature. We finally got our shots done by 5:45.

It was a little difficult to sleep that night because both arms were sore at the injection sites, which made it hard to pick a side to sleep on. The flu shot arm recovered quickly, but the Moderna side remained quite sore all the following day. Now, about 36 hours after the shot, it’s only a little tender. My wife tends to react worse to these shots and felt achy most of yesterday.

We haven’t watched a lot of movies lately—mostly TV—but yesterday was a three-movie day as we lounged about in our post-vaccination malaise. First, I watched No One Will Save You on Hulu (my wife doesn’t care for scary movies). This one is an alien invasion film starring Kaitlyn Dever, who I first knew from Justified. She plays a young woman living alone in the family house, ostracized by her community for reasons. Then, one night, the aliens come and she has to fight for her life while some of her neighbors are possessed by X-Files-esque grays with awesome powers. The kind of aliens that Whitley Streiber wrote about. The film’s gimmick is that there is virtually no dialog, even in places where it would make sense for the character to say something, even to herself. I’m not sure that was necessary—the movie would have been just fine if people said things. Her character is feisty, ingenious and resilient. The ending has sparked some controversy and discussions—it took me a while to figure out exactly what it meant and whether or not I liked it. Ultimately, I think I do, but it sure does go in an oddball direction. All-in-all, definitely worth checking out.

Then we watched Moving On (also on Hulu) starring a virtually unrecognizable (to me, at least) Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Malcolm McDowell and Richard Roundtree. Fonda plays a woman who’s longtime friend has just passed away. At the viewing, she announces to the new widow that she’s going to kill him. She then tries to get her other friend (Tomlin) in on the plan. Tomlin, playing her usual pithy, sarcastic character, has most of the best lines. Roundtree plays Fonda’s first ex-husband. Of course, things don’t go as planned, and decades-old secrets are revealed. The humor is dark, but it’s always fun to see these legends on the screen.

Finally, we watched Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which was every bit as fun as I hoped it would be. I’d avoided most of the spoilers (except for the cameo at the very end). I absolutely did not recognize Antonio Banderas. At all. But I did pick out Boyd Holbrook from the new Justified series. Raiders of the Lost Ark was one of the first movies I purchased on VHS when it became available in late ’83. It cost something like $40, if I recall.

I took a one-month subscription to AMC+ which also got me Sundance/Now and access to a batch of interesting crime series, many of which I’d never heard of before. Dark Winds, based on the Tony Hillerman novels, was what got me there in the first place. A very good interpretation of his Leaphorn/Chee stories, set in the seventies. Glad to hear it’s been renewed. Then I stumbled on Wisting, a Finnish crime series that I quite liked. I knew about Des, starring David Tenant as a real-life serial killer, but this was the first time I got to see it. Also quite good. I found a couple of New Zealand crime series with multiple seasons: The Gulf, set on an island, and One Lane Bridge, which features a Maori cop who has special skills and a seemingly cursed bridge. The Light in the Hall is a good Welsh crime series about a decades-old murder, and The Cry, starring Jenna Colman, has plenty of twists and turns. I almost quit Deadloch after fifteen minutes because it was so crude and over-the-top, but I’m glad I stuck with it, as the characters grew on me and the story is well conceived.

I liked Hijack on Apple TV+ (hard to go wrong with Idris Elba). I rewatched season 1 of Yellowjackets as a preamble to the second season. It helped me eliminate a lot of my confusion about who was who in the different eras. Justified: City Primeval was a different creature from its predecessor and I think it suffered from the lack of those old, familiar faces, but I enjoyed it, and was amused to learn that the actress who played Raylan’s daughter was Olyphant’s daughter.

Currently watching: The Changeling on Apple TV+ and random episodes of early M*A*S*H.

Currently reading The Deadly Rise of Anti-science: A Scientist’s Warning by Peter J. Hotez and a forthcoming novel by Sarah Langan. Also reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin to my wife. Just finished Hallowe’en Party by Agatha Christie because the new Kenneth Branagh Poirot film is loosely based on it. Very loosely, it seems, based on the trailer. It’s not one of Christie’s finest, I have to say. It has an interesting germ of a story (a young girl announces to a large group of people that she once saw a murder, only she didn’t realize that’s what it was at the time. A few hours later, the girl is murdered) but it’s quite repetitive and Christie shoehorns in a lot of Greek mythology that seems forced. I do look forward to seeing A Haunting in Venice, though.

It’s been a while. Lots of water under the bridge in the past few months but, more importantly, lots of water in front of the beach house where we spent the last week. For nearly 20 years, my wife and I have been vacationing in a little community on the Gulf Coast called Surfside Beach. It’s down the coast from Galveston and is much quieter than that island city. Not nearly as many amenities, but we bring what we need and enjoy the peace and quiet.

This year we arrived on Memorial Day afternoon, which was a very busy time in Surfside Beach. It’s one of the few places I know where people are allowed to drive and park on the beach and on that Monday it was wall-to-wall cars. The day before had been so busy they had to close access to the beach completely. However, we didn’t need to get on the beach—our rental house faces the water with a dune between us and the gulf to provide some degree of privacy. (The dune was posted with a sign that said “Rattlesnake nesting area.” I think I’ll get one of those for our front lawn.) There’s a restaurant nearby that we patronized a few times, but the meals we cooked for ourselves were our favorites.

We couldn’t have asked for better weather. It was in the low-80s most of the week, with low humidity and a near-constant breeze coming off the water, so we were able to sit outside most of the time. The house has two decks; the upper deck provides decent shade to the lower one, although we had to keep shifting position during the day to avoid the sun. (I apparently didn’t do a very good job of that, as I sunburned my shins, presumably from sunlight that crept between the board of the upper deck.) Also, there were no mosquitos, which were the bane of our previous trip to Surfside Beach. It only rained a couple of times, briefly, so, yeah, perfect. We celebrated my birthday on Friday and enjoyed the full “strawberry” moon on the weekend before packing it in to return to reality on Monday. I find the constant sound of the surf to be one of the most relaxing things on earth.

Another of the unlauded joys of vacation rentals is finding books on the shelves that I might not ordinarily read. I read a total of six novels during the week, four of them books I discovered on the shelf. (For some reason, there are quite a number of Dutch translations in this house!) I did absolutely no writing, though. A total break.

However, that doesn’t mean things aren’t moving along on the writing front. My essay “Facing Reality” appeared this week on Something is Going to Happen from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in conjunction with the release of my story “His Father’s Son,” which will be in the July/August issue of EQMM, which goes on sale very soon. A couple of other recent short story publications:

• The River Heights Ripper, Black Cat Weekly #84, April 2023
• Crocodile Tears, More Groovy Gumshoes, Down and Out Books, April 2023

I was also gratified to learn that Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of His Work, Life, and Influences made the short list of the Locus Awards. The winner will be announced on June 24. I first read Locus magazine in about 1980. Back then, I would never have imagined that things I wrote would be reviewed in that august publication, so this nomination is very cool.

We’ve watched a number of documentaries recently: Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could See Me Now, Bowie: Moonage Dream and Never Surrender. The latter celebrates the 20th anniversary of the quasi-Star Trek film, Galaxy Quest. My wife had never seen that film, so we watched it first. It still holds up as one of the funniest science fiction movies ever, and the documentary is definitely worth checking out. In the feature film category, we enjoyed A Man Called Otto, Where the Crawdads Sing, Juniper, 80 for Brady and Tetris, the latter being a surprisingly excellent espionage film.

I enjoyed the second season of Perry Mason and am sad to hear it has been canceled. I binged through all four seasons of Succession. A difficult series in that every character is reprehensible, but it’s still compelling TV. I thought the final season of Barry lost its way a bit in the middle, but the ending was satisfying. Beef was weird, but I’m glad I watched it. We loved The Diplomat and can’t wait for the second season. I also fully enjoyed Rabbit Hole and The Night Agent, as well as Black Butterflies. Manifest wrapped up in a satisfying manner and it was good of Netflix to give it a second life after it was canceled after the second season. It’s a big mythology series with spiritual overtones that sometimes grated on me. The finale had shades of Lost (even a smoke monster!) but the resolution was different from that series. I liked Beyond Paradise, a slightly darker series than Death in Paradise. I’m currently in the middle of season 2 of From.

While we were in Surfside Beach, we did something we almost never do, which is turn on the TV. After flipping through a lot of dreck, we settled on MeTV and watched episodes of M*A*S*H, Andy Griffith, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres and All in the Family. Only the latter didn’t really hold up all that well. Archie is a lot to take and the plot of one episode was so painfully awkward we stopped watching. We also found the 1941 move Man-Made Monster, starring Lon Chaney, Jr., on Svengoolie, which kept us entertained.

My wife thoroughly enjoyed Fairy Tale, so I followed that up with Billy Summers and Bag of Bones. I often cite “BoB” as one of my favorite King novels and this reread really brought that home to me again. It’s an amazingly complex and lovely novel. Then we read Forever Home by Graham Norton and are currently reading The Enigma of Garlic by Alexander McCall Smith. I also read King’s new one, Holly, and will probably read it again before I review it.

My vacation book binge included Where I End by Sophie White, Redemption by David Baldacci, Enemy of the State by Kyle Mills, The Sleeping Beauty Killer by Mary Higgins Clark & Alafair Burke, Where Are You Now? by Mary Higgins Clark and Becoming the Boogeyman by Richard Chizmar. The middle four were “found” novels. I also finished Look Both Ways by Linwood Barclay and have his new one on deck.