You're Mine, World's Finest!

Biff! Bam! Books! Plus, a cover reveal.

Somehow, it’s been a month since my last newsletter. I want to assure you I’m alive and as well as someone like me can be. As usual, I’ve had my hands full with creative projects, but for some weeks I’ve prioritized my personal life over creative output, something I rarely do. But don’t worry. I’ve not slowed down enough to keep churning out delectable horrors for you, my pretties. I doubt that day will ever come.

I’m currently working on a new novel as well as my upcoming collaboration with splatterpunk legend Wrath James White. There’s a new issue of The Obituaries coming out in June, and I have a novella release planned for July. Check out the cover reveal and synopsis below.

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Because You’re Mine is an extreme horror romance. It was originally published in April 2024 as part of The Dark Embrace, a limited, special edition collection by me and Mona Kabbani, author of The Bell Chime and Vanilla. Now the novellas the book contained are having their own individual releases.

Mona’s The Color of Blood comes out June 2^nd. 

Because You’re Mine comes out on my birthday, July 16^th. Initially, this will be exclusive to TRIANAHORROR.COM in a signed paperback bundle. Wide release will follow.

The stunning cover art and interior design for Because You’re Mine was done by Scott Cole of 13Visions, who is also the author of Headless and Crazy Times.

Here is Because You’re Mine’s synopsis.

Bryan’s elderly mother is terminally ill, and that’s the way he likes it. Mom comes from old money, making it easy for Bryan to hire an in-home nurse, but he’s looking for someone to provide a special kind of treatment, something he’s long fantasized about.

Shelby is a nurse with a horrible secret. When she begins caring after Bryan’s mother, the two strike up an unlikely kinship, bonding over their troubled pasts and hidden desires. Together, the older Bryan begins teaching Shelby classic methods of diabolism, and she teaches him about the modern tools of their terrifying trade, making them a duo to die for.

When I call this book an extreme horror romance, I use the word “romance” in the darkest sense possible. Think Natural Born Killers or Harley Quinn and The Joker, only more sadistic. Think Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, the real-life Ken & Barbie Killers who raped and tortured teenage girls in the 1990s, including Homolka’s own sister. While the book has its eroticism and is about a budding romance, it is also filled with the same sort of dark, transgressive, taboo content readers have come to expect from the author of Gone to See the River Man and They All Died Screaming.

While you wait for that one to come out, let me remind you of my most recent novel, The Old Lady. Have you read it yet? Did you survive? If so, drop a review on Amazon or Goodreads. Every little review helps the books get seen by others. If you’ve not read it yet, you can snatch it up wherever you snatch books, as well as in a signed bundle on my website. The audiobook version has just wrapped production and is expected to release early next month. Stay tuned for the announcement.

People often ask which book of mine I’m most proud of. It’s a difficult question to answer. I’m proud of most of my stuff but in different ways for different reasons. I’m very proud of the two River Man books because of how popular they’ve become, which shows how deeply they’ve touched the world of horror fiction. I’m proud of the Koyote series because they required the most time, research, and effort from me to create them. But The Old Lady is one of my favorite things I’ve written, and many who have read it seem to feel the same way. It’s bleak and unflinching, a mature story with intense violence and gore. I believe it will please fans of thrillers and action novels as well as hardcore horror fans. If you’re curious as to which of my books to read next, I recommend that one first and foremost. Its popularity is only beginning to grow with readers, so get in on it now so you can say you liked it before it was cool.

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I’ll be promoting The Old Lady and Because You’re Mine on my 2024 book signing tour (see tour dates below) which continues in June with a signing at Vortex Books & Comics in Columbia, Pennsylvania. The shop is owned by my friends Brian Keene and Mary SanGiovanni, two horror scribes who have just celebrated their first wedding anniversary—congrats, you crazy kids! I’m very excited to check out their store and do my first ever signing in a comic book shop, having spent so much time in them as a youth.

I’m no longer the comic book fan I was back then. The genre will always hold a glowy place in my heart, but I don’t read comics regularly, and recently I’ve been vocal about my superhero movie exhaustion. Cinema has been egregiously oversaturated with invincible, caped characters. The plots are repetitive and derivative, and they’re presented in a nauseating ejaculation of CGI overabundance. It becomes too sophomoric for me, especially when I feel like I’m watching someone else play a video game. Once you start making a whole movie series about C-list heroes like Aquaman and Ant-Man, you’ve officially gone too far, in my opinion. It also doesn’t help that I’m a die-hard DC fan and always have been, and their live action films of recent decades have been mostly terrible (with the exceptions of Christopher Nolan’s first two Batman movies and the flawed-but-good Superman Returns, and with The Flash getting big brownie points for Michael Keaton’s return to the cape and cowl). But while I have grown weary of modern comic book movies, the ones from my childhood remain some of my favorite films of all time.

Batman ’89 and Batman Returns. Superman ’78 and Superman II.

All four are ingrained in my heart. Anytime I watch them, I’m flooded with the dopamine of sweet, sweet nostalgia. Feelings of awe and wonder revisit me, making me believe—at least for the duration of the films—that a man can fly, and another man can be both the world’s greatest detective and the ultimate gothic ass-kicker. Even the scores to these films, composed by John Williams and Danny Elfman respectably, delight me like few film soundtracks can outside of John Carpenter’s discography. I’m also a massive fan of the television series Batman ’66, which makes me laugh as hard as The Naked Gun trilogy, which is no easy feat. Along with The Simpsons, this is my go-to comfort show.

Batman and Superman have always been my favorite superheroes. They are the only comic books I can claim to have extensive knowledge of. The World’s Finest, as this duo is known, resonate with me in ways the Marvel gang never has. One represents the darkness I’ve always been drawn to while the other is the beckon of hope we all should aspire to be. So whenever I revisit those movies, I get a little manic as my lifelong love for them returns in an unstoppable squall of nerdiness. The past few weeks have found me in one of those peculiar spells.

Revisiting my favorites, I got to thinking about something that irks me, leading to this newsletter article. While casual viewers and fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe will jump at the chance to piss all over the recent live-action DC films, many completely disregard (or are unaware of) the fact that DC’s animated films—particularly the Batman ones—are some of the greatest comic book movies ever made.

Much like they perfected superheroes in a television series with Batman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series, DC has given us some true gems in the realm of animated feature films, even as they’ve repeatedly crapped in their pants with their abysmal live action cinema.

The Dark Knight Returns; Under the Red Hood; The Flashpoint Paradox; Assault on Arkham. These are highly enjoyable genre entries that exceeded my expectations. Many feature fan favorite Kevin Conroy as the voice of Batman, reprising his role after the enormously popular ’90s show Batman: The Animated Series. And in 2016, Adam West, Burt Ward, and Julie Newmar were reunited to reprise their iconic roles for the first time in decades for Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders, a hilarious cartoon throwback that pays loving tribute to the ’60s show and reminds us why previous generations referred to comics as “funny books.”

But the two I want to mention here are the ones I think horror fans will enjoy the most.

Batman: The Killing Joke is a hugely influential, superb graphic novel written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Brian Bolland. Published in 1988, it provides a grim origin story for The Joker, adapted from the 1951 story “The Man Behind the Red Hood.” It’s regarded as one of the greatest Batman stories ever told, an assessment I strongly agree with.

In 2016, an animated film adaptation was released, and quickly became the most controversial and divisive Batman movie in history. Not only does Batman: The Killing Joke stray a little from the source material, but it’s also the single darkest Batman movie in existence. Yes, darker than the live-action The Batman (2022) and Joker (2019). Even the notorious Batman Returns, which was highly criticized for its gloomy, nihilistic tone, cannot compare to the pitch-black extremities of this movie, which is one of the few Batman films to recieve an R rating. This one’s definitely not for the kiddies.

While I understand why many comic book fans despised this dark, twisted outing, I happen to love it, because I am a dark, twisted person. Though a stand-alone story, it’s easy to understand why it hurts.

Kevin Conroy returns at Batman and is joined by his Batman: The Animated Series costar Mark Hamill, who returns to his role as The Joker. Hamill gives a truly chilling performance here, reminding me why I consider him the greatest Joker of all time. And this version of the cackling villain is the epitome of unhinged evil, a sadistic murderer and rapist inflicting the cruelest revenge. Batman is presented as a hero who, while still fighting against such evil, has lost all hope. His faith in humanity is nearly gone, as is any chance for him to live a happy life. This is truly a broken bat, and his relationship with Batgirl gets muddied because of it.

This tale is as disturbing as conventional comic book characters get, and the treatment of some of them caused outrage amongst purist DC fans. And something about Conroy and Hamill doing the voices for such a grim film (after delighting us as the same characters in the kid-friendly animated series) adds a creepy undercurrent to an already difficult watch.

But for me, this is exactly the sort of adult-orientated Batman content I crave—brooding, nightmarish, and dangling over the divide of adventure and horror. It’s available on Blu-ray for pretty cheap or to stream even cheaper on Amazon.

Then there’s Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham. This ambitious animated feature is based on the three-issue comic book miniseries from 2000. It combines the Batman universe with that of H.P. Lovecraft’s literary horrors, pitting The Caped Crusader and others against The Great Old Ones when Ra’s al Ghul awakens The Lurker on the Threshold.

That’s right—it’s basically Batman Vs. Cthulhu.

While not as extreme as The Killing Joke, the film is 100% a horror movie, and is just as devoted to the Lovecraft source material as it is the DC, interweaving famous characters from both worlds in a noir 1920s setting that takes The Penguin on doomed arctic missions and turns Harvey Dent into a portal to Hell. It’s a total nerd-gasm that rewards those knowledgeable of the Cthulhu mythos and the heroes and rogues of Gotham City, but it is still accessible to causal fans. I highly recommended this one. It’s currently on HBO Max, along with some of the other films in the DC animated universe.

As for the live-action stuff, we can only hope the current reboot of the whole damn DC cinematic universe will revive it. I would think there’s nowhere to go but up after unwatchable stinkers like Batman Vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad. Maybe the upcoming start-again-from-scratch Superman movie starring David Corenswet (whoever that is) will kick things off nicely. I can’t say I’m excited just yet, but I’m listening.

If I had my way, we’d get a live-action version of Frank Miller’s The Dark Night Returns. And since the story features Batman and The Joker in their later years, I’d put Michael Keaton and Mark Hamill in those roles. And then add Michelle Pfeifer in a cameo as Catwoman. How amazing would that be? Superman is in that story too. Maybe it’s time Nicolas Cage finally got his shot!

But for now, the animated features will do. Just don’t sleep on them, true believers.

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I’ll be leaving my own Fortress of Solitude for the following events, so mark your calendars and come out to see me!

June 8^th : Vortex Books & Comics – Columbia, Pennsylvania

August 3^rd : Books & Brews (Books of Horror) – Evanston, Illinois

August 9^th - 11^th : Killercon. Austin, Texas.

September 7^th – Spooktastic Book Fair. Framingham Public Library. Framingham, Massachusetts

September 21^st - 22^nd : CT Horrorfest. Hartford, Connecticut.

October 4^th - 6^th : Scares That Care presents Authorcon IV. St. Louis, Missouri.

October 19^th : Merrimack Valley Halloween Book Festival. Haverhill Public Library. Haverhill, Massachusetts.

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Currently watching: All those Batman and Superman cartoons, and some lesser-known Alfred Hitchcock movies.

Currently reading: Angel’s Inferno by William Hjortsberg, the unexpected sequel to his most famous novel, Falling Angel, which served as the basis for the cinematic masterpiece Angel Heart.

Currently listening to: Lost Heart by Midnight Smoke, The Way In by Trigg & Gusset, and All the Way by Jimmy Scott. Dark jazz gets my creative brain chemicals bubbling.

Keep reading, try to be happy, and tune in next time—same bat-place, same bat-newsletter.

Your pal,

Kris