Getting spooky at StokerCon

Punk Rock Bowling, The Sphere, Elvis & Paul Tremblay

What scares you?

A vampire movie you saw when you were little? A recurring nightmare that returns when you’re sick? The 2024 Presidential election?

Last weekend I went to StokerCon, the annual convention of the Horror Writers Association. These are people who are reading, writing, and thinking about scary stories all the time. I’d never been to StokerCon before and since it was held in San Diego I decided to go.

Before I get into that, I want to share some links about the previous weekend’s activities.

Devo at PRB

Festival Frenzy

I’ll start with my story for the Los Angeles Times about Punk Rock Bowling. In a section that recaps the history of the festival, I added an aside about my own contribution to PRB lore, and I’m delighted my editor let me keep it in there:

“The first band to play the bowling tournament was punk rock cover crooners Me First and the Gimme Gimmes in 1999, making guitarist Joey Cape, whose band Lagwagon played the main stage on Saturday, one of the longest tenured performers of the festival. The bowling tournament awards ceremony, which often featured performances by Manic Hispanic, became a full-on show, and the seeds of the festival were sown. (Full disclosure: Twenty years ago I bowled on a team representing L.A.-based Razorcake fanzine. We were called the Blatant Stereotypes and we came in second place. This doesn’t have any bearing on the story, but I thought you should know.)”

Self-indulgent? Maybe? But there’s a method to my madness. You’re just going to have to wait a couple years to see how it all plays out…

Many of you have asked if I’ll be going to No Values this weekend and the answer is no. I generally don’t like festivals because there are too many people crammed into too small a space. What makes Punk Rock Bowling different? At PRB you have options. Don’t feel like standing the sun? Go to a club show. And if you do go to the festival there’s plenty of shade, places to sit and eat, places to sit and drink, and a free water station—just like at an all ages show—all with a general admission ticket. If you go, I’d like to know how much the water costs at No Values.

The ancient, sacred, secret, crypts of Egypt.

What about the Dead?

I wrote a short essay about seeing Dead & Company at The Sphere and Devo at Punk Rock Bowling on back to back nights for Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World. It’s called Suburban Robots That Monitor Reality:

“In 1989 I was an acid-eating, tie-dye t-shirt wearing, hacky-sack playing college freshman, so if you’d told me that in 35 years I’d get to see the Dead and Devo, and that one of them would be performing in the most technologically innovative music venue known to man, and the other would be playing in a parking lot, I would have been dead wrong about who was performing where.”

You have to be a subscriber to read the story, which I heartily recommend.

Getaway vehicle for when Elvis leaves the building

Elvis is a punk rocker

Lastly, I wrote about a punk rock wedding at Graceland Wedding Chapel for my column in Razorcake.

“At the Graceland Wedding Chapel, guests are allowed to choose two songs for Elvis to play. Jan asked Elvis to play “Return to Sender,” which is an unusual selection for one’s wedding day. The actual wedding went bye in a flash. Elvis ran through his lines, worked in a few zingers and sound effects, and moved on. The vows were replete with lines from Elvis songs, and the ceremony was perfunctory and quick. We’d seen the other couples waiting outside. We were under no illusions that this was going to be a long, drawn out affair.”

Whoops, this one isn’t published yet and you’ll need a subscription to read it, but guess what? It’s the June Razorcake Subscription Drive! You can get America’s only non-profit independent music magazine delivered directly to your door six times a year. Choose the subscription plan that’s right for you because you can’t put your arms around a website.

StokerCon in San Diego

That brings us back to last weekend. Conveniently, I wrote about StokerCon for Saturday’s LA Times Book Club newsletter. It’s got quotes from horror writers like Stephen Graham Jones, a short interview with StokerCon Guest of Honor Paul Tremblay about his new novel Horror Movie, links to reviews of all your favorite horror writers, and recommendations on where to shop for horror in Southern California. (Clinking on the link above is much appreciated.)

As many of you know, I’m a huge fan of horror movies. That will happen when you grow up with a screenwriter in the family. (My late cousin Mark Patrick Carducci wrote about slashers from another dimension in Neon Maniacs and the cult classic Pumpkinhead.) About half the movies I see in a given year are horror movies.

I read fewer horror novels but as someone who reads a lot of crime fiction the strange, deranged, and unexplained are usually lurking out there on the periphery. This is what I’m drawn to and this is what I write. My first novel is about a haunted casino and features a cursed slot machine. My latest novel involves a drug that turns junkies into a walking corpses. And my stories are full of haunted houses, zombie gangsters, and unreliable narrators who slip in and out of reality.

So I recently joined the Horror Writers Association chapter here in San Diego and while I covered StokerCon for the LA Times, I went because I wanted to find other writers who don’t really fit into a single category.

Since I talked to San Diego writer Jonathan Maberry and punk rock enthusiast Paul Tremblay for the newsletter, I started with their events. I met Paul ten years ago at the LA Times Festival of Books. He was sitting next to Stephen Graham Jones who was on the panel I was moderating and they were amiably chatting together about their shared disdain of coffee. At the festival the following year, I found them at the same seats at the same table. For a while I thought of them as a duo.

As a result of those chance encounters I’ve read many of their books. Paul was just getting started on his horror career. Stephen had already published hundreds of short stories and books across a wide range of genres, but was something of a cult figure. Now they are both stars in the world of horror. Paul was a guest of honor with his name on the back of the StokerCon t-shirt and Stephen’s signing lines stretched out of the venue.  

Clockwise from the top: David Agranoff, Keith Rosson, Paul Tremblay, J.R. Blanes & Brain Asman

As a member of the HWA I’d met a handful of people running the conference, like KC Grifant, who has a new collection of stories coming out in July called Shrouded Horror, Brian Asman, whose new werewolf novel Good Dogs comes out in October, and David Agranoff, who I’ve known going back to Vermin on the Mount and who seemingly always has a new book he’s touting, including the WWII vampire novel Last Night to Kill Nazis from Clash Books.

Then there’s Razorcake contributor and rising star Keith Rosson. I loved the work he’d put out with the indie Meercat Press, especially the novel Mercy of the Tides, but his new horror novel Fever House with Random House has been at the top of my TBR pile all year, and with a sequel on the way, it just got higher.

Every time I spent time with these writers, they introduced me to more people and by the end of the weekend I’d met dozens of writers doing interesting work and had a a stack of books to bring home.

Every writer feels like an outsider, an outcast, a weirdo. StokerCon is the only convention I’ve been to where I saw people wearing t-shirts for Bad Religion and Salem’s Lot, Black Flag and Pumpkinhead. It’s a place you’ll find magazines and publishing houses like Bourbon Penn and Tenebrous Press doing really cool things well beyond the margins of the mainstream. It’s a place where you might bump into writers doing brilliant work across a range of styles such as Tananarive Due, Duane Swierczynski, Justina Ireland, and Brian Evenson.

I felt right at home.

Colombia Calling

I’m going back to South America later this summer for a trip to Colombia. I’ll be spending time in Medellin and Barranquilla. If you have any recommendations for bookstores, record shops, punk bands, or other cool things to see and do, please let me know.

That’s it! Thanks for reading. Next week I’ll have a long review of one of the most entertaining music books I’ve read in a long, long time that I think will surprise a lot of people. If you’ve been thinking about upgrading to a paid subscription, maybe today is the day?

If you’re new-ish here and you liked this newsletter you might also like my latest novel Make It Stop, or the paperback edition of Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records, or my book with Bad Religion, or my book with Keith Morris. I have more books and zines for sale here. Message from the Underworld comes out every Wednesday and is always available for free, but paid subscribers also get Orca Alert! on Sunday. It’s a weekly round-up of links about art, culture, crime, and killer whales.