Horror cinema is known for its inability to generate new ideas, and for its ability to latch onto big moneymakers and milk them to death, until no one wants to see one more Friday the 13th or Halloween or Saw made ever again. Horror books don’t fall into this trap as often, barring intentional series that authors create. Here are some upcoming horror titles I’m looking forward to (and you should be, too!)

1. Zombie, Illinois, sequel to Zombie, Ohio by Scott Kenemore

After I read the first one, Mr. Kenemore graciously replied to a message I sent him about how much I enjoyed his unusual zombie story (which I reviewed here), and kindly gave me two tidbits of information. The first tidbit was that he was working on a sequel. The second was that this sequel will take place in Illinois, my dear home state.

If you couldn’t already deduce this, the sequel will be called Zombie, Illinois. It will be about a zombie outbreak in Chicago and the outlying Chicagoland areas. Maybe he can make my hometown famous (aside from the brief car chase in The Blues Brothers), and have zombies invade the historic Pickwick theater in Park Ridge? In any case, I can’t wait to see how he continues his unusual take on zombies.

RELEASE DATE: TBD (book expected to be completed by March 31, 2012)

2. This Book Is Full of Spiders, sequel to John Dies at the End by David Wong

As soon as I finished reading Wong’s first novel (reviewed here), I immediately discovered two things that gave me great excitement: the first book was being made into a movie, and there was going to be a sequel.

Go read my review of it. John Dies at the End is absurd, gruesome, creative, clever, and hilarious. I can only imagine that a sequel called This Book Is Full of Spiders will be equally awesome. I assume that this sequel will continue the exploits of John and Dave, two dimension-hopping stoners, [SPOILER ALERT] one of whom is actually just a clone of his original self. [END SPOILER] If anything, I just want to see what other shenanigans these guys get up to.

RELEASE DATE: October 2, 2012

3. Dr. Sleep, sequel to The Shining by Stephen King

Wait. Hold on just a minute. Stephen King, the master of horror, who wrote the 1977 book that made everyone scared of hotels for decades to come, is writing a sequel? Yes. Yes, he is. Rejoice!

Dr. Sleep will follow a 40-year-old Danny Torrance living in upstate New York and working as an orderly at a hospice. He uses his psychic powers to help terminally ill patients pass away peacefully. Meanwhile, there are psychic vampires who, instead of sucking blood, feed off of psychic energy the likes of which Danny Torrance possesses.

This book is guaranteed to be a smash hit. There’s no question about that. The only question now is if that same creepy kid who played Danny in the Jack Nicholson movie might reprise his childhood role for Dr. Sleep (come on, you know that would be all kinds of awesome). Wonder if the little boy who lives in his mouth still talks in a croaky voice out of his finger. “Red ruuuuum...”

I haven’t been this excited for a King book since… well… ever?

RELEASE DATE: 2013

What sequels did I miss that you’re looking forward to reading? Name them below so the rest of us can salivate over the continued exploits of our favorite horror characters!

I didn’t get much into the nursery rhymes in my last post about Grimm fairy tales, but I’ve been researching them for my novella. Creepy nursery rhymes are almost worse than disturbing fairy tales. They have the same effect—a chilling desecration of innocence—but in a more compact package. What seals the deal is the bouncy, rhyming aspect of them. They sound nice and singsongy, but when you actually look at the lyrics, something sinister lurks beneath the surface.

“There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly” seems innocent enough but brings to mind images of Renfield from Dracula and the horrors of some sort of insane eating disorder. Just imagine someone eating spiders!

That's some Fear Factor shit right there.

There was an old lady who swallowed a fly,
I don’t know why she swallowed a fly,
Perhaps she’ll die.

There was an old lady who swallowed a spider,
That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her,
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly,
I don’t know why she swallowed the fly,
Perhaps she’ll die.

There was an old lady who swallowed a bird,
How absurd! to swallow a bird,
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider,
That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her,
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly,
I don’t know why she swallowed the fly,
Perhaps she’ll die.

There was an old lady who swallowed a cat,
Imagine that! to swallow a cat,
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird,
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider,
That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her,
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly,
I don’t know why she swallowed the fly,
Perhaps she’ll die.

There was an old lady who swallowed a dog,
What a hog! to swallow a dog,
She swallowed the dog to catch the cat,
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird,
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider,
That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her,
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly,
I don’t know why she swallowed the fly,
Perhaps she’ll die.

There was an old lady who swallowed a goat,
Just opened her throat! to swallow a goat,
She swallowed the goat to catch the dog,
She swallowed the dog to catch the cat,
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird,
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider,
That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her,
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly,
I don’t know why she swallowed the fly,
Perhaps she’ll die.

There was an old lady who swallowed a cow,
I don’t know how she swallowed a cow!
She swallowed the cow to catch the goat,
She swallowed the goat to catch the dog,
She swallowed the dog to catch the cat,
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird,
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider,
That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her,
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly,
I don’t know why she swallowed the fly,
Perhaps she’ll die.

There was an old lady who swallowed a horse,
She’s dead—of course!

It’s kind of cute, especially the cumulative aspect of it, but something just nags at me. Maybe the way it keeps wondering if this woman is going to die, and then so nonchalantly tells us that, yes, all of her compulsive eating has led to her death.

Weirdness and death have a way of weaving their way into all sorts of folk rhymes, and since little poems with a perfect rhyme structure are automatically assumed to be for children, well… they end up being creepy children’s rhymes. How about this one? You probably heard it if you ever saw A Haunting in Connecticut.

One bright day in the middle of the night,
Two dead boys got up to fight.
Back to back they faced each other,
drew their swords and shot each other.
A deaf policeman heard the noise
and ran to save the two dead boys.
And if you don’t believe it’s true,
go ask the blind man, he saw it too.

Yeah, there’s all sorts of intended weirdness in that one. Disregarding the fact that the poem is about two dead boys, we’ve got paradoxes all over the place, turning the poem into a contradiction of itself. It’s an exercise in nonsense, and the confusion only adds to the creep factor.

Then you get poems written specifically to be creepy but also to be for children; therefore humor is mixed in with the creepiness. These would appear in grotesque little scary story books that weirdos like me loved reading as a kid. One of those is “The Hearse Song.”

Don’t you ever laugh as the hearse goes by,
For you may be the next to die.

They wrap you up in a big white sheet
From your head down to your feet.

They put you in a big black box
And cover you up with dirt and rocks.

All goes well for about a week,
Then your coffin begins to leak.

The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out,
The worms play pinochle on your snout.

They eat your eyes, they eat your nose,
They eat the jelly between your toes.

A big green worm with rolling eyes
Crawls in your stomach and out your eyes.

Your stomach turns a slimy green,
And pus pours out like whipping cream.

You spread it on a slice of bread,
And that’s what you eat when you are dead.

I’m not sure why anyone would have to be told not to laugh when they see a hearse… but anyway, this poem seems like it’s for kids. It’s got moments of wonderful morbid humor, like the worms playing pinochle and eating toe-jam. Ending the whole thing with smearing pus on bread and eating that when you’re dead is also kind of hilarious, in a sick twisted way. There’s a lot of nice gruesome imagery for little readers to enjoy that will probably make them opt for cremation.

Got any more creepy nursery rhymes you want to share? Post them below. I’d love to see some more good ones and explanations for why they creeped you out, either as a kid or as an adult.

Horror TV is experiencing something of a renaissance with the firecracker popularity of American Horror Story and that other show Grimm. The latter sounded like it had a cool premise, perhaps something to replace the dying Supernatural, but after one episode I wan’t impressed enough to keep watching.

Still, the Grimm fairy tales fascinate me. Fairy tales are something we associate with innocence and childhood wonder, not grotesque visions of mutilation, cannibalism, and cruel magic. But that’s exactly what you find in a book of Grimm stories. Sure, most of them are still more or less tame and have happy endings, but you do get some really sick ones.

For instance, there’s one where the devil tricks a man into giving him whatever is behind him; the man, thinking it’s a tree, obliges, but it turns out his daughter is there. She ends up having to cut off her own hands to get out of the deal. Another spooky one has a physician whose godfather is death and who has the power to give and take life, until he tries to cheat death and his own candle is snuffed out.

But my favorite is called “The Juniper Tree.”

A man, with a boy from his previous wife, marries a woman with a daughter. But the stepmother hates the boy, so while he is leaning into a chest to get an apple, she slams down the lid and it chops off his head. Naturally, she doesn’t want to get caught, so she ties his head back on with a handkerchief and sits him on a chair by the door with an apple in his hand. Smooth, lady. No one’s going to notice that.

I can only imagine she was going for something like this.

The daughter comes up and asks him for the apple, but he doesn’t respond. Her twisted mother tells her to give him a box on the ear if he continues to ignore her. She does, and when his head rolls off, the girl thinks she killed her brother. Her mother comforts her and says they will make him into black puddings so that no one will know what the daugther did. So, letting the girl think she killed her brother, the mother proceeds to chop him into bits for dinner.

Father comes home and starts eating dinner with them. He says, “Ah, wife, how delicious this food is, give me some more.” If you’re not puking a little in your mouth already, he continues to eat the whole damn thing, throwing the bones under the table. The girl takes the bones outside and buries them by the juniper tree… where the dead boy turns into a bird, flies off, and sings a decidedly creepy little tune:

My mother she killed me,
My father he ate me,
My sister, little Marjory,
Gathered together all my bones,
Tied them in a silken handkerchief,
Laid them beneath the juniper tree,
Kywitt, kywitt, what a beautiful bird am I.

Seriously, dude? Who cares what a beautiful bird you are. Your father ATE you.

These aren’t exactly the type of stories you’re going to tell as you tuck your little ones into bed (unless your little ones are as twisted as I am), so who decided that fairy tales, which were originally gruesome morality fables, should be for children? When they turn dark, I think they’re even creepier because of the childish element of them.

Kind of like when you learned "Ring Around the Rosie" was really about the Black Plague. Keep dancing, children.

This happened with nursery rhymes too, which I think were invented to disturb the children who thought they were really about Jack and Jill going to get water and not King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette’s decapitation via guillotine. (“broke his crown” = had his head chopped off).

Queen “Bloody” Mary I shows up in a lot of nursery rhymes, like in the “Three Blind Mice” when she burned three men at the stake who were conspiring against her crazy ass. She’s also the Mary in “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary.” Her “garden” (cemetery) grows with “silver bells and cockleshells” (instruments of torture) and “pretty maids all in a row” (The Maiden, aka, the guillotine). What a sweet little rhyme… about grisly torture and execution.

I’m not sure why we do this to our children, but it’s got to be better than inundating them with unrealistic Disney princesses. So come on, kids! Gather round while I tell you a nice little bedtime story about how to pickle the eyes of your evil stepmother…

Dante’s Inferno is probably the most iconic exploration into the religions concept of Hell this side of… well… Hell. Even if you haven’t actually read it, you probably know something about the descent through the nine circles with Virgil leading the way through the increasingly horrific scenes of torture, or you’ve heard the ominous phrase:

“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

This is why so many stories have payed homage to the King of Hell (yeah, he wrote about Heaven and Purgatory too, but those are less interesting). If you watch the movie 1408 carefully, you’ll see and hear subtle references to these circles of Hell, especially when he ends up frozen near the end, since Dante told us that, despite our belief that Hell is on fire, the innermost core is actually frozen solid.

Even I wrote a story with Dantean overtones, called “Lakeshore Drive,” which was supposed to be published in Arcane, but won’t be this go around… don’t worry, it’ll get published eventually so you can read it. Synopsis: During a snowstorm of apocalyptic proportions, Susannah is trapped in her car on a closed Lakeshore Drive. Unfortunately, the snow isn’t the only thing she has to worry about as her mind unravels, a terrible secret haunts her, and the city becomes a living nightmare…

Another who tackled the themes presented in Dante is the editor of Indiana Horror and Indiana Science Fiction, James Ward Kirk, in his story, “Ghosts in the Mirror” (Dark Gothic Resurrected Magazine), which follows protagonist Dan Teagarden (Dan Tea-garden. Dan Tea. Dante. Get it?). Dan’s family has been butchered, his wife’s eyeless body left in his house and his children missing but for the blood and clothing.

Determined to find the culprit, Dan constructs a list of people he thinks might have done it, all exhibiting some sin like pride or avarice. Then he and his friend Virgil venture into their homes, only to discover that their families have been killed too. Dan is horrified, but Virgil tells him that sinners do not deserve their tears.

The exploration into the sinners’ homes mimicks Dante’s descent into Hell, complete with guide Virgil to show him the way. I’m sure the missing children means something as well, but I’m drawing a blank; any Dante scholars have an answer?

Anyway, it’s a short but interesting story, written in a style that reminds me of Medieval writings while still remaining in the present time, so if you’re interested in stories that utilize the Dante mythology, you can put it on your list.

The Inferno is a fascinating and detailed look at Hell, and its ideas have long been snatched up to use as themes or allusions in other works of fiction. Any other stories or movies you know use Dante’s ideas? Post them below!

A new teen horror series is being released by Macmillan Publishing, and I have the pleasure of hosting a FREE GIVEAWAY for the first book in the series to the winning  contest entrant!

The series is called “Escape from Furnace” by Alexander Gordon Smith, and the first book, which will be shipped to the contest winner, is called Lockdown.

What it’s about: Beneath Heaven is Hell…. Beneath Hell is Furnace! Furnace Penitentiary: the world’s most secure prison for young offenders, buried a mile beneath the earth’s surface. Convicted of a murder he didn’t commit, sentenced to life without parole, “new fish” Alex Sawyer knows he has two choices: find a way out, or resign himself to a death behind bars, in the darkness at the bottom of the world.

There are five books in the series that will be made available in 2012: Lockdown, Solitary, Death Sentence, Fugitives, and Execution.

Watch the trailer here:

Also keep an eye out for a future review of Lockdown by yours truly: I’m looking forward to reading the book and giving you all the inside scoop!

Want to win a free book? Here’s what you have to do:

Fill out the following entry form by SEPTEMBER 1. That is when I will close the contest and randomly draw a winner.*

CONTEST NOW CLOSED

*Any information given in your entry form, including name, e-mail, or address will be used for the sole purpose of sending the prize to the contest winner; it will not be given out to any third party aside from Macmillan Publishing and will be deleted immediately after the contest has ended.

Check out www.alexandergordonsmith.com for more info on the series, and continue checking Pandora’s Pen for updates, reviews, and more horror news!