I had 10 stories published in 2025, not counting one which was self-published and one reprint. This is more stories than I had published in 2024 and 2023 combined. In order of publication, the stories are: “Nerves” in Cold Signal Magazine #3, “Islands” in Keep Planning, “GOUGER” in ergot.press, “End Screen of Your Life” in Marrow Magazine #13, “Tonight I Will Split His Heart With a Knife” in Chthonic Matter Quarterly Vol 3 #2, “Nowhere People” in Magazine1 #4, “Movements on a Moonless Night” in Keep Planning, “The Illuminated Tower” in minor literature[s], “Rituals in a Concrete World” in antenna #1, and “InterIterant” in Whisk(e)y Tit Journal #12. I extend my sincerest thanks to the editors of these venues, all of whom treated these stories with care. I am also grateful to my friend Trevor Henderson, with whom I self-published a collaborative piece, “Mouth”, and the team at WYRD Magazine, who reprinted my 2023 story “Nocturn” in their 12th issue.
Some non-comprehensive notes: The stories listed above were written over the past few years. “GOUGER” is the oldest of the bunch, having been first drafted in 2022. I don’t pick favorites among my own stories, but I am especially fond of this one. It comes from a period wherein I was mostly writing straight (in one sense of the word) Weird Fiction which lacked any direct engagement with communications technology. Since “GOUGER”, the effects of such technologies on perception and consciousness has become one of my primary themes. It was also one of my first attempts to synthesize the expressionist landscapes of my favorite horror authors with the world around me. I’m happy with pieces I wrote before “GOUGER”, but I think it is the story where I found my voice.
“The Illuminated Tower” and “Tonight I Will Split His Heart With a Knife” were both written in 2023. I’ve always been obsessed with the suggestive power of retro videogame graphics and the schoolyard rumors surrounding their worlds, so “The Illuminated Tower” was my stab at approaching both. The style owes much to Borges, and to the videogame stories of Damian Murphy, but I can’t discount the influence of the videogame creepypastas that I was addicted to in middle school. “Tonight I Will Split His Heart With a Knife” was born from my dissatisfaction with a certain SF novel about telepathy, and a love of Dario Argento’s Deep Red and Edgar Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd”, among others. In its attempt to blend arch weird-fiction narration and urban environments, I think of it as a cousin to “GOUGER”.
“End Screen of Your Life”, “Nowhere People”, “Movements on a Moonless Night”, “Islands”, and “Nerves” were written in 2025. I consider “End Screen of Your Life” an SF story in how it relates to a person’s emotional landscape being filtered through technological representation. Again, here is my obsession with the possibilities of videogame worlds, here a Build engine map. I thought of the protagonist’s practice as an inversion of the urban legend of the Columbine shooters mapping out their attack in DOOM. “Nowhere People” was based on a real sign in a real secondhand shop my spouse visited. I think of this one as the most comic of all of my stories, and was intended as a parody of the blinkered worldview suggested by many works of Weird Fiction.
“Movements on a Moonless Night” is pulp after Woolrich and Evenson. I’m happy with how the prose came out, and I think it has one of my scarier images. “Islands” was written when I was recovering from a debilitating sickness, and largely in longhand. It is my most overtly political piece to date, and ended up acting as a receptacle for my despair, which is better left to art. “Movements…” and “Islands” were published in Keep Planning, which is a wonderful new venue by David C. Porter, whose short fiction informed the textures of both.
As I mentioned with “GOUGER”, I don’t have any favorites of these stories, but “Nerves” is very close to my heart. It is my most personal story: it is the one which most closely relates to my life, and the one which best expresses my relationship to the body. For a long time, I was unable to articulate how I could express my relationship with my spine, and so I cracked open Thomas Moynihan’s Spinal Catastrophism and devoured it in two days. Over a year later, I can say that was one of the most impactful reading experiences of my adult life, and the story couldn’t exist as is without it. To a lesser extent, the structure of the story is informed by my dive into the writings of Kitarō Nishida. The story-inside-the-story here is a sort of parody of “GOUGER” and its giallo/pink-film (see my later section on movies) fetishism.
Finally, “Rituals in a Concrete World” and “InterIterant” were written in 2025. “Rituals in a Concrete World” is a fragment of what will hopefully be a book-length piece, and continues my obsession with the technological uncanny. “InterIterant” is a ghost story, of sorts, and another glimpse at a videogame world. It is one of five of my stories published this year where the world behind a computer screen infects or overwrites a character’s dreams.
I wrote a number of other stories this year which have yet to see publication. I am proud of most of them. I realize I have been extremely lucky this year to have received so many publications, and am not expecting to reach this number again. But I hope you enjoyed my stories this year, and I hope to share more of my fiction soon.
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I read a lot of books this year, most of them novels. The best of them all was Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, which I love as much as any book I’ve read. In second place is Maurice Blanchot’s Awaiting Oblivion, with Petronius’ Satyricon — an almost-novel — in third. An honorable mention must go to Alain Robbe-Grillet’s screenplay for Last Year at Marienbad, which is closer to a novel than any screenplay I’ve read. Other Robbe-Grillets I loved this year were Jealousy and his essay collection Towards a New Novel.
Many of the novels I enjoyed this year were crime novels: The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Savage Night, The Pledge, The Big Nowhere, maybe My Loose Thread if you’re playing loose with genre. Two of the best new releases I read this year were crime novels of a sort: Matthew Kinlin’s So Tender a Killer, and David C. Porter’s NTTN. In addition, Seth Harp’s The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces was a great true crime book that “read like a novel” or whatnot.
The other big genre for me was science fiction. Both Anna Kavan’s Ice and Philip K. Dick’s VALIS blew me away. I thought David Cronenberg’s Consumed was far greater than its reputation suggests: a delicious catalog of strange surfaces and monstrous fetishes, somewhere between 21st century Delillo and 21st century Gibson. More recent SF novels I loved were The Veldt Institute by Samuel M. Moss (would he consider it SF? Probably not), and Applied Ballardianism by Simon Sellars.
Weird Fiction is my home, but looking back, I’m realizing that I read a lot less of it in 2025 than I would’ve liked. The best collections I read were Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata, The Brains of Rats by Michael Blumlein, Spiritus Ex Machina by L.C. Von Hessen, and Good Night, Sleep Tight by Brian Evenson. Additionally, when crashing with a friend in Toronto, I picked around his copies of the Hingston & Olsen Ghost Box anthologies, and was impressed by “The Watcher” by R.H. Benson, “N0072-JK1” by Adam Corbin Fusco, “The Pale Man” by Julius Long, and “Pumpkinhead” by Al Sarrantonio.
Some other favorite Weird/weird stories I read for the first time this year: “The Companion”, “The End of a Summer’s Day”, and “The Gap” by Ramsey Campbell;“The Answer Tree” by Steven R. Boyett; “The Man Who Collected Ligotti” by Erik McHatton; “The Dummy” by Nicolas Royle; “Dead Thought Space” by Ben Lockwood; “The Braille Encyclopedia” by Grant Morrison; “Paranoid Cancers of a Demented Eros” and “The Power Company Detective” by Joe Koch; “The East”, and “Empty” by M. John Harrison; “Godhead” by Gordon B. White; “Balloon” by Donald Barthelme; “”The Nine Billion Names of God”” by Carter Scholz; “Misbegotten” by Brendan Vidito; “Slasher” by Samantha Barrett; “Strappado” by Laird Barron; “The Necromantic Tale” by Clark Ashton Smith; “Dr. Ligeti’s Dreams” by Ian Delacroix; “Whole Life Ahead” by Maryse Meijer; the CCRU speculative essays “Who’s Pulling the Strings?”, “Skin Crawlers”, and “Beneath and Between the Net”. “Call at Corazon” by Paul Bowles, “The Fire” by Maryse Meijer, and a few dozen of the texts in The Complete Stories of Diane Williams live on the edge of the Weird, and for my purposes, I’ll include them here.
While I’m more into Weird stories than Weird novels, I finally read The Haunting of Hill House this year, and it was well worth the wait. Also, I’m not sure if they’re Weird, and not sure if they’re novels, but The House Inside the House of Gregor Schneider by Gary J. Shipley and Prelude to Transgression by M. Kitchell were excellent.
For non-fiction, I spent a third of the year working through Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, which I found immensely rewarding. Later, I read John Marks’ book Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity, which gave some very helpful insight into his thought,and Deleuze’s own Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, the best book on aesthetics I’ve ever read. Also incredible was John Berger’s The Sense of Sight, which features wonderful essays on aesthetics, but the best pieces concern Pessimism and Marxism. Butoh: Dance of the Dark Soul, the RE/Search Industrial Culture Handbook, and Geoff Manaugh’s The BLDG BLOG Book were inspiring. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life by Adornoand The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh kept me company on my commutes, and both have left a sizable impact. I finished Illuminations by Walter Benjamin too recently to gauge its effect on me, but I imagine I’ll think about it forever. And among all of the cyber-theory I read, Tong-Hui Hu’s A Prehistory of the Cloud stands out as not only exciting and provocative but lucid, which I can’t say about a lot of what I’ve encountered in the field.
Now for some literary odds and ends. My favorite dramas were Murder in the Cathedral by T.S. Eliot, Short Eyes by Miguel Piñero, The Cenci by Antonin Artaud, and Hamletmetmachine and Other Texts for Stage by Heiner Müller. My favorite comics were Grant Morrison’s run on JLA, The Deviant and the first two volumes of W0rldtr33 by James Tynion IV, UFO Mushroom Invasion by Shirakawa Marina, Hour of the Beast by Konstantine Soldatos, and Absolute Martian Manhunter. The best book of poetry I read was Four Hundred Men on the Cross by Henri Michaux, with an honorable mention to Sundog: Selected Lyrics by Scott Walker.
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I watched a fair amount of movies for the first time this year, three of which were masterpieces: Explosion… by Hisayasu Satô, The Shrouds by David Cronenberg, and Highway Hypnosis by Ken Camp. I saw Explosion… during a period where I watched eight of Satô’s films released between 1985 and 1987 in fairly quick succession, some of which I’d seen before, most of which I hadn’t. Two of these new-to-me Satôs I was particularly impressed by were Decaying Town and Gimme Shelter, and later in the year I got a lot out of two pink films by other directors: Love Hotel by Shinji Somai and Looking for an Angel by Akihiro Suzuki.
Now that I think about it, it was just a good year for me and Japanese films. Especially depressing ones. I finally got around to Shunji Iwai’s All About Lily Chou-Chou, Toshio Matsumoto’s Demons, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Retribution. Cloud, the new Kurosawa, was also something of a bummer, but Broken Rage, the new Takeshi Kitano, was hilarious. Cloud, Broken Rage, and The Shrouds were the only three new releases I got much out of this year. In fairness, they were also some of the only ones I saw.
The best horror movies I saw were Spontaneous Combustion by Tobe Hooper, Season in Hell by Elliot Passantino, El Televisor by Chicho Ibáñez Serrador (originally an episode of TV, but who cares?), James O’Barr’s The Crow by then-teenage directors David Ullman and Matt Jackson (an adaptation which runs laps around Alex Proyas’ film), and best of all, The Living Dead Girl by Jean Rollin. I’m glad I saved The Living Dead Girl for when I already had ten or so Rollins under my belt, and am sad I have one less unwatched Rollin to look forward to.
I saw a lot of prints this year, mostly of films I already loved. Pastoral: To Die in the Country, Harakiri, Hana-Bi, The Turin Horse, The Prowler (Losey, not Zito), and The Leopard Man all came to Chicago on 35mm. There was a selection of gorgeous Jordan Belson films screened in 16mm. During the aforementioned trip to Toronto, a 35mm print of Heat was playing, so of course I saw that too. But the best screening was a 16mm projection of Stan Brakhage’s Eyes, Deus Ex, and The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes at the Museum of Surgical Science.
Some shorts of note: Abductees by Paul Vester, The Secret Garden by Phil Solomon, Roswell by Bill Brown, Frank Stein by Iván Zulueta, and Mouse Klub Konfidential by the novelist James Robert Baker. Mouse Klub Konfidential played after Highway Hypnosis the second time I saw it, and it blew my head off.
A few other films I greatly enjoyed: Executive Action, Le Cercle Rouge, Drug War, A Self-Induced Hallucination, The Comfort of Strangers, Le Boucher, The Flowers of St. Francis, At Sea, and Magic Mike XXL.
I finished more videogames this year than I had in a while. The best of them were by Grasshopper Manufacture: Killer7, The Silver Case, and Flower, Sun, and Rain. Two other favorites were Pentiment and the Japanese version of Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere, translated by Team NEMO. I finally played Silent Hill 3, which is as good as its current reputation suggests, and picked up Silent Hill f on release, which is good, but looks better next to the sorry state of its contemporaries. I made a real effort to get into JRPGs, but only really clicked with the Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga duology, although Valkyrie Profile was cool. I played a fair amount of short indies too, the best of which was 0_Abyssal_Somewhere, which I ended up playing twice in a day.
The best podcast of the year was SFULTRA, particularly the Deep Territory episodes. I also enjoyed the Knightfall and Strange Apparitions episodes of The Black Casebook. I am terrible at watching TV, but CITY: The Animation was, of course, the show of the year.
See you in 2026.
The Butterfly Pavilion 