Welcome to Gleefully Macabre!

Welcome to my website! Whether you were brought here by interest in my work or a Google search gone terribly wrong, I encourage you to hang around and start clicking away!

LATEST SCRAPS OF NEWS:

Dweller, my second “serious” novel, is available for pre-order in both a collector’s hardcover edition and a mass market paperback. And it has its own song! Click here for details!

The paperback edition of Gleefully Macabre Tales is now available, and has been expanded to include my novella Disposal! Get it here!

Pressure is available NOW at your local bookstore! Go grab a few copies! The Pressure page on this very site (click the cover to your right) has a handy feature that will let you flip through the first couple of chapters of a virtual copy!

The Severed Nose is now available from Bloodletting Press, in paperback and deluxe hardcover editions!

Blood Lite, featuring stories by Charlaine Harris, Jim Butcher, Sherilynn Kenyon, and Kelley Armstrong, and also my own contribution “The Bell…FROM HELL!!!” is now available as a mass-market paperback. I encourage you to buy a copy, then go up to the featured authors and say “Ooh! Ooh! Will you sign this? Oh, wait, YOU’RE not Jeff Strand! Forget it!” It’ll be fun and amusing!

Friend me on Facebook! Follow me on Twitter!

Interrogate Me!

So an interview I was going to do for the Dread Media podcast has turned into a guest-co-hosting gig! And we need YOUR questions. If you’ve got a horror-related, writing-related, or general-related question for me, and you want me to have to babble through my answer without any preparation, this is your chance! Send it to feedback@dreadmedia.net and host Desmond Reddick will ask it when we record the show.

Got a question for Desmond that you want ME to ask? Send it to JeffStrand@aol.com.

Got a question for both of us? Send it to…uh, either address.

Want to hear your lovely, melodic voice on the show? Call the official Dread Media voice mail line at 206-203-1213 and ask your question there!

There are 128 episodes of Dread Media available, and of course they’re all free, so check ‘em out at www.dreadmedia.net.

The actual recording date hasn’t been set yet, so until I say otherwise, you can assume that the question line is still open!

Sweet!

E-mail from Desmond Reddick of Dread Media: “Finished DWELLER and now I’m crying like a baby. F***ing excellent.”

(He didn’t actually use asterisks, but I try to keep this site reasonably kid-friendly, despite posting links to stories like “Mr. Twitcher’s Miracle Baby-Chopping Machine.”)

Dread Media is one of the best podcasts out there and a must-listen for any horror fan. Check it out at http://www.dreadmedia.net/

Dead Lines #3

Issue #3 of DEAD LINES is available online (for free, kids!) and contains my story “Mr. Twitcher’s Miracle Baby-Chopping Machine,” which originally appeared in the WHC 2008 souvenir anthology DESOLATE SOULS.

Check it out here.

The First DWELLER Review

The Horror Fiction Review has posted the first official DWELLER review, describing the novel as “A best bet for any monster enthusiast” and “heartbreaking.” That’s right, heartbreaking! Didn’t see THAT one coming, did ya?

Check out the full review right here!

The Movie Top 10 Revisited

Okay, it’s February, and tonight I’m going to an advance screening of FROM PARIS WITH LOVE, so it’s time to revisit the Top 10 Movies of 2010. I’ve decided to disqualify THE LIVING DEAD AT MANCHESTER MORGUE because it’s about 30 years too early to be a 2010 movie, which means that my previously posted list will be revised as follows:

1. Daybreakers

However, I’ve seen a few movies since then, so my official ranking of the Top 10 Movies of 2010 is:

1. Kill Theory

2. The Reeds

3. Daybreakers

4. Zombies of Mass Destruction

5. The Book of Eli

6. [Not seen yet]

7. [Not seen yet]

8. [Not seen yet]

9. [Not seen yet]

10. [Not seen yet.]

Three of those are from the After Dark Horrorfest, which I’ll write more about later.

How to Eat Fried Furries

Having just discussed the potty-humor-filled extravaganza Dark Jesters, it was ironic that the next book for review was How to Eat Fried Furries by Nicole Cushing, which begins with a tale involving excrement on an epic scale. I’d have to create a spreadsheet and compare the projects side-by-side to determine which one has more poop jokes (I have no immediate plans to do so) but I think the opening tale in How to Eat Fried Furries may defeat Dark Jesters in quantity if not in level of detail.

Also ironic is that for my birthday I got the entire series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus on DVD, which I’ve been watching over dinner for the past couple of weeks. How to Eat Fried Furries also bills itself as a “flying circus,” and the feeling is indeed similar–bizarro stories with sort of a common theme (furries) that are connected by surreal bits of Terry Gilliam animation. No, wait–instead of being connected by Terry Gilliam animation they’re connected by pseudo non-fiction bits on the subject of furries (y’know, squirrels, ferrets, bunnies, etc.). Much like an episode of Monty Python, you won’t find coherent plots or much of anything resembling traditional story structure, but rather a barrage of amusing weirdness.

Actually, one of the stories doesn’t have any furries in it that I could find–just cows and pigs. And not real cows and pigs, but children forced into cow and pig suits and forced to live like…uh, you get that this isn’t a normal book, right? It’s half-LOL and half-WTF?

Obviously, this is not a book destined for Wal-Mart distribution. I’m not sure I can even say “If you would buy a book called How to Eat Fried Furries, you’ll love it!” because I can see somebody saying “Ha ha! That sounds like a clever and amusing lark!” and not being prepared for the level of sheer weird that lurks within. Personally, I enjoyed every f***ed-up page of it. Will YOU like it? To test this, you’ll need to visit the publisher’s website, Eraserhead Press. I think you will discover very quickly if you are the target audience for this kind of fiction, or if you wish for it to be never spoken of again.

How to Eat Fried Furries isn’t available for pre-order yet, but you can follow Nicole Cushing (and see a picture of her in a cow suit) at http://nicolecushing.wordpress.com/.

DWELLER at Amazon

The paperback edition of Dweller is now available for pre-order from Amazon. Order now! Order often!

http://www.amazon.com/Dweller-Jeff-Strand/dp/0843963581

Butcher Knives & Body Counts

First of all, I apologize if my update yesterday about the Conan O’Brien/Jay Leno situation distracted you from the part of the website where I’m trying to convince you to pre-order a copy of the hardcover limited edition of Dweller. That certainly wasn’t my intention. Just scroll right past it.

Meanwhile, Dark Scribe Press has announced the final contributor’s list of Butcher Knives & Body Counts, a collection of essays about the classy world of slasher flicks. I have an essay in there about the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and one about what I must now sadly refer to as the original Mother’s Day, since a remake is on the way.

I really, really, really can’t wait to read this book. Learn all about it at http://swingingmachetes.blogspot.com/

The Late Night Wars!!!

I’m finding myself surprisingly obsessed with the whole Jay Leno/Conan O’Brien thing. It’s probably because I have a book deadline coming right up, and so anything that is NOT a book deadline becomes a source of great interest. But, also, I’ve read The Late Shift and was an avid watcher of late night TV back when the first round of chaos began, so it’s fascinating to watch the drama continue to play out.

The real question I take away from this whole thing is: They gave Jimmy Fallon a frickin’ late night TV show? Jimmy Fallon? The guy who couldn’t get through a single joke in Weekend Update without stumbling over a line? I dunno, maybe his show is a work of genius, but…Jimmy Fallon? Really?

I watched the very first episode of Late Night With Conan O’Brien, back when people were flipping out over “They’re giving Letterman’s show to a guy with no on-camera experience???” I watched him for about the first year, during which I found him kind of funny, sometimes. (Ahhhhh…I feel such nostalgia for the days when I could devote an hour a day, five days a week, to watching a TV show that didn’t even impress me all that much.)

Since then, the grand total of my Conan O’Brien viewing totalled to, I dunno, the equivalent of two full episodes. (I’ve never seen Triumph the Insult Comic Dog or the Masturbating Bear.) But last night I decided to watch his final appearance on The Tonight Show. And it was…kinda funny. Sometimes. The bit with Steve Carrell as an NBC employee conducting Conan’s exit interview could’ve been a gem, except that Conan was laughing hysterically through the whole thing, making it feel more like they were rehearsing the bit than actually performing it.

Overall, I can’t quite see the NBC executives as demonic villains. In 2010, in a world of thousands of TV channels and TiVo and the internet, it seems odd to say “The 10:00 PM Monday through Friday slot must be filled with an hour-long drama! A drama!” Would they really be destroying the legacy of The Tonight Show by moving it back half an hour? Playing Armchair Executive here, it seems like it would work out in his favor, since he’d gain from the people who watch the first half of Letterman and then switch over when the second-tier guests arrive.

[Note: The preceding opinions are not based on having any actual idea of what I'm talking about.]

But if you’re one of those people proposing an NBC boycott: stop it. You look stupid. And The Office is an infinitely better show than anything being discussed, and does not deserve your petty vengeance.