I can’t explain why I did this, but in the days and moments leading up to the halftime show by The Who at Super Bowl XLIV, I kept posting twisted and sick puns of Who song titles and lyrics to my twitter account. A few weirdos joined me in the fun.

Like most puns, some of these are astoundingly bad examples of wordplay, but what the heck: here is the complete collection of Who Horrors for your amusement, my embarrassment, and, well, posterity.

Pinhead Wizard
Tommy, Can You Fear Me?
Blobophrenia
You Deader, You Deader, You Dead
I Can Spree For Miles and Miles
Slip Kidney
The Kids Are All Fright
My Regeneration
Quease Box
I Canned His Brain. / Froze his blood. / Gonna serve to you. / When it turns blue.
Can You See the Real Meat?
Blowing Mo’ Bile
BarkBark O’Diely
No one knows what it’s like. To be the dead man. To be the bled man. Behind Strewn Eyes.
Won’t Eat Food Again
Blood Rain on Me
Embalmee, Can You Hear Me?
Skinned the Wizard — grabbed his magic stick — Skinned the Wizard — it came off at the wrist.
Raspy Jack
I call that a Gorgon. You best not make it mad!
Goodbye Blister Disco
I want you to burn…together…with the brand.
Pictures of Chilly
Slime Free
LONG LIVE SHOCK. Be it Dead or Alive.

Bonus Extras:

Boo! Scar You.
Eating my brain on the 5:15
Another Sticky Day
Phlegminence Front (it’s a spute-ahm!)

Thanks to all the other people who played along and posted their own, including: @BlackDogNate, @nitewanderer, @davidltamarin23, @Adam_Blomquist, @StephenWNagy, @DavidKM, and @chuntastic…you might be able to find their contributions still. And kudos to @jmridenhour for coming up with the best of them all: “Tragic Bus”!

You’re perfectly welcome to keep this sick train a rollin’ by adding more in the comments…but really, why would you?

I love this dangerous and disturbing book, and highly recommend it…especially if you’re getting bored with the run of the same old mills:

Learn more…

Read that book. And if you’re still hungry for more, and you can find back issues of the (now defunct) magazine that spawned this book, you might find my memoir of Amityville lurking in Morbid Curiosity #7.

αΩ

Dead or Alive?

How many of your authors are dead?

Dead: 49 / Alive: 116 / Unknown: 153 / Not a Person: 1

Percent alive: 70.3%

xo

The above is a report generated from a neat new analytical script that LibraryThing can do to your home bookshelves, called “Dead or Alive?”

I sort of assumed I’d have more dead authors.  Ah well.  Ironically, they listed my own name as “Unknown”…and I found that a little soothing.  Call me anthropomorphic, but I think I’d rather be among those undead than “Not a Person”.

[Scrolled to the bottom ... They DO have a catagory for "Zombies" too!  LibraryThing is a riot.]

Happy Valendine’s Day.

I just finished teaching a wonderful “Horror & Suspense Writing” course at Seton Hill University. Under my office door last week, I found a slip of paper from an anonymous student, who was writing down the weirdest of the wacky things that came out of my mouth during lectures and discussions. Here’s a select few snippets of profound wisdom:

On point-of view in horror fiction:
“You shouldn’t be writing in First Person Singular all the time…instead, try writing in First Monster Singular.”

Responding to a question about sexual perversion in horror fiction:
“What do you mean?  Necrophilia is the safest of sexes.”

On ghosts and the supernatural:
“There are no friendly ghosts in horror. Try running off with Casper to his friendly place and it won’t be long before he turns around and eats you.”

When arriving late during a snowy day:
“I had so much snow in my shoes today, I almost fell down three flights of stairs, which would have been bad for the metal plate in my head.”

On genre:
“Horror and fantasy have a lot in common, but you know horror when you see it. If your story starts out with unicorns and fairies having sex, that’s not horror, but it’s still pretty scary.”

On conflict:
“Characters shouldn’t whine, ‘oh, wah, I hate my life.’ Try ‘I hate my job, I hate my mother, and, oh yeah, I have a knife in my belly, too.’ Your protagonist needs to be in agony.”

On word roots:
“Agony and aggravate have nothing to do with agriculture.”

On the psychology of horror:
“Horror fiction is about looking at yourself after you hack a person to pieces…and your brain is thinking ‘Gee, I still want that pickle.’”

If you somehow expected this entry to have actual advice, I recommend you go pick up a copy of the textbook we used this semester:  On Writing Horror 2nd Edition, edited by Mort Castle. 

[This class was a lot of fun.  At the end of the term, we had a writing contest with the grand prize of a pinata that my wife made in homage to Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”  You can find a photo of this in the brand spanking new online gallery at gorelets.com.

“The monster’s skin began to crumple, the pale gray color turning into a sickening olive green that had a mustard tint to it. It reminded Sailormoon of animal droppings, though she wasn’t sure if there even was a kind of animal with droppings as gross as the color of the monster’s skin.”
– “John” on SailorMoon

“Slowly levitating above the wave of fur so as not to hurt animals, Goku appeared next to the Ouji with a gopher on his head. “Guess what Vegita?” he said happily, a large grin on his feces covered face. “I made a new friend!” he pointed at the gopher, “His name is Bob! Bob likes french fries! He names them Skippy!”
– “Mika” on DragonBallZ

Last weekend, I attended Horrorfind Weekend in Baltimore, sponsored by the genre’s great search engine, horrorfind.com. I had a blast. It’s a huge gathering of people in the scary business, from George Romero and Jack Ketchum to people who make funny black t-shirts for goths and bondage gear for everyone else. Horrorfind is more “multimedia” oriented than the usual “literary” cons I attend, but that only means the bar is even more crowded. You know a convention is cool if it’s got an “Evil Dead Museum” and a dealer’s room where you can buy (fake?) flayed human faces under cellophane with those little bar-code stickers on them just like at the supermarket.

I love horrorfind.com and I’ve even contributed fiction to the site. But I’ve always found the sponsored name — “Horrorfind Weekend” — kind of clumsy for a convention title. It doesn’t have the grand ring of something like “World Fantasy Convention” and it doesn’t even go for a catchy pun, like “ConNiption” or “ExCon.” So to puzzle things out, I decided to play journalist and run around all the late night parties, asking: “When you’re not here, where do you find the horror?” Here’s what people said:

• “In all children.” – Tanya Twombly
  
• “The bathroom toilet.” – Jack Fisher
  
• “My VISA bill.” – G. Italiano
  
• “Pop culture.” – Jon Hodges
  
• “In the people I watch in the streets of the city.” – Gerard Houarner
  
• “Consciousness…within me.” – John Edward Lawson
  
• “Everywhere.” – Deena Warner
  
• “The German toilets…stuff just sits there.” – Darren Speegle
  
• “The Washington Subway — the press of bodies — the fat people with hairy moles — it’s the worst.” – Matt Warner
  
• “The fever depths of my imagination.” – Scott Allen Emerson
  
• “In my fiance’s bed.” – Kathleen J. Trimmer
  
• “When I wake up in the morning and see what’s beside me.” – Brian T. Rollo
  
• “Where DON’T I find the horror?” – Mark McLaughlin
  
• “In the newspaper office where I work.” – Jonathan Reitan
  
• “All around us, everywhere.” – Jennifer Barnes
  
• “In my hotel room.” – Sean Wallace
  
• “In my kitchen…with three kids, it’s the horror.” – Denise Herman
  
• “I work retail. Think about it.” – James A. Moore
  
• “In the basement in the pit where I keep the cast of CHIPs.” – Kevin Donihe
  
• “In the eyes of religious zealots.” – St. Michael Amorel
  
• “Everyday life.” – Oliver Baer
  
• “In the mirror, baby.” – Nicholas Kaufmann
  
• “The news.” – Dave Friscolanti
  
• “A lot of conventions…Frightvision, Chiller Con, Cinema Wasteland…” – Dr. Satan
  
• “Every. F**king. Where. I. Look.” – John Skipp
  
• “In The Graham Norton Effect.” – Rob Swartwod
  
• “The Nightmare Mansion.” – Ashe
  
• “I’m also a criminal lawyer, so, in the cases I haven’t written about yet.” – Michael Slade
  
• “Where I work.” – Jason Brannon
  
• “In the people who run our planet…the people who think they know what’s best for us, the people who think they know what we should think.” – Tim Lebbon
  
• “FOX News channel, fair and balanced.” – Christopher Golden
  
• “The toilet.” – Richard SanFilippo
  
• “You find it here [breast gesture pointing to logo for Horror Web.com].” – Kelli ["HorrorWench"]
  
• “In our schools today.” – Joe Branson
  
• “In my pants.” – M. Stephen Lukac
  
• “My naked body in the mirror…I’ve had two children.” – Meghan Fatras
  
• “Everywhere I look.” – Geoff Cooper
  
• “On the L.I.E.” – Adam Pepper
  
• “Have you met my family?” – Marcy Italiano
  
• “In the unknown…in the afterlife. I mean, what’s after this?” – Shawn Brannon
  
• “In my toilet after Indian food.” – Jenny Orosel
  
• “In the stock market.” – Paul Melniczek
  
• “Politics.” – Chesya Burke
  
• “Anywhere outside my front door.” – GAK
  
• “When I’m shaving and accidentally glance at my own eyes.” – James Futch
  
• “My family’s history…ya know, murder, that kinda stuff.” – Brandon Massey