Welcome to the RockSnark music podcast with me, Nathan Pool, and no prizes for guessing it’s going to be about the late Gerry Solby, who died this week.

I arrived early on my first day at Palacio Cardoso. The air was heavy with exhaust fumes. I crossed the street, shielding my eyes from the glare, and hugged the thin strip of shade provided by the buildings until I found a tiny café.

I love my mother, but if I ever see her again, I’ll kill her. Perhaps I love my mother because of biology, but biology can be hacked these days, so who can trust that anymore?

When I was a child, my father used to scare me with this rubber Halloween mask. It’s burned into my brain like the remnant image left on a TV screen after you power it down. It covered his entire head and changed his skin from pale white to black and red with a piercing set of yellow eyes.

The heat oozed through the windows and pooled behind Scott’s blackout curtains. If he sat still, hunched over his desk, he could stay cool enough to think.

Even after all those years, the yellow eyes still haunted him. A sickening feeling roiled in his stomach. He looked out the window and saw the ground below him menacing, almost grinning at the prodigal son’s return.

We were hiking in dense woods when a sudden rainstorm blew up. We ran, looking for shelter, and came upon an old, abandoned house—a mansion, really, that must have once been beautiful.

If she squinted and imagined nightmares, the house would have looked haunted. With eyes wide open, and her darker dreams tucked away, it was just a big gray building adrift in a sea of trees. Charity Barnes opened the rental car door in a cloud of dust she’d trailed in from the gravel road and dirt driveway.

When we think of modern horror—the kind that unfolds in suburban living rooms, that transforms everyday objects into instruments of terror, that locates dread not in ancient castles but in the psyche itself—we inevitably think of Stephen King. King’s sprawling novels have defined the genre for generations, his name synonymous with contemporary American horror. But… Continue reading The Overlooked Pioneer Who Invented Modern Horror

The black velvet petunias eat away at your antipathy– sunless conduit flowers for unlit obituary candles, Drunk Tank Pink garnish of a burial shroud,

Leather-bound tatters Blood-ink maters to parchment Read atop an escarpment Fire-blue tines rape the sky On-high violations as Motivation for Necronomic Incantations, audible permutations Of flesh, veins, and hatred Eyes red with sound and fury Signifying there is no worry Of nine clouds of judgement  As Mephistical mystics Regurgitate cannibalistic  Fetid decay disguised as lyrics… Continue reading Grimoire