The outside of a Victorian house tells you something is wrong. The inside tells you why. Victorian floor plans are not the open, legible spaces of modern architecture. They are systems of passages, thresholds, and rooms that exist between other rooms. They were designed for a social world that required certain people and certain things […]

The Anatomy of Dread: Why Victorian Architecture Looks Haunted You know the house the moment you see it. It sits at the end of a long lot, or at the top of a hill, or simply at the edge of your peripheral vision as you drive past. You don’t need to be told it has […]

Honesty is the Policy There is something deeply reassuring about a small town. Nothing bad ever happens here because nothing ever happens here. Everyone knows everyone, and what they don’t know, they make up. If a stranger comes to town, everybody knows it, and that fellow better hope nothing goes wrong while he’s inside the […]

One of my few memories of living on Cedar Street in the capital of Arkansas, which we left for the rural north-central part of the state when I was four or five, is arguing with my older sister about watching the series. Her position against it was that it would scare me, and of course, […]

What Makes Ghost Romance Different — And Why That Difference Matters If you’ve ever finished a paranormal romance and thought — I want more of that, but different — ghost romance might be exactly what you’re looking for. It sits in its own corner of the paranormal world, and once you understand what makes it tick, […]

Not the ghost. That’s the counterintuitive truth at the heart of every ghost story that actually works. The ghost is the engine, not the destination. What the ghost does to the living — that’s where the fear lives. The monster in the closet is only scary until you see it. Once it steps into the […]

My son says Douglas isn’t a ghost. Douglas is the protagonist of my paranormal romance series Phantom Forensics. He’s a man whose body is lying in a hospital bed in a coma while his spirit wanders free, invisible to nearly everyone, aware of exactly what happened to him and why. He can see his own body. […]

The recent release of The Bride has reignited something that was quietly smoldering — a hunger for steampunk horror. Searches for the subgenre have spiked dramatically in recent weeks, and it’s easy to understand why. There’s something uniquely compelling about horror set against a backdrop of brass gears, gaslit streets, and the dangerous optimism of an age […]