1. Crooked Little Vein, Warren Ellis. Can’t remember if I actually read this last year or the year before, but it really doesn’t matter; Ellis’ utterly original blend of classic noir tropes, black humor and imaginative details was the most entertaining and satisfying thing I’d picked up in at least a couple of years.

2. Shutter Island, Dennis Lehane. I got around to reading most of Lehane’s body of work this year, and it’s all amazing, but this one’s my favorite. The writer steps away from Patrick Kenzie’s violent cases and troubled psyche for a mind-bending thriller that borders on horror and provides a genuinely surprising twist.

3. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon. Can’t decide between this or The Yiddish Policemen’s Union for my favorite Chabon, but they’re both so good it’s sick. Chabon conducts the English language like a maestro.

4. Please Step Back, Ben Greenman. The best rock ‘n’ roll novel ever written? Probably.

5. The Lost City of Z, David Grann. A wonderful and highly informative look back at the early years of Amazonian exploration centered on legendary adventurer Percy Fawcett’s search for what might or not have been El Dorado.

6. Sacred, Dennis Lehane.

7. Prayers for Rain, Dennis Lehane.

8. A Drink Before The War, Dennis Lehane.

9. Darkness, Take My Hand, Dennis Lehane.

10. Pirate Latitudes, Michael Crichton. Definitely not my favorite Crichton, and I don’t think it was finished, but it did provide an entertaining adventure yarn.

I also got turned on to a great writer named Kelly Link via her blazingly original short stories “Catskin” and “Monster,” and was pleased enough by the intriguing ideas behind Virginia Baker’s Jack Knife to want to check out some more of her work.

(We don’t go to the movies much, partially because of scheduling but mostly because, seriously, you can’t go two hours without talking on the phone or texting? You’re not a trauma surgeon, you know. Other people exist. For shame.)

I’ve gotta say, we liked-bordering-on-loved it. I’d heard all the muttering about doors being pulled closed with fishing line, and it seems to me that this little movie provides a perfect opportunity to talk about suspension of disbelief. Everybody knows horror films aren’t real, and PA didn’t even go through the Blair Witch rigmarole about pretending to be real “found” footage or whatever. No, there aren’t any big gags. But it’s surprisingly well acted (Katie Featherston, in particular, makes us forget we’re watching a movie), and if you’re not in it to judge–if you’re sincerely looking to get your neck hair raised, rather than to sit around and take a film apart and mention how much better you’d do if it was your flick–then the movie does a great job of getting under your skin.

In Danse Macabre, Stephen King talks about how, as we get older, we have to want to help suspend that disbelief, that the imagination of childhood erodes, that after a while it starts to need a little conscious leg up. Maybe that’s why horror fiction and film offer fewer surprises and chills for fans in the new millennium–to butcher a cliche, kids have seen it all these days. Nobody’s a fan, everybody’s a critic.

But Rebecca and I went into Paranormal Activity excited, and willing to be chilled as well as charmed, and by the time Katie got dragged out of bed by her leg, we’d traded cynicism for that wide-eyed what’s-going-to-happen-next immersion. Yeah, it took setting aside that seen-it-all attitude, and reminding ourselves of the excitement we’d felt since first hearing about the movie. But the payoff was so much better than sitting through what some people see as an hour and a half of faux-real shaky-cam footage and picking it apart. We met the movie halfway, and got back much more than our investment.

Anyway, check out a chapter here, if you’d like.

And they did. I finished the story, which attracted a few dozen readers and eventually earned me something like a hundred bucks in royalties, and then went about revising the serial chapters into a novel. It wasn’t a great book, but it was my first completed novel-length manuscript, and I loved it, warts and all. There were actually some ideas and scenes in it that I thought were really cool (like when the bad guys peeled their victims, or when one character communicated to another through the vibrations of a certain sex toy).

My pitches didn’t really go anywhere, and I was kind of glad to move on to other, better – or at least more well-organized or thought-out – projects, but I kept tossing The Birthright at first-novel competitions and publishing cattle calls in the meantime while I worked on new stuff.

Last night I got a rejection from the last contest in which I entered it. I wasn’t too surprised or anything, but it definitely seemed like a sign that it was time to put it behind me for good, stick it in the trunk and move onward and upward, yadda yadda yadda. I’m a little bummed about it, as are, I suppose, all fiction writers whose first “real book” doesn’t set the world on fire. But just finishing it was a personal triumph, and really, why would I want to go on pitching something I know isn’t my best work now that I’ve got better stuff out, and better stuff on the way? I can always dig it out from time to time to enjoy what I got right and laugh at what I got wrong.

So, goodbye, The Birthright. Thanks for all the great feelings you inspired during your creation and upon your completion. You were the evidence that proved to me that I could do this.

New awesomeness: Florida-based indie electronic publisher Pandora Project has just issued a standalone e-book version of short story “The Terrible Twos.” It’s sort of an experiment, we’re going to find out together whether folks will pay around a buck for a single (*cough* great *cough*) short story of a few thousand words, so by all means, please support – and leave a comment or review in the appropriate forum if you’re so moved. This edition, which is available in both Amazon Kindle and MobiPocket cross-platform formats, features wonderfully evocative cover artwork by my good friend and bandmate Joey Neill, a/k/a HeathenLife. An appreciative round of applause, if you please.

“The Terrible Twos” is maybe the least directly horror-themed story of mine yet, it’s about families, and the bonds that are never broken no matter how many choices and/or mistakes have been made, and the simple, unassailable power of love. But, naturally, it’s pretty dark and weird.

You can grab a copy through the links above, or via this site’s BUY portal.

I’m pretty stoked. Thanks, Joey. Thanks, guys.

But one of my favorite things about the series lately, now that it’s seven years gone, is watching episodes and realizing just how many now-famous (and in a few cases, then-famous) people were on the show. Hardly an episode goes by wherein I don’t go, “hey, that’s so-and-so,” or at least “hey, that’s the girl in the new commercial for that detergent!”

(I watch way too much TV, I know.)

What follows is a list of 15 names recognizable to most contemporary television/film buffs. Only one of these people did not appear on The X Files. Can you figure out which one it is without resorting to IMDB?

Ryan Reynolds

Jack Black

Garry Shandling

Lily Tomlin

Luke Wilson

Sherilyn Fenn

Tom Noonan

Seth Green

Giovanni Ribisi

Felicity Huffman

Donal Logue

Lili Taylor

Jane Lynch

Shawnee Smith

Cary Elwes

So, Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly’s new movie, The Box, comes out November 6, and is currently the beneficiary of a crazy-expensive promo campaign. It looks a little more action-oriented than his previous stuff, but otherwise appropriately austere and slightly off-kilter and generally, erm, Kelly-esque. (Disclosure: I thought Donnie Darko was pretty OK, but I don’t understand all the cult-worship hoopla – its murky surrealism and fractured narrative remind me a bit of Gregg Araki, a filmmaker whose work I actively loathe – and I didn’t see Southland Tales.) But you’ve got to wonder, how is The Box going to take a Richard Matheson short story that barely stretched out to fill a half-hour episode of The Twilight Zone, and fill a couple of hours without a ton of incidental filler? Matheson’s “Button, Button” is a psychologically gripping update of the classic horror tale “The Monkey’s Paw,” which is surely one of the two or three best examples of macabre irony ever handed down. The Twilight Zone episode of the same name changes Matheson’s ending just a bit – who knows why, the original is every inch the sort of perfectly appropriate twist that defines the Zone’s vibe – and The Box will necessarily change it further, for length and format and modernity and demographics and whatever the hell else.

My point is, in the vast majority of cases, each step taken away from the original creative work, be it a story, a song or a screenplay, seems to lessen the intent and impact of the original. And Kelly, whose Southland Tales tanked, probably labored under much closer studio scrutiny than he’s been used to. Maybe the movie will be great; Kelly is a gifted filmmaker. But the odds are stacked against it, and those computer-altered shots of Frank Langella’s face don’t freakin’ help. (Am I the only one who gets a weirdly cross-referential Vanilla Sky vibe from the trailer?) If both the Twilight Zone episode and Matheson’s story are unfamiliar to you, the simple, universal idea behind The Box will likely grab your attention. But, you know, seriously – seek out Matheson’s original vision of how that idea plays out.

Almost completely unrelated anecdote: On one of our first dates, my wife and I were talking film, and after a lull in the conversation, she asked me, “have you seen The Hole?” I immediately responded, “are you coming on to me?” She thought that was some extremely funny shite. Yeah, we were made for each other.

But it means a lot to me. Halloween is my favorite holiday, and as a member of that cabal of adults who still love the childlike aspects of the imagination-firing holiday, I look forward to those years when it actually falls on a night that doesn’t involve me worrying about the following day. I can give candy to the kids, and not be concerned about showing up to Roger’s block party too late, the awkward guy arriving to a shindg that’s been over for two hours because everybody has to get up for work the next day.

But “adult Halloween” seems a little, erm, dead this year. The cable channels that usually run horror movies starting around the first of the month have been derelict – look, I love Anthony Hopkins’ Magic as much as the next die-hard, but AMC seems to have abandoned Fear Fridays completely, and Syfy (what’s up with that “redesign” BTW, I coulda killed it for half the price) is running pretty much regular programming under the false aegis of their Halloween-centric marketing plan. Yeah, they’re rolling out new shows like Stargate Universe, and new seasons of Sanctuary, but none of it is particularly horror-themed or Halloween-centric, so, you know … WTF?

I don’t ask for much. I sit through hours of bad horror movies looking for the kernel of originality or creativity – looking for something good to say about a genre that increasingly lends itself to dismissiveness. Because I LOVE IT. And I wait for Halloween to fall on a weekend night because I figure other horror-fied adults do the same, and will treat it with a little extra-special action because our schedules might permit. But nobody at all is stepping up this year; it’s as if Halloween is actually less important to grownups this time around, despite the fact that we’re going to be able to celebrate it with both our kids and our adult friends.