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This movie was on IFC last night. That's why I dig having cable, even though 90% of what's on sucks, every so often one of these stations comes through with something I haven't seen before but want to.

I'd been wanting to see Sleepaway Camp for a couple years now, ever since I read somewhere that the ending was still pretty disturbing, 25 years later.  I came in about an hour late -- I figured no big deal, since it's a teen slasher flick, I can probably pick up the plot on the fly, and I did.  I spent about twenty minutes thinking, Man, this thing sucks, hard--even worse than I expected.  Anybody who put this piece of crap out, even back then, couldn't possibly give it an ending that would be remotely scary.

Then, the ending came.

And I sat there, all alone at 1:30 AM, staring at my TV screen like I was 13 again and freaked out of my mind.  It not only worked, it worked so well that I was afraid to turn out the lights and find my way upstairs in the dark.  That final image, through luck or a stroke of genius, goes straight to the nerve endings in a way that a thousand otherwise superior films have failed to do.  There's nothing great about this flick--not even anything especially good--but it's like the freak that can swallow razor blades at the end of his act.  He does it, and you just...can't...believe it.  

Coming across something like this, an artifact out of the past, is particularly rewarding because so much of what succeeded back then just doesn't hold up now.  The final shot of Sleepaway Camp, like the last scene of Carrie, works because it's like the brains of the filmmakers were momentarily possessed by something darker and more distrubing than the desire to make a quick buck.  It's there and it's gone, but looking back, you can't forget it. 

People ask me, as a horror writer, what's your real life like? I mean, honestly, do you just sit around thinking about scary stuff or is your life scarier than most people's, or what?

Well, today I found a corpse in my refrigerator.

I should explain that it's been in the 90s all week here in central Pennsylvania, and even with the air conditioning on, it gets warm in the house. A couple days ago I started to be aware of a kind of odor in one corner of the kitchen...like rotten food. But I couldn't track it down. Today, as I was getting breakfast for the kids, I smelled it again and this time there was an undeniably feral quality to it, like an animal that's been digging up bodies from the graveyard. Except it was in my kitchen. I got down on my hands and knees and started sniffing, and the smell got worse as I approached the back of the fridge. My wife and I pulled it out and I shined a flashlight back there.

"Get me the screwdriver," I said.

Five minutes later, I had the back of the fridge removed and aimed the flashlight down at the inside corner, where the compressors and fans are. Tucked into the corner was a large furry lump. It looked stiff and clutched together and very, very dead.

See, here's the backstory. A couple months ago, the cat brought a mouse into the house. The mouse wasn't dead at the time. The mouse still had some life left in him. We never found it. And it never got out.

Mouse, found. Stench, identified.

I write horror because I enjoy it.

But real life is already plenty scary.

Take my word for it.

As difficult as it is to believe, I first read Stephen King's The Stand 25 years ago this month when I was 13 years old. I remember because it was June, the month when the action of the novel's first section takes place, and I had a slight early summer cold, just like most of the folks in the book complain about before they fall over dead from Captain Trips, the superflu. There aren't many books that I can remember the exact physical and temporal circumstances under which I read them, but I can remember almost all of them for every King novel I ever read. The Stand is particularly fragrant in my mind -- and now, 25 years later, I have no reason to believe those romantic early teenage reading memories will ever fade. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that I wouldn't be the writer I am now (and maybe not any kind of writer at all) if it weren't for that book, at that particular time.

Now, a quarter-century later, I'm reading it again. It's the extra-large, uncut edition that King released back in the late-80s, a great old honking doorstop of a library hardcover that people are already teasing me about at the pool ("Doing a little light reading?") but I don't care. To my vast relief the book is as good as I remember it being (so many things aren't) and I'm enjoying it just as much as I did the first time around. To me, it's proof that King, at one point in career, was in possession of such astonishing storytelling prowess that even he didn't know quite what to do with it, except jump on and strap himself in for the ride. It's all right there on the page,

I've spent all work outlining my new writing project -- yes, that one.  The secret one.  The one I'm not allowed to talk about.  I remember being in this exact stage with Eat the Dark, in the summer of 2006, outlining, rewriting, re-outlining, making notes on the computer, scrawling notes in a notebook, emailing my editor with progress reports, lying awake nights, thinking about how it's all going to go.   It's draining.  It's exhausting.  There are moments of exhilaration, when you feel the whole wide open highway spreading itself out in front of you, but there are also hours of mind-numbing stop and go traffic, or even worse, what feels like total gridlock. 

Sometimes you have to stop.  You have to dedicate yourself to something so wholly different from what you're doing, just to clear your head.

So I'm going camping.

I'm taking the whole family.  We're headed up to Maine.  Not for a few weeks yet, but this time of year, you have to plan ahead.  We're packing up the Hershey bars, soda, paper plates and beer spending three days up on that fabled coastline and then heading down to Nantucket for the 4th of July to visit some friends.   Just thinking about it, looking at the map and the ocean a hundred yards away from it, I feel better all ready. 

Of course I'll be bringing the laptop along.

Just in case.

I found out yesterday from my agent that Random House has finally sent along the contract for my next book, which is good news for me because that means I'm one step closer to actually being able to talk about it.  I already have one novel coming out in November of 2009, currently titled The Black Wing, but this other one has basically been under a veil of secrecy, and will continue to be until the powers that be make the announcement on their end.  

All of which means that pretty soon, I'm actually going to have to write the thing...