Magical Creatures... Take a Look!

Unicorns are beautiful creatures… until they disembowel you with that horn.

Mermaids are the gorgeous women of the sea… before they try to drown you, of course.

Leprechauns are charming little Irishmen… except when they rip out your gold teeth while you sleep.

Mythical creatures often have two sides, both enchanting and terrifying. I’m so stoked to be a part of a new anthology called Menagerie de Mythique. It’s a collection of short fiction about magical creatures, and it does a really cool job of straddling the line between wonder and danger.

My short, “Drains to the Ocean,” is definitely in the latter category. I did a creepy, little mix-and-match between Ewoks and CHUDs. (Don’t know what a CHUD is? That’s probably for the best.) Anyway, this anthology is lighting it up on Amazon right now, so check it out. How often do you feel enchanted and terrified at the same time?

Diggin' Up Frankenstein

Buzzing electricity.

Reanimated flesh.

A yellow eye slowly opening.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has given pop culture some of its most iconic horror images and ideas. For the last two hundred years, her work impacted all types of books, movies, songs, and TV shows. It’s been reinvented so many times that people forget what is and what is not in the book itself.

Flipping through the book today, modern readers may be surprised by the lack of any flat-headed, green-skinned monster. They might expect something very different from the short, ambiguous descriptions of the laboratory or the long, drawn-out scenes in the Arctic. These ideas have evolved so much in the last two centuries that vast chunks of the novel are near-unrecognizable to those who grew up on the Universal films or, say, Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet Frankenstein.

What better time, then, to rediscover what started it all? 2018 is the bicentennial anniversary of the story’s first printing, so why not check it out before the end of the year? Even better, why not check out the glossy, beautifully printed, fully illustrated version? I was lucky enough to have my art featured in this collection, and I absolutely love how the text and illustrations work together to both recreate and reinvent the story.

The art doesn’t just capture the events of the iconic novel, it filters those events through two centuries of adaptations. It’s a coffee table book with all the original text intact, but it also riffs on that text in ways that even surprised me.

Now, this is a big project with a big price tag to match, but I really stand by it. The thing is gorgeous. And just like the monster itself, it’s pieced together from dozens of different sources, mixed and matched in a way that makes everything come alive.