Here we are with the 20th edition of Sunday Scaries and, strangely, Sundays don’t seem to be getting any less scary. Dismaying! Well, there’s only so much any one newsletter can do. Now, let’s take your last few hours of weekend peace and relaxation and ruin them, shall we?

I’m going to take some time this week to do some uncharacteristic self-promotion. I generally put out one book every four years because life is difficult and I hate everything, but in a surprise turn of events, my 2021 novel RED X is receiving a special fifth anniversary edition from Hell’s Hundred, the Soho Press horror imprint that also published The Butcher’s Daughter. This is especially welcome as the original edition’s US release was compromised by the unfolding pandemic. This gives the book another chance in the US market at a time when stories of queer survival are very much in need.

This US-only edition (sorry world) includes a newly commissioned foreword by Gretchen Felker-Martin, author of Manhunt, Cuckoo and Black Flame, and ‘Death in the Village,’ Anthony Oliveira’s essay originally published by Hazlitt. Noted queer genre author Sam J. Miller generously described the book as “One of the greatest horror novels ever written, period.”

This edition also has an eye-catching new cover with a die-cut and a stepback that speaks to Toronto’s queer history with a selection of matchbooks from the city’s bars and clubs of decades past.

It’s a rare and humbling opportunity to return to a work in this way. I wish I could say that the book has somehow grown less relevant since it was first published but sadly that’s not the case. In updating the acknowledgements, I stated: “If you are struggling, if you are fearful, if you are tired and losing hope, please know that you are not alone. We stand in strength together, as we always have, as is our destiny.

“Existence is resistance.”

Now watching: Well, last night’s movie club was a double bill of Lucio Fulci’s delirious zombie-fest City of the Living Dead (1980) and Takashi Miike’s candy-coloured horror-comedy-musical The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001), so it’s no great surprise that I’ve had Fulci’s The Crazies-inflected Zombi 3 (1988) on in the background as I’ve been writing this. Zombie birds, zombie childbirth, flying decapitated zombie heads, the fun never stops.

Now listening: Well, it’s Slayyter/Robyn weekend, so get on those if you haven’t already. But for a fascinating world radio tour from the comfort of your couch, head over to Radio.Garden for an interactive globe-spanning adventure. (Right now I’m checking out Sia’s Flames, being played on a station in Chengdu, China.)

Cool story, sis: Closing out Women in Horror month with Paula D. Ashe’s Anna, An Annihilation, her powerful coda to the formative New French Extremity 2008 film Martyrs, over at The North Meridian Review.

That’s it for this edition. It feels like it’s spring pretty much everywhere other than snowy St. John’s. Keep us in your warmest thoughts. Till we meet again, just remember: