Coming October 27—just in time for Halloween! VALLEY OF THE DAMNED My new folk horror novel set in the Blue Ridge Mountains. —Inspired by my own experience living through Hurricane Helene in South Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains.— When a catastrophic hurricane isolates a small mountain community in the Carolinas, something ancient breaks free. Roads are destroyed, power is gone, and help cannot reach the valley. An aging guardian and a handful of ordinary residents must confront Spearfinger, a monster drawn from Cherokee legend, before she hunts down everyone they love.

I'm hearing things both locally and nationally about Dems voting straight ticket and then checking their ballots and finding that they were switched to Republican. Is this a real issue? Seems scary to me.

I'm a full-time novelist who writes epic fantasy, horror, and the occasional thing that refuses to stay dead. I'm currently querying a dark-comedy novel titled "Rural Zombie." 🏆 Winner of 27 international awards.

When you're on page 212 of revision 8 and you see the light at the end of the tunnel, it's like hitting mile 25 of a marathon. You're kinda over it.

Horror readers and writers: I’ll soon be querying a bawdy, profane dark comedy set in a rural community where heavily armed locals have a live-and-let-live attitude toward zombies—until everything goes to hell. Can anyone suggest recent book comps with a Widow’s Bay vibe?

From a writer's POV: Perfect Beta reader: This really touched me, great job overall. You might want to consider ... I was wondering ... Here's an idea ... This character could use ... Not-so-perfect Beta reader: This needs a lot of work. Let me tell you how to rewrite it.

Ha!

For the past 29 installments of my free newsletter, I’ve been taking a close look at Volume 1 of "The Death Wizard Chronicles," using excerpts from the novel to explore what happens in the story, and more importantly, how and why it happens. jimmelvin.substack.com/p/the…

Part of me wants Darline Graham to lose because she's such an idiot. But another part of me wants her to win because she's such an idiot. You know what I mean?

So awesome! Cornell Lab eNews: August 23, 2026 200 million birds were flying above the U.S. last Monday night, a sign that autumn migration is well underway, even in mid-August.

I just finished the first draft of my dark comedy zombie novel (100K). I've now written 3 novels in the past 9 months. Zombie novels, TV shows, and movies have always been a guilty pleasure of mine, so this one was a lot of fun to write. Now comes the grueling revision process.