The Bookshelf of Jimmy Utah

"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them." –Joseph Brodsky

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Chasing the Boogeyman: A Novel

Richard Chizmar

"And still the questions remained: Why had the killings suddenly stopped? Was the Boogeyman waiting, biding his time before striking again? Or had he finally given up and left town, or maybe even gotten locked up for some unrelated offense?

I knew Detective Harper was asking himself the same questions day and night, and was in a much better position to formulate answers, but that didn't stop me from wondering. The Boogeyman was a part of my life now a part of all our lives. It was during those long, midday walks - Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones blaring on my headphones - that I first began contemplating writing a book about the murders. If my former next-door neighbor Bernie Gentile was right, time would continue to march forward, the residents of Edgewood would eventually move on with their lives, and memories of the four dead girls would fade away until they were nothing more than a footnote in the town's history. Thta didn't feel right to me."

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The Invisibles: Book Two

Grant Morrison

"Put your money where your fucking mouth is, dickhead."

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The Invisibles: Book One

Grant Morrison

"Ah, I feel a sadness on me, Dane. That's how the Irish people say it. In their language, you can't say, 'I am sad,' or 'I am happy.' They understood what we English have long forgot. We're not our sadness. We're not our happiness or our pain but our language hypnotizes us and traps us in little labelled boxes."

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My Heart Is A Chainsaw

Stephen Graham Jones

"Horror's not a symptom, it's a love affair."

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Verbal Judo: The Gentle Art of Persuasion

George J. Thompson

"A samurai warfare state of mind called mushin is defined as 'the still center,' or the ability to stay calm, read your opponent, and attempt to redirect his aggression in a more positive way. If you cannot keep a still center, you cannot stay in control of yourself or the situation.

The mushin state underlies both physical judo and Verbal Judo—a mind-mouth harmony, if you will. The English word closest to the idea of mushin is disinterested. Many make the mistake of defining disinterested as uninterested. In fact, disinterested means impartial. Dis is from the Latin root meaning 'not' and interested is from the Latin word meaning 'biased.' So the word means 'not biased, open, flexible.' As you can imagine, those are the three great traits of not only a good police officer, but also of any good communicator.

A closed mind misreads people and makes terrible errors. The flexible mind has the surviving strength of the willow tree, which survives even in heavy winds because it bends, it is malleable. This is precisely what we have to do and be when under the influence of verbal abuse.

Being malleable is always superior to that which is unmovable, thus the judo principle of controlling things by going along with them—mastery through adaptation. This allows you the strength to deal with people different from yourself."

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The Final Girl Support Group

Grady Hendrix

"Dying isn't the important thing. It's nothing more than the punctuation mark on the end of your life. It's everything that came before that matters. Punctuation marks, most people skip right over them. They don't even have a sound."

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Denali: A Literary Anthology

Bill Sherwonit (Editor)

"From Athabascan distant-time legends to contemporary tales of modern-day adventures, the storytellers in this anthology powerfully portray the wild nature of Denali, the High One, and the vast wilderness region that surrounds The Mountain. They tell us of the landscape's dangers, its obstacles, and its abundant wildlife; and they share its allures, whether gold or mountaintops, snow-white sheep or wilderness solitude. Here we discover why men and women who are drawn to this place find hope, challenge, inspiration, and sometimes sorrow - in Denali and the broad shadow that The Mountain casts. We learn, too, of the new possibilities for personal discovery, both past and present, and the essence of the 'wilderness spirit' that draws people here and sometimes will not let go. Finally, we learn of threats to the region's wildness that prompt writers and other storytellers to continue sharing the story of Denali and the ancient magic that must be protected."

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Taking Shape: Developing Halloween From Script to Scream

Dustin McNeill, Travis Mullins

"With Taking Shape, we wanted to celebrate Halloween's incredible forty-year history in a unique way. That meant taking a close look at scenes and ideas that did and didn't make the big screen. In writing this tome, we were fortunate to speak with filmmakers from all eleven entries for insight into their creative processes. In a sense, these are the stories behind the stories. Taking Shape is a book of origins, inspirations, callbacks, easter eggs, obscure trivia, deleted scenes, alternate versions, unused ideas, studio meddling, test audiences, reinventions, and so much more. It's a celebration of Halloween at its best and worst."

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Screaming for Pleasure: How Horror Makes You Happy and Healthy

S.A. Bradley

"One of the things I genuinely love about horror is how inclusive it is. Horror is such a universal storytelling style that something as quintessentially Texan as 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' can be loved in Japan, and something as Japanese as 'Ju-on: The Grudge' can be a hit in Texas. It's a style that can be pure nightmare fuel, or it can be a slow-burn tale of dread, or allegorical social commentary, or even a satire, but it will still be unmistakably horror. There are dozens of horror subgenres out there, and there's bound to be one with which you'll fall in love.

Why do we watch? We watch horror movies because we want to connect to our humanness. We want to know what still scares us. We want to know that we are still shockable in a world where the abominable is the new normal. We want to have a handshake with our shadows and know that we aren't alone in our dark thoughts."

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Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and 80's Horror Fiction

Grady Hendrix

"Horror is a woman’s genre, and it has been all the way back to the oldest horror novel still widely read today: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, daughter of pioneering feminist author Mary Wollstonecraft. Ann Radcliffe’s gothic novels (The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian) made her the highest-paid writer of the late eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Charlotte Riddell were book-writing machines, turning out sensation novels and ghost stories by the pound. Edith Wharton wrote ghost stories before becoming a novelist of manners, and Vernon Lee (real name Violet Paget) wrote elegant tales of the uncanny that rival anything by Henry James. Three of Daphne du Maurier’s stories became Hitchcock films (Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, The Birds), and Shirley Jackson’s singular horror novel The Haunting of Hill House made her one of the highest-regarded American writers of the twentieth century."

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Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

Michael Eric Dyson

"The most radical action a white person can take is to acknowledge this denied privilege, to say, 'Yes, you’re right. In our institutional structures, and in deep psychological structures, our underlying assumption is that our lives are worth more than yours.'"

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The Hunger

Alma Katsu

"She was continually shocked by the fact that the others seemed to forget the obvious: that the mountains, like most beautiful things in this world, were deadly."

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Nightmares in Red, White and Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film

Joseph Maddrey

"American filmmakers and moviegoers have developed the horror genre by continually re-imagining the most basic nightmares. Even the causal viewer can recognize the repetition of certain characters and formulas in horror films - according to one critic, they are as fixed as stations of the cross - but the monsters themselves shape-shift from decade to decade as the fears of the popular audience change. This is perhaps what has allowed the genre to thrive for so many years - it is at once timeless and firmly rooted in the world we know."

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On Juneteenth

Annette Gordon-Reed

"Love does not require taking an uncritical stance toward the object of one’s affections. In truth, it often requires the opposite. We can’t be of real service to the hopes we have for places—and people, ourselves included—without a clear-eyed assessment of their (and our) strengths and weaknesses."

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The Shining

Stephen King

"Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters."

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Why Vegan? : Eating Ethically

Peter Singer

"Intensive animal production is a heavy user of fossil fuels and a major source of pollution of both air and water. It releases large quantities of methane and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We are risking unpredictable changes to the climate of our planet - which means, ultimately, the lives of billions of people, not to mention the extinction of untold thousands of species of plants and animals unable to cope with changing conditions - for the sake of more hamburgers. A diet heavy in animal products, catered to by intensive animal production, is a disaster for animals, the environment, and the health of those who eat it."

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A Brief History of Vice: How Bad Behavior Built Civilization

Robert Evans

"History, as taught by schools, has white washed the drunkenness out of the past. It has minimized the influence of drugs on history's great thinkers, and covered up the impact of prostitution and insults on human development."