If you’re looking for this week’s Women in Horror Year recap, it’s at the end of this newsletter. That’s because the list will grow exponentially throughout the year.
Before that, however, greetings from The Verve, a hotel on the outskirts of Boston that is part of The Tapestry Collection by Hilton. The hotel’s full, official name is The Verve Hotel Boston Natick Tapestry Collection by Hilton which is an unwieldy mouthful of mish-mash, but oddly suitable for lodging that feels like it was designed by a bunch of TikTok influencers using AI while micro-dosing on some new hallucinogenic drug nobody over the age of 25 has ever heard of.
It is 4am on Saturday morning as I write this, and I am unhappy because there is no coffee to be found in the hotel, except for the coffeemaker in my room, which I dare not use because the latest TikTok lifehack trend involves young people putting their dirty underwear inside their hotel room coffeemakers and then running hot water through them to clean the soiled item of clothing. And this has the vibe of the type of hotel such a person would be attracted to, so I’d be a brain-damaged fool to use the hotel room coffee pot.
The hallways and corridors are filled with random kitsch and pop art, but again, it all distinctly feels one step removed from any sort of human design. There are random candle shrines devoted to Ozzy Osborne and Hulk Hogan, complimented by framed print-outs of their Wikipedia pages on lime green and neon pink copier paper. There is a random Honda motorcycle in the lobby, along with framed pictures of James Dean, Evel Knievel, and Batgirl hanging behind it (all posed on motorcycles which are not, in fact, the Honda), and a sign advertising the bike as a ‘Selfie Zone’.
The hotel lobby music, an employee enthusiastically told me, “is all oldies that fit the vibe”. Which mostly just seems to be The Breakfast Club soundtrack. Which I’ll allow is now “oldies” given that film and soundtrack came out the year I graduated high school, but “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” decidedly doesn’t fit the ‘vibe’ of this place, unless I’ve fundamentally misunderstood the sentiment of the song for many decades, and Simple Minds were instead signing about jamming a bunch of random pop culture stuff together and calling it art.
Each door on my floor is adorned with a spirograph drawing that glows in the dark, and a painting of some random game from the 1980s — Pac-Man, Rubik’s Cube, Simon, etc. This has the effect, at four in the fucking morning when you’re wandering around these liminal spaces looking for a cup of goddamned coffee, of making one feel they’re in a version of The Great Northern from Twin Peaks, except a version that’s run by a bunch of Silicon Valley tech bros and also possibly Ernest P. Worrell.
There is a painting above the toilet in my room that looks like what a damaged generative AI might think Marilyn Monroe would look like after being dragged through a septic tank, and it is accompanied by a permutation of Betty Boop’s famous slogan, except tweaked for the bathroom.
“Poop Poop Pee Do!” This monstrosity hangs at eye level, so every time I stand above the toilet to pee, this nonsense is staring me in the face. Now… to be fair, I don’t know for sure if AI was used to make that or not (but if human hands did indeed make that painting, then those human hands should be broken with a ball-peen hammer. But this abomination, which hangs outside the bathroom, was most certainly vomited out by AI. The hands are a dead giveaway.
Those hands are AI. And if they aren’t AI — if those hands were indeed painted by human hands, then again, those human hands should be beaten with a hammer.
You can tell a lot about the health of a society by looking at its culture.
Poop Poop Pee Do, indeed…
Good morning. I’m Brian Keene and this is Letters From the Labyrinth, a long-running weekly newsletter for friends, fans, and family.
We had a great day at the library in Ashland, Massachusetts yesterday. Long lines and lots of people. I worry sometimes, when the lines are long like that, and there’s enough time to say hello, sign your book, and thank you, that not everyone is getting the experience they’d hoped for in attending. But each of us made ourselves available before and after and in-between, so hopefully everyone was happy. I know we authors certainly were.
It was particularly great to see my old pal Jack Haringa, whom I’ve known since around 1997 or so. And speaking of long-time writer pals, upholding a tradition first started by Geoff Cooper and Mary SanGiovanni was back in 2001, Joe Hill stole my leather jacket. But unlike Coop and Mary, I got it back after a few hours (but only after he and Chris Golden searched the pockets looking for joints or throwing stars or fireworks and coming up only with a tin of Altoids).
A few pics from the day.
Folks have been asking where I got that shirt. Believe it or not, I found it at an Amish Framer’s Market here in Central PA.
Next signing is April 25 at the Ephrata Public Library 550 South Reading Road, Ephrata, PA 17522.
One thing many of us talked about with each other yesterday was the unfortunate passing of the great Thomas Tessier. A versatile writer who could switch styles at the drop of a hat and move between subgenres with ease, Tom was a sweet, smart, shy, quiet and unassuming guy. Over and over again, it was commented on how kind and supportive he’d been over the years. And of course, there was much discussion of his work. Many favorites were brought up. (My personal faves are Phantom, World of Hurt, and The Nightwalker, which is one of the best werewolf novels I’ve ever read).
He was the winner of two International Horror Guild awards, and a three-time nominee for the Bram Stoker award. He, like so many others, should have absolutely received a Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement award, but, like so many others, did not. (This is an issue that I’m becoming increasingly frustrated by with the passing of each of these legends, and I know I’m not the only one. But this isn’t the time or the place for a lengthy essay about that. Luckily, there are a wealth of people who recognize his contributions to the genre, regardless of whether an organization ever officially acknowledged those contributions or not).
Memory eternal, as my pal Nick Mamatas says when these things happen. And as long as folks are reading his books, his memory will be just that.
On this week’s episode of KEENEVERSATIONS, I propose that the practice of online merchants allowing unmoderated customer reviews is contributing to the decline of civilization. Not every opinion has merit, and not every screed has value. Listen now via Patreon or Spotify.
Currently Watching: Survivor season 50.
Currently Reading: A Better Kind of Hate by Beau Johnson.
Currently Listening: Child of the Kindly South by W.D. Miller, and Sirius/XM’s Howard 100, Howard 101, Outlaw Country, Ozzy’s Boneyard, and Rock The Bells.
And that does it for this week. Thanks for reading. See you back here next Sunday.
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