Bram Stoker’s great grand-nephew Dacre Stoker, who penned Dracula the Un-Dead, the official sequel to the 1897 classic, made the pilgrimage to the author’s final resting place as part of a two-day symposium to celebrate the blood curdling success of the godfather of gore.

Seth Grahame-Smith’s personal take on Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes – “I first read Something Wicked in middle school. Not for class, but on the advice of my stepfather — a used- and rare-book dealer who kept some 5,000 volumes of horror and science fiction in our basement. I’d already tried my hand at Bradbury’s other books, but he hadn’t yet grabbed a hold of me with the sharp claws I’d hoped. But then, I was 12, and not quite ready. Something Wicked, however, was tailor-made.”

In the first deal of its kind, the San Jose, California based Winchester Mystery House considered the “world’s most haunted house” is authorizing Hammer, an Exclusive Media company, the use of its unique property for a feature film based on its legendary story. Hammer has optioned all rights to develop and produce the feature film with Imagination Design Works (IDW) and Nine/8 Entertainment, it was announced today by Simon Oakes, Vice-Chairman of Exclusive Media and President & CEO of Hammer, and Guy East and Nigel Sinclair, Co-Chairmen of Exclusive Media.

With the all the superhero blockbusters hogging theaters this summer, it seems that film producers are relying more and more on comic books for their source material. On top of the big-budget superhero movies, the success of The Walking Dead TV series, and films like 30 Days of Night and Blade, are perhaps a sign that we’ll be seeing more horror comics being adapted for the screen in the near future. While the horror genre hasn’t always been the most accessible, recent trends in pop culture have veered towards the darker side of fiction, opening the door for horror comic adaptation. Bloody Disgusting has done some wishful thinking and put together a list of comics they’re dying to see in live action, some of which are already in the works.

Bethesda Softworks, the publisher behind Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, is teaming up with the creator of Resident Evil on a new survival horror game. Shinji Mikami and his studio, Tango Gameworks, will develop the title code-named “Zwei.”

Taking Submissions: The Inanimates I

These three are very different books, not at all aimed at the same target audience, so it’s interesting to see how each author decided to handle the werewolf mythos. The Pack is pulpy adult horror fiction; Wereworld is middle grade fantasy; The Last Werewolf is adult literary fiction. Rise of the Werewolves: 3 Very Different Stories About Lycanthropes

Profile Books is re-inventing the “choose your own adventure” genre for the digital age with the launch of Frankenstein, an interactive app based on Mary Shelley’s 19th-century horror novel.

Riven, the latest tale set to debut in Dark Horse Comics’ legendary anthology Dark Horse Presents, marks a new beginning for horror fans. Dark Horse Comics recently announced the Riven graphic novel, the third collaboration between cowriters Bo Hampton (The Legend of Sleepy Hollow) and Robert Tinnell (The Wicked West), which is slated to hit stores August 22.

If you thought everything Stephen King’s ever written has already been filmed, you’d be wrong. SyFy has found one of the few that got away: The Eyes of the Dragon is now in development for American TV. Published in 1987, this was King’s next book after It, but fans who expected more trademark horror were a little thrown. The book begins: “Once, in a kingdom called Delain, there was a King with two sons. Delain was a very old kingdom and it had had hundreds of Kings, perhaps even thousands; when time goes on long enough, not even historians can remember everything.”

Stir in a little Lovecraft and magic, season it with apocalyptic gloom, and you have Joe Golum and the Drowning City. Horror author Christopher Golden and artist Mike Mignola, creator of the comic Hellboy, have collaborated on an illustrated novel. New York is “The Drowning City” set in an alternate world where earthquakes in 1922 start disasters that culminate with half of Manhattan under water.

Fans of H.P. Lovecraft are likely to be familiar with his subgenre of weird fiction — best described as a cross between horror and science fiction, with a healthy dose of suspense. In the third-annual H.P. Lovecraft Festival, presented by Radio Theatre and the Horse Trade Theater Group, several of Lovecraft’s weird stories are transformed into a theatrical experience that explores the fear of the unknown.

GenreCon, a free literary convention featuring several mystery, science fiction, horror and fantasy authors, returns to Sarnia Library on Saturday, May 5. Providing fans and local writers with an opportunity to talk with other genre fans and writers, GenreCon presents a wide range of panels on writing, reading, marketing, electronic publishing, genre mystery, horror, fantasy and science fiction.

Resident Writer Kit Reed has been nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award. Her book, What Wolves Know, published in spring 2011 by PS Publishing, was nominated in the category of Single Author Collection.

Stephen King’s newest effort, The Wind Through the Keyhole, combines two of the author’s more masterful skills: creating short stories with similar themes in a single package, and writing chapters set in his Western-tinged fantasy The Dark Tower series, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year.

Death of a Saint is the second in the Mall Rats horror series by South African writing phenomenon Lily Herne, which is the pen name for the composite efforts of a local mother-and-daughter writing team, Sarah and Savannah Lotz.

Terror Comes Knocking is the second of Aaron Paul Lazar’s Sam Moore novels, a series which expands his habitual country mystery genre into the paranormal. Sam Moore, a retired family doctor in rural upstate New York, is a keen gardener.

Joey Esposito is the comics editor over at IGN and he recently stepped into the world of comics creation with his new series Footprints. The comic details a mystery being solved by the most unlikely of noir characters, the world’s cryptids (Bigfoot, Nessie, The Jersey Devil, etc.). Exclusive Interview: Footprints’ Joey Esposito

IFC Films is treating The Moth Diaries, a moody bildungs roman that also features a vampire, as a horror film. In trailers and promotional images, IFC is using Moth’s most exploitable scene, in which a teenage girl is showered in blood, to highlight the film’s more generic elements. Director Mary Harron is on record calling it “a chillingly atmospheric horror story with real emotional depth.”

An interview horror author Ray Wallace, who is the author of The Nameless, Escape from Zombie City, and the new release The Hell Season. More than two dozen of his short stories have appeared in various publications. His story “One of the Six” took first place in CHIZINE’s second annual fiction contest. He now writes reviews for CHIZINE and SFReader.com.

“Zombies have represented everything from communism to consumerism,” Seth Grahame-Smith said of his first smash novel Pride & Prejudice & Zombies at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Book. “All I wanted to do was take Jane Austen’s themes and humor and put them in an even more absurd landscape. It’s the same thing in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. The vampires are slavery. They steal your life force to enrich themselves. That’s what slavery is.”

Werewolf fiction is borderline-anthropomorphic, and Corpus Lupus is especially so. At least these werewolves are sentient, not feral dumb beasts. But the narrator, homicide detective Lieut. Larry Highridge, and his Pack spend most of their time in this novel in human form. It is a good murder mystery/horror novel, if a rather repulsive one; just not a very anthropomorphic one. Review: ‘Corpus Lupus’, by Phil Geusz

Stephen King: “I never think of stories as made things; I think of them as found things. As if you pull them out of the ground, and you just pick them up. Someone once told me that that was me low-balling my own creativity. That might or might not be the case. But still, on the story I am working on now, I do have some unresolved problem. It doesn’t keep me awake at nights. I feel like when it comes down, it will be there…” This is a quote from an interview Neil Gaiman did with Stephen King. You can read the interview in its entirety on Gaiman’ blog.

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