Author of adventure/thriller and horror fiction

MY EX, THE ANTICHRIST Releases Today!

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My Ex, the Antichrist releases July 1, 2025 from Hachette in trade paperback, all popular eBook formats, and a multi-narrator audiobook in all bookstores, libraries, and online retailers!

When a rock musician learns her ex is the Biblical Antichrist, she must find a way to stop him before he grows powerful enough to end the world. MTV’s Behind the Music meets The Omen in this novel about music, free will, and the apocalypse.

“It’s a familiar story: the starry rise and tragic fall of a rock band. This is not that story. This is one you haven’t heard—a tale of divine prophecy and a breakup. Oh, and the apocalypse…”

1999: At the Armageddon Battle of the Bands, the Shivers fought Universal Priest in an epic musical showdown. What started the shocking riot that claimed the lives of nine teens?

2010: At the height of stardom, the Shivers’ frontwoman Lily Lawless walked into a police station to confess to murder. Why did she do it, and why did she wait ten years to confess?

2011: The band broke up after Lily’s arrest, its members refusing to talk to the press. What secrets were they protecting?

NOW: In this oral history, Lily and the rest of the Shivers finally tell all about how a pop-punk band that inspired a generation might have saved the world.

Online, you can get it here and here.

What early reviewers are saying:

“Outré even by the standards of supernatural horror fiction, DiLouie’s ostentatious, 1990s-set latest proposes that the Antichrist is the front man for a Pennsylvania art band and that the apocalypse he threatens can only be averted through the intervention of a punk pop group headed by his ex-girlfriend… DiLouie seeds the narrative with enough pop theology to undergird its tongue-in-cheek excesses, which include a cabal of rogue clergy wielding rocket launchers and a Universal Priest stage performance that unfolds like a mash-up of The Omen and This Is Spinal Tap. It’s a wild ride.” —Publisher’s Weekly

“I am a massive DiLouie fan and wait patiently for every new release. And when My Ex, The Antichrist showed up in my mail box, I was giddy. And as a kid that grew up listening to pop-punk and devoured musician biographies under my high school desk–this was everything I needed … I just loved everything about this book.” -Horror Bound

“Craig DiLouie uses music as a framework in this dangerous, outrageous good versus evil headbanger of a story… This is a fun one, folks, don’t miss it!” -Books, Bones & Buffy

“My Ex, the Antichrist is a rollercoaster of emotions, with moments of creepiness, heartfelt sincerity, and outright goofiness. DiLouie balances these shifts with ease, hitting a variety of emotional notes that make the experience deeply enjoyable.” -Capes & Tights

“A tale of love, self-discovery, and following your dreams, all told through the twisted lens of a rockumentary about Armageddon. Craig DiLouie brings his sharp mix of heart and horror to the end of the world with this clever story about rock n’ roll, relationships, and destiny.” —NYT bestselling author Peter Clines

“One hell of a performance! With My Ex, the AntiChrist, Craig DiLouie once again proves he is a master of the epistolary genre. Immersive, compelling, and chillingly plausible. It’s as if you were there. Resounding.” —Lee Murray, five-time Bram Stoker Awards-winning author of Grotesque: Monster Stories

“The ultimate battle draped in rock and roll… DiLouie’s latest novel is an exciting glimpse into music history and the enigmatic 2000s with a timeless tale about the end of the world and love, of all things, as its connective tissue. What a wild ride.” —L. Marie Wood, author of The Realm Trilogy and The Promise Keeper

“Thrumming with energy and tension, My Ex, The Antichrist is a horror-filled love letter to music and how it can save our souls.” —Kaaron Warren, author of The Underhistory

“DiLouie assuredly weaves a punk band’s rites of passage with the dark arts, crafting an occult love story from burnt-out memories and scavenged, sacred hearts.” —Andrew F. Sullivan, author of The Marigold and The Handyman Method

“Craig DiLouie is the sly officiant presiding over this marriage of heady theology and anthemic punk rock. This book weaves age-old philosophical conundrums into a sensitive, aching, and raw portrait of a band’s rags-to-riches tale. With its lively oral history format, reading My Ex, The Antichrist is like letting Behind the Music take you to hell and back.” – Andy Marino, author of The Swarm

“A diabolical twist on rock and roll saviors, My Ex, The Antichrist conjures a horrifying riff on the classic question: Can rock and roll really save your soul? Craig DiLouie spins a lush account of late 90s rock, a talented but struggling band, and a harrowing brush with the divine conflict between good and evil into an atomic-powered concept album of a novel that shreds the literary walls. Thoughtful, heartbreaking, and unsettling, My Ex, The Antichrist is a rock and roll parable for our times.” —James Chambers, Bram Stoker Award and Scribe Award-winning author of On the Night Border and Three Chords of Chaos

28 YEARS LATER

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28 DAYS LATER marked a salient reinvention of the zombie genre, providing an infection in the blood that turns people into enraged homicidal maniacs. 28 WEEKS LATER was the polished but less punchy and visceral follow-up. With 28 YEARS LATER, director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland team up again to revisit this sad universe, returning to its grungy, episodic roots with a new film that explores fresh weird and blood-soaked terrain.

28 DAYS LATER was a big influence for my zombie novels back in the day. From the gritty look and music to the desolation to the terror of the infected to the sheer desperation of the survivors, I loved it. I liked 28 WEEKS LATER–especially the insane opening scene–but didn’t love it. Tonally, it was so different, and when the SHTF, it ended too quickly for me. So, I went into 28 YEARS LATER ready for anything, especially after watching the off-the-hook trailer with the wild song where an actor recites Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Boots.”

Anyway, England has fallen due to a blood-borne virus that causes homicidal rage and shedding blood. The infected immediately either kill you or infect you. The authorities disinfected the island and tried to bring the survivors back to repopulate London, but a fresh outbreak destroyed the settlement. The virus was pushed back from mainland Europe, and the UK is permanently quarantined, leaving the human survivors to fend for themselves.

In a community surviving on a small island off mainland UK, 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams, who pulls his weight as the lead) lives with his father and ailing mother. The community has a strange culture with traditions around conquering death, including masks and boys going ashore to kill an infected. When Spike learns of an isolated and possibly insane doctor tending a perpetual bonfire of the dead, he sets out in the hopes of getting his mother cured, learning to respect instead of fear death in the process. An apocalyptic bildungsroman. Along the way, Spike encounters various survivors and variants on the infected as the Rage virus has mutated.

Overall, it was fun and weird and different, throwing out the fast-food menu of the franchise for a far grungier vision that hearkens back to the original. At the end, Spike meets up with someone in a setup for a continuation of the story, which I would definitely watch.

As far as criticisms, some of the editing is heavy-handed, and Boyle’s trick of occasionally freeze-framing during action scenes doesn’t work for me. The first act has cutaways to British documentary war footage and old movies of medieval warfare, which was odd and unnecessary. The overall story’s episodic nature is similar to Garland’s CIVIL WAR. Story wise, I think it would have been better to convey more tangibly what Spike is rejecting about his home and why beyond the philosophical theme, and make him a little older. If it’s a simple story set in an apocalyptic world, they should have leaned on it. Also, I’m surprised Spike finds a home in the wild world when it’s obvious he very likely won’t survive–it’s not really clear he understands and accepts this. I don’t want to overthink a zombie movie, but this one does seem to reach for something bigger.

Anyway, no matter. Overall, I thought 28 YEARS LATER was a worthy addition to the Rage universe. It didn’t trigger a hungry sense of wonder like the first movie did and it wasn’t quite as visceral, but it was weird, punchy, exciting, and a fun ride.

WOUNDS by Nathan Ballingrud

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Nathan Ballingrud’s WOUNDS is a collection of short stories and a novella about ordinary people connecting with the border of Hell. Packed with ideas, it blew my mind and warmed up this reader’s jaded horror heart.

Yes, I’ve been jaded lately as a reader, with too many books bought only to be DNF’d. (That’s a statement on me, not the general state of fiction.) So, when I was recommended Nathan Ballingrud’s WOUNDS, I was surprised to very quickly fall in love with Ballingrud’s fearless imagination, big ideas, and tantalizing and surprising mythology of Hell.

In these stories, an order of monks lives at the border of Hell, working on the nether region’s Atlas. Strange creatures overrun a city and turn the dead into a musical instrument. A bartender discovers an underground ritual that summons angels. And more…

The writing is terrific–Ballingrud knows what he’s doing–but it’s the cascading ideas, one striking and surprising image after another often confronted through the lens of ordinary people as characters caught up in the horror, that really won me over. I felt like I could read a hundred of these stories just to keep learning a little more about Ballingrud’s mythology of Hell, which had a way of filling in some detail only to add even more mystery.

Highly recommended–even for jaded horror fans.

ANDOR, Season 2

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I gave up on STAR WARS years ago, but ANDOR accomplished something remarkable–it elevated the franchise and gave it a much-needed boost of gravitas. The second season tied off the story beautifully.

I was 12 when the first STAR WARS came out. My mind exploded. I went to see it nine times. When the franchise returned with the second trilogy, I slogged through them until eventually I gave up, just as I did with every other beloved franchise from ALIEN to INDIANA JONES to James Bond as they just got, well, dumber.

So, I had little interest when ANDOR appeared. I did catch ROGUE ONE, which everyone seemed to like, and I personally found it overbaked with an unlikable protagonist, so hearing Cassian Andor’s backstory carried little appeal. But everyone kept talking up how different and deep ANDOR was, so I checked it out and, benefited by low expectations, quite enjoyed it for its intelligent writing and fairly realistic depiction of how dissent becomes active resistance against tyranny. STAR WAS as gritty political thriller–I liked it.

The show is really about empire and rebellion, fascism and the the desire to resist it, and how resistance requires sacrifice and often resorting to tactics that mirror the evils of the oppressive regime. (Strangely, there are some people who watched the show and rooted for the fascists, go figure.) In the first season, we primarily follow Cassian Andor (Diega Luna), an orphan looking for a shortcut to a comfortable life who through circumstance winds up pushed to radicalism, one man’s journey to become a revolutionary. While he simply wants to be left alone, the police state will not allow it, pushing him and others until they put their lives on the line to resist. For them, there’s little inspirational talk about democracy and way more base resistance to being dominated, used, and destroyed. Simple justice, often taking the form of an eye for an eye.

In Season 2, Andor is now an agent working for Luthen Rael (the excellent Stellan Skarsgård). From what I understand, ANDOR was originally conceived as five seasons but cut off at two, and instead of phoning it in like the last season of GAME OF THRONES and THE EXPANSE, the writers went all out to condense the story into something powerful. Each episode takes place a year apart, providing a countdown to the commissioning and use of the planet-killing Death Star. This results in an episodic evolution of the Rebellion itself from an underground terrorist organization to an openly operating military force that rejects the ignoble tactics of its origin. We see a senator forced to accept a lethal decision to protect the Rebellion during a wedding scene (with a banger techno song) and then make a brave, high-risk stand against the Emperor, the provocation of a planet to rebel so it can be crushed, the portrayal of those who serve the Empire for personal gain as competent bureaucrats instead of cartoon villains, and more.

It all culminates in Andor accepting one more assignment, which results in him joining the adventure of ROGUE ONE, which I rewatched and liked so much more as a series finale of sorts.

My only criticism of this season and the show as a whole is despite a huge effort to make the worlds look lived in, they never really do. Sometimes, it’s like a weird space Middle Ages where a single city represents a whole planet, and again despite some good efforts, often a lot of willing suspension of disbelief is needed to go with the locations being real places. Contrast it with GAME OF THRONES, for example, which shows how to do world-building right (at least until characters started teleporting). This was largely a function of budget, of course.

Overall, ANDOR is a real standout show, so different from the rest of the STAR WARS franchise, challenging in its ideas of what real rebellion looks like, and the true cost of freedom.

MY EX, THE ANTICHRIST Coming July 1, 2025

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MY EX, THE ANTICHRIST releases July 1, 2025 from Hachette in trade paperback, all popular eBook formats, and a multi-narrator audiobook in all bookstores, libraries, and online retailers!

You can pre-order it here and here.

One of “12 Must-Read Horror Books of 2025” —Novel Suspects

“Outré even by the standards of supernatural horror fiction, DiLouie’s ostentatious, 1990s-set latest proposes that the Antichrist is the front man for a Pennsylvania art band and that the apocalypse he threatens can only be averted through the intervention of a punk pop group headed by his ex-girlfriend… DiLouie seeds the narrative with enough pop theology to undergird its tongue-in-cheek excesses, which include a cabal of rogue clergy wielding rocket launchers and a Universal Priest stage performance that unfolds like a mash-up of The Omen and This Is Spinal Tap. It’s a wild ride.” —Publisher’s Weekly

“A tale of love, self-discovery, and following your dreams, all told through the twisted lens of a rockumentary about Armageddon. Craig DiLouie brings his sharp mix of heart and horror to the end of the world with this clever story about rock n’ roll, relationships, and destiny.” —NYT bestselling author Peter Clines

“One hell of a performance! With My Ex, the AntiChrist, Craig DiLouie once again proves he is a master of the epistolary genre. Immersive, compelling, and chillingly plausible. It’s as if you were there. Resounding.” —Lee Murray, five-time Bram Stoker Awards-winning author of Grotesque: Monster Stories

“The ultimate battle draped in rock and roll… DiLouie’s latest novel is an exciting glimpse into music history and the enigmatic 2000s with a timeless tale about the end of the world and love, of all things, as its connective tissue. What a wild ride.” —L. Marie Wood, author of The Realm Trilogy and The Promise Keeper

“Thrumming with energy and tension, My Ex, The Antichrist is a horror-filled love letter to music and how it can save our souls.” —Kaaron Warren, author of The Underhistory

“DiLouie assuredly weaves a punk band’s rites of passage with the dark arts, crafting an occult love story from burnt-out memories and scavenged, sacred hearts.” —Andrew F. Sullivan, author of The Marigold and The Handyman Method

“Craig DiLouie is the sly officiant presiding over this marriage of heady theology and anthemic punk rock. This book weaves age-old philosophical conundrums into a sensitive, aching, and raw portrait of a band’s rags-to-riches tale. With its lively oral history format, reading My Ex, The Antichrist is like letting Behind the Music take you to hell and back.” – Andy Marino, author of The Swarm

“A diabolical twist on rock and roll saviors, My Ex, The Antichrist conjures a horrifying riff on the classic question: Can rock and roll really save your soul? Craig DiLouie spins a lush account of late 90s rock, a talented but struggling band, and a harrowing brush with the divine conflict between good and evil into an atomic-powered concept album of a novel that shreds the literary walls. Thoughtful, heartbreaking, and unsettling, My Ex, The Antichrist is a rock and roll parable for our times.” —James Chambers, Bram Stoker Award and Scribe Award-winning author of On the Night Border and Three Chords of Chaos