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MY EX, THE ANTICHRIST Coming July 1, 2025

June 10, 2025 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

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

Filed Under: Apocalyptic, APOCALYPTIC/HORROR, Books, CRAIG'S WORK, MEDIA YOU MIGHT LIKE, My Ex, The Antichrist, The Blog

UZUMAKI

December 7, 2024 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

UZUMAKI: SPIRAL INTO HORROR (Max/Adult Swim) is a four-part miniseries based on Junjo Ito’s haunting manga about a Japanese town haunted by a “spiral curse.” After being disappointed by the 2000 live-action adaptation, I checked out this anime take and found it a pretty good adaptation, from the visuals to the quirky score.

The manga is a series of interconnected stories about Kirie, a teenage girl whose boyfriend, Shuichi, believes their town is haunted by uzumaki, the spiral and mesmerizing secret shape of the world. Time after time, she sees people become obsessed or infected by spirals. As the incidents mount, the spirals grow until becoming a whirlpool threatening to consume everything.

In some ways, the story reminded me of PI, a 1998 film about a man who discovers a number that is one of the names of God and drives him to the brink of madness. UZUMAKI has the same level of originality and strangeness, though it takes its concept much farther, straight to an unflinching, very satisfying finish.

The adaptation is basically the manga come to life. Fans of Ito’s work might be disappointed as it has a high fidelity to the original but periodically feels a little lifeless, though I went the other way, kind of wishing they’d interpreted the manga in a way that went deeper with character and otherwise put a fresh spin on it.

Overall, I liked it quite a bit. The anime was a great way to revisit this classic story. I hope you’ll check it out if you’re unfamiliar with Ito’s work.

Filed Under: Apocalyptic, APOCALYPTIC/HORROR, Comic Books, COMICS, Film Shorts/TV, MEDIA YOU MIGHT LIKE, Movies & TV, The Blog

MADS (2024)

December 5, 2024 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

In MadS (2024), a French zombie movie, a young party goer becomes infected with a strange virus. Shot in one continuous take, the film packs a lot of frantic energy and has a lot of unpredictability, but the limitations of the form may have some viewers restless while watching.

The movie begins with a young man scoring coke from his dealer. On the way home, he is forced to pull over, which is when a strange woman jumps into the car and appears to kill herself, splashing him with blood. Frantic, he drives home and is drawn out of the house by a woman he’s dating and their friends for a night out on the town. As the night wears on, he becomes increasingly paranoid, appears to have gas mask-wearing soldiers with rifles chasing him, and finally breaks down and acts erratic.

The film then switches point of view to the woman and then to her friend. Along the way, it’s uncertain if they’re sharing a really horrible drug trip or turning into zombies. This is more or less answered by the end, but the question hung over much of the movie for me.

The movie doesn’t bother too much with character, preferring to lean on the one continuous take to stimulate the viewer. The only trick is this can be fatiguing, and there are very long stretches of the POV character moving from place to place where not much is happening.

By the end, I felt like I’d eaten a chocolate bar for dinner, if you know what I mean.

All in all, though, I had fun with it. The continuous take is always an impressive technical feat. The actors all act naturally, which along with the somewhat grainy aesthetic gives the whole thing a bit of a cinema verite feel. It’s both a zombie movie and not a zombie movie, inspired by them but doing its own thing, showing how a z-poc might start from the infected’s point of view.

Filed Under: Apocalyptic, APOCALYPTIC/HORROR, MEDIA YOU MIGHT LIKE, Movies, Movies & TV, The Blog, Zombies

OUTSIDE (2024)

November 21, 2024 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

In the Filipino zombie movie OUTSIDE (2024, Netflix), a family faces its dark secrets and inner demons against the backdrop of a zombie apocalypse. Though arguably it could have used more zombies and a bit more action, the movie is a breath of fresh air in a genre whose tropes have been overworked by Hollywood, focusing on the human toll of stress when everything falls apart.

The movie begins with a family traveling into the countryside, where Francis (Sid Lucero) believes they can find refuge with his parents. He brings Iris (Beauty Gonzales) and their boys Josh (Marco Masa) and Lucas (Aiden Patdu). They take over the sugar plantation and attempt to hold out, but Iris is anxious about reaching other survivors and wants to leave, while Francis wants to stay.

There’s a lot of slow burn family drama and psychological horror here, as the characters and what drives them unravels like the proverbial onion. Iris appears cold, but she has her reasons. Francis is insecure and tries too hard to prove himself as a man, but he has his reasons. All of it enhanced and salted by not knowing if anyone else is alive amid civilization’s collapse; instead of putting aside all the old stuff because the world is ending, the movie makes the point that the opposite may be true. The actors do a great job communicating in a layered way, both what they want and what they need.

The zombies are pretty well done, nicely creepy. The only trick is by the third act, they start to fade as a threat until the very end, while the family drama boils over. I was all in for it, as I greatly enjoyed the movie and was happy to go where it took me, but some might not be. The location was interesting too, taking us into the rural Philippines.

Overall, I liked OUTSIDE a lot. I’ve seen a lot of zombie movies, and while this one ain’t perfect, it’s good. Where movies like WORLD WAR Z excelled in action but failed in basic character development and making us care, OUTSIDE goes the other way, not providing nearly as much action but offering richly drawn characters who feel like real people, thrown into a claustrophobic horror of the apocalypse.

Filed Under: Apocalyptic, APOCALYPTIC/HORROR, MEDIA YOU MIGHT LIKE, Movies, Movies & TV, The Blog, Zombies

HELLBOUND, Season 2

November 11, 2024 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

I was blown away by HELLBOUND (Netflix), a Korean series about a strange new phenomenon occurring in which angels appear to people to tell them the hour of their death and that they have been sentenced to suffer in Hell. Season 2 blew me away even more.

The first season reveals the phenomenon and what it means to society. People are of course terrified, wondering what God wants and how to avoid suffering a similar fate as those very publicly beaten by demons before being incinerated and taken to Hell. To prevent societal collapse, a young man named Jung Jin Su–prophesied himself 20 years earlier to go to Hell–understands the only way to save humanity is to create a religion in which people taken to Hell clearly deserve it, leaving you safe as long as you follow his religion’s rules. When he pays to live-broadcast a woman named Park Jung Ja being taken by the demons, everyone believes it’s true–and they all flock to Jung Jin Su’s New Truth Society. Later in the season, after Jung Jin Su is taken to Hell, a charlatan takes over the New Truth and sets out to suppress information that a baby has been sentenced to Hell–directly contradicting the church’s teachings.

In the second season, the New Truth battles with Arrowhead, a mass movement of evangelical fanatics bent on destroying society and handing the ruins to God, and also Sodo, a group formed by a former lawyer dedicated to finding and exposing the truth about the demons. As the Arrowhead continue to gain in popularity and society starts to crumble, the government attempts to make a deal with the New Truth, its agent saying, We know Park Jong Ja has been resurrected, we know you have her, and we want to use her to create a new doctrine and destroy Arrowhead.

What they don’t know is that Jung Jin Su has also resurrected, and his experience in Hell has changed him.

The result is pure cosmic horror. I’ve always found conventional religion to be as scary as Lovecraft. I mean, there’s this Supreme Being, and he loves you, but if you don’t follow the rules and love him back you will suffer for eternity. Now imagine angels appear around the world and tell seemingly random people they are going to Hell, and then demons come at the prophesied time and shred them before burning them to ash. The show explores how humanity might react to such a thing, and how you’d end up with competing religions offering salvation, and then you’d end up with opportunistic people taking over these organizations and using them to gain and hold power and privilege. While the first season was about the battle to either give humanity the truth about its lot or offer it comfort in a new religion, a battle over meaning and interpretation, the second season is about the battle to control the narrative as a means to hold power.

I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s amazing TV in the vein of THE LEFTOVERS, though even more thought-provoking and powerful. Highly recommended.

Filed Under: Apocalyptic, APOCALYPTIC/HORROR, Film Shorts/TV, MEDIA YOU MIGHT LIKE, Movies & TV, The Blog

A BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL ETERNAL WORLD by James Chambers

October 28, 2024 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

In A BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL ETERNAL WORLD, horror author James Chambers provides a new collection of Lovecraftian stories, each hitting a different dark note.

I’d read Chambers’s ENGINES OF SACRIFICE on a lark a few years back and loved it. I say “lark” for two reasons: One, I tend to read novels far more often than I do novellas and short stories, an art form I’m still learning to appreciate as time passes. Second, all the stories were based on the Lovecraft mythos, and I’m weird in that I love everything Lovecraft except reading the actual stories.

With these two collections, Chambers in my honest opinion improves on the original, giving me all the mystery and cosmic horror I love but told through the lens of modern prose and contemporary stories. Each is highly distinct, creating flavors of horror both cosmic and grisly. In A BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL ETERNAL WORLD, the unifying device is a fishing town called Knicksport, where weird things happen, and they might happen to you.

Overall, this collection is a lot of fun and highly recommended if you’re interested in a fresh and thoughtful take on the Lovecraft mythos.

Filed Under: Apocalyptic, APOCALYPTIC/HORROR, Books, MEDIA YOU MIGHT LIKE, Reviews of Other Books, The Blog

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