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Hi everyone! 

I’ve managed to get my hands on the infamous sold-out Paqui Chips “One Chip Challenge “, a single carolina reaper dusted tortilla chip that is hailed by many as unbearable / agonizing / a scientific experiment gone horribly wrong. I’ll be taping myself eating it in order to raise money for local legend Amy Kutsenkow ‘s annual charity drive, in which she purchases Christmas gifts, coats, food, and other necessary items for less fortunate children in the Mount Washington Valley here in New Hampshire.

Once we feel like we’ve collected enough money, I’ll record myself doing the deed and post the video on social media, where people will make fun of my red, sweating face for all time. 

So please, open your hearts (and your wallets), donate what you can, and get ready to watch me charbroil my internal organs in the name of holiday charity.

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~ Mike

Another trip around the sun lands us at the tenth month of 2019, which means another edition of my recommendation list for scary books I’ve read or listened to since October of 2018 is finally ready to pop out of the oven. To be honest, I have no real concept of how many people read or use this annual compilation as an “eeriness enhancer” during the weeks leading up to Samhain, or how much revenue this generates for the fantastic authors featured on it. All I know is people complain to me if I’m late getting it out, and that it’s a fun way for me to keep a running record of my literary / audio digestion that isn’t as monotonous of a chore as updating Goodreads is for me.

It is my firm belief that fall nights were designed specifically for cozying up indoors with a hot cup of tea and a great horror novel, and it is my hope that something from this list inspires you to do the same.

FULL DISCLOSURE: For the first time, I’ve included affiliate links to purchase books from this list. It doesn’t cost more for you to buy a book this way; Amazon just kicks me a little something for leading you to it, which I in turn use to splurge on luxuries like operational costs and feeding myself with actual food.

Cool? Cool. Let’s get to it.

Usher’s Passing by Robert McCammon

The best way for me to describe this novel is “Edgar Allen Poe fan fiction elevated to the highest possible level.” The Ushers from The Fall of the House of Usher are real, and one estranged son comes back home the sprawling North Carolina estate he fled from so many years ago to wrestle with a whole slew of problems – some corporeal and some very much supernatural – as the gang attempts to decide who will become the new head of the powerful family.

Lullaby by Jonathan Maberry

This is a super fun little Audile Original ghost story (only 37 minutes in length) by Jonathan Maberry. Babies and hauntings? Don’t mind if I do.

Elevation by Stephen King

It’s Stephen King, but it’s a short story, so you don’t have to invest four years of your life into reading it. Without revealing too much, this is a fun one to burn through during the Halloween season, ESPECIALLY if you’re currently on some kind of diet. Trust me on this one.

The Labyrinth Index by Charles Stross

I’m a big fan of The Laundry Files, which is a phenomenal series by legendary author Charles Stross that somehow manages to blend the bleak horror of Lovecraft with the mundane frivolity of modern office life into something I just can’t put down. The Labyrinth Index is the ninth installment, but if you want to start at the beginning of the series, go here.

The Listener by Robert McCammon

There’s a whole hell of a lot of Robert McCammon in this year’s list, and for good reason. The dude is beyond prolific, and is responsible for some of the best contemporary fiction out there (See Swan Song, Boy’s Life, and Usher’s Passing above). Set in 1930s New Orleans, The Listener offers a crystal-clear window into the colorful bayou city of yesteryear with just a pinch of supernatural flavoring to enhance the mystery in a way you truly won’t expect.

The Darkwater Bride by Marty Ross

This is an Audible Original Drama (almost like a radio opera, so think “War of the Worlds” but with infinitely better production value) concerning a ghost story set in the darkened corners of Victorian London, so think Peaky Blinders. I’ve been a huge sucker for audio dramas ever since I was lucky enough to catch Gabriel Rodriguez and Joe Hill’s Locke & Key through Audible, and The Darkwater Bride definitely scratches the same spooky, fun, fantastically acted itch.

The Dispatcher by John Scalzi

Much like Lullaby, this is a 2+ hour short story produced for Audible Originals by the inimitable John Scalzi (who you really should follow on Twitter because he’s hilarious). It’s narrated by actor Zachary Quinto (Spock in the new Star Trek movies, as well as Charlie Manx in the new NOS4A2 series), who absolutely nails his role as a state-licensed futuristic assassin.

Inspection by Josh Malerman

This is the guy who wrote the breakout hit Bird Box (which in turn created those timeless Sandra Bullock memes), as well as another book on this list which you’ll run into a bit later. Inspection is about a bunch of kids who are being raised and taught in a huge building in the middle of the woods in some remote location who have no knowledge of the outside world. The boarding school from hell, really. I feel like this shares a lot of similarities with Stephen King’s newest release “The Institute”, which was also fantastic and you’ll find further down the list.

I Am Behind You by John Ajvide Lindqvist

Surrealist horror at its finest. Did you like “Let the Right One In”? If so, you’re in luck, because John wrote that. I Am Behind You starts off at a galloping pace as several families wake up only to realize they’re no longer in the Swedish RV campground they holiday in every year. No birds, no wind, no sun; just endless fields. The radio will only play one particular song. This massively unique one gets creepy very quickly and grips you through the entire book.

The Demon Next Door by Brian Burrough

A 2:46 Audible Original about real life serial killer Danny Corwin, and how a perfect storm of ineptitude, incompetence and apathy allowed him to do the horrendous things he did. This one will leave you frustrated and screaming at whatever device is playing it for you, and visceral reactions like that are the hallmark of truly great storytelling.

Junk by Les Bohem

Surprise, surprise. Another Audible Original. I burn through a lot of these driving around and doing chores around the house, so naturally a lot of them are going to end up here. This is the most bizarre alien takeover story I’ve ever encountered, and the whirlwind of creative insanity is elevated to a perfect pitch thanks to narration by none other than JOHN WATERS. Yes, that John Waters. You will read a lot of bad reviews about Junk. All of them are wrong.

The Haunted Forest Tour by Jeff Strand, James A. Moore

A massive forest springs up out of the ground overnight. Said forest is filled with horrifying monsters. Of course, the smart, reasonable thing to do in this situation is to start a haunted forest tour in order to capitalize on the anomaly, right? What could possibly go wrong? Think Jurassic Park, but replace the dinosaurs with creatures from every fairy tale, myth, legend and recess of the human mind.

Dead Moon by Peter Clines

Zombies, but on the moon? A pretty entertaining take on a stale genre by the guy behind one of my favorite books of the 2010s – Paradox Bound. Nerdy, slightly campy at times, bear hugged by the frozen desolation of space, and like any good zombie-themed content, absurdly violent. Fun for the whole family!

Unbury Carol by Josh Malerman

See? I told you there would be another Josh Malerman book in here. It’s the Wild West. A woman named Carol has a strange condition in which she occasionally slips into impossibly deep comas. Because it’s the Wild West and medicine is still pretty primitive, Carol’s fugue states make her look dead to everyone around her. Carol’s shithead husband Dwight decides to take advantage of this by proclaiming her dead during one of her comas and burying her in an attempt to take control of her fortune. Only her long lost lover, an outlaw by the name of James Moxie, knows of her condition and can save her from a claustrophobe’s worst fate. Very cool read.

Nightwise / The Black Dahlia by R.S. Belcher

Like Constantine? Then you’ll probably like the Nightwise series. Laytham Ballard used to be a member of the Nightwise; a society of mages who work together to fight for good. Laytham, a man with more baggage than a Southwest arrivals carousel, left the Nightwise to freelance because he’s a booze-swilling sex hound who doesn’t play well with others. Only two books to it so far, but this is a great series. My only gripe is that Laytham’s occasional penchant for sexual domination play is a bit unnecessary to me, and I’m not quite sure how it pushes the narrative forward, but I’ll put up with it to get to the really, really good content R. S. Belcher’s putting down here.

FUN FACT: If you spring for the audiobook, all of R.S. Belcher’s books are narrated by Bronson Pinchot. Yes, Balki reads this to you. Turns out he’s turned into one hell of an audiobook narrator since Perfect Strangers.

The Six-Gun Tarot by R.S. Belcher

If you can’t tell by the sheer number of them on this list, fantasy westerns are quickly becoming my jam, and R. S. Belcher knocked this one out of the park. Olde tymey gunslingers meet mystical apocalypse in a version of the Wild West where magic is very much a real thing. I was particularly enamored with the character development in The Six-Gun Tarot, and found myself clinging to the pieces on this tumbleweed-blown chessboard of a story arc. I hope to hell a sequel is being considered for this.

King of the Road, by R.S. Belcher

R.S. Belcher is just spattered all over this list like cake frosting on a high chair. Sometimes when I discover a great author, I go a little nuts and devour their entire catalog. King of the Road is the second installment in the Brotherhood of the Wheel series (go here for the first), and pertains to the Knights Templar, more specifically how they avoided persecution by splitting into three groups, one of which eventually was tasked with protecting the ancient magical lay lines below America’s roadways, where bad shit tends to take place. Loads of children are missing across the country, and it’s up to southern charmer / Templar-in-an-18-wheeler Jimmy Aussipile and friends to figure out just what in the hell is going on.

Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant

You looking for something super one-of-a-kind and creepy to read? You’re probably not going to do a whole hell of a lot better than a novel about killer mermaids. Mira Grant is incredible, and her tale about a massive research vessel called the Atargatis being assaulted by the very aquatic life it was attempting to study and exploit perfectly showcases her talents as a novelist. I triple dog dare you to read this on a cruise.

The Institute by Stephen King

Excuse my language, but Stephen King’s latest novel is an absolute fucking treat to burn through. Children with unique abilities are being kidnapped all over the country and placed in “The Institute”, where they are housed, fed, studied, tortured, and…much, much worse. How good is this book? They announced it was green-lit it for a limited TV series almost immediately after it was released.

The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft by – shocker – H.P. Lovecraft

As far as I’m concerned, no Halloween-themed reading list can be taken seriously if there isn’t at least something Lovecraftian in there. Maybe it’s because I’m a well-documented H.P. Lovecraft fan. Maybe it’s because of my love for nihilistic cosmic horror. Maybe it’s because I’m a lifelong coastal New Englander who appreciates the use of creepy, craggy ports and primitive waterside villages ass the backdrop for truly great fiction. Regardless, if you’re into horror literature at all, and you feel like you can get past the dated language (and occasional spurts of gross racism), Lovecraft is required reading. I own this as an enormous and well narrated 40+ hour audiobook, and I listen to it whenever I run out of Audible credits for the month. At that rate I should have it all wrapped up by the year 2046. Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, Marty Ross (adaptation)

If you’ve already read Treasure Island, this is a really wonderful audio drama version of the classic for you to revisit. If you haven’t already read Treasure Island, what the shit is wrong with you. The voice acting is beyond skilled, the sound effects and score are killer, and it all serves to breathe new fun and punchiness into a universally beloved story. How does Treasure Island fit into a spooky reading list? Pirates, hauntings, violence. It ticks all the boxes, kids.

The Conception of Terror: Tales Inspired by M. R. James – Volume 1 By M. R. James, Stephen Gallagher, A. K. Benedict, Jonathan Barnes, Mark Morris

Four scary short stories packed into one hell of an Audible Original. Each story is very good, but the first one, “Casting the Runes”, is my favorite of the bunch. All are done in an audio drama style, which is another bonus.

Winter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys

A Lovecraftian tale pertaining to Devil’s Reef, Innsmouth, Deep Ones, Dagon, Cthulhu, and plenty of other well-known H.P. Lovecraft tropes, Winter Tide does a great job of acting as a love letter to the works of Lovecraft without leaning too heavily on the subject material in order to create a wonderfully unique novel that’s solid AF on its own merits. Quick synopsis: The people of Innsmouth were captured by American soldiers and placed in a concentration camp. All but two died in captivity, who are recruited to help US intelligence services stop communist forces from harnessing a power that could potentially destroy the world. This is the first installment of The Innsmouth Legacy series, and I loved it enough to put the second installment Deep Roots in my queue. Ruthanna Emrys. Remember the name. I’d bet money she’ll be huge one day.

Make Me No Grave by Haley Stone

Another fantasy western? Don’t mind if I do. The Grizzly Queen of the West is on the loose, and US Marshal Apostle Richardson is hot on her trail. Strange tales of The Grizzly Queen’s evil supernatural abilities are spoken of in hushed tones around guttering campfires and sticky bar tables. Is The Grizzly Queen as evil as the rumors say, or is she being framed for a crime she didn’t commit? Apostle’s sure gonna find out, and so are you if you’re cool enough to buy this book, hombre.

The Queen of Bedlam, Mister Slaughter, The Providence Rider, The River of Souls, Freedom of the Mask, Cardinal Black by Robert McCammon

Mainline the adventures of Matthew Corbett directly into my god damned veins. Full stop.

I stumbled across Robert McCammon’s epic series last year with Speaks the Nightbird, and I’ve been on a madman’s quest to chew my way through the whole series ever since. Matthew Corbett is an obsessive, socially maladjusted Sherlock Holmes-esque character, albeit much younger and without the messy opium habit. The series is set in 1700s America (largely New York), and pits Master Corbett and company against hellacious villains who threaten to transform the new colonies into a playground of corruption. It’s fun, it’s a historically accurate portrait of the times, and it keeps you on the edge of your seat throughout the series. I mean, I burned through SIX BOOKS of the series in one year. I don’t know if it’s possible to give a better recommendation than that.

The Invited by Jennifer McMahon

There aren’t nearly enough female authors in this year’s list, and I have no idea why that is. Maybe it’s because I was so busy churning through Robert McCammon and R.S. Belcher this time around. That being said, my absolute favorite novels this year were written by women, and Jennifer McMahon’s The Invited was one of them. I enthusiastically recommended The Winter People last year, and was super duper excited when I came across this one.

A couple decides to drop everything, build a house from scratch in rural Vermont, and to try their hand at homesteading. The Instagram dream, right? Strange things start happening to Helen when she realizes the sprawling property is home to the ultra-violent lynching of a woman deemed a witch on it by the townsfolk many years before. From there it just gets more and more sinister as Helen delves into the history of the incident, hell bent on learning the truth about the cozy little town they moved to, and the seemingly malignant curse of the family Breckinridge.

Circe by Madeline Miller

No, this isn’t a GoT spinoff. Here’s another favorite of mine from 2019. This is an unbelievably well-done retelling of ancient Greek mythologies from the viewpoint of Circe; the daughter of the titan Helios (the sun) and Perse (a sea nymph). This novel has it all. Gods. Monsters. Heroes. Villains. A kick ass plot that will have you firing through pages like a one of those money-counter machines. The very best part about Madeline Miller’s Circe is how personal and intimate she’s made Greek mythology. You really do feel like you’re right there in the action and drama, and that you can understand the motivations and actions of these immortal beings out of time immemorial. I can’t recommend this one enough, and neither can HBO, who’s already ordered a series based on the novel.

Tales from the Gas Station: Volume One by Jack Townsend

I wanted to hate this book. I really did. The narrator is not good. The audio recording is definitely an amateur undertaking. The flow of the narrative does not lend itself to being told aloud. I almost returned this one, but then I realized it was based on a CreepyPasta (horror stories and fan fictions written on obscure internet forums, a la Slenderman), and decided to be less critical of it right out of the gate. With the background information in mind, I actually enjoyed Tales from the Gas Station very much.

From the description:

“As the only full-time employee at the twenty-four hour gas station at the edge of town, Jack has pretty much seen it all. But when he decides to start an online journal documenting the bizarre day-to-day occurrences, he unwittingly attracts the attention of much more than just a few conspiracy theorists. With the body count steadily on the rise and a dark, ancient force infecting the dreams of everyone around him, Jack will do everything in his power to stay out of the way and mind his own business.”

It’s unpolished and far from perfect, but it was those qualities almost became positive as I listened my way through the wildly unique material. This is definitely a wildcard recommendation in the way that you’re either going to like it, or you’re going to hate it so much that we stop being friends, and I have no idea how to gauge public reaction for this one. Roll those dice if you’re feeling lucky, partner.

Evil Eye by Madhuri Shekar

AUDIO DRAMA ALERT! This smart lil’ short story (1:38 in total) takes a series of phone calls and voicemails, and weaves them into a creepy supernatural story about a paranoid oversees mother (Usha), her Indian American daughter (Pallavi), and Sandeep, a dashing young entrepreneur who has his romantic sights set on Pallavi. Someone here isn’t who they say they are, and nobody will listen to Usha’s warnings. I’m not going to describe this one too much because it’s so short that I’m bound to give something away if I keep talking about it. It’s good. Get it. You’ll like it.

House of Leaves by Mark J. Danielewski

How am I supposed to describe the most famously indescribable novels of all time? Mark Z. Danielewski’s eccentric and surrealist story about a house that is not quite a house is told through a strange series of narrators, footnotes, clippings, illustrations, photos, musical scores, and text that somehow starts winding and swirling and vanishing before your eyes. If you’re in the market for something very different and you’d maybe love to know what it feels like to be clinically insane, buy this as a paperback (they can’t even make this an audiobook because it’s so fucking bizarre). Your straightjacket and Thorazine shots are in the mail.

“Devil worshipers are going to murder you in a cabin in the woods if you play that.”

That was what my mom told me when I first asked her if I could play Dungeons & Dragons as a kid. I’d found out about it from the cartoon series of the same name that ran during the 1980s; a time when the vast majority of cartoon series on TV were engineered specifically to sell toys. He-Man, G.I. Joe, Pound Puppies, My Little Pony, Care Bears, Transformers; all started as a toy line, and ended up with a show almost as a marketing afterthought that somehow took off. Your fondest television memories from childhood? Those were nothing but thirty-minute commercials. Sorry, Eighties Baby. Your life is a lie.

None of the kids I knew had the actual Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game at my elementary school, so I really had no idea what it entailed. All I knew was that I was a huge fan of Bobby the Barbarian and Presto the Magician (characters from the cartoon), and that I already had little plastic souvenirs from all of my favorite benign, family friendly Saturday morning cartoons littering the living room floor, so imagine my confusion when I received that bizarre answer from my mom.

My mom was hardly the only adult in America worried about that kind of thing at the time, and universally-debunked conspiracy theories like QAnon and Pizzagate are hardly new to American culture. Aside from being home to your favorite children-targeting animated promotional spots, the 1980s also lays claim to the “Satanic Panic” phenomenon, in which society collectively lost their shit over the fear of widespread demonic influence. Let’s dig into that a little:

The 1980s: Everybody Goes Batshit over Satan

The term “stranger danger” was a product of the eighties for a number of reasons. Once sleepy towns noticed drastic upticks in population growth (read: lots of unfamiliar faces in the neighborhood). Overzealous media coverage of the Tylenol Murders, the brand-spanking-new AIDS epidemic, that one dude who poisoned Halloween candy which escalated into your parents checking EVERY SINGLE THING you brought home after trick-or-treating helped stack the kindling for what would eventually become a panic bonfire. Of course, walking down the dairy aisle and being bombarded by the cherubic faces of missing children didn’t exactly help ease tensions either. Modern families now needed two streams of income, which meant nervous moms were starting to place their kids in the care of babysitters and day care facilities for the first time. Family-friendly programming regularly featured “a very special episode” about topics like drinking, drugs, what to do if approached by someone you don’t know, etc. And just like that, a clammy blanket of distrust descended upon the land.

Paranoia about imaginary dangers to the nuclear family culminated in the rise of Christian fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell, who quickly discovered just how much money you could make from a terrified customer, and quickly attributed the blame for America’s imaginary moral vulnerability on Satan and demons and shit. A bunch of memoirs came out from people claiming they were ritually abused by satanic cultists, and, while all of them were swiftly debunked by fact checkers, the media’s relentless praise promoted them until folks just assumed those books were credible. Many experts on the subject credit one of these books specifically, Michelle Remembers, as the root of that famous “day care / satanic sex abuse” conspiracy theory that held the 1980s in its ridiculously unfounded grip.

A cottage industry of people who self-described as “occult experts” materialized out of nowhere, and made all sorts of money as consultants, authors, columnists, speakers, and paid witnesses for trials involving some flavor of demonic wrongdoing or another. Police departments paid these experts to create training videos in order to help them learn to identify satanic crimes.

I mean, look at 1995’s The Law Enforcement Guide to Satanic Cults. Huh, all of the conveniently spray-painted devil graffiti is super fresh, and somehow it’s all in the same handwriting. This plays like a god damned Tim and Eric sketch.

In 2019, if it came out that your local PD spent community funds on something as patently absurd as this training video, your chief would be laughed out of town. In 1995, a mere twenty-four years ago, law enforcement officers tasked with keeping real people safe watched this and were like “These insights are very helpful.” Insane, right?

With Satanic Panic at a fever pitch, people eventually started getting arrested, charged and prosecuted for ritual satanic abuse and murder. Almost all of those convictions were overturned due to a grab bag of falsified evidence / coerced testimony / unsubstantiated claims, and out of the handful of cases that were prosecuted successfully, most of those ended up being overturned later for the same reasons (HBO’s lauded Paradise Lost docuseries about the West Memphis Three is a great example of this). Personally, I feel like the legal terrorization of innocent folks is WAY more terrifying than actual dagger wielding beelze-bros.

Dungeons & Dragons was unfortunately dragged into the mire of Satanic Panic when, in 1982, a boy named Irving Lee Pulling committed suicide. It was determined that Irving was the unfortunate host of a slew of emotional problems, but his mother, Patricia Pulling, decided it was the role-playing game her son was into that killed him. Pulling sued her son’s school and his former principal, claiming the curse placed upon her son’s D&D character as he played on school grounds was real. Pulling also attempted suing TSR, who was the publisher of D&D at the time.

After every single one of Pulling’s unfounded lawsuits was dismissed, she decided to form the group BADD (Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons) in 1983, and basically ran a full-court press in the media with the help of conservative Christian associations like The 700 Club in order to discredit the game as thoroughly as possible. They attempted targeting rock bands and pornography as well, but their main focus always remained fixed on D&D.

BADD ended up getting pretty big, spanning multiple continents, holding countless speaking engagements, and influencing a great deal of the world’s perception of the game. Ultimately, Patricia Pulling ended up getting majorly called out for manipulating BADD’s statistical data as well as purposefully misrepresenting her credentials, and that ultimately led to her abandoning the very watchdog group she founded, but by then it was too late. The damage to Dungeons & Dragons’ reputation had already been done.

So, as we circle back to a young Mike asking his mom if he can play Dungeons & Dragons, we now have a better understanding of why she said no.

MIKE’S SIDE THEORY: The Era of Demonized Intellect

OK, so we know why people started flipping their collective shit about Dungeons & Dragons, but that alone doesn’t explain why, after not being allowed to play it on that fateful day, I spent three entire decades making fun of it. Mom’s concern about it certainly informed my young brain, but that alone didn’t sour me on role-playing games.

For whatever reason, pop culture in the 1980s/90s was obsessed with ridiculing smart people. Don’t believe me? Here are twenty-two god-damned examples of what I’m talking about, and I’m only stopping there because I ran out of room in the free photo collage program I’m using.

While I was a bit too young to really have experienced Satanic Panic, I was the *chef’s kiss* perfect age during the 80s and early 90s to experience this dork-culling phenomenon firsthand. Nearly everything on TV and film repeated the “nerds are to be either mocked (Saved by the Bell, Family Matters) or overhauled until socially acceptable (Teen Witch, She’s All That)” trope, and in turn, American society parroted what they saw on TV and film. Anyone who showed signs of being of above-average intelligence was classified as a nerd, geek or dweeb, and quickly shunned by the upper echelons of polite society. While everyone can remember watching a nerd get abused at some point in their lives, I can’t think of one instance in which benevolent cool kids from the real world ever took it upon themselves to drag a lowly wretch from the depths of geekdom all the way up to the golden pastures of popularity.

I don’t consider myself to be of above-average intelligence (and I’m sure my childhood testing results echo that sentiment), but I read a lot, was involved with Odyssey of the Mind, played the cello, didn’t play sports, and did all sorts of other shit that would be deemed nerdy by the standards of yesteryear. Subsequently, I was bullied by elementary school classmates to the point that I, a twelve-year-old-boy, fantasized about killing myself so wouldn’t be forced to live through another day of being pelted by rocks on the way home from school, or asked out by a girl only for her to scream OH MY GOD I’M OBVIOUSLY KIDDING I’D NEVER HAVE A DORK FOR A BOYFRIEND to the applause and laughter of my entire class who’d been secretly in on it.

I obviously survived childhood long enough to watch the majority of my old bullies devolve into unemployed alcoholics, violent spousal abusers and model inmates, but lots of kids, including Irving Lee Pulling, weren’t as lucky. People like Irving Lee Pulling checked out early in the worst possible way, and I grew up to be someone who passively made fun of kids who were in an awkward, shitty situation just like I was…and I’m literally coming to this awful epiphany for the very first time as I finish this sentence [Reading Enhancement Tip: Now would be a great time to have Cat’s in the Cradle playing in the background.].

It is my personal belief that Dungeons & Dragons was not only an unfortunate victim of the Satanic Panic era, but also a victim of the equally absurd Era of Demonized Intellect™, and it was the combination of the two that pitched the classic role-playing game headlong into years and years of public contempt and ridicule.

Celebrity, Analog Novelty, and D&D’s Resurgence

The breakout success of Netflix original series Stranger Things is widely considered to be responsible for the Dungeons & Dragons renaissance we’re experiencing today. Sure, The Big Bang Theory’s frequent dice rolling (uselessly bitter side note: I despise this show so much) and a wider acceptance of fantasy themes courtesy of Game of Thrones have contributed to D&D’s spectacular revival, but Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro-owned publisher of Dungeons & Dragons, is experiencing record profits and popularity thanks to handful of kids battling a demogorgon in a dimly lit basement [insert Netflix “bum bummm” here].

Case in point: they even made an inexpensive Stranger Things themed D&D starter set for the swarms of people who became interested in role-playing games because of the show.

Another major factor in Dungeons & Dragons’ newfound popularity? Famous people. As it turns out, loads of celebrities are super into D&D.

• Matthew Lillard
• Stephen Colbert
• Vin Diesel
• Joe Manganiello
• Dame Judi Dench
• Ta-Nehesi Coates
• Drew Barrymore
• Aubrey Plaza
• Paul F. Tompkins
• Patton Oswalt
• Tim Duncan
• Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson

With Dungeons & Dragons officially destigmatized by some of the most famous people on earth, Twitch / YouTube channels like the incredibly successful voice actor driven Critical Role further spread the word about just how much fun it can be to sit down with your buddies and make shit up.

This leads to what I personally consider one of the biggest factors behind Dungeons & Dragons’ unfamiliar popularity; the novelty of analog entertainment in the digital age.

Video games. Movies. Television. YouTube. Twitch. Smartphones. Smart TVs. Firebox. Apple TV. Roku. Sling. The Internet has become an umbilical cord of perpetual stimulation for the majority of people currently breathing, and whenever something becomes universally enjoyed by society, a diametrically opposed counter-culture crops up. It’s inevitable. Global capitalism takes off? Punk rock pops up to challenge it. Hippies Elyse and Steven Keaton have a baby? Guess what? It ends up becoming semi-lovable conservative wet blanket Alex P. Keaton. You get the drift. As we all march into a largely digital future, more and more people are wanting to at least temporarily unplug from the endless stream of digital content, and find enjoyment in the world around them. It explains the newly burgeoning board game industry, the influx of people spending money on outdoor activities, as well as the 40 million people playing Dungeons & Dragons.

Mike Takes Interest in D&D, Rolls for Initiative

I experienced a revelation after having attended PAX East (an enormous indie gaming convention) for the first time this past spring, and that revelation was that I really love board games.

My experience with board games before PAX East wasn’t exactly glowing. A half-crumpled cardboard box was typically doled out by parents to us children on rainy days, power outages, or basically whenever they felt it important to keep us busy with something while they did something else. Candyland, Chutes & Ladders, Chinese Checkers, the occasional fist-fight inducing marathon round of Monopoly.

Board games were all pretty much low budget “last ditch effort” fun until Fireball Island came around. That was the first board game I was ever truly excited about. Navigating around an island while trying to keep from being charred to a crisp by a fireball vomiting volcano god?! That was RIGHT up my alley.

I forced everyone to play Fireball Island with me. I made my mom and sister play it with me whenever I could, and when I’d visit my dad, I’d bring it along with me and get the other side of my family to give up on our traditional game of Old Maid (which typically ended up with me crying when I lost) to set up Fireball Island. That old cardboard box saw so much travel that it eventually disintegrated, and I eventually lost enough pieces to force the game into a kind of “toy retirement” until it was thrown away during one house cleaning project or another. As time went on, my attention inevitably drifted toward video games, where it still remains fixed to this day.

Thirty years later, I stood in the secondary entry line at PAX East, which was situated near the tabletop gaming section of the convention center. As I waited for the ropes to be dropped, I was floored by the sheer amount of space tabletop gaming took up. Rows upon rows of shelving stacked full of board game boxes I’d never seen before. An endless sea of kiosks selling interesting looking dice and figurines of monsters and heroes. An enormous portion of the floor taken up by plastic picnic tables at which attendees could sit down and play any game they chose. It blew my mind. Why, at a convention filled with the latest video games to play before they’re available to the public, was the dumb tabletop gaming section so big?

When the ropes eventually dropped and the crowds stampeded into PAX East, I decided to hang back and explore what was clearly a massive part of the show’s experience.

It was then that I came across this absolute gem.

“It’s actually a remake of the original Fireball Island.” A helpful woman at a register told me as I stared slack jawed at the reincarnation of my long lost love. “It started out as a Kickstarter, believe it or not. It’s a lot of fun, and there are expansion packs to keep it interesting after you’ve played it a bunch.”

I bought it instantly, and lugged the giant box around with me throughout the convention for hours until I eventually caught a bus back home to New Hampshire. I was beyond excited to crack it open, and scheduled a game night for friends to come over and try it out with me, and that ended up being the real draw of Fireball Island for me as an adult; a group of great friends all hanging out together and enjoying an analog relic from our childhoods. No TVs. No phones. No crowded bars. No expensive tabs. Just some dice rolling and a hell of a lot of laughs.

I even went a little further, and made a rule that you had to down a gross shot of Fireball if your game piece was taken out by a fireball marble. Most of us were too hammered to play by the end of it, so I’ll probably skip that requirement next time. Whooooooops.

My rediscovery of Fireball Island sent me into a tabletop gaming frenzy. I started compulsively scooping up all sorts of fun board and card games I’d never heard of before. Ramen Fury, Santorini, Gloom, Pandemic, Scythe, Mansions of Madness, Redneck Life; I quickly filled the storage area underneath our bar with games, and finally slowed down when I realized I was buying games faster than I was playing them.

I was on Amazon hunting for the next fun board game to try when I came across the Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set, and in the effort of trying new things for the Was I Wrong About it All These Years blog theme, I snagged it.

During the descent portion of my infamous Tuckerman Ravine hike, I mentioned to Micah (who is rapidly becoming a fixture in this series) that I’d bought the D&D kit so I could write about it. He said he was way into trying it out, that he’d played it as a kid, and that he even had a couple friends who would join us. I figured it would take me months to assemble an open-minded crew willing to sacrifice a few hours to the nerd gods, but there we were. Ready to go.

We set a date to play a few weeks later, I cooked a gigantic lasagna for everyone, and I hosted my very first Dungeons & Dragons night.

Some Rules, Some Doubts, and a God Damned Bugbear

Me, my wife Jess, Micah, and Micah’s friend Scott who’s played role-playing games his entire life gathered around my coffee table. We opened the box, pulled out the contents and examined them. The adventure book, a rulebook, player sheets, and a handful of weird-looking dice, including the infamous d20 – the twenty-sided die that even the furthest removed and uninitiated recognize as the unofficial symbol of global nerd culture.

On top of the players who are all working together to win the game, each game of Dungeons & Dragons requires one person to act as “Dungeon Master” or “DM”, who basically acts as the game’s referee and narrator. They read the storyline out to the players, play the parts of the villains / monsters, and make decisions regarding certain outcomes. Scott, who handily had more role-playing experience than all of us combined, decided he wanted me to DM the game, as he’d never been a part of a game with a DM who’d never played before. I was a little hesitant to agree, but I ultimately did. What the hell, right?

Unlike a traditional game of Dungeons & Dragons in which you create a character from scratch and roll the dice to determine what kind of stats it has (stuff like strength, agility, smarts, hit points or “HP”, which are how much damage you can take, etc.), the streamlined Starter Set includes pre-made character sheets for your group to choose from. Scott chose the hill dwarf soldier, Micah opted for the high elf wizard, and Jess picked the lightfoot halfling rogue, which is basically a mean ass hobbit criminal. Each character has inherent skills, bonuses and drawbacks which are unique to them, so there’s definitely some strategy involved in choosing who you’re going to play. All of the characters in this kit start out at level 1 (the most basic bitch, bottom rung level), and levels up with experience points earned along the way, which in turn makes them more powerful. Everybody had a blast coming up with creative names for their characters, especially Jess. I still can’t stop laughing at “Audrey Butterton”.

With the characters created and named, it was my turn to get situated as Dungeon Master. Scott graciously provided me with a folding Dungeon Master’s screen to block the players from seeing the adventure book (the story we were about to play through, my dice, notes, etc.), everybody introduced their characters to each other, and I began reading the story out for everyone. The game had begun.

Lost Mine of Phandelver started out with our group being hired to escort a wagon full of goods to the town of Phandalin, and keep it safe from bandits and marauders along the way. Before anyone other than Scott really had their bearings about what the hell we were doing, we came across some dead horses blocking our cart’s path. There was also an empty leather map case lying right in front of everything. Ooh, where is the map? What does it give directions to?

As we got closer, we realized the dead horses were studded with arrows. It was a trap, and we’d wandered right into it.  

Four goblins popped out of the brush and ambushed us. This was our very first combat encounter, so Scott walked us through the mechanics of it:

1. Rolling for initiative: Attacks happen in turns. Everybody basically rolls dice to see who attacks first, second, third, etc. The DM rolls initiative for the enemy the players are fighting.
2. Taking your turn: Everybody takes their turn in order. When it’s your turn, you have several choices regarding what you can do with it; attack, try to hide (maybe if you’re super low on HP), cast a spell, help one of your fellow characters who’s been banged up by the enemy, etc. Attacking looks like the most fun, to be honest. You roll to see if your swing or ranged attack (read: arrow or whatever) hits them, and if it does, you roll again to determine how much damage they took.
3. The enemy’s turn: The DM rolls for the enemies, and decides whether anyone in the group gets hit.

You keep going around and around doing this until your enemies are dead, or everyone in your group is dead. If people fall in a combat encounter (the enemy hit you until all of your HP are gone), you’ll be revived after the rest of your group kills the baddies. If everybody in your group falls in an encounter, the game is basically over.

In our first of many, many combat encounters, all but one of us survived the ordeal, forcing us to “take a break” in order to revive ourselves and regain our characters’ collective composure.

Once that was done, the continued down the path with our cart, and had to fight some more goblins. We almost all died that time, too. That’s the thing about level 1 characters; they’re hilariously fragile. We kept running into goblins, and they almost ended the game for us over and over again. It was nerve-wracking, a bit tedious, and I’m not going to lie, at that point I started regretting buying the starter kit a little. There were so many rules to take in, and the progress was so slow at first because everybody except Scott was brand new to Dungeons & Dragons, and I kept screwing up as Dungeon Master by reading parts of the story that were meant for just me and not for the players to hear. The learning curve was a bit aggressive, and I wasn’t sure if role-playing games were going to be my thing.

I remember thinking how funny it would have been if those Satanic Panic weirdos from the 80s actually sat down to see what D&D was all about, only to realize it’s less about summoning demons and human sacrifice, and more about constantly flipping through a rulebook and doing basic math on a notepad.

The players reached the mouth of a cave, at which a couple of goblins were standing guard. We’d reached THE goblin hideout, where all of those little assholes ate dinner and slept and hoarded their stolen goods. The brush was thick there, so they never saw us approach. We had the option of sneaking around them and continuing on the town of Phandelver so we could get paid, or we could sneak attack the goblin guards, make our way into the cave, and clear it of the gruesome little shit birds who’d been terrorizing that lonely trail for so long.

The players looked at each other, concluded that they really had nothing to lose at that point, and decided they were going to kick the shit out of a bunch of goblins.

And that’s when my entire attitude about Dungeons & Dragons changed.

The players snuck up on the goblin guards and promptly handed them their asses; the first fight they’d gotten into in which they had the total advantage. Our spirits lifted a little, or at least mine did. Everyone walked into the cave, climbed around, fought a couple more groups of goblins, and they dispatched them all.

After a bit more cave exploration and a little more climbing, the adventurers ended up saving some random warrior dude named Sildar, who was being held hostage by the second-in-command goblin, a shithead named Yeemik who threatened to kill Sildar if we didn’t strike a truce with him. We were all like “screw this dude”, and killed Yeemik, too. Micah froze him with an ice spell, and toppled him over so he shattered into a million pieces like the T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

The group decided Sildar should lay back and rest while the rest of the players continued on through the cave, clearing it of anything that remotely posed a threat to the outside world. Everyone cheered every time someone rolled a hit. Momentum had been achieved. Hopes were high. It was awesome.

We finally came to a large naturally formed room in the middle of the vast cave system. This is where the batshit head honcho of the goblins chilled. The story read that he was super nuts, and that referred to himself in the third person all the time. His name was Klarg, and he was something called a bugbear.

“Oh shit, a bugbear?” Micah chimed in. “That’s basically like a huge goblin.”

I checked. Micah was right. Homeboy was vicious.

Now our group of three was up against giant ass Klarg, his pet wolf Ripper (of course he had a giant wolf, because why would this be easy), and two more goblins. The players had been getting their butts handed to them by regular goblins for most of the game, so we were all starting to think Klarg and company might be the end of the line for everyone. Could you imagine playing what was supposed to be the easy version of a game for the very first time, only for it to end before you were even halfway through it because you sucked that badly? The thought was too much to (bug)bear.

Micah’s wizard character rolled the best initiative, and he decided the only chance the group would have to get out of that cave alive was for him to cast a sleep spell on Klarg. If the rest of the group could kill Ripper the wolf and two goblins, they could all basically run a blanket party on the bugbear while he snoozed. The problem was that Micah would have to roll a pretty high number to land a sleep spell, as Klarg’s stats were pretty beefy. If it didn’t work, one swipe from Klarg’s weapon would instantly kill any one of the adventurers. That would pretty much be the end of it. There was obviously no money on the line, but the anticipation and excitement I felt at that moment was very similar to how I feel when I place a big bet at Mohegan Sun. Almost everything in this game is governed by chance. This is a lot like gambling, I thought.

Everyone agreed with Micah’s assessment, and we all held our breath as he rolled his d20.

IT WAS A HIT! HOLY SHIT! KLARG WAS WALLOPED WITH A SLEEP SPELL AND PASSED THE FUCK OUT! We screamed and high-fived each other in celebration of a truly momentous turn of events for this sorry band of brittle little warriors.

The group quickly started going to town on the two goblins and the pet wolf while Klarg took a nap on the cave floor. One by one, the remaining enemies fell to the adventurers’ swords, daggers and arrows, and then they all moved on defenseless, crazy old Klarg.

Jess was the one to put the big boy down after having missed nearly every one of her targets throughout the game thus far, and when asked to describe what happened, she blurted out “I SHOT HIM WITH MY SHORT BOW THROUGH THE BACK OF THE HEAD AND THE ARROW WENT THROUGH HIS EYE!!!” She just made that up, right there on the spot. My wife, a mid-30s financial consultant who considers herself one of the least creative people on the planet was absolutely loving all of this.

Klarg was defeated. The goblin caves had been cleared by the heroes. They plundered the treasure left behind by the savage little jerks, and everyone earned enough experience points to move their characters up to level 2, which meant it wouldn’t be as easy for them to fall in combat going forward. The team grabbed poor Sildar from the cave they’d left him in, made their way back to the wagon filled with supplies, and headed toward Phandalin to collect their payment.

And that’s where we stopped for the night. I checked my watch. It was ten-o-clock. Over three and a half hours had passed since we first started playing. It honestly felt like maybe an hour, tops. Micah and Scott got in their cars and drove off to their respective homes, and Jess and I headed up to bed. It was a school night, after all.

WAS I WRONG ABOUT IT ALL THESE YEARS? YES.

It’s fun. It’s social. It’s inexpensive. It’s immersive. It’s exciting. It’s creative. It’s challenging. It’s artistic. It’s beautiful. It’s hilarious. It’s different. As it turns out, Dungeons & Dragons checks off A LOT of boxes for me. Even as I type this, I find myself excited to get the gang back together and see what happens once we reach Phandalin. I’m pumped to DM all the way through this adventure, and then play the next one with a customized character of my very own. I was way, way off about this stuff. If I’m bummed out about anything, it’s because my stupid preconceived notions and prejudices kept me from playing Dungeons & Dragons for so long.

But that’s what this whole blog series is about, right? Forcing myself to do the things I’ve always thought were stupid, and publicly flagellating myself for your entertainment if/when I discover I was wrong about them. Personal growth at a price, if you will.

As an official act of contrition, I’ve made a donation to the D&D Extra Life 2019, a fantastic annual charity drive that raises funds for the Children’s Hospital Network (and I challenge you, dear reader, to do the same). I will also help spread the Dungeons & Dragons gospel by randomly springing unannounced games on unwitting friends who think they’re just coming over for casual dinner and drinks. Be forewarned, guys: you’ll never know if a night of grilled steaks and wine will turn into an epic sword-slashing adventure for treasure and fame until it’s far, far too late to decline.

It all started with an iPhone.

I’d been a staunch supporter of Androids for the better part of a decade; boasting about their far-reaching capabilities while simultaneously shitting all over iPhones and, more specifically, Apple fanboys. Nothing rattled my monkey cage more than the stereotypical Apple stan, sipping an overly-complicated coffee concoction as he made sure every living soul in the coffee shop was aware he was clacking away on the latest MacBook Pro. I giggled without end when a botched update would render a friend’s iPhone useless. “YOURS DOESN’T WORK OH WOW THAT’S SO WEIRD MY SAMSUNG WORKS JUST FINE.” I’d never owned an iPhone in my life. I’d never even bothered to experiment with a friend’s iPhone in my life. I was so obnoxiously sure of myself that I never bothered to give myself a real-life understanding of how the other half lived.

I was perfectly content in my self-assured, pretentious little tech bubble all the way up until my Droid stopped working as well as I thought it should given its astronomical price tag, and our carrier started reducing their quality of service. When the screen on my fully-insured Note 8 cracked, and I was told I’d still have to drop $400+ for a refurbished replacement (not even a new one!), my wife Jess and I decided it was time to switch carriers. When it came time to pick out our phones, instead of immediately picking out the latest and greatest Androids, I did some research, and realized the new iPhones had some amazing specs, and a seemingly endless list of positive reviews to match. After being offered a BOGO deal on the iPhone 10, Jess and I had a long talk about the pros and cons, and ultimately decided to dive headfirst into the Apple pool.

We were immediately floored by the quality, speed, UI and design of our new phones. Leaning how to navigate iOS (our biggest fear) turned out to be a breeze, and within minutes we were using our phones with the ease of old pros. I was absolutely in love with my iPhone 10 XS Max, and I was feeling really, truly, tremendously stupid about the years I spent demonizing those little miracle machines.

That got me thinking. For whatever reason (but probably due to some brand of personal insecurity), I’d spent the lion’s share of my life making fun of things I’ve never experienced before. What else was I completely wrong about? What else have I been ridiculing my entire life without having ever tried? What else was I missing out on? I started making a list, and within minutes I was flipping to a fresh notebook page for more room.

…High end coffee. Yoga. Hobby conventions. Tabletop role playing games. Hiking. Meditation. Writing seminars. Crossfit. Gardening. Learning a new language. Cycling. Woodworking. Skinny jeans. Doomsday prepping. Skydiving. Therapy. Snowshoeing. Hunting. Fishing. Geocaching. HAM radios. Scuba diving. Metal detecting. Antiquing. WWE fandom. Stand Up Paddleboarding. Model building. Racquetball. Disc golf. Sailing. Falconry. Improv. Food canning. Surfing. Fencing…

I wasn’t naïve enough to think everything I was writing down would turn out to be something I enjoyed (read: if I end up liking sailing I’ll assume aliens are editing my brain in my sleep), but I’d never truly know until I tried them out, and processed my experiences like I do everything else – by writing. Thus, I began the herculean effort to better my willfully ignorant ass, and the “Was I Wrong About It All These Years?” blog series was born.

***

DIVINE ASSHOLERY; THE GENESIS OF MY HATRED OF HIKING

Hiking, or “expensive walking” as I’ve always called it, has been an area of contention for me since my early teens. Once upon a time, my best friends were members of a church youth group, and I would tag along with them on certain events despite not identifying as Christian because, at that age, hanging out with your teeny-bopper clique is infinitely more important than your negative thoughts about organized religion. You’d sit through a bullshit sermon from some Uncle Joey sweater-wearing “I’m not stuffy like those other pastors” pastor if it meant chilling with the homies for a few extra hours every week.

One of these youth group excursions was a mountain biking trip, where Rev. CoolDude McGoo accidentally took us up an advanced hiking trail, forcing us to carry our heavy bikes up sheer rock faces in a freezing downpour. We were lost and shivering on the mountain for hours without any rain gear or supplies before my friends and finally split from the pack, despite the pastor’s bellowing protests. We found our way down the mountain using an old logging trail as the evening sky darkened to night, knocked on a stranger’s door at the bottom, called the pastor’s cellphone to tell him how to get the rest of the group back to safety, and drank hot tea in a dry garage while we waited for the church van to arrive.

Instead of being hailed as heroes for using our wits to save the group from certain disaster, we were admonished for disobeying the pastor, who called our parents to make sure we were properly punished. It did not go as he planned. My mother lectured the pastor for needlessly putting a group of children in danger. My best friend’s father, a polite, professional British man, called him an asshole and hung up. 

Shortly after the trip, a letter was mailed to my house saying I was no longer welcome at youth group because my faith in god wasn’t strong enough, and because I was a bad influence on the other kids. Not only was my simple childhood view of church as an inclusive, joyful, meaningful experience for people of all walks of life torn from me, but my love of mountain biking and hiking and experiencing nature on the trail in general was as well. The weekend nights spent in backyard tents trickled to a halt. My subscription to Mountain Bike Action was never renewed. I traded my two-wheeled chromoly steed in for a skateboard, swapped my Nike ACG Moabbs out for a pair of olive green Simples, and that was that. Goodbye, Missy Giove. Hello, Gino Ianucci.

My low-grade personal beef with hiking morphed into more of a public gripe compulsion once humanity entered the age of the social media influencer. Endless pics featuring models in top-end activewear looking out over grand vistas with braindead platitudes captions like “Being yourself is the most beautiful thing you can be” were like a rusty cheese grater on my soul. I was convinced nobody actually liked hiking; that people only did it because those kinds of posts generate loads of likes and shares, and that was because Americans live such sedentary lifestyles that they look up to those beautiful people doing active things in a natural environment entirely unfamiliar to them.

An entire industry has popped up around the fact that you can shame regular people into believing their life sucks with a handful of artfully crafted social media posts, and that buying shit through an affiliate link will make their life better. It’s fucking stupid and I hate it, but influencers wouldn’t be generating billions of dollars if the depressing psychology behind it all wasn’t bedrock solid.

Still, I didn’t have to like it, and I ragged on friends and family and total strangers for sinking mortgage payment sized amounts of cash into hiking and camping gear, and spending their weekends snapping pictures of themselves posing like their favorite nature-faking Instagram hustlers.

When hiking materialized on my list of things I make fun of without giving a fair chance, and I found myself at the end of snowboarding season with no real workout regimen planned outside of the Peloton bike in my basement, I decided I’d eat my words and go for my first hike in a quarter-century. I’d pick a smaller, rinky-dink mountain I could be in and out of in an hour. Best case scenario: I’d end up loving it, and it would give me a reason to spend more time in a part of New Hampshire I’m absolutely in love with. Worst case scenario: It would make for a funny write-up. Win win.

PREPARING FOR THE BIG DAY

Being largely out of the loop when it comes to gear, I still knew I’d need a solid pair of boots, and after spending way too much time researching them, I settled on a pair of Merrell Men’s Moab 2 Mid Gtx hiking boots. They’re waterproof, they protect your ankles, and I already knew they’d be comfortable right out of the box, as I’ve owned many pairs of Merrell sneakers over the years. This wasn’t a terribly difficult purchase to justify, as I live in New England, where it is constantly pissing and shitting rain, snow, hail, locusts, roofing nails, meteorites, etc. Even if hiking didn’t work out, I’d always find a use for them.

Then I contacted my good buddy Micah, the preeminent hiking guru of my social circle. On top of being an arborist and the owner/operator of Heartwood Tree Company, the dude bags peaks like Omar bags stash houses; with frightening regularity and precision. Not only would he know what gear I’d need to be safe and comfortable on the mountain, but he’d probably join me on the hike as well.

“Tucks”, or Tuckerman Ravine, is widely known as the birthplace of extreme skiing in North America, and has claimed many lives over the years. It’s located near the peak of Mount Washington, which is the highest peak in the northeast, and has claimed an absolute metric shit ton of lives over the years (over 150 souls lost since 1849). It holds the world record for highest recorded wind speed not affiliated with a tornado or tropical cyclone, and the weather up there changes drastically and often. Many people die from exposure on Mount Washington, even in the dog days of summer. It offers some of the most difficult hiking and mountain climbing experiences in the entire country, so much so that people who regularly hike 14,000’ mountains out west have left complaints online about the difficulty of our stout ‘lil 6,288 foot leviathan of unending despair.

And apparently city slicker Mike with his 30 lbs. of extra chub and his struggling 3-month cigarette free lungs were about to climb it.

Oh. Great.

I was clearly going to need more than just hiking boots in order to get through this alive. Thankfully, Micah shot me a link to a list of things I should bring for the journey, and also made recommendations for light, calorie dense foods, and other items that would help make the day hike as stress-free as possible.

I picked up this L.L. Bean day pack, these trekking poles, these hiking pants (the waists run super small, so size up at least once), these hiking socks, this waterproof parka, and a brand new polyester/wool Columbia hiking sweater at Savers for a cool $9. Everything else I brought, like this pair of micro-spikes, these water bottles, this headlamp, this first aid kit, this multitool I gave out as groomsmen gifts at my wedding 9,000 years ago, this LifeStraw, and this mega dope Stanley flask (as if I wasn’t going to rip a snort or six of bourbon at the top) I already owned. When it was all said and done, I was about $250 in, all for an activity I wasn’t even sure I liked doing. I hadn’t even set foot on a trail and alarm bells were already ringing in the treasury.

I could hear my almost supernaturally observant wife’s voice in echoing around in the back of my head. This is what you do. You get obsessive over things, invest a ton of time and money into them, and then abandon them a handful of months later for something else. I’m not saying it’s good or bad, but this is your pattern. Christ, is that what all of this is? Is my defining characteristic that I senselessly entertain every fleeting whim my dreaming caveman brain cooks up? After some introspection, I decided a man can only be so emotionally honest before he starts talking himself out of everything he really wants to do, and that any kind of perseverance requires a certain level of self-deception. Willfully ignorant, I pressed forward.

As the days passed and we got closer to the day of the hike, I compulsively researched hiking gear, second guessed the purchases I made, organized and reorganized my day pack, and sent Micah a torrent of obnoxious texts requesting his advice. To his credit, he never one told me to shut the fuck up and chill out. Sure, I was excited to get on the mountain, but there was a nervous, almost frantic energy to how I was preparing, and I attribute that to the fact that I was attempting my first exploratory hike on such a burly mountain. I was also afraid I was inviting a very experienced hiker along, only to make him wait for me as I slowly wheezed my fat ass up the trail.  I finally wore myself down, decided I was as prepared as I could possibly be, and left the rest up to the gods.

THE DAY OF THE HIKE

My alarm was set for 5:30 am the morning of the hike, but I got out of bed at 4:47 am because my two unruly cats decided they wanted to use my face as a UFC octagon. I changed into the clothes I’d set aside the night before, made myself a strong cup of coffee, packed up the car, kissed my sleeping wife on the forehead, and waited for Micah to arrive.

We hit the road heading north around 6:30ish, and after a couple pit stops for food, last minute trail provisions and a couple of post-coffee pee breaks, made it to the AMC Joe Dodge Lodge in Pinkham Notch by roughly 8:00 am. The weather, while sunny and warm at home, was twenty-degrees colder and overcast with an occasional spitting rain shower at the base of Mount Washington. A thick fog rolled over the mountain, spurred on by high winds that seemed to develop out of nowhere. Despite the conditions, the parking lot was jammed full of people strapping skis and snowboards to their packs, and getting situated for the trek up. The chill in the air was enough for me to throw a puffy red vest on over my new hiking sweater, slip on some light gloves, and swap my baseball cap out for a warmer winter hat. I adjusted my trekking poles, cinched tight the straps on my day pack, and we headed up to the trailhead.

I don’t think we even made it a thousand feet up the muddy, craggy trail before my heart was pounding, my breathing became labored, and I stopped to take my puffy vest off and switch back to a cooler baseball cap. I’d already broken into a sweat and I could still see the parking lot through the trees. A quick flash of self-preservation lazily arced across the landscape of my frenzied mind like a comet. Quit now, before you get yourself hurt and stranded on this dumb fucking rock. Apologize to Micah for wasting his time, and take him out day drinking in North Conway to repay him for the trouble. He’ll understand. Before I could argue with my fight-or-flight lizard brain, I realized my body had already started back up the trail without me having any input regarding the matter. OK. I guess we’re really doing this.

Micah, being Micah, decided we’d forego the easier, more heavily traveled trail to Tuckerman for the Lion Head winter route in order to see some off the beaten path views and to avoid the crowds. Mike, being Mike, had no idea what this meant, and blindly trusted his Sherpa to get him to the summit in one piece.

It didn’t take long before I started to see why people loved this hiking shit.

Lush vegetation. Wildlife everywhere. Waterfalls like you see on the covers of crappy grocery store fantasy paperbacks. Oh look, a cool little wooden bridge in the middle of fucking nowhere. This is awesome. Wait, is that snow ahead?

Yes, that was most certainly snow ahead. Crusty, dirty, half-melted snow. We stopped and stretched our silicon micro-spikes over our hiking boots and proceeded up the trail. “You lose a lot of energy without these things on because you slip at the end of every step.” Boy was Micah right. I originally bought micro-spikes to help me snowblow my steep driveway in the winter (some of you are already aware of my track record with icy driveways), but had never taken them out of the box until this trip. I was grateful for all of the gear I took on the hike, but my cheapo micro-spikes ended up being the real MVPs of the day. They worked great in muddy portions of the trail and over slippery boulders, too. I’ll definitely be stashing a pair in my car for dire winter emergencies, like navigating the occasionally icy parking lot of my favorite bar in the entire world.

Most of the hike to Tuckerman Ravine looked exactly like this. Overcast, foggy, chilly. We traveled slowly over slushy snowpack that was riddled with icy runoff streams underneath, so we had to use our trekking poles like probes, and skirt around problem areas so we didn’t punch through and dunk our legs. Of course, that didn’t stop Ol’ Tenderfoot Boulerice here from punching through and dunking his legs multiple times over the course of the trip.

Now here is where things got a little more interesting, and by “a little more interesting” I mean “legitimately terrifying”. As we made a turn to continue on the Lion Head winter trail, Micah said “OK, you’re going to want to stay on the monorail here. Otherwise you’ll sink right through the snow up to your dick.”  I had no idea what he meant by this, but I learned very quickly. A monorail is a trail condition in which the compacted, icy snow from people walking on the trail all winter melts far slower than the loose snow around it, creating a long ribbon of raised tightrope that ends up being the only safe part of the trail you can walk on. Wandering a little to the left or right of the monorail immediately resulted in me post-holing right through the snow all the way to my crotch. You could see how this could get dangerous very quickly, as a rock or downed tree in the right place under that snow could easily snap a leg, leaving you stranded and waiting many hours for help…if it came at all.

Some portions of the Lion Head trail monorail were totally mellow and easy to traverse. Others portions were entirely crumbled by the feet that came before us, forcing me to stumble sideways and take my chances in the deep, loose snow which bookended our course. Even more portions hugged the trail as the angle of it violently increased upward toward the peak, demanding I scramble up the narrow strip of ice using my hands and feet for purchase. My gloves became soaked almost instantly (note to self: pick up waterproof glove liners).

We eventually came to a semi-sheer, moss peppered rock face, glistening with fresh runoff near the top of a particularly steep part of the trail. Micah effortlessly scrambled up it like some kind of pony-tailed orangutan, and gave me instructions regarding how to do the same.

“Plenty of good hand and footholds here. Just use those and you’ll be fine.”

“No way, dude”, I said as I felt the weight of my overstuffed pack on my shoulders, and eyed what would have undoubtedly been a bone-shattering tumble down to the switchback below. “This is some straight-up Cliffhanger shit.”

Without a stitch of shame, I bitched out. I didn’t feel bad about it then, and I still don’t now. I’m aware of my limits in life, especially the physical ones. They are many in number, and this was definitely one of them.

“Is it smooth going after this slippery death rock, or is it just more slippery death rocks? Isn’t there an easier way up?!”

Unable to determine if there was indeed a smoother trail ahead after the rocks, we both decided to backtrack to the Lion Head trail sign several hundred yards down, and then take the easier, more Mike friendly route up to Tuckerman Ravine.  Micah explained to me that the trail was so difficult because the snowpack, with all of its convenient traction, had all but melted away there, leaving nothing but bald rock and slick, exposed tree roots in its wake.

On the way down, we encountered a large group of Canadian hikers heading up on the same trail. We stepped to the side to allow them passage (UNSPOKEN TRAIL RULE: People coming up have the right of way), and noticed that, aside from one woman near the very back in micro-spikes and a sensible rain shell, every single member of their group was woefully unprepared for the mountain. Bald-treaded sneakers. Shorty socks. Sweatpants. Cotton t-shirts. Jeans. These guys were the poster-children of what not to bring or do on a hike. After having sweated and stressed about the things I needed for the day trek, it was unbelievable to see so many people winging it up the trail in nothing but casual street wear.

“Allo, allo”, a blonde woman in her mid-30s at the head of the pack hailed Micah and I in a thick Quebecois accent. We answered in kind. 

“Is safe to head up, yes?”

We explained to her how the two of us with our trekking poles and micro-spikes and trail-ready footwear and wool clothing and medical supplies decided it was smarter for us to take a different route, so it would probably be smart for them to do the same.

“OK, thank you!” She smiled as she hauled right by us. We watched as the ill-prepared caravan of Canucks marched up the trail, offering the occasional nod of recognition or weird French snort of disapproval as they passed.

“Is that common?” I asked Micah as he picked up some litter left by the group several hundred feet down the trail and stuffed it into his pack.

“Oh yeah. You wouldn’t believe how common that is. They’re everywhere, especially in the warmer months, and they’re almost never properly prepared. You know how you always hear stories about people getting hurt and killed up here? It’s nearly always people like that who think the conditions at the base are the same all the way up to the top.”

After ten minutes or so, we reached the Lion Head trail sign and made our way up the heavily-switchbacked route to the top. A sustained and high-pitched scream echoed through the dense forest that surrounded us.

“You hear that?” Micah asked.

I nodded yes.

“One of those Canadians just broke a leg up there. I’d bet money on it.”

Mortified, I asked if we should head back up to see if they needed help, but we decided there would be little we could do that their group of 20+ hikers couldn’t do themselves.

We marched onward, taking periodic water breaks, a quick stop to nosh on some beef jerky from our packs (side note: I always buy a bag of beef jerky for road trips, and this somehow tastes way better on a trail than it does in a car), and encountering small groups of red-faced hikers lugging their heavy skis and snowboards toward their ultimate destination of risky springtime glory and the very last tracks of the season. It was here that Micah introduced the concept of “active recovery” to me. Instead of coming to a full stop, you just walk really slowly, regaining your wind while still gaining ground. This ended up saving my delirious ass during the last leg of our journey, as I was huffing and puffing and sweating through all of my layers by that point. Even Micah was breathing a little heavier toward the end, which helped me feel like less of a fat failure.

And then, suddenly and without fanfare, we’d arrived at the base of Tuckerman Ravine. I did it. Holy shit, I actually did it.

Folks of all ages stood around Hermit Lake Shelter #6, where caretakers of Tuckerman Ravine live, educate hikers and campers, and occasionally act as first responders for injured skiers and snowboarders. Seeing as it was a rather overcast, cruddy day with poor snow conditions, I wasn’t expecting to see a party at the top of the trail, but I’d clearly underestimated the perseverance of the average New Englander looking to take in the last bumpy spring runs before their ski boots come off for the year.

When I say “party”, I literally mean party. Look at these animals.

Micah and I swapped out some of our sweaty layers, ate some more food, and I broke out my trusty bourbon flask while I took 900 terrible selfies to commemorate my having completed a hike that, judging by the size and diversity of the crowd at the base of the headwall, just about any average human being can do. Still, I wasn’t about to let that rob me of my baseless self-congratulating.

For a moment, Micah and I debated hiking the measly mile up to the peak of Mount Washington (he’d gotten his wife and her friend to do the same thing a while back), but ultimately decided against it because we hadn’t brought enough auxiliary gear with us to account for every conceivable variable along the way. Instead, we packed up our crap and meandered our way down the main Tuckerman trail, which turns out to be WAY EASIER GOING THAN THE BACKWARDS ASSED ROUTE WE TOOK UP. That fucker Micah clearly wanted me to earn my bourbon.

We eventually made it to the bottom of the trail, got back in my car, and I took us to Fiesta Jalisco for a late lunch and oversized margaritas before heading home.

WAS I WRONG ABOUT IT ALL THESE YEARS? YES.

If you have any semblance of ego, it’s never perfectly easy to admit you’re wrong about something, especially if you’ve spent decades being woefully, aggressively wrong about it. I clearly had a bad experience with it that ended up hard-coding a distaste for hiking into my personality, but after trying it again as an adult, the responsibility for owning up to my own bullshit ultimately falls on me. I was way wrong about hiking. It’s super fun, it allows me to stay connected to the Mount Washington Valley outside of snowboarding season, and I’m already organizing my next hike with Micah. Jess even says she wants to give it a shot now, so the potential for having a little built-in hiking crew to organize trips with is already there. I’m always bitching about losing weight, and I don’t think it will be remotely possible for me to carry a spare tire if I make hiking a regular activity. Hell, I’ve even subscribed to Backpacker Magazine. I’m all in. Hiking is great.

One extra bonus thing I wasn’t expecting to enjoy about hiking was the conversation. That isn’t to say I don’t enjoy conversation, but I honestly didn’t think I’d be capable of it as I slogged my way up and down a mountain. It annoys me to no end when people try to talk to me when I’m running, as I typically need every shred of my focus concentrated on not collapsing from a stroke in the middle of the street. I figured hiking would be the same way. We remained fairly quiet on the way up, but ended up having a genuinely great talk on the meandering trek down to the base lodge. For decades I’ve considered Micah to be a really good friend of mine, but as many of you can surely attest to, adulthood tends to create gulfs of space and time in which communication with the people you care about just doesn’t happen as much as it should. On top of the hike being a goofy premise for me to write about (and clearly great for exercise as evidenced by the gallons of sweat I left on the trail), it gave us a chance to catch up with each other without the modern distractions of phones and laptops and televisions, and I’m looking forward to more of that on the hikes to come.

As an official act of contrition, I will strike an acrobatic yoga pose on my next mountain peak with some cloying basic bitch HomeGoods wall art slogan like “Live, laugh, love.”

EDIT: Mt. Major, 6/1/19. A promise is a promise.

I’ve been using Facebook to keep in touch with friends and family, promote my writing projects, muse openly about current events, concoct viral memes about Ted Cruz being the lead singer of Stryper, and help small “mom-and-pop” businesses market themselves since about 2007. As of today, I will never use the service again.

MY RELATIONSHIP WITH ZUCKERBERG’S BILLION DOLLAR BABY:

Since the untimely demise of MySpace, Facebook has long been by favorite social media platform. My twelve-year-old personal page is littered with pictures of my pets, sordid tales about my trips to the little grocery store where I live here in extremely rural New Hampshire, and silly jabs I take at the occasional news headline. Many of my friends have deleted their profiles because of the many scandals plaguing Facebook, but I’ve stubbornly clung to mine like a captain refusing to disembark his sinking vessel; not wanting to abandon the 2,100+ followers who have been reading my blogs, buying my books, and supporting me as a writer since The Departed won best picture at The Oscars. That’s what I always told myself, anyway. In all reality, I was pretty obsessed with posting on Facebook, more specifically the instant gratification of posting something witty and getting immediate praise for it. Something as-of-yet-to-be-identified inside of me really, really enjoys that.

So imagine my surprise when I fired up my laptop and discovered Facebook issued me a 30 day ban over a seemingly benign two-year-old post about living without power after a windstorm.

Only I wasn’t surprised at all, because this is the third time I’ve been randomly banned from Facebook in three months.

BAN #1: MINIONS MEME = HATE SPEECH?

The first unexplained Facebook ban came in November of 2018. My notifications told me I’d violated Facebook’s terms of service in one of my posts, and when I clicked on the notification to learn more, the post in question turned out to be a family-friendly (albeit white trash) Minions meme I shared on my page to make fun of, because obviously. Even more confusing was the fact that the post in question was almost three years old.

“Who the heck cares about something I posted two years ago?” I thought. Deciding it must have been some kind of mistake, I clicked further, and chose to have the decision re-reviewed by someone on Facebook’s team. Moments later, another notification told me the decision had been reviewed, and that I was still guilty of violating Facebook’s conduct policy about hate speech.

Hate speech? A goofy Minions meme is now considered hate speech?

I was given an option to have my case reviewed by Facebook a second time, and was finally offered a chance to plead my case in a little text box they provided to me. Sadly, that was answered with a similar auto-response that my light-hearted Minions meme was still in violation of Facebook’s TOS, and the 30 day ban would still be upheld.

BAN #2: WHITE TRASH BOOGALOO

My first ban ended, and I made it less than two weeks as a law abiding Facebook user before I was once again issued a 30 day ban from the service. My crime? Posting about how much I loved the movie Krampus, and how I always rooted for supernatural European child snatcher over the white trash in-laws (my favorite of which being David Koechner’s hilarious character).

Again, I appealed the decision. Again, the appeal was almost instantly denied. Again, I was offered a chance to plead my case in the little text box. The only difference between this ban and the last ban was that the second appeal was never reviewed. In fact, it remains in an “in review” state even now, almost two months later.

This time I sat back and thought about what might be the cause of these bans. Was I being targeted by a particular individual who knows they can report me and I’ll have no recourse? Is it a concentrated effort by Facebook’s police bots to remove problematic users after all of the scandals they’ve just weathered (and continue to weather)? Are humans involved in this effort at all, or is this push to purge bad things from Facebook entirely managed by AI? If humans are, in fact, in charge of this project, is there any oversight regarding who they’re targeting for infractions and why? What exactly is going on over at Facebook?

In November of 2018 when my banning issues began, Facebook lauded themselves for being newly proactive about what they considered to be hate speech. According to their report, the amount of hate speech Facebook’s artificial intelligence detected went up from 24% to 52%. That is a MASSIVE increase in AI reporting. They also went on to say “Context is important. Our team of trained experts review hate speech to better understand it before it’s removed.” This is the part I don’t buy, because there is no way a sentient human being would look at the context of a Minions meme and call it hate speech. Also, if their “team of experts” was really commensurate with the new uptick in AI reporting, there would be someone available to speak with me about this. Alas, there isn’t, and I’m forced to speculate here about the hows and whys.

The only similarity I could find between my first two bans was that I used the term “white trash” in both flagged posts. As someone who lives off a dirt road in the boonies of New England, white trash is something we encounter on a daily basis. It’s an inextricable part of living in rural America. Some laugh at the term, and others wear it like a badge of honor. In fact, I ran a popular weekly “which of these things is the most white trash” poll on Facebook for years without ever hearing word from the Facebook attack bots. Could that be the problem now, though? Is white trash now verboten over in Menlo Park?

I finally decided to take a look at Facebook’s updated stance on hate speech. It reads as follows:

We do not allow hate speech on Facebook because it creates an environment of intimidation and exclusion and in some cases may promote real-world violence. We define hate speech as a direct attack on people based on what we call protected characteristics — race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, caste, sex, gender, gender identity, and serious disease or disability. We also provide some protections for immigration status. We define attack as violent or dehumanizing speech, statements of inferiority, or calls for exclusion or segregation. We separate attacks into three tiers of severity, as described below.

Sometimes people share content containing someone else’s hate speech for the purpose of raising awareness or educating others. Similarly, in some cases, words or terms that might otherwise violate our standards are used self-referentially or in an empowering way. When this is the case, we allow the content, but we expect people to clearly indicate their intent, which helps us better understand why they shared it. Where the intention is unclear, we may remove the content.

We allow humor and social commentary related to these topics. In addition, we believe that people are more responsible when they share this kind of commentary using their authentic identity.

Any usage of the term “white trash” on my behalf clearly fits into the “humor and social commentary” portion of the TOS, yet there I was – locked away in Facebook jail with not a guard or warden to review the insanity of my situation for another 30 days. That’s another 30 days in which I couldn’t post, use Facebook Messenger, or even publish content for my social media clients. I was even barred from boosting posts for the businesses I manage while under one of these seemingly frivolous punishments. At a time when people are leaving the platform in droves, major stakeholders are selling off shares as they decrease in value, and multi-billion dollar fines against the company are in the works, Facebook refused to let me give them money. How often is this happening to users? How much ad revenue is Facebook losing because of this?

Furthermore, what are Facebook users supposed to do about older posts that might violate a recently updated TOS? The last two bans I received were for posts I wrote YEARS ago. I probably couldn’t even tell you what I ate yesterday, let alone what I posted in 2017. Are we all supposed to scroll backwards through our respective feeds and scrub them of twelve years’ worth of minor infractions in order to keep from being banned in the future? Nothing about this makes any sense.

Out of curiosity, I went ahead and typed “white trash” into Facebook’s search bar, expecting to see zero results. Not only is the social media platform positively dripping with the term, there’s even a page with over a million followers named – shockingly – “White Trash”. Am I being punished for an infraction that apparently doesn’t apply to anyone else? Is this real life?

“OK”, I said when I realized I was going to have to sit in the digital time-out chair for another 30 days. “No more white trash talk. Let’s see if that works.” Pathetically, I found myself willing to censor myself if it meant no more hiccups with the content police. After all, it was my go-to social media platform. I was easily spending 90% of my online time on Facebook. It was cozy and it made me happy, like the threadbare pair of fleece Nautica sweatpants I bought in 1999 that, much to my wife’s dismay, I’m still not ready to throw out.

BAN #3: 90 DAYS IN FACEBOOK’S PENALTY BOX, AND A REVELATION

I made it almost an entire month before being banned from Facebook again. This is the post the community standards team deemed as “hate speech”:

This post from October 30^th, 2017 is apparently in violation of Facebook’s most recently updated terms of service. No warning. No simple deletion of the old content in question. Just another senseless month-long ban as a reward for a naïve Facebook user who chose to stay while so many others have left, albeit for reasons more honorable and sensible than my selfish “they won’t let me fucking post” rationale.

Do I have any hope of this issue finally being resolved by Facebook? Absolutely not. I’m not famous enough for them to make a correction, I’m not blue check verified, and apparently there aren’t enough commas in my post boosting budget for them to investigate why my particular stream of ad revenue has suddenly stopped. As the mass exodus from the platform illustrates, I’m confident the user experience of Facebook is permanently broken. There will be no special exception for me, and honestly, I no longer want one. Congratulations, Facebook! My stalwart, entirely irrational loyalty to you has finally been worn to the bone.

After some introspection, I can’t help but correlate walking away from Facebook with quitting smoking. Before I stopped, I had access to a mountain of information detailing exactly why smoking cigarettes was terrible for me. I just chose to ignore it because smoking felt good, and I rationalized that decision by telling myself I could quit whenever I wanted to. It wasn’t until I came down with a nasty flu this winter and finally gave up the American Spirits that I realized how good it feels to be smoke free. I’ve obviously known Facebook was a dumpster fire for years (2018’s Cambridge Analytica scandal being the cherry on top of the shit sundae for many), but that didn’t stop me from using it because I felt like I genuinely needed the platform to stay connected and be productive. It was familiar, I’d spent a lot of time cultivating my presence there, it allowed me write at length, and it offered direct interaction with my followers, but a funny thing started happening with each bizarre, unfounded, seemingly arbitrary ban.

I realized how little I actually needed Facebook.

As it turns out, you can keep in touch with friends and family just fine without it. Who knew? I have Twitter and Instagram to lean on (although I’m hesitant to even use the Facebook-owned latter after being treated as I have), and while neither provide me with the long form outlet my wordy fingers crave, I have a woefully neglected blog for that. When it comes to professional communications, there are really great newsletter and email optimization outlets I’m not taking advantage of nearly enough. As painfully obvious as this will sound to most of you, there’s no shortage of ways to communicate personally or professionally outside of the social media network I was once so hopelessly attached to. I’ll still help manage my clients’ accounts until they’re ready to abandon Facebook for warmer climes, but as for me personally? I’m out.

While it feels good to no longer be endlessly scrolling through a newsfeed filled with racist uncle rants and 60-second video recipes for “Jeez Louise Cheezy Pizza Tacos”, another bonus is that it feels really good to know I’m not personally contributing to the data mining, micro-targeting, democracy crushing, soul-masticating platform that legitimately devoured years of my invaluable free time. I don’t buy products from companies who advertise on InfoWars, and I do my best to make sure I’m not giving money to any company owned by Nestlé, because I don’t appreciate how those businesses operate. I know I’m too young to be this laughably late to the anti-Facebook party, but it blows my mind that I can make the same informed choices regarding which social media outlets I use.

In summation, I guess I’d like to thank Facebook’s team of community standards experts for helping me realize just how much more productive and healthy life can be without Facebook. I’d ask where I can send an Edible Arrangement, but I can’t contact you for another 29 days.

It’s that time of the year again, ghouls and gals. If you’re looking for something creepy to read during the month of October, check out my recommendations below. This should be just about everything from the horror genre that I’ve been able to chew through since I published the last list in October of 2017. I might have forgotten some, and there are a few I’m not listing because I thought they were pretty farty. Everything else you’re seeing is because I think it’s rad as fuck.

Enjoy. Or not. Whatever. Be that way.

***

Some Will Not Sleep
By: Adam Nevill

https://www.amazon.com/Some-Will-Not-Sleep-Sel…/…/B01LBBQV7W

Adam Nevill is the guy who is probably most famous for writing The Ritual, which is now a movie on Netflix (although the book is WAY different and far better than the movie). Some Will Not Sleep is a compilation of scary short stories that, as you’ll discover very quickly, all possess the ability to make you feel really, really uncomfortable. Lots of people with doll hands. Yikes.

Flight or Fright
By: Stephen King, Bev Vincent

https://www.amazon.com/Flight-Fright-Stephen-K…/…/1587676796

This is another collection short horror stories, these ones flight themed, from authors like Stephen King, Joe Hill, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, Roald Dahl (seriously), and Dan Simmons was a super fun read. I worked through a chunk of this one a flight from Boston to San Francisco, which made it all the creepier.

The Handyman
By: Bentley Little

https://www.amazon.com/Handyman-Bentley-Little/…/ref=sr_1_1…

I picked up Dominion by Bentley Little last year, and when I was finished, I realized I’d just discovered an author who had no fear about delving into some truly bizarre themes. I wanted more, so luckily I gave The Handyman a shot. Reader’s Digest version: A handyman makes his way across the country constructing dangerously built homes, and swindling the owners in the process. It gets very weird very fast. I really liked this one. I had zero fucking clue where it was going at any given moment.

Bad Man
By: Dathan Auerbach

https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Man-Novel-Dathan-A…/…/ref=sr_1_1…

Ban Man. Jesus, this was a doozy. A boy’s younger brother goes missing in their sleepy northern Florida town’s grocery store. Years later, the boy gets a third shift stocking job at the very same grocery store, where he quickly realizes shit isn’t, well…normal. If making you feel attached to characters was a musical instrument, Dathan Auerbach would be a fucking virtuoso on it. I still think about this ending months after I put it down.

The Eerie Adventures of the Lycanthrope Robinson Crusoe
By: Peter Clines

https://www.amazon.com/Eerie-Adventures-Lycan…/…/ref=sr_1_1…

Written in the same antiquated style, the famous tale of Robinson Crusoe as re-imagined by one of my very favorite contemporary fiction authors (if you haven’t read The Fold, 14, or my very favorite, Paradox Bound, do so immediately). This time he’s a werewolf. No shit. Lots of interesting Lovecraftian tidbits strewn around this one too, if that’s your thing. It’s definitely my thing.

The Great God Pan and Other Weird Tales
By: Arthur Machen

https://www.amazon.com/Horror-Stories-Classic…/…/ref=sr_1_2…

Speaking of Lovecraft, this Welch dude inspired the old racist galoot to start writing in the first place. The Great God Pan is widely regarded by the masters of the genre as one the first emergence of what we know as “modern horror” for good reason. It’s really fucking good, as are the rest of the stories in this compendium. This guy invented existential dread. Required reading for any serious horror buffs.

The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All
By: Laird Barron

https://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Thing-That-A…/…/ref=sr_1_1…

You’re going to see a lot of Laird Barron in this list, and probably every list going forward. Dude pumps out a ton of material, and this collection of horror stories is one of his very best. “The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven” in particular blew my mind.

The Cabin at the End of the World
By: Paul Tremblay

https://www.amazon.com/Cabin-End-W…/…/0062679104/ref=sr_1_1…

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. This fucking story, Jesus. I haven’t wanted to yell at the characters in a book like Sebastian in The Neverending Story more than I did with The Cabin at the End of the World. Two men and their adopted daughter are spending their summer at a cabin in rural New Hampshire when four people come trotting out of the woods with some very strange looking homemade weapons, and everything starts getting WEIRD.

The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies
By: John Langan

https://www.amazon.com/Wide-Carnivorous-Other…/…/ref=sr_1_1…

In last year’s super spoopy book list, I could not stop polishing the knob of John Langan, more specifically The Fisherman, which remains one of my favorite horror novels of all time. The dude can write, and this collection of short stories carries with it the same level of “holy shit, how did this guy come up with this idea?” as his previous effort. The one about The Masque of the Red Death” is so good it makes me jealous as a writer. The struggle is real. This shares the top spot with a Nick Cutter novel I’ve mentioned toward the end.

The Outsider
By: Stephen King

https://www.amazon.com/Outsider-Novel-Stephen…/…/ref=sr_1_1…

Stephen King’s latest novel is good. Really good, and if you liked The Bill Hodges Trilogy (Mr. Mercedes, etc.) at all, then you’re in for a fun little cameo surprise here. Kids are getting murdered in truly gristly, an unlikely suspect is taken into custody, and before long, you start to suspect somebody else is responsible for all of this gruesome shit.

The Imago Sequence
By: Laird Barron

https://www.amazon.com/Imago-Sequence-Other-S…/…/ref=sr_1_1…

I told you you’d see more Laird Barron before this was over. I’m pretty sure this is his first attempt at a collection of short stories, this one focusing more on occult themes. “Bulldozer”, my favorite story from this book, is about a hard-boiled Pinkerton investigator who unwittingly follows the facts somewhere nobody wants to end up. The mashup of horror and detective/spy themes was something I really enjoyed, and was only used to from Charles Stross’s “Laundry Files” series.

Blackwater: The Complete Saga
By: Michael McDowell

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_2_14…

This is a long book that takes you deep into the heart of the south of yesteryear. Perdido, Alabama, to be exact, where a young woman is discovered taking shelter from a flood in the top floors of a hotel in 1919. Once rescued, this woman becomes an invaluable fixture to the town and the people in it, but something about her is, well…off. McDowell paints a very vivid picture of a time and place I wasn’t super familiar with before this novel, and the amount of detail he injects into it helps to paint a picture so crisp you might as well be there watching it all play out firsthand. Well worth the 800 page investment.

Occultation and Other Stories
By: Laird Barron

https://www.amazon.com/Occultation-Other-Stor…/…/ref=sr_1_2…

OH HEY WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT MORE LAIRD BARRON. This guy is my spirit animal. Another collection of short horror stories. If I had to give you a theme, I’d say “regular people vs. monsters and gods and shit” sums this up. The story “The Lagerstatte” was a Theodore Sturgeon and Shirley Jackson nominee, which is a big deal.

Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy
By: Jeff VanderMeer

https://www.amazon.com/Area-Southern-Annihila…/…/ref=sr_1_5…

This trilogy is the source material for that movie Annihilation that everybody hated. The Southern Reach Trilogy, however, was really great to read, so don’t let Alex Garland wack-as-fuck adaptation stop you from digging in here. There’s ALL SORTS of creepy, crazy shit in the books that never gets used in the movie. Once you finish this, you’re going to yell at your TV for putting you through that Natalie Portman-fueled rainbow nightmare beforehand.

The Stone Man
By: Luke Smitherd

https://www.amazon.com/Stone-Man-Science-Fict…/…/ref=sr_1_2…

A giant stone statue shows up in the middle of a city center. Nobody knows where it came from. Then it starts walking, towards what, we have no clue. Nothing can stop its nightmare path through Europe; not buildings, not lakes, not mountains, not missiles. This is a crazy original idea from an author I’ve never heard of before, but I’m definitely stoked to read more from.

The End of the Story
By: Clark Ashton Smith

https://www.amazon.com/End-Story-Collected-Fa…/…/ref=sr_1_1…

If this guy’s name sounds familiar to you, it’s because he’s a fucking legend. Clark Ashton Smith was basically a celebrity in the horror/fantasy genre back in the day, and was good buddies with Robert E. Howard (the dude who created Conan), Lovecraft (yes, that Lovecraft), and Jack London (yes, that Jack London). His fiction is taught in schools all over the globe, and this collection is a great primer on all things Smith.

The Croning
By: Laird Barron

https://www.amazon.com/Croning-Lai…/…/159780231X/ref=sr_1_1…

HOLY FUCKADOODLEDOO, MORE LAIRD BARRON. I know, I know. What do you want from me? I’m a creature of habit, and when I find an author I like, I want to consume everything they’ve ever put out. The Croning is definitely my favorite compilation from Laird Barron. These intertwined tales all center on a mysterious, ancient entity known as “Old Leech”, who, you’ll never believe it, is not very nice. This one is my third favorite on this list.

The Ritual
By: Adam Nevill

https://www.amazon.com/Ritual-Adam…/…/0312641842/ref=sr_1_1…

Look, I know plenty of people who loved this movie, and I know a lot of people who disliked it. I even know a handful who were like “meh” about the whole thing. The book includes LOADS more stuff about the lore behind everything, the creepy weirdos who live in the woods, the main characters themselves, and about the monster, which makes way more sense in the book than in the movie. This is probably in my top three horror books of the year. Definitely #2 on this list.

Her Body and Other Parties
By: Carmen Maria Machado

https://www.amazon.com/Her-Body-Other-Parties…/…/ref=sr_1_1…

Horror writing has long been a dude’s sport, and nobody makes that more clear than Carmen Maria Machado and her absolutely brilliant compilation of short stories that focus around women and women’s issues. It’s horrifying. It’s unsettling. It’s sexy. In some stories, you get the feeling it’s not entirely fiction. “Genre demolishing” comes to mind. So does “when does her next effort come out?” If the Law & Order: SVU themed story “Especially Heinous” doesn’t turn you on to Machado’s genius, you brain has been removed, and your skull has been refilled with some kind of idiot gruel.

After the End of the World
By: Jonathan L. Howard

https://www.amazon.com/After-End-World-Carter…/…/ref=sr_1_3…

This is the sequel to Carter & Lovecraft, a novel I put in last year’s spoopy list. I won’t go into too much detail about this one if you haven’t read the first book, but know that the juice of the sequel is well worth the squeeze when you’re ready. Lovecraftian alternate timeline stuff full of Communists and tentacles. The good stuff.

The Last Days of Jack Sparks
By: Jason Arnopp

https://www.amazon.com/Last-Days-J…/…/0316433039/ref=sr_1_1…

Shock journo Jack Sparks has built a career and a personal life out of being a total piece of shit. Once he starts investigating a bizarre YouTube video, all of that starts to crumble apart, leaving a frantic, self-deceptive man on the hunt for the truth behind it all. The inclusion of alternative viewpoints to Sparks’s belligerent, snarky point of view is a great touch you find yourself looking forward to throughout the novel.

The Changeling
By: Victor LaValle

https://www.amazon.com/Changeling-Novel-Victo…/…/ref=sr_1_1…

This slow-burning novel was something I almost gave up on about a third of the way through, and I’m really, REALLY glad I didn’t. Part social commentary, part modern fairy tale, part surrealistic horror narrative, The Changeling drags you the streets of New York City, to dark, forgotten places you really weren’t expecting to go. How this hasn’t been optioned into a movie is beyond me. I am the god Apollo. I am the god Apollo.

Paradox Bound
By: Peter Clines

https://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Bound-Peter-Cl…/…/ref=sr_1_1…

Remember when I talked about Peter Clines a while back? You know, when we took at look at that crazy werewolf Robinson Crusoe book? That’s Peter Clines, and I think Paradox Bound is his best work yet. More science fiction than horror, Paradox Bound centers on a kid named Eli Teague, and the Revolutionary War costumed stranger in the Model A he keeps running into during certain parts of his boring, unfulfilling life in his go-nowhere town. Peter Clines does time / interdimensional travel concepts better than anyone these days. If that’s your thing, this is your thing. I’m chomping at the bit for a sequel to this one.

Strange Weather
By: Joe Hill

https://www.amazon.com/Strange-Weather-Four-S…/…/ref=sr_1_1…

Stephen King’s son Joe is a top-notch novelist all on his own (NOS4A2, Heart Shaped Box, Horns, etc.). Strange Weather, not to be confused with the 2016 movie starring Holly Hunter is his second short story compilation. Well, a collection of four novellas, really; each one pitting its protagonists against forces of nature that are pretty unnatural it you ask me. “Aloft” blew my fucking mind. “Loaded” hit way too close to home, and made me weep for the contemporary human condition.

What the Hell Did I Just Read
By: David Wong

https://www.amazon.com/What-Hell-Did-Just-Read/…/ref=sr_1_1…

Jason “David Wong” Pargin is the guy who once brought you Cracked.com, as well as John Dies at the End. What the Hell Did I Just Read is the third book in the John Dies at the End Series {the second one being This Book is Full of Spiders). Like After the End of the World, I’m not going to spoil the series by reviewing this one in any great depth. I think this is a spectacular way to end a much-loved trilogy, very much in line with the first two books, and I can’t wait to see what David dreams up next. The sauce is boss.

The Deep
By: Nick Cutter

https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Novel-…/…/1501144839/ref=sr_1_2…

On last year’s list, I added The Troop and Little Heaven (my #1 pick) because Nick Cutter is a fucking horror dynamo. The Deep continues Cutter’s tend to create dark, seemingly hopeless worlds for his characters to suffer through. Synopsis: Everyone on Earth is dying from a disease that makes you forget everything; how to drive, eat, eventually how to breathe. There might be a cure, though; at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, where humans were never meant to go. Long story short, if it says Nick Cutter on the cover, it’s worth the price of admission. Out of this entire list, this is my shared #1 pick, along with The Wide Carnivorous Sky by John Langan.

I devised a telemarketing scheme when I was thirteen.

I went onto my friend’s computer, found a text-to-speech program. and wrote the following:

“Do you want to know the meaning of life? If so, mail a one dollar bill to [address redacted], and we will send you the meaning of life.”

My thinking was that people would pay for it no matter what. A dollar was such a throw away amount of money, and even if it wasn’t the “real” meaning of life, curiosity would force some people to stuff those envelopes, just to figure out what this snake oil salesman was shilling.

The address given in the script was to a house in Rye, New Hampshire that was in foreclosure and had head-high weeds growing in the yard.

My plan was to clean the mailbox out weekly, and keep the proceeds for myself without mailing anything back to my customers. If, in the off chance that somebody really complained about not getting the secret of life, I decided I would mail them a random page from the Bible to shut them up.

I wrote my script, converted it to robotic text voice using my friend’s program when he was asleep, and recorded it onto one of my mother’s micro-cassette recorders she used for her social work practice.

When I slept at my friend’s house in Rye, I sneaked out in the early morning hours and walked a mile down the road to a convenience store called the Hungry Horse, where I used the pay phone and dialed random numbers from a phone book. When people answered, I played the robotic voice from the recorder into the receiver:

“Do you want to know the meaning of life? If so, mail a one dollar bill to [address redacted], and we will send you the meaning of life.”

I did this for two weeks straight, until a police car flashed his spotlight on me, and I was forced to escape though a maze of fields, marshes, horse farms and a length of sopping wet swamp back to my friend’s house.

I left my muddy clothes outside by the garage, went to bed, and then rode my bike home before my friend woke up so he wouldn’t know about my foiled scheme.

I never checked that mailbox. Every now and again when I’m driving down to the beach, I’ll drive by the house, now occupied by a happy looking family, and wonder if they get random one dollar bills mailed to them, accompanied by notes begging them for the meaning of life.

The day started out as every other day has since I’ve been prescribed a heroic dose of antibiotics for a pair of ear infections; with me speedily tip-toeing to the closest toilet, and discharging something the color and consistency of highly pressurized hot chocolate into it. Despite my wife and I knowing “MAY CAUSE DIARRHEA DURING TREATMENT” is printed all over the bottle of horse-sized pills I dip into twice a day, I still do her the courtesy of running the faucet during my frequent bouts of expulsion, hoping against hope that the babbling stream will somehow mask the gruesome noises coming from behind the bathroom door. It does not work. In fact, I would go as far as to say the act of masking the bad thing almost serves to amplify it, like hanging a pine scented air freshener in a morgue during a rolling summer blackout. On the infinite spectrum of ways one can wake up, the past five mornings land somewhere between “house fire” and “rolling over to spoon your wife, only to find it’s a serial killer wearing her cleaved face like a dead skin mask.”

Not being one to let a little humiliation get in the way of having a good day, I sat down in my office, and buried myself in work. None of the software I use to manage accounts was functioning, forcing me to remember what I’d set them to the night before, and spend several hours recreating all of my work manually.

Needing a break from the computer, I decided I’d run some errands. I let the dog hop in the car to come along for the ride, and I stopped at the end of the driveway to check the mailbox before hitting the road. A giclée art print I’d ordered for my wife as a surprise had arrived. It had been folded six or seven times in order to fit into the small mailer it came in, making it completely unfit for framing. I tossed it and a handful of envelopes onto my passenger seat, noticed the look of frustration-nearing-rage creeping onto my face in the rear view mirror, and continued toward the main road.

Lowe’s was out of the metal flatbed carts one would typically use in the gardening section, forcing me to load a plastic shopping cart with approximately four-hundred pounds of pelletized lime, fertilizer, grass seed, natural insecticide, and a Scotts handheld broadcast spreader I’d had my eye on for a while. Having breached the maximum load weight for the cart, two out of four wheels seized, forcing me to angle my shoulders down and put all of my weight into shoving the cart across the store, through the register line, and all the way out into the parking lot, as if I was bulldozing a rack of blocking dummies for old white men with clipboards at the NFL Combine.

Once back at home, I got an email from my wife, telling me the $25 per month savings I was expecting to save on homeowners insurance after installing a security system turned out to be only $2.25 per month. After a few minutes of storming around the house and swearing at inanimate picture frames and window treatments, I responded.

“I’m going to take a lunch break for lo mein and green tea with Evan at that Chinese joint in Rochester.”

As I got out of my car at the restaurant, my watch strap broke; sending it crashing to the ground, where it joined my rationality, well being, happiness, and hopes for a bright future.

My spirits were mended after an hour spent with great friends and truly excellent spicy chicken lo mein, so when I got home, I decided “heck, why not get some of this lawn stuff taken care of before it gets dark.”

I pulled the Scotts Turf Builder 23-lb Broadcast Spreader (a $40.48 value) out of my car, loaded it up with pelletized lime, set the spreader dial appropriately, and began walking up and down my lawn, firing little pH balancing soil nuggets this way and that. The sun was warm on my face. A slight breeze rustled the tree tops as I went. All was right with the world again, and I was a truly reformed man. I giggled at how ridiculous I was for allowing myself to be upset over trivial things, like shopping carts, and diarrhea. I mean, life is so much more important than that, right? You just have to play through the pain, and that’s when things get better. It’s moments like these that really put the human condition into —

CLUNK

I looked down. The broadcast spreader wouldn’t move forward anymore. I checked around it, but didn’t see any roots, rocks or branches that could have impeded its path. I pushed it again. Nothing. Getting on my hands and knees, I discovered the problem — the plastic differential that connected the wheel axle to the spreader had snapped after ten minutes of use, rendering my brand new Scotts Turf Builder 23-lb Broadcast Spreader completely useless.

And that’s when I finally lost it.

I had no idea what to do with my rage, so I went ahead let my rage dictate the next several minutes without any input from me. I did a full lap around my property, speed walking and pumping my arms like a WWE wrestler walking down the aisle toward a steel cage match. I picked up a rock and I threw it into the woods as hard as I could. I kicked a tree. I made to scream, but not wanting to upset my neighbors, I tensed up my entire body, and let out a whisper-level, red-faced, close-fisted “fuuuuuuuuuuccckkkkkkkkk” that hissed through my clenched teeth like a tea kettle.

The insanity train only showed signs of slowing down as I was storming toward the broken spreader, realizing that hurling it into the stratosphere would only keep me from getting a refund, further sledgehammering my day into the bowels of perdition.

Conquered and broken, with the ghost of a not-yet-dead Kenny Rogers reminding me to “know when to fold ’em”, I walked inside, leaving the mangled plastic device in the yard as an artistic representation of the toll 4/17/2017 took on one Michael A. Boulerice.

“Tomorrow’ll be a better day”, I told myself as I tip-toed to the bathroom to expel the last ounce of dignity I had left to my name. “Yeah, tomorrow’s going to be alright. I can feel it.”

I was about to walk upstairs and put some clothes away, when I discovered that, in my haste to open every window in the house on an incredibly rare seventy-degree day in February, I’d accidentally opened a window without a screen. For most people this wouldn’t be a problem, but my special needs cat Charlie is forever housebound due to his abject inability to do normal cat things (read: he thinks my dog is his dad/mom/brother, and has once tried to nurse from his nipple), and in a town where long forgotten “HAVE YOU SEEN FLUFFY?” printouts are stapled to every ninth tree as sun bleached reminders of nature’s cruelty, he would not last an hour in the coyote-saturated wilderness surrounding my property.

Panicking, I scoured every room for Charlie, but couldn’t find him. I threw my headphones off, sending an Audible compilation of Robert E. Howard’s short stories clattering to my kitchen floor, and bolted outside as fast as my legs would allow, trudging through the knee deep snow and bellowing his name. Nothing.

Shortly after that, I began to lose my shit.

I thought of how upset it would make my wife if Charlie was gone forever; how awful it would be to come across his flattened little body on a random drive down the rural dirt road that leads to our house. My mind darted to a future scene in which we discussed how long we should wait before we adopt a new cat, because getting one too quickly would seem like an insult to the one we just buried. For a second I even thought “Oh man, I’m definitely not snowboarding this weekend“, and then instantly reprimanded myself for being so selfish. It’s weird how our reptilian brains shift attention from one benign topic to another during a crisis in an attempt to keep us doing whatever we need to do without seizing up from anxiety and fear.

*trudge trudge trudge* “CHAARRRRLIIEEEEE!!! COME HERE COO COO KITTY!!!” *trudge trudge trudge* “COME HERE, LITTLE BUDDY!!!” *trudge trudge trudge* “EVERYTHING’S GOING TO BE OK!!!”

But was it?

There was no sign of Charlie anywhere, and the last vestiges of crucial daylight almost seemed to drain from the sky in double-time. Again with nature’s cruelty.

After thoroughly soaking my feet and jeans in the melting expanses of snow in my yard, I sprinted back inside to grab my dog Rodney, hoping the cat would maybe come for his milkless surrogate father, and found Charlie standing on the kitchen table, patiently staring at me as if I were some kind of sweaty palmed, over-reactionary alarmist, which I undoubtedly was, and am, and will most likely be forever.

I exhaled, gave Charlie a pat on his head, shook off my slush-laden sneakers, reached into the fridge for a cold beer, and finally closed this malicious asshole of a window that is clearly trying to tear my family apart.

We now have FOUR hour-long episodes of The Michael Boulerice Show podcast uploaded for your listening pleasure. My wife and Chuck and I are definitely having a blast with this new, completely unscripted project of ours, and despite our inexperience, we’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback. You can find it on iTunes, Google Play and Soundcloud (links below).

iTunes

Google Play

Soundcloud