Confessions of my Past, Present and Future
by
Dominic Stabile
The Past
As a kid, I read everything from biographies to random instalments
of Hank the Cowdog. I didn’t go
looking for any particular genre. If the cover was enticing, I’d read it. In middle
school I discovered the Goosebumps
books and that was my first literary foray into the world of horror. I specify
“literary” because I had watched tons of horror movies.
My mom has always been a fan of the old horror flicks,
especially Creature from the Black Lagoon.
I was pretty much allowed to watch anything, as long as it was the edited for
cable version: Night of the Living Dead,
Fright Night, The Lost Boys, Silver Bullet.
I was watching these movies while reading anything and everything. Inevitably,
these parallel interests intersected, and I began to select books with covers
that depicted monsters, haunted houses, and graveyards.
I remember standing in line at some bookstore, begging my
mom for roughly ten minutes to buy me Knee
Deep in the Dead by Dafydd ab Hugh, the first of four novelizations based
on the Doom games. The edition I
waved frantically in her face that day depicted the iconic image of a man in
badass combat/space armor, firing a futuristic weapon into a parade of slavering
demons, as they closed in on him. I still love those books shamelessly. And their
combination of action and horror still influences my work today.
