J.W. Donley

Tag: reading

  • Five Stories Ya Gotta Read – June 2020

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    This is the start of a brand-new series of blog posts. Each month I will share with you five stories that I’ve read recently that you should look into. ‘Wilderness’ by Letitia Trent from Exigencies ed. Richard Thomas Recently I took a course on contemporary dark fiction, and this is the first short story we…

  • Five Stories Ya Gotta Read – July 2020

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    It’s time for another Five Stories Ya Gotta Read! ‘Rust and Bones’ by Craig Davidson from The New Black ed. Richard Thomas. This was my very first read of anything by Craig Davidson. It is the vivid story of a broken boxer’s life. You feel every bone crunching punch and the blood spray from head…

  • What I Learned from Perdido Street Station by China Miéville

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    This book blew my mind the first time I read it. I finished the whole thing while on flights for work in December of 2019. I’d never read anything quite like it. Warning: minor spoilers ahead. Before reading this book, I was convinced that there was an unspoken law that authors were not allowed to…

  • 20 Short Stories That Inform and Influence My Fiction

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    Occasionally, someone will ask me what stories and authors influence my writing. That is a difficult question. Really, everything a writer reads in some way influences our writing. It all pushes or pulls our work in some direction. When I read a story that doesn’t work for me, I learn that I should not attempt…

  • What’s It Like To Take A Long Intensive Writing Course?

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    My Contemporary Dark Fiction writing and reading class is finally over. Well, almost over. I still have a couple assignments to turn in and I owe critiques on my classmates’ stories. Want to know what it was like? Is a class like this something for you? Read on to find out. I will have 4…

  • Lessons Learned from Josh Malerman’s Bird Box – An Essay

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    The first time I attempted to read Bird Box I did not like it. I made it only a couple chapters in, and the thriller style pacing turned me off. Over the months, the story bugged me until I picked it back up. That time I finished the full story and loved it. But, for…

  • Joe Reviews: Bird Box by Josh Malerman

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    My Thoughts on Bird Box It is time for my review of Bird Box by Josh Malerman. To start things off, I need to let you all know that Bird Box took me a couple tries to get through. On my first attempt, I gave up only a few chapters in. It may have been…

  • Joe Reviews: Wounds

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    Okay. So, you need to read this. Please, if you are into horror you owe it to yourself to experience these stories. These collection sums up what is possible in the modern horror and weird fiction genres. This really among the best fiction I’ve ever read. I’ve not come across horror short fiction this engrossing…

  • Joe Reviews: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

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    Shirley Jackson is a legend. Just like every other teenager in high school English, and well before I ever had serious aspirations for writing, I’d read her short story, The Lottery. At the time I didn’t thing much of it. It was just another thing I had to read for class, and I made it…

  • Joe Reviews: My Best Friend’s Exorcism

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    I recently finished his next novel, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, and it was a pile of nostalgic fun. I never did get around to reading Grady Hendrix’s other book, Horrorstor, and now I regret that a lot. 80s nostalgia is the ‘in thing’ at the moment, especially in horror. It has been going for a…