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Rest in Peace, Rocky Wood

   Rocky Wood, president of the Horror Writers’ Association, Stephen King expert, and Stoker-award winning author, passed away December 1  at the age of 55, after complications related to ALS. While I didn’t ever meet him, I know from others that he was a dedicated, determined, and kind person, as well as a talented author and researcher. We reviewed two of his books: Stephen King: A Literary Companion (reviewed here), which won the Stoker Award for nonfiction, and Witch Hunts: A Graphic History of the Witching Times (reviewed here), the Stoker Award-winning graphic novel he co-authored with Lisa Morton. Rocky also believed in promoting scholarship in the horror genre– he contacted us some time ago, offering to write a detailed review of Bev Vincent’s reference work The Dark Tower Companion, which we published here on the blog.

The Horror Writers Association has announced the establishment of a scholarship focused on nonfiction writing in the horror genre in his memory.

To learn more about him, visit his official website.

 

Having gone through a similar loss here this year, I have the deepest sympathies for his family.

 

The Original Monster Librarian

In Memoriam: Dylan Kowalewski, The Original Monster Librarian

September 5, 1973-April 17, 2014

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Monster Librarian was the idea and passion of Dylan Kowalewski. Dylan, in a typical burst of optimism and energy, with an intense love of horror fiction, started the site at the end of 2005. Where he got the energy and conviction to start it off less than three months after our first child was born, while working full time and attending library school, I do not have the slightest idea. Library school was an eye-opening experience for him, as over and over again he ran into librarians or soon-to-be-librarians who told him they didn’t like horror fiction, didn’t want to read it, and didn’t know what to hand readers who asked for “something like Stephen King.” He was tired of going to bookstores and finding only the same three or four authors in the “horror” section. Anne Rice and Stephen King were just the tip of the iceberg, but you would never know that from looking there.

Dylan himself grew up down the street from a used bookstore called “Granny’s Attic”. Remember used bookstores? I do. The one I frequented at that age was run by a guy with a beard and a very sneaky cat, with shelves of yellow-spined DAW paperbacks. Dylan’s, apparently, was stocked with killer animal (and killer plant) books from the 1970s and 1980s. As we cleared out the bookshelves in his basement study so new carpet could be installed, he let go of a lot of books, but Guy N. Smith’s Crabs books, James Herbert’s The Rats, and many other well-worn paperbacks stayed.

While I’m not actually working in a library anymore, I do have the degree, and I’ve been a children’s librarian in a public library, a school librarian in an elementary school. I’ve also had plenty of anecdotal experiences in which I’ve run into people who were non-readers who became readers when they discovered Stephen King, or Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, or R.L. Stine. I’ve seen all of these attacked by censors and belittled as trash reading or merely a stop on the way to “real” literature.  And I firmly believe that the world becomes a better place when people learn to read and to love reading. Dylan believed that too, and felt that a lot of kids, teens, and adults, were turned off to reading because the people who have the most influence– parents, teachers, and librarians– didn’t see the value of reading horror for pleasure. He always maintained that reading for entertainment is enough reason to read– there doesn’t have to be deeper meaning, and sometimes a tree really is just a tree.

And so he started Monster Librarian, writing short, objective reviews of just a few sentences, almost completely by himself, and publishing them every week, to create a resource for all those people (especially librarians) who told him “I don’t like reading horror, but I need to know about it”. For a long time that’s the only name by which people knew him. At a conference he attended, someone finally took him around and introduced him– “This is Dylan, the Monster Librarian”.  And he’s the only person who, I think, can ever own that title. At one point he worked full time, had a second job in a library, and put in probably the equivalent to a part-time job in time and effort for the site, as well as being a devoted and loving father and husband.

Most of the people who knew Dylan through Monster Librarian knew him mainly online, but both he and I have been lucky to have both authors and reviewers call us friends. This site became what it is because, in spite of his being an intensely private person, his personality and love of the genre and the horror community always shone through. Bret Jordan, Bob Freeman, David Agranoff, Rhonda Rettig (formerly Wilson), Erik Smith, Kelly Fann, Michele Lee, Colleen Wanglund, Darlene Wanglund, Dave Simms, Patricia O. Mathews, Diana Lord, Sheila Shedd, Hannah Kate, Lucy Lockley, Aaron Fletcher, Julie Adams, and so many more contributed to making this site what it is– a place where parents write to thank us for finding the right book for their reluctant reader, authors contact us to tell us that finding their book reviewed here convinced them to keep writing, small presses and self-publishers get their names out into the mainstream, Midwestern moms confess their love for horror, and librarians discover the gems of the horror genre.

The work of all these people has made the site a success.

But Dylan is the one who made it happen.

And to quote Amy Dalton,  his coworker from the Southport Library, “the only thing monstrous about the Monster Librarian was the size of his heart.”

 

If you have any memories or stories about your friendship or interactions with Dylan that you would like to share, feel free to email me at kirsten.kowalewski@monsterlibrarian.com.

 

 

Good Night, Sammy Terry: Guest Post by Mike Redmond– Bob Carter Is Dead, But Not Sammy

Sammy Terry - Sammy Terry George Wallwalker Bonus Picture

Sammy Terry– Photo courtesy of George Wallwaker.

If you grew up in Indianapolis in the 1960s, 1970s, or even 1980s, you probably remember Sammy Terry. Before cable, before movies came out on VCR or DVD, before Netflix and Hulu, if you wanted to see the classic (or classically awful) horror movies out there, you had to hope that your local television station had spent money on Universal’s “shock theater” package, and put together a low budget midnight movie show, complete with creepy host. The local station here was WTTV4, the show was Nightmare Theater, and the horror host was Sammy Terry, played by Bob Carter. Sammy’s impact didn’t stop in the Indy area (I was wowed by this tribute at Horror Hosts and Creature Features), but this is where he started, and when Bob Carter died on June 30, it was clear what a major influence he was on so many of us who grew up to love scary movies (and books). Sammy Terry’s official website can be found here, if you’re interested.

Mike Redmond, an author, humorist, journalist, and speaker who grew up in the Indianapolis area (and still lives here) agreed to share a tribute to Sammy Terry he had written here.

 

Bob Carter Is Dead, But Not Sammy

By Mike Redmond

The news came in the form of a text that said, simply, “Sammy Terry died.”

How sad. And how wrong. If you took a look at the World Wide Interweb thingie in the days after the story broke, with comments by the hundreds on Facebook, you would have seen that Sammy Terry was more alive than ever in the memories of all us kids who peeked from behind sofa cushions  (or, in the case of my brother, the sofa itself), when “Nightmare Theater” was showing on WTTV Channel 4.

The death of Bob Carter, who created and played Sammy from 1962-1989, brings a couple of ideas to mind.

The first is how much fun it used to be to watch a scary movie. Of course, my definition of scary has little in common with what passes for a scary movie today, unfortunately.

I’m a big fan of the classic monsters– Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman, the Mummy. Why? Because despite the visual impact of the monsters themselves, their movies rely on your mind to do most of the scaring. Blood and gore– the stock in trade for scary movies for the last three decades or so– aren’t necessary. The sight of the Frankenstein monster coming to life or Dracula’s riveting stare was more than enough to send a kid’s imagination into high gear. One of the greatest– and spookiest– shots in any classic monster movie has to be in The Mummy, after Im-Ho-Tep comes back to life. As he shuffles away, the camera fixes on a piece of linen trailing after him out of the room, and you just know bad things are going to start happening.

Bob’s death (I met him a couple of times so I’m taking the liberty of calling him Bob) also brings to mind how much we’ve lost with the death of local entertainment television. Kiddie shows like “Cowboy Bob’s Corral,” “Janie,” and “Harlow Hickenlooper” were just the beginning. Remember Jim Gerard’s interview show? I always thought that was one of the best things about being home from school.

Oh, well. That’s why we have memories, I guess. Which gets us back to Sammy Terry.

Bob Carter, the man who played spooky ol’ Sammy on Channel 4 during the 60s, 70s, and 80s, might have gone, but Sammy himself? He’ll be around forever, or at least as long as guys like me remember his spooky laugh, his spider George, and the creepy-campy fun of the classic monster movies he loved.

— This tribute first appeared in the July 16, 2013 issue of Current in Carmel.