Welcome to another edition of the Carnival of Calamity’s Backstage Pass! This edition is a little lighter than editions prior to due to a missing column—House is being renovated, in a manner of speaking. You can read about it in the House brief below.
In last week’s edition, we were very excited to present the first cosmic horror story in the Backstage Pass, with Robert Bloch’s The Shambler From the Stars. This week, we’re excited to share another work of cosmic horror, this time from the author who worked tirelessly to define the genre: H. P. Lovecraft.
Our elder vampire, Edgar, works with focus to uncover what happened to his coven, and we move further into the Manor with he and Isabelle in this search. Keep up with them in this week’s installment of A Vampire’s Vengeance.
Our cinematic picks this week celebrate both Halloween and clever heroine’s in the aptly named Good for Her! list. Read the review, and then settle in with Haunt once you’ve finished treating the neighborhood tricksters.
And last but never least, we bring you the latest from the bus driver. The journey through infected-infested is nigh upon our passengers, and we have front row—well, driver’s actually—seat to the coming action.
Let’s get into it →
I will have you know that this week was spent in much the same way prior weeks have been spent: in development. Backstage infrastructure. Story infrastructure. Backstage and story communications. An inter-vault network. Revising the existing content management system. Learning how to make better use of existing tooling for task management. In short, a whole lot of boring stuff. But that’s part of what Backstage is about: insight into the processes and story-making progress that makes the Carnival of Calamity possible.
In this hyper-online day and age, it’s no longer enough for a writer to just write. We have to market. We have to sell. And none of that is effective without a system. So that’s what is in priority development right now: systems.
More updates to come as progress is made!
Normally, we would post a link to the next chapter of House. However, it has come to our attention that Meta, Inc. uses content in posts to train their AI. This is distasteful to us here at the Calamity. We are considering moving the serial to the Backstage Pass site, but are undecided on this course of action. Keep an eye on this space for future developments.
There’s a reason A Vampire’s Vengeance was relegated to its own column, and not featured in serial in the Backstage Pass. This is a slow burn. But it’ll be worth it, we promise! Come catch up with Edgar and Isabelle as they uncover more ground in the Manor and we learn a little bit more of the Column.
What is this, another story of cosmic horror? Why, that’s two in a row! The Festival is not Lovecraft’s response to Bloch’s The Shambler From the Stars, but it does share some eerie and baffling themes. What terrors lie beneath the places where we sleep?
Horror films are notorious for leaving survivors barely hanging on to what shreds of sanity remain to them once the terror is over. What we have prepared for you is something just a little bit different: survivors who turn around and kick ass. Dive in to this weekend’s picks in our Calamity on Cinema feature.
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A patron falls prey to the whimsical magic of a touring artist. Currently only available on Apple Books.
Welcome back to Bus Driver! When last we traveled with the bus driver, we were privy, sort of, to a basic exercise of infected roundup and elimination. Well, sort of, because we didn’t get to actually see it, we just got the quick and dirty run down from the bus driver himself. If you haven’t already, you can catch up with Part VIII here. Now that they’re well on their way, what will they come upon next? Let’s find out.
