Jason Daniel Chaplin's Blog

I’d intended for my upcoming anthology of science fiction and dark fantasy short stories to be ready to publish this year but now it seems that’s totally out of the question.

In the past two years I’ve lived in three different states and held two simultaneous jobs working long hours. I know that’s no excuse for not being as productive as I should have been.

However my upcoming book titled ‘The Fragment Color Darkly’ was almost finished. But after giving it a full read through by myself as well as my editor, I’ve decided the book needs about two more drafts before I can be proud enough to share this work.

This will push the book’s publication date to Summer of 2022!

I apologize for if the inconvenience if you happen to follow my work. Hang in there... We'll get through this together.

Is he an influence? No. Not really. I first heard of H.P. Lovecraft after watching Re-Animator in the 7th grade. I looked into him because I liked his name. It’s the kind of name that makes you think he’s the type of guy who really knows what he’s talking about when it comes to all things creepy-crawly. Boy was I surprised. His stuff was really hard to find in the town I grew up in. Eventually, I was able to read him and understand him. I always loved his ideas and I believe his work took horror fiction, sci-fi, and pulp to another level — especially another level of quality for genre fiction. He created weird fiction. And for better or worse, he paved the way for the cult status of writers to follow him. He’s not a writer whose books I look up at on my shelf and get inspired to write. His stuff never scared me like Matheson or Blatty did. But I can’t really compare him to anyone except for maybe Poe and that’s a HUGE stretch. He did his thing, went his own way, had his own opinions, and still garnered a readership. I mean, we’re still talking about him over a century after he published his first story. Was he a racist? Yeah, it seems so. As a Hispanic, does that bother me? No. He’s an American writer just like I am, and I do believe that American writers should be given carte blanche to say and do whatever we want to when it comes to words. That’s really all, then.

Not really a definitive list of my favorite works of fiction but a list of books written in the last century that’ve really stuck to my insides and haven’t let go.

The Trial by Franz Kafka
The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick
Imajica by Clive Barker