Steven E. Wedel's Blog

What happens to a man’s soul when his mind is gone?

It’s a question that haunted me long before I ever wrote The Dead of the Day. I’ve seen people I cared about fade slowly into the fog of dementia—forgetting names, faces, entire chapters of their lives. The body stays, the eyes still open, but the person behind them? It’s like watching someone drift away in pieces.

We’ve all read stories about monsters.

The ones that crawl out of the woods with too many teeth. The ones that live under the bed. The ones with claws, wings, fangs, or fire. They make for great entertainment. They’re scary, sure. But they’re also easy to spot.

You know what really scares me?

An old man in a hospital gown who whispers your name even though you never told it to him.

A man with a foggy memory, but perfect clarity about your sins.

A man who doesn’t have to chase yo...

There’s a certain pressure in fiction to make your protagonist likable. Relatable. Sympathetic. You’re supposed to give readers someone they want to root for—someone they’d grab a beer with or follow into battle.

But sometimes, the story demands someone worse.

Someone angry. Someone broken. Someone who’s said and done things you can’t defend.

Someone like Enoch Hoffmann.

When I started writing The Dead of the Day, I knew I wasn’t creating a hero. Enoch is a racist, bitter old man wit...

Some ghosts don’t come from outside the house.
They come from your last name.

One of the oldest horror tropes—maybe even older than the vampire or the haunted house—is the cursed bloodline. From Greek tragedies to Southern Gothic, horror keeps coming back to the same chilling idea: You can’t escape your family.

You can try. You can move across the country, change your name, leave the church, bury the past. But in stories like Hereditary, The Witch, The Shining, or Pet Sematary, the evil isn...

When most people think of Gothic horror, they imagine crumbling castles, fog-drenched moors, or Spanish moss hanging off antebellum mansions. But Gothic doesn’t belong exclusively to Europe or the American South.

There’s a different kind of Gothic hiding in the plains and hills of Oklahoma.

Maybe we don’t have vampires in stone towers or ghosts in plantation ballrooms. What we do have are empty fields, flooded riverbanks, and forgotten towns, a...

Nursing homes have always creeped me out. My first experience in one was in maybe the 4th grade as a Cub Scout. Our den mother took us to a nearby nursing home to sell raffle tickets or something. I remember old women sitting in a lobby like they were waiting for us. Waiting to take us to the other side with them.

As an adult, I know that’s irrational, but the places still make me uneasy. Maybe it’s the long, quiet hallways that smell like antiseptic and old skin. Or the way time seems suspen...

I have just come home from my last-ever visit to Bar K Dog Bar, a park that, for almost three years, had become the second home for me, Bear, Sweet Pea, and countless other canines and their humans. Sadly, it wasn’t for one last run through the splash pad, one more Diet Coke in the bar, or even one final game of Singo, which I hosted on Friday evenings. It was to pick up that Singo equipment and take one final look at the closed doors of a place that had come to mean so much to so many.

When ...

Imagine being raised to believe in God and Satan, Heaven and Hell, and choosing to allow your baser nature to govern your actions. You’re mean, selfish, abusive to your wife, children, and animals. But you believe it’ll all be okay because you’ll confess or repent on your deathbed.

But then you develop dementia and can’t comprehend that your end is near and it’s time to repent or make that confession.

Think about that.

This is the first of 13 posts I’m making to promote my new psycholog...

This post isn’t about writing. It’s quite a bit about literature, but really it’s about personal problems and healing. I don’t usually share such personal stuff here, but I feel compelled to do it tonight. If that isn’t for you, skip this post, but come back soon.

Books have always been my refuge. As a kid, if I got in trouble at home, I read to take my mind off what I’d done or the punishment I’d received. How many times did I read Where the Red Fern Grows or Little House on the Prairie or O...

Driving home from the dog park tonight, a random image from my past popped into my head. It was a scene from the fourth novel I finished sometime back in about 1992. You probably know that Shara was my first published novel, originally released in 2003, but it was the seventh novel I’d completed. I finished my drive home tonight thinking about those first six books I wrote, so I thought I’d tell you about them.

My first novel, composed on a Smith-Corona Electra XT typewriter, was The Promethe...