here<\/a>). The opening words of reviewer Michaele Jordan made me laugh because, although we\u2019ve never met, she seems to understand at least a part of my personality in a pretty fundamental way. \u201cJosh Strnad does not look like a horror writer,\u201d she writes. \u201cHe\u2019s not dark and brooding, or dressed in black leather. Rather, he\u2019s young and blond, fresh faced and apple-cheeked. He looks like he just came straight from a Wisconsin dairy farm. (And for all I know, he did.) Yet he writes horror. It says so right there on his website.\u201d<\/p>\nShe\u2019s right, of course. Although Pantheon<\/i> is fantasy, not horror, a good deal of my writing (especially in regards to my short fiction) does tend to lean toward darker subject matter\u2026 which is weird because I\u2019m not a particularly dark person. In fact, if you had told me as recently as four or five years ago that I would cut my writing teeth (or fangs, if you prefer) crafting stories for horror markets, I may not have believed you. Unlike the popular image conjured when one thinks of the horror genre, I\u2019m not big on gory movies (I\u2019m more a fan of Pixar), I\u2019ve never dabbled in the occult (I\u2019m a committed Christian), and I don\u2019t spend large portions of my time brooding over the subject of death (despair for its own sake doesn\u2019t do a lot for me). I don\u2019t even actively celebrate Halloween, for crying out loud. I am as unlikely a candidate for horror fiction as they come.<\/p>\n
And yet\u2026 this is the genre that I\u2019ve chosen, or perhaps the one that has chosen me. I love speculative fiction in all its many stripes, sci-fi, fantasy, and, yes, horror. Something about it speaks to me in a special way\u2014I love the ability to look at reality and deeply human truths through the lens of the fantastic, to strip away the commonplace associations in order to see things, perhaps, as they really are. The truth of the matter is that I do enjoy a good creepy story, and, furthermore, that horror seems to have a way of tackling interesting philosophical issues that other genres may not be as good at. In fact, I find horror fiction at its best to be a profoundly moral genre (I\u2019ll probably write more on this subject at a later date). On that note, my experiences with the indie horror writing community have been overwhelmingly positive\u2014there are many remarkable, kind, friendly, funny, intelligent people who, like me, enjoy and participate in the creation of\u00a0dark fiction.<\/p>\n
So here I am: a country boy who is also an unapologetic geek, a blue-collar worker with a 4.0 gpa in his Masters-level classes, a man who teaches children and writes for an adult audience, a Christian who is comfortable to be associated with dark fiction. I suppose this makes me a walking contradiction, but I\u2019ve long since made my peace with that. I’m convinced that nobody is just one thing\u2014there is much more to each of us than meets the eye.\u00a0Let\u2019s have a conversation and get to know each other. Just don\u2019t put me in a box, because you\u2019ll most likely be surprised.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019m trying to devise a good method for linking to Pantheon reviews from my web site\u2014something easy and unobtrusive that wouldn\u2019t clutter things up. In the mean time, I suppose it\u2019s enough to state I\u2019ve been honored by a very positive response to the book thus far (if you\u2019ve not checked it out yet, there\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.joshstrnad.ztechcomputers.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.joshstrnad.ztechcomputers.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.joshstrnad.ztechcomputers.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.joshstrnad.ztechcomputers.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.joshstrnad.ztechcomputers.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=197"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.joshstrnad.ztechcomputers.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":200,"href":"http:\/\/www.joshstrnad.ztechcomputers.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions\/200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.joshstrnad.ztechcomputers.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.joshstrnad.ztechcomputers.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.joshstrnad.ztechcomputers.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}