Just a heads up that Tom Breen will be at Readercon in beautiful Quincy, Mass. on Friday, July 8 and Saturday, July 9. He won’t be there in any official capacity, and tells us he finds most conventions a little bougie for his tastes, but you’ll easily spot him as a giant fat man in a Montreal Canadiens cap drinking cider and handing out Orford Parish buttons like they were Pez. If he goes to anything, it’ll be the Gemma Files reading on Friday, because Gemma Files rules. Otherwise, hit him up at the hotel bar.

Hot dang! Our compadres at Muzzleland Press have an interview up as part of their “Faithful Frighteners” series with Orford Parish Books’ own Tom Breen. Here’s an excerpt:

The conflict that most people see between Christianity and horror is usually rooted in a simplistic understanding of either, or both. Dante’s Inferno is simultaneously a work of profound religious devotion and a catalog of grotesque horrors. The contradiction only exists for people with a shallow, unreflective Christianity or a simplistic notion that horror is primarily concerned with freaking out the squares. There are plenty of both kinds of people, which is why there’s a strong notion that horror is incompatible with Christianity, but I see the reality as the opposite: horror is much more germane to Christianity than the limp materialism of most contemporary “literary” fiction, say.

Go ahead and read the rest!