Damn, is there nobody around Tom Monteleone who can tell him to just stop already? 

I was one of the many people “lucky” enough to get his first Substack newsletter, in which he tripled down on the racism and transphobia that got him booted out of the HWA last year. And I hit the “Unsubscribe” button with a quickness. 

I will not repost the entire mess, but according to Tom, just about anyone who won an HWA lifetime achievement award while not being white, male, straight, or American only got the recognition because they were minorities. Why would he think this? Because he’d never heard of several of these people, and/or he considered their body of work too trivial to deserve the award. The newsletter was loaded with right-wing scare buzzwords like “Marxists,” “DEI,” and “woke.” 

I’m sure there are people in the horror field who read his rant and said “Right on!” to their basements, but many of us (he spammed this to a lot of people) took to social media to express our disgust. 

This is such an ugly thing to do to these authors, to undermine their hard work and their achievements this way. To think he calls Linda Addison a friend and then so coldly dismisses her accomplishments, right down to putting “horror poetry” in quotes like it’s not a real thing.

And how the hell do you not know who Koji Suzuki is and somehow think your ignorance means the HWA has a problem? Tom dismissed Suzuki’s 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award as a choice “from out beyond Neptune.”  

Dude. Seriously? Suzuki is the author of The Ring novels, which were tremendously popular and influential in both Asian and American horror and were made into multiple films and spinoff properties. For that alone, I’d say Suzuki is more than deserving. He also wrote Dark Water, another work that got film versions in both Japan and the US. The Japanese and American movies based on the Ring novels are downright iconic. That’s just embarrassing, Tom. And it should make people question his assessments of the other authors in his rant. 

Full disclosure: I had a great time at his Borderlands Boot Camps. I made my first in-person horror writing friends there. Tom tore into my submissions like Jason Voorhees going after horny teenagers with a machete, but he gave me a lot to think about. Out of the four workshop leaders in 2020, he was probably the hardest on the segment of The Keeper of the Key that I brought for critiques, but he also said “You could publish this, but it needs a lot of work”—and he was right. 

That being said, I’m not all that surprised that Tom’s knowledge of recent genre works is lacking. During the craft lectures, he and the other faculty used works that were several decades old as storytelling models. Like The Maltese Falcon, which is nearing 100.

There’s nothing wrong with the classics, but if you’re teaching writers to seek publication in the 21st century, maybe use a few works that are, I dunno, recent. Market awareness is an important part of anyone’s publication journey.

I don’t enjoy posting this negative stuff about Tom, but because I mentioned him in Tidepool’s acknowledgments, I want to be clear where I stand. At the workshops, I found Tom funny and charming. A few things he said on his Facebook page back then made me suspect we didn’t see eye-to-eye politically, though I had no idea how deep the rot ran until he went on the tirades that got him the boot. 

But I liked him, and I hate that he’s done this. Tom could have had such a great legacy as an esteemed horror author and editor running these workshops to help the next generations of horror writers. 

But he decided to be…this instead. And that’s a real 2024-style tragedy. He’d rather throw away the decades of respect and goodwill he built as an author, editor, and mentor than let go of his resentment that the horror genre has evolved beyond what he’s familiar and comfortable with. It’s everyone else who has the problem; it certainly couldn’t be him. 

Personally, I think our genre is far richer and more interesting when we read and recognize work from diverse perspectives. I loved The Reformatory by Tananarive Due, this year’s Stoker winner for Best Novel. I loved The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias, last year’s Best Novel winner. Both authors wove their backgrounds into stories that felt fresh and new while being terrifying and heartbreaking. 

It’s Tom’s loss that he refuses to see that diversity makes horror stronger, but he’s apparently never going to understand that.

And that’s so fucking sad.