I always have a fun time at Baltimore’s Charm City Spec reading series, once as a participant, often as an audience member, and sometimes as a podcaster who steals away with one of the invited readers to break bread and record an episode of Eating the Fantastic. So it was prior to that event’s last installment with horror writer William J. Donahue!

Donahue is the author of such novels as Burn Beautiful Soul (2020), Crawl on Your Belly All the Days of Your Life (2022), and most recently, Only Monsters Remain (2023). His short story collections include Brain Cradle (2003), Filthy Beast (2004) and Too Much Poison (2014). When not writing fiction, Donahue works as a full-time magazine editor and features writer. Over the past 15 years, his writing and reporting have earned nearly a dozen awards for excellence in journalism from the American Society of Business Publication Editors.

We discussed the artistic endeavor which had him performing under the name Dirty Rotten Bill, why the first three novels he wrote will never see the light of day, what he was doing with one of those heads from the film 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag, why he finds playing with the apocalypse so appealing, the reason he’s neither a plotter or a pantser, but a plantser, how a vegetarian is able to do damage to human flesh in his fiction, the way our journeys were different and yet we managed to wind up at the same destination, how wrestling changed his life, why we keep writing and submitting in the face of rejection, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us for dinner at Mt. Washington Pizza & Subs & Indian Cuisine —

1) Subscribe at Apple Podcasts — or wherever you choose to consume your podcasts — where I hope you’ll be tempted to sample a few of the 234 previous episodes.

2) Listen via the RSS feed of http://eatingthefantastic.libsyn.com/rss on the device of your choice.

3) Or simply use the embed below.

And here’s what loosened our tongues at Mt. Washington Pizza & Subs & Indian Cuisine — but not, alas, my Lamb Rogan Josh, for alas, my iPhone misfired —

Garlic Naan

Bill’s Mattar Paneer
homemade cheese gently cooked with tender peas and spices

Rice

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Coming up two weeks from now — a return visit with Jeffrey Ford, whom you last had the chance to eavesdrop on here way back in 2016 on Episode 17. When we last chatted, his collection A Natural History of Hell had just come out, but since then, he published the novel Ahab’s Return: or, The Last Voyage in 2018, A Primer to Jeffrey Ford in 2019, The Best of Jeffrey Ford in 2020, and Big Dark Hole in 2021, plus almost three dozen stories, so we had plenty to catch up on.

Thanks for listening!