Father’s Day is a greeting card holiday pretending to be a human one.
The cards show men grilling. Men fishing. Men asleep in recliners with the game on. The language is warm and rounded and careful, the way language gets when people are trying not to say the complicated thing. Best dad ever. My hero. The man, the myth, the legend. All of it true, maybe. None of it the whole picture.
Horror knows the whole picture.
The best horror fiction has always understood that fathers — really understood them — in a way that no greeting card company has the stomach to. The genre has given us Jack Torrance and his typewriter. Ray Molina sitting in a motel room at two in the morning, listening to his son sleep while something tapped from under the floor. Abel Crowder at a church table with his hands flat and his face the color of old lard, carrying sixty years of a dead man’s name — that last one from my own collection, There Be Monsters: Then and Now. Fathers who loved fiercely and held on too long. Fathers who sealed something up and told the children not to touch it. Fathers who stayed when every instinct told them to run — and fathers who ran when they had no other answer.
That’s not a condemnation of fatherhood. That’s the truth of it. Fathers carry things. The good ones, the bad ones, the ones doing their best in a house that slopes and a life that costs more than they planned for. Horror just won’t let them put it down.
This Father’s Day, we’re celebrating that.
A Father’s Day Short Read — Out Today
To mark the occasion, I’m releasing a brand new short horror story written specifically for Father’s Day. It’s the kind of story that gets at what the holiday actually is about: the things fathers protect their children from, the things they can’t, and the weight that passes between one generation and the next whether anyone meant it to or not.
The Father’s Day Card is available right now on Gumroad.
It’s a short read — written to finish in one sitting, ideally tonight. Consider it a different kind of Father’s Day gift. One that takes the holiday seriously.
Gifts for the Horror Dad in Your Life
If the father you’re celebrating has a shelf of paperbacks with broken spines and dog-eared pages, or a watchlist three seasons deep, or a habit of finding the one horror podcast nobody else has heard of yet — here’s what to get him.
These are not the obvious picks. Skip the gift baskets.
For the Dad Who Reads
A collection he hasn’t found yet.
The horror canon is deeper than most people go. Stephen King is the obvious entry. Shirley Jackson is the obvious next step. After that, things get interesting. If your dad has read The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle and is looking for the next thing, point him toward Thomas Tryon’s The Other, which came out in 1971 and still has no business being as unsettling as it is. Or toward Robert Aickman’s strange stories, which are the closest thing to reading a half-remembered dream that the genre has ever produced.
The Collected Strange Stories by Robert Aickman
For the dad who prefers his horror American and rural and steeped in the kind of dread that comes from knowing a place too well, Laird Barron is the name most horror readers get to too late.
The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All by Laird Barron
And if he’s the kind of reader who wants something new rather than catching up on the canon — something he won’t find recommended everywhere else — my own collection There Be Monsters: Then and Now is linked horror stories set across generations of the same family. Abel Crowder, from the opening of this post, has his story here. It’s the kind of book that rewards a slow read and a quiet house.
There Be Monsters: Then and Now by T. P. Grimbard
For the Dad Who Watches
Something he won’t forget.
Before the screen: the right pair of headphones. Horror audiobooks and horror podcasts are a different experience through speakers than through something that actually isolates you. The Sony WH-1000XM5 is the standard recommendation for a reason — noise cancellation good enough to make the rest of the house disappear, sound detail that rewards a narrator who knows what they’re doing, thirty hours of battery so he’s not hunting for a cable halfway through something good.
Sony WH-1000XM5 Wireless Noise-Canceling Headphones
The Wailing (2016) is the best horror film of the last decade that most people outside the genre haven’t seen. A small-town detective, a sick daughter, a stranger in the woods. It runs two and a half hours and earns every minute. Your dad will be thinking about the ending for days and won’t be able to explain why he can’t stop.
For something domestic and slower and deeply wrong in the way only the best slow-burn horror is, Hereditary holds up. If he hasn’t seen it, that’s the gift.
If he has seen both and is looking for something older: Don’t Look Now (1973). Grief and fathers and the things we think we see when loss has rewired us. There’s a reason it’s still on every serious horror list fifty years later.
For the Dad Who Has Everything
A piece of the shelf.
If your dad is a serious reader and collector, signed or limited editions from small press horror publishers are the gifts that end up displayed rather than buried in a pile. Cemetery Dance Publications puts out limited hardcovers of major titles with author signatures. Subterranean Press does the same. First editions of classic horror — real ones, not reprints — can be found through AbeBooks for less than people expect.
Cemetery Dance Selected Fiction by Stephen King
For something more affordable: a leather bookmark, a quality reading lamp, a Moleskine journal for a dad who writes in the margins of everything he reads. These are small things. The right small things matter.
Moleskine Classic Hardcover Notebook
For the Dad Who Creates
Tools for the work.
If your dad writes, or has a story he’s been meaning to get down, or keeps a notes app full of opening lines and goes quiet when you ask about it — get him something that treats the work seriously. A dedicated writing app license. A year of a craft newsletter. A copy of Stephen King’s On Writing, if he doesn’t have one, which remains the most honest book about writing that anyone has produced without meaning to write a book about writing.
And if he’s ready to go from the notes app to the page, the single best thing you can give is time. Uninterrupted hours. The kids handled, the house quiet, the expectation removed. That’s free. It’s also the rarest thing most writing fathers have.
The Part the Card Gets Wrong
Father’s Day cards suggest that fatherhood is something you’ve already done. Past tense. A record to celebrate.
Horror knows it’s ongoing. Something you carry into every room. Something that waits under the floor of wherever you are and taps until you deal with it, and the men who do well by their children are not the ones who sealed it up and put six screws in and hoped it would stay quiet. They’re the ones who eventually picked up the drill.
Happy Father’s Day to the ones still holding it.
The Father’s Day short story is available today only on Gumroad. Grab it here: The Father’s Day Card
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