Vale, Paul Haines

Paul Haines was an amazing man and an incredible writer.

I’ve been sitting here for a while staring at the cursor, trying to figure out what to say.  Paul and my father walked a similar path fighting cancer, both of them going to extraordinary means to try to beat the disease.  They exchanged emails, I believe, and my father was always invested in how Paul was going with his own fight.

If you’ve never read any of Paul’s work, even if you’re not a fan of horror, go and find some.  Wives is what most people will recommend and seriously worth the read.  Paul always had a way of twisting off the veneer of normalcy of life, revealing something beneath that could be shocking, gut wrenching or just plain horrible.  But it always made you look at the world with new eyes, always made the real world more real.

I had hoped, so much, that there would be some magic cure for Paul.  I can only begin to imagine the hole that’s gaping in his family’s lives.  Paul, you will be missed, as a writer and as a damn fine human being.  I take comfort in the idea that maybe you and my father are sitting somewhere at a bar having a drink and sharing war stories and declaring a heart “Fuck You” to cancer.