{"id":59912,"date":"2025-12-03T18:30:13","date_gmt":"2025-12-03T18:30:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/59912\/"},"modified":"2025-12-03T18:30:13","modified_gmt":"2025-12-03T18:30:13","slug":"old-school-scream-queens-sam-j-millers-courtney-lovecrafts-book-of-the-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/59912\/","title":{"rendered":"Old-School Scream Queens: Sam J. Miller\u2019s \u201cCourtney Lovecraft\u2019s Book of the Dead\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome back to Reading the Weird<\/a>, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana\u2014from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Sam J. Miller\u2019s \u201cCourtney Lovecraft\u2019s Book of the Dead<\/a>\u201d, first published in Nightmare Magazine in October 2025. Spoilers ahead!<\/p>\n

Evan Brabbick is the creator of the wildly popular podcast, Night Logic, which \u201cpeeks behind the curtain of the sunlit world of what we believe to be reality, to see the dark side that most of us only ever catch glimpses of. I\u2019m determined to document that dark side\u2014and the people who work along its borders.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his current episode, the borderline worker is Courtney Lovecraft, an \u201cold-school, old-ass drag queen [who does] old-school drag\u201d in trowelled-on makeup that makes her look like \u201cthe evil queen from a Disney cartoon.\u201d She claims to be named after her drag mother Darlene Lovecraft, nothing to do with Courtney Love or H. P. Lovecraft. Her performances feature \u201cabundant shade,\u201d lip-synched torch songs, and psychically retrieved postmortem messages for specific audience members. Many messages are nasty, because the talking dead are \u201cdeeply disappointed.\u201d Other spirits send \u201clove and kisses instead of promises of bloody revenge.\u201d Like the spirit who wants someone to know \u201che\u2019s sorry he had to leave you.\u201d<\/p>\n

At which point Courtney renders \u201cOur Love\u201d by Donna Summer, a performance sure to make at least one \u201cold queen\u201d go \u201cverklempt.\u201d<\/p>\n

Courtney Lovecraft claims complete ignorance of social media. She\u2019s never auditioned for a TV drag competition. She\u2019s performed her entire career at Shenanigan\u2019s Ballroom, a former movie theater in Poughkeepsie, New York, where \u201cthe drinks are cheap, the paint is peeling, and it smells like it\u2019s still the seventies inside.\u201d As an \u201cunderground icon,\u201d she doesn\u2019t need to travel: The fans come en masse to pack her chosen venue. She refuses interview requests. So why\u2019s she doing Night Logic? Her publicist thinks she may be broke, hoping to expand her audience.<\/p>\n

Brabbick\u2019s podcast includes his narration, performance excerpts, and a backstage interview. When Brabbick asks about the show\u2019s supernatural aspects, Courtney describes early memories of three aunts who\u2019d share family scandals. Her mother demanded the source of one particularly scurrilous story, then broke down when Courtney named the aunts. Mom\u2019s sisters, it turned out, had died before Courtney was born. So, yeah, the dead have always talked to her. She tried to pass on their messages, which only got her bullied and didn\u2019t stop the dead\u2019s whispers.<\/p>\n

Brabbick asks if the dead ever want more than message delivery. Courtney scoffs that the dead only want one thing: to be rid of their pain, to pass it on to someone else.<\/p>\n

The podcast cuts back to Courtney\u2019s performance. She knows people want to hear the standard diva hits, but next up\u2019s a real deep cut. Before she starts, the speakers emit a strange mix of \u201cfeedback and shrieking and whale song and wolf song and a churning bass line.\u201d (They\u2019ll emit similar blasts twice more during the show.) But it\u2019s the \u201cdeep cut\u201d that makes Brabbick feel he\u2019s finally approaching the dark side. A \u201cshriek of terror from [his] lizard brain\u201d urges him to flee. He stays put. When asked about her song choice, Courtney changes the subject. Here Brabbick inserts a drag scholar, who semi-jokes Courtney is a vampire. Giving her audience the sense that \u201cSomething isn\u2019t right here\u201d is \u201cfundamental to her mystique.\u201d She doesn\u2019t want drag to be universally loved. The world is scary for queer and trans folk, and she wants to spread the scariness around, \u201cmaking the straights sweat a little,\u201d while making the unsafe feel safer.<\/p>\n

Next interview clip, Brabbick asks Courtney about Alger Sinani, a local gay superfan who after a show murdered his best friend\u2019s stepfather. A local gay trans fan, Courtney corrects, a detail Brabbick purposefully left out. And yes, he killed the man who was abusing his best friend. Their interplay grows more intense. Courtney opens out of her stage persona, gradually shedding her makeup. She says that gender \u201ctransgressors\u201d are \u201cpublic enemy number one these days,\u201d the \u201cscapegoats\u201d straight white cis people use to distract from their planet-killing messes. Brabbick\u2019s cashing in on this \u201cmanufactured dread\u201d by spotlighting \u201cdrag\u2019s biggest creep.\u201d He retorts he\u2019s not the enemy. Courtney talks over him. His only concern is getting more listeners, more attention. Ophelia told her so.<\/p>\n

Brabbick doesn\u2019t remember who Ophelia is at first. He inserts a post-performance clip of a fan sounding wild, unhinged. A local barkeeper claims people are coming out of her performances vomiting, with nosebleeds. Wearily, she says that the spirits\u2019 pain is increasing. She can\u2019t satisfy them. They\u2019re out of control. Can\u2019t Brabbick see, smell, the black sea of hate rising to drown everyone? He\u2019s here to help her soothe the spirits. And to atone for his sin against Ophelia, the sister whom only he and (now) Courtney know about.<\/p>\n

Brabbick acknowledges he had a brother named Trevor, who killed himself at sixteen. The night before, Trevor confided in Brabbick: she was living a lie, and her name was Ophelia. Though Brabbick didn\u2019t verbally express his horror and anger, he knows \u201cTrevor\u201d read the emotions on his face.<\/p>\n

Through ignorance and fear, Courtney says, Brabbick failed Ophelia, but he can help her and others by working with Courtney. He must promote this episode hard, get at least his eleven million followers to listen; otherwise, the raging spirits will kill him. Remember those three weird speaker blasts during recording? They\u2019re \u201cthe chime at midnight\u201d that causes the veil obscuring the \u201cother side\u201d to drop. Afterwards, listeners will hear the dead as Courtney (and now the chime-struck Brabbick) do. She fervently hopes the chime-struck will do what the dead ask, which is this: Be good to each other. Live and act with love in everything you do. Too saccharine a sentiment to save the world? Courtney believes in it. So does Brabbick, amid spasms of regret over broadcasting the \u201cchime.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Courtney Lovecraft episode ends with Courtney\u2019s last admonition from the stage: \u201cIs that too fucking hard? To be decent to each other? Pity the poor fuck who fails to clear that very low bar. Life doesn\u2019t have to be hell, any more than death does.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Degenerate Dutch: Courtney warns, accurately, that \u201cGender transgressors are public enemy number one these days.\u201d It makes for all too many unquiet dead.<\/p>\n

Libronomicon: You can learn more about Courtney Lovecraft in Tommy Kinkaid\u2019s Camp Concentration: The Drag Queens Who Are Resisting the Mainstream and Reserving the Right to be Revolting.<\/p>\n

Madness Takes Its Toll: Evan mocks his own claims about the will of the dead: \u201cWoooooo spooooky, it\u2019s like some The Ring bullshit where you hear this podcast episode and go insane.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ruthanna\u2019s Commentary<\/p>\n

In his author spotlight<\/a>, Sam Miller talks about \u201cthe glorious queer-specific emotion that combines anger and pain and grief and joy and community and love and lust and defiance,\u201d and the long history of drag that embodies that emotion. I\u2019ve loved me some fabulous big-wig lip-synching in my day, especially on days when the world outside was dark and bigoted. Drag transgresses boundaries, of gender but also anything else it can get its manicured hands on. That makes it a terrific match for horror. Why peek through the veil when you can tear it apart completely?<\/p>\n

\u201cCourtney Lovecraft\u201d has everything that I wanted, and didn\u2019t get, from Beyond Black<\/a>. As in Black\u2019s novel, we have a real medium with all the trappings of a con, surrounded by the resentful dead. But there are no multi-chapter doldrums of the living and dead who can\u2019t move on. There\u2019s body shaming\u2014over-the-top Courtney-style, for an audience expecting it\u2014but no fat-shaming. Instead there\u2019s \u201ca little bit of too much truth\u201d: the truth you get in performance, and the truth you get when the makeup comes off, and the truth you get when you don\u2019t need an intermediary any more at all.<\/p>\n

And there\u2019s a touch of hope, even amid Courtney\u2019s cynicism. Hope in this case is not so much a discipline as a mandatory assignment: we can make life better than it is. And in doing so, we can make death better too. \u201cIs that so fucking hard? To be decent to each other?\u201d Often, yeah, it seems to be ridiculously fucking hard. But it\u2019s possible.<\/p>\n

Podcaster Evan is \u201cthe poor fuck who fails to clear that very low bar,\u201d and the story does make us pity him. And everyone else, all of us listeners, who will soon be in good company smelling the dead. Stinking intestines make a gross sort of sense, but why burnt popcorn?<\/p>\n

The dead want to give away their pain. Justice, closure, revenge, maybe even run of the mill resentful sniping. But they can also grow: Courtney passes on a message from a father who has learned, post-mortem, to believe his child\u2019s truth. And Evan\u2019s sister, who never lived her truth, goes by her own name in death.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a theme in the sort of dead who frequent Courtney\u2019s shows. Not surprising: there are presumably other mediums for those who\u2019ve neither perpetrated nor suffered from anti-queer oppression and violence. What will they think about her sharing the secret? Are some of them being pushed to do the same thing?<\/p>\n

It makes me wonder about Courtney Lovecraft\u2019s unacknowledged namesake\u2014H.P., not the living punk singer who got stuck at the worst table in the house. He was certainly a guy with a lot of negative emotions. He had feelings about gender, some of them unpleasant. He might have been gay, or bi, or ace. He was a hellish bigot. He hated New York City, but Poughkeepsie is a safe distance away. Does he hang around Shenanigan\u2019s?<\/p>\n

And if so, has he learned anything? If he can, maybe there\u2019s hope for the rest of us. Otherwise, if we can\u2019t manage our assignment, we\u2019d better pray that the dead are merciful. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Anne\u2019s Commentary<\/p>\n

Finally we meet a fictional medium who rivals Hilary Mantel\u2019s Alison in Beyond Black. The two won\u2019t ever meet, since Alison\u2019s circuit lies in the London hinterlands, while Courtney performs exclusively in Poughkeepsie, New York. Both ladies have been psychically sensitive from early childhood. Both are mobbed by spirits stuck between what Brabbick calls \u201cthe sunlit world of what we believe to be reality\u201d and \u201cthe dark side\u201d humans rarely glimpse. Courtney had three familiar spirits in her dead aunts, whose shady gossip delighted the future queen. Alison\u2019s less lucky. Her familiar spirits are a petty criminal who tormented her while he was alive, and his pack of equally dead, equally loathsome mates.<\/p>\n

Courtney and Alison share a facility with makeup, too. I can see them bonding over this, despite the former\u2019s flamboyance and the latter\u2019s relatively subdued style.<\/p>\n

Courtney denies any connection between her stage name and Courtney Love or H. P. Lovecraft. She claims the moniker was bestowed by her drag mother, Darlene Lovecraft, \u201cone of the supreme queens of the Niskayuna drag scene.\u201d Unsurprisingly, the Night Logic team can\u2019t find evidence that there was ever a drag scene in Niskayuna. I suspect, with Brabbick, that Courtney protests her strictly upstate roots too much. Bette Bathory from San Francisco had a look much like Courtney\u2019s, and their stage shows sound identical, with a review describing Bette\u2019s as a mix of \u201ctorch songs and obscene comedy and communion with the Great Beyond.\u201d Like Courtney, Bette delivered spirit messages to specific audience members, who were often deeply affected.<\/p>\n

Countess Elizabeth Bathory (1560-1604) was convicted of serial murders, mostly of young girls. Rumor said she drank and bathed in the blood of her victims to retain her own youth, making her at least a wannabe vampire. Historians dispute the accusations of murder, some claiming Bathory was persecuted for political reasons. Tommy Kincaid, drag scholar, accuses Courtney of being a vampire, with coffins in her basement and no mirrors in her dressing room. He adds he\u2019s only joking; yet that she might be a vampire is \u201cexactly the kind of thing she wants you to think.\u201d She wants to scare her audience out of their complacency. To regain for drag culture its power to disturb and provoke, sadly eroded by the safe entertainment of TV drag competitions. Despite the career perks offered by shows like RuPaul\u2019s Drag Race, Courtney disdains auditioning for them. Riches and broad-based fame aren\u2019t her goal. She reigns over a niche market and makes Poughkeepsie a site-of-passage for fledgling queens. Maybe this satisfies her, but it\u2019s not enough for her ever-growing following of uneasy spirits. The pissed-off ones don\u2019t just want to say hey to their loved ones. Their messages are often threats of violent revenge. So what do the dead want, Brabbick asks, beyond a living voice to speak for them? Provoked when Courtney counter-asks what he, \u201cMr. Leading Authority on the Paranormal,\u201d thinks the dead want, Brabbick sullenly says they want \u201clots of things, in [his] experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wrong, lamb chop, Courtney snipes. The one thing the interstitially trapped dead want is to be \u201crid of their pain. To pass it on to someone else.\u201d Kincaid thinks it\u2019s not a question of what the dead want at all, but of what Courtney wants, which is \u201cto build a massive fan base of people who are just as scared\u2014and just as angry\u2014as she is.\u201d Why? Because \u201cwhen you attract an audience of people in extreme states of mind, extreme things can happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tommy\u2019s partly right. Courtney does want what the dead want, which is to escape the pain inflicted by the black tide of hatred rising in the world. Their shared demand of the living is simple but profoundly difficult: Be good to each other. Live and act with love in everything you do. That\u2019s an extreme ask, all right, and Courtney\u2019s followers are too few to work the magic. That\u2019s why she needs Brabbick, even though she senses his only concern is to gain listeners. To garner attention. To make people like him<\/p>\n

Needing to be liked, alike and hence acceptable, may be why Brabbick couldn\u2019t hide his horror when Ophelia revealed she was a transgender woman. He\u2019s tried to catch Courtney out with his questions about Bette Bathory and Alger Sinani, but she nails him with what his suicide-dead sibling has told her. Critically, to gain the ears of his 11 million listeners, she doesn\u2019t threaten to expose Brabbick; instead she offers a way to atone for his gravest sin. Thus Courtney proves she\u2019s not just a heartless shady bitch. The bitch does have a heart, much enlarged by the strenuous exercise given it by the spirits. That\u2019s another thing she and Alison have in common.<\/p>\n

Brabbick broadcasting the \u201cchime at midnight\u201d to a much vaster audience than Alison\u2019s presumably creates millions of sensitives. Will the revelation of an afterlife and the all-healing power of love save the world? Brabbick doesn\u2019t know. Neither does Courtney. The extreme happening it sparks could easily be destructive instead of redeeming.<\/p>\n

Tune in to the next episode of Night Logic to find out!<\/p>\n

Next week, we\u2019re ready to find out what\u2019s going on with Her in Chapters 21-23 of Lucy Snyder\u2019s Sister, Maiden, Monster.
\nicon-paragraph-end<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":59913,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[10584,22933,5922,9,24,63,122,124,123,32187,32188,32189],"class_list":{"0":"post-59912","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-queens","8":"tag-drag-queens","9":"tag-gender-issues","10":"tag-horror","11":"tag-new-york","12":"tag-new-york-city","13":"tag-nyc","14":"tag-queens","15":"tag-queens-headlines","16":"tag-queens-news","17":"tag-reading-the-weird","18":"tag-sam-j-miller","19":"tag-weird-fiction"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59912"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59912\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}