What's the most improbable but true thing about you?
The most improbable thing about me is that I don't have any dark secrets or afflictions.  I'm overwhelmingly, almost distressingly "normal."  I had loving parents, got along with my siblings, did well in school, made friends, found adult employment to pay the bills.  I'm happily married, have three children, a mortgage on a house in the suburbs, a few pets, a minivan.  Never been in trouble with the law, never had to outrun a natural disaster, never had a health scare or near-death experience, no crippling addictions or mental health struggles.  It's a charmed life and I hope I don't sound like I'm humblebragging, because I really don't take any credit for it, I've just been very fortunate.  When everything I've experienced in the real world has always ranged between "fine" and "amazing," I reckon it's weird and improbable that I would write fiction almost exclusively in the horror genre, about wanton destruction and unimaginable monstrosities.  But it's true!

Why did you choose to submit to Horror Over the Handlebars?
I'm a proud Gen X kid whose prize childhood possession was absolutely his bike, so the title was immediately evocative to me.  I'm also still fond of the "kids on bikes" movies I was raised on.  When I ran across the open call for Horror Over the Handlebars referencing those kinds of movies and asking specifically for authors from Connecticut, I knew I had to take a shot at submitting something.

Tell us a little about your story, "P.E.T.E." and its genesis.
One of my favorite horror tropes is taking a fundamentally non-scary idea and turning it significantly darker.  Thinking about kids' coming of age movies from the 80's, I remembered one film that was in heavy rotation on HBO was I was young: D.A.R.Y.L., which was about a test tube baby with a computer brain raised in a lab until a kindly scientist broke him out so he could live as a normal kid.  The beginning of the movie is just gentle fish-out-of-water comedy about how the Data Analyzing Robotic Youth Lifeform has trouble adjusting to normie life, and then it turns into an action movie with guns and explosions as government agents try to recapture their escaped experiment.  Of course it all works out eventually with a sweet happy ending.  But what if it didnt?  D.A.R.Y.L. is basically a good kid; P.E.T.E. is like D.A.R.Y.L.'s less conscientious, more bloodthirsty cousin.

Tell us about "A Home for His Fears" in Horror Over the Handlebars and what you liked about it.
Anne Woods created something pretty special in "A Home for His Fears."  It's a haunted house story, and those are great, but it's also a nuanced, sympathetic portrait of childhood anxiety, in the sense of a neurological, diagnosable disorder that makes life difficult--even moreso back in the 80s and 90s when it wasn't commonly diagnosed at all, and kids were just scolded to stop worrying so much.  The creepy atmospherics of the story are really well-rendered, but it's the inner experience of Mike that will stay with me for a long time.

If you could time travel, where would you go, what would you do, and why would you do that?
Not the past, because everything was always worse!  I'd probably go about 100 years into the future just to verify how humanity was able to solve the climate crisis and maintain a sustainable environment on Earth.  The optimist in me would like to believe I wouldn't be visiting a toxic hellscape, and that I could return to the here and now able to reassure my kids that they should plan on living a long time on an inhabitable planet.

Who would you bring back from the dead for one hour and what would you do with them?
There's a serious answer to this, which would be a meditation on the precious fleeting nature of life, and also grief, whether one hour could be worth the pain of reopening previously healed wounds, and how every temptation to play god is always a tragedy waiting to happen.  But my silly answer is more entertaining, so let's go with that instead!  I would bring back a random central European peasant from the Dark Ages and spend an hour with them watching YouTube shorts, drinking Mountain Dew and eating Cheetos, Starbursts and M&Ms, just to see how much it would blow the palate and/or mind of said serf.

What's your favorite piece of art? Could be music, writing, sculpture, painting...
Probably Voltron?  Not the anime series, although that is wonderful, but the titular concept itself.  Five huge color-coded lion-shaped spaceships which transform into limbs and combine into a gigantic humanoid robot warrior with a sword?  That is a testament to human aspiration and genius.  And they made toys out of it, actual transformable lions that assembled into Voltron, which totally counts as sculpture in my book.  The painting The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch is a close second.  

What are you most proud of creating?
Of the forty-something short stories I've had published, eleven of them have featured my druidic private-eye, Kellan Oakes.  I'm proud of creating a character who embodies many of my childhood fantasies, most of which came from running wild through the woods behind my house looking for adventure, monsters, and portals to adjacent worlds.  I'm proud of the little universe I've created for Kellan to inhabit as well, and I plan to keep it going as long as possible.

What's next on your literary horizon?
Speaking of Kellan Oakes, my first novel The Blight on the Deep Woods is scheduled to be published later in 2024.  This also happens to be a Kellan Oakes story, with a bigger scale and scope than he usually gets in his short stories, and I'm incredibly excited to unleash it upon the unsuspecting world.  Last year I published a collection of short stories, Assorted Malignancies, which gathered together numerous horror stories and drabbles I've written over the past ten years.  In 2025 I hope to publish a second short story collection, title TBD, which will focus on the other genres I tend to play in, pulpy sci-fi and fantasy.

Where can readers connect with you online?
I am old school, so my main internet presence is my blog: https://dalewglaser.wordpress.com/  You can find links to all of my works there, either for sale through Amazon or available to read free online, or even e-mail me if you check out the Contact page.  You can also follow or like me on GoodReads as Dale W. Glaser.