Growing up, he was Dad.
It wasn’t until I joined the Navy that he became Pop. I don’t remember making some big decision about it. It just happened. I would walk in, say, “Hey, Pop,” and he would smile, wave, and say, “Hey.” That was about the full ceremonial exchange. No speech. No sentimental music swelling in the background. Just two words and a smile.
When my kids were born, he wanted to be called Papa, and somehow that made Pop stick even harder for me.
The last thing I ever said to him was, “Hey, Pop. I love you.”
That feels right. Simple. Honest. Ours.
Pop was one of those men you couldn’t always tell was joking until the damage was already done. He was quiet, mischievous, sometimes blunt, sometimes gentle, and capable of saying the most inappropriate thing in the world as if he were commenting on the weather.
When I was twenty-two, fresh out of the Navy, I was living with my parents while looking for an apartment. My birthday was coming up, so they spent the weekend at a bed-and-breakfast and let me have a cookout at their house. One of my female friends got very drunk and ended up passed out on the deck. She kept telling me she thought Pop didn’t like her.
“Did he tell you he doesn’t like you?” I asked.
“No.”
“Then you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
That was my mistake.
A few days later, she came over to pick me up so we could go look at apartments. While I was getting cleaned up, Pop turned to her and said, perfectly serious, “So I hear you were dancing naked on my table.”
She froze.
Then she went outside and waited in the car.
When I came out, Pop was sitting in his chair with this grin on his face like the cat who had eaten the canary, the birdcage, and maybe half the curtains. He told me he had embarrassed her. On the way to the apartment complex, she said, “Your dad really doesn’t like me. He just said he heard I was dancing naked on his table.”
I laughed so hard I don’t think I got myself under control until we pulled into the first apartment complex.
That was Pop.
He loved his family, even when we pissed him off. Maybe especially then. He had a way of being funny, gentle, frightening, and absolutely impossible all at the same time.
He was also the first person who opened the door to horror for me.
The first horror book he gave me was a movie adaptation called Dead and Buried by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. I was around twelve, and it was the first book I ever read cover to cover for fun, not because a teacher told me to. I loved it. I won’t spoil the ending, but if you ever get the chance to read it, it will surprise you.
Before that, though, there were the evenings in front of the television.
When I was six or seven, Pop and I watched The Twilight Zone reruns together. That was probably my first real doorway into the supernatural. I still remember “The Hitch-Hiker,” where a young woman driving across the country keeps seeing the same man trying to catch a ride, only to discover she died in an accident. That one stuck with me. So did “Night of the Meek,” with the drunk who finds Santa’s bag and gives out gifts, and “Long Distance Call,” where a child speaks to his dead grandmother on a toy telephone.
Those stories got under my skin because they were not just scary. They were strange. Sad. Quiet. Human.
Pop also loved Star Trek. Not casually. He loved Star Trek. When Star Trek: The Motion Picture came out, he pulled me out of school to go see it. Officially, I had a “doctor’s appointment,” a detail my mother knew nothing about. It was my birthday present from him.
That was another thing Pop gave me: monsters and spaceships. The dark and the stars.
Of course, not every horror memory was subtle and atmospheric. I was eight when we saw Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and I still remember the dog with the human head. I believe that was the moment I decided my shoes were suddenly fascinating, because I stared at them for the rest of the movie. Then came Phantasm. The Tall Man still creeps me out.
“Boy!”
Yeah. Thanks, Pop. Scarred me for life.
But those movies also taught me something. I learned that gore was not what scared me most. I’ve never been fond of splatter for the sake of splatter. The horror that works best on me is the thing you almost see. The shadow in the wrong place. The mirror image that doesn’t move quite right. The sound from the room that should be empty. The suggestion that something is there, waiting just outside the frame.
That was the kind of horror Pop seemed to love, too. He never explained why. He was not the type to sit down and deliver a lecture on narrative dread. He just shared what he loved and let me figure it out.
That was his way.
He believed in letting you learn things for yourself. He would guide you, but he would not do the work for you. He and I could sit in a room, say maybe two words to each other, and somehow it would still feel like a full conversation. We bonded over The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, old horror movies, and classic monsters. Mom would sit nearby reading her romance novels while Pop and I watched Bela Lugosi smile and say, “I am… Dracula.”
I was wrapped up in those moments. Not just the stories on the screen, but Pop’s stories about them. Trivia. Memories. Little comments. The kind of things that don’t seem important when you are young, then become priceless later.
Pop encouraged me to write from an early age. I once wrote a short western for my grandfather when I was about thirteen. It was full of typos and grammar problems, bound between canvas boards and covered with cloth. It was probably terrible. But after Pop read it, he encouraged me to keep writing.
So I did. A little here. A little there. I even had something published in the newspaper back in the early eighties. But I never truly pursued writing until later. My wife is the one who pushed me to take it seriously. She gave me the passion to write. Mom gave me the skills. But Pop gave me the monsters, the spaceships, the imagination, and the belief that stories were worth telling.
He knew I was working on The River’s Edge. I told him about it. Unfortunately, he passed away in 2025, just a few months before I submitted the story. He never got to read it.
So I had to put him in it.
Not in a loud way. Not with a spotlight. Just enough to honor him. Just enough to say, “Thanks, Pop.”
Losing him did not make me write harder. It made me write with more meaning. When a parent and child finally become close, losing them leaves a different kind of silence. It reminds us that the moment we are born is also the moment we begin moving toward the end. That sounds dark, I know. But horror has always understood that truth. The best ghost stories are not really about death. They are about love that remains after death has done its worst.
Pop is sprinkled through my work. His humor is there. His bluntness. His belief in the other side. His quiet wisdom. His love for his family. Sometimes a character speaks with a little of his voice. Sometimes a scene carries something he gave me long before I understood what it was.
Horror can be inherited as love.
My father gave me monsters and spaceships. He gave me vampires, ghosts, alien worlds, strange roads, haunted phones, and shadowed rooms where anything might be waiting.
But more than that, he gave me imagination.
And somewhere, I like to think he is sitting aboard the Enterprise, trying his best to make Mr. Spock laugh.
Pop Grin