Quick Take
- Narration: Tom Jordan narrates Steve Barton’s story with affectionate irreverence, he captures the voice of a man who processes difficulty through humor without losing access to the difficulty.
- Themes: horror fandom as vocation, mentorship and creative community, digital media entrepreneurship
- Mood: Raw and funny and genuinely moving, the combination only works when both elements are real
- Verdict: A memoir that earns its emotional moments by not manufacturing them, Barton’s story works because the comedy and the grief are inseparable.
I came to this one knowing almost nothing about Steve Barton beyond his association with Dread Central, which I was aware of peripherally through the horror film coverage ecosystem without being a regular reader. What I found was a book that surprised me by being more emotionally direct and more structurally thoughtful than a horror journalism autobiography had any reason to be. The title earns itself.
Barton co-founded and served as Editor-in-Chief of Dread Central, which positioned itself as one of the internet’s first genre-specific media outlets before the infrastructure of online media had become naturalized. His autobiography traces the trajectory from founding that institution to the specific griefs and recoveries that punctuated it, to the eventual role in the Terrifier film franchise’s success, a trajectory that is genuinely eventful and that Barton does not present as a triumphant arc so much as an honest account of what it looks like when someone builds something they believe in and then has to figure out how to keep building when the conditions keep changing.
The 9/11 Section and What It Changes
A memoir that positions 9/11 as a formative event in the author’s personal and professional development risks using historical catastrophe as biographical backdrop rather than engaging with it on its own terms. Barton avoids this. The section describing the aftermath of September 11 is among the most honest in the book, and it matters because Dread Central was a horror media outlet trying to understand its own relevance in a moment when the culture’s relationship to fear and death had just undergone a significant rupture. Barton was not a bystander to that cultural reckoning; he was trying to build something at the intersection of entertainment and genuine terror, and the timeline forced him to think about that intersection in ways he had not previously needed to.
The passage through 9/11 is also where the book’s emotional honesty becomes most concentrated. Barton does not perform grief; he reports it, and the restraint is more affecting than elaboration would be. One reviewer described the book as something that tears your heart apart and then mends it with laughter, and while that sounds like marketing copy, the specific emotional rhythm being described is accurate. The book moves between registers with genuine control rather than lurching between tones.
Romero, Haig, and What Mentorship Actually Looks Like
The sections dealing with George A. Romero and Sid Haig, Barton was mentored by both, are among the most valuable in the book for anyone interested in horror film history or in the specific culture of the genre’s working community. Barton writes about both men with the specificity that only comes from actual proximity, and neither portrait is hagiographic. Romero in particular emerges as a complex presence, generous and exacting, committed to his vision in ways that sometimes served the work and sometimes complicated it.
A reviewer described the book as offering true insight into his life but also convention life behind the scenes as well as insider information on the creation of Dread Central and the inner workings of Bloody Disgusting. The observation about Bloody Disgusting is worth noting: Barton’s perspective on what it looked like to build Dread Central while watching a competitor site grow is one of the more unusual business-within-subculture accounts you will find in this space, and it is candid in ways that require some courage to publish.
Tom Jordan’s Narration and the Problem of Performing Someone Else’s Self-Deprecation
Tom Jordan narrates, which immediately raises the question of whether the book’s particular voice, Barton’s persona of affectionate horror-host grandeur with genuine self-awareness about its own artifice, translates through a narrator who is not its originator. Jordan handles this well. He does not attempt to ventriloquize Barton so much as to find the tonal register the book requires: warm, slightly theatrical, honest beneath the performance. The comedy in the book is not stand-up comedy and not prose wit exactly; it is the comedy of a man who has found a way to make the bad parts tellable, and Jordan reads it as such.
The nine-hour runtime is appropriate for the material. Barton’s life has enough incident to fill the space without requiring padding, and the narrative does not drag in the way that some career-summary memoirs do when the central figure’s career has been more episodic than exponential. The book knows when to move and when to linger, which is a craft judgment that many first-time memoirists do not have.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do you need to be a horror film fan to connect with this memoir, or does it work for a general audience?
It works for a general audience, but the specific pleasures are deeper for readers with some investment in the horror genre. The Romero and Haig sections will mean more if you know their work. The Terrifier material will be richer with context. That said, Barton writes about the industry and the community with enough explanatory texture that newcomers can follow the stakes without needing to do homework.
The book covers Barton’s role in the Terrifier franchise success, how central is that to the narrative?
It is present as a later chapter in the arc rather than the central subject. The memoir is organized around Barton’s full trajectory, and the Terrifier material represents a relatively recent development in a career that the book traces from its origins. Fans of the franchise will find the inside account valuable, but the book does not read as a Terrifier origin story, it reads as the autobiography of a person who has been building genre media since before the internet was a primary distribution channel.
The title A Comedy of Tragedies promises a specific tonal balance, does the book maintain it throughout, or does it tip toward one register?
The balance holds reasonably well across the full runtime, though the grief sections are not lightened artificially. Barton seems to have made peace with the difficult parts of his story by finding the comedy in them, and Jordan’s narration respects that, the laughter and the hurt coexist rather than one smoothing over the other. The 9/11 sections are the most purely serious, and they work because the book earns the gravity rather than manufacturing it.
Tom Jordan narrates rather than Barton himself, does the narration feel authentic to the material?
Jordan manages the unusual challenge of performing someone else’s self-deprecation with genuine care. He finds the tonal register the book requires without imitating or over-performing Barton’s persona. Listeners who have heard Barton in interviews or convention appearances may notice the gap, but as an audiobook experience Jordan delivers a narration that serves the story rather than getting in the way of it.
