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Old-School Scream Queens: Sam J. Miller’s “Courtney Lovecraft’s Book of the Dead”
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Old-School Scream Queens: Sam J. Miller’s “Courtney Lovecraft’s Book of the Dead”
By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth
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Published on December 3, 2025
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Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Sam J. Miller’s “Courtney Lovecraft’s Book of the Dead”, first published in Nightmare Magazine in October 2025. Spoilers ahead!
Evan Brabbick is the creator of the wildly popular podcast, Night Logic, which “peeks 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’m determined to document that dark side—and the people who work along its borders.”
In his current episode, the borderline worker is Courtney Lovecraft, an “old-school, old-ass drag queen [who does] old-school drag” in trowelled-on makeup that makes her look like “the evil queen from a Disney cartoon.” She claims to be named after her drag mother Darlene Lovecraft, nothing to do with Courtney Love or H. P. Lovecraft. Her performances feature “abundant shade,” lip-synched torch songs, and psychically retrieved postmortem messages for specific audience members. Many messages are nasty, because the talking dead are “deeply disappointed.” Other spirits send “love and kisses instead of promises of bloody revenge.” Like the spirit who wants someone to know “he’s sorry he had to leave you.”
At which point Courtney renders “Our Love” by Donna Summer, a performance sure to make at least one “old queen” go “verklempt.”
Courtney Lovecraft claims complete ignorance of social media. She’s never auditioned for a TV drag competition. She’s performed her entire career at Shenanigan’s Ballroom, a former movie theater in Poughkeepsie, New York, where “the drinks are cheap, the paint is peeling, and it smells like it’s still the seventies inside.” As an “underground icon,” she doesn’t need to travel: The fans come en masse to pack her chosen venue. She refuses interview requests. So why’s she doing Night Logic? Her publicist thinks she may be broke, hoping to expand her audience.
Brabbick’s podcast includes his narration, performance excerpts, and a backstage interview. When Brabbick asks about the show’s supernatural aspects, Courtney describes early memories of three aunts who’d share family scandals. Her mother demanded the source of one particularly scurrilous story, then broke down when Courtney named the aunts. Mom’s 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’t stop the dead’s whispers.
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.
The podcast cuts back to Courtney’s performance. She knows people want to hear the standard diva hits, but next up’s a real deep cut. Before she starts, the speakers emit a strange mix of “feedback and shrieking and whale song and wolf song and a churning bass line.” (They’ll emit similar blasts twice more during the show.) But it’s the “deep cut” that makes Brabbick feel he’s finally approaching the dark side. A “shriek of terror from [his] lizard brain” 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 “Something isn’t right here” is “fundamental to her mystique.” She doesn’t want drag to be universally loved. The world is scary for queer and trans folk, and she wants to spread the scariness around, “making the straights sweat a little,” while making the unsafe feel safer.
Next interview clip, Brabbick asks Courtney about Alger Sinani, a local gay superfan who after a show murdered his best friend’s 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 “transgressors” are “public enemy number one these days,” the “scapegoats” straight white cis people use to distract from their planet-killing messes. Brabbick’s cashing in on this “manufactured dread” by spotlighting “drag’s biggest creep.” He retorts he’s not the enemy. Courtney talks over him. His only concern is getting more listeners, more attention. Ophelia told her so.
Brabbick doesn’t 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’ pain is increasing. She can’t satisfy them. They’re out of control. Can’t Brabbick see, smell, the black sea of hate rising to drown everyone? He’s 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.
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’t verbally express his horror and anger, he knows “Trevor” read the emotions on his face.
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’re “the chime at midnight” that causes the veil obscuring the “other side” 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 “chime.”
The Courtney Lovecraft episode ends with Courtney’s last admonition from the stage: “Is that too fucking hard? To be decent to each other? Pity the poor fuck who fails to clear that very low bar. Life doesn’t have to be hell, any more than death does.”
The Degenerate Dutch: Courtney warns, accurately, that “Gender transgressors are public enemy number one these days.” It makes for all too many unquiet dead.
Libronomicon: You can learn more about Courtney Lovecraft in Tommy Kinkaid’s Camp Concentration: The Drag Queens Who Are Resisting the Mainstream and Reserving the Right to be Revolting.
Madness Takes Its Toll: Evan mocks his own claims about the will of the dead: “Woooooo spooooky, it’s like some The Ring bullshit where you hear this podcast episode and go insane.”
Ruthanna’s Commentary
In his author spotlight, Sam Miller talks about “the glorious queer-specific emotion that combines anger and pain and grief and joy and community and love and lust and defiance,” and the long history of drag that embodies that emotion. I’ve 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?
“Courtney Lovecraft” has everything that I wanted, and didn’t get, from Beyond Black. As in Black’s 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’t move on. There’s body shaming—over-the-top Courtney-style, for an audience expecting it—but no fat-shaming. Instead there’s “a little bit of too much truth”: the truth you get in performance, and the truth you get when the makeup comes off, and the truth you get when you don’t need an intermediary any more at all.
And there’s a touch of hope, even amid Courtney’s 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. “Is that so fucking hard? To be decent to each other?” Often, yeah, it seems to be ridiculously fucking hard. But it’s possible.
Podcaster Evan is “the poor fuck who fails to clear that very low bar,” 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?
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’s truth. And Evan’s sister, who never lived her truth, goes by her own name in death.
There’s a theme in the sort of dead who frequent Courtney’s shows. Not surprising: there are presumably other mediums for those who’ve 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?
It makes me wonder about Courtney Lovecraft’s unacknowledged namesake—H.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’s?
And if so, has he learned anything? If he can, maybe there’s hope for the rest of us. Otherwise, if we can’t manage our assignment, we’d better pray that the dead are merciful.
Anne’s Commentary
Finally we meet a fictional medium who rivals Hilary Mantel’s Alison in Beyond Black. The two won’t ever meet, since Alison’s 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 “the sunlit world of what we believe to be reality” and “the dark side” humans rarely glimpse. Courtney had three familiar spirits in her dead aunts, whose shady gossip delighted the future queen. Alison’s 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.
Courtney and Alison share a facility with makeup, too. I can see them bonding over this, despite the former’s flamboyance and the latter’s relatively subdued style.
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, “one of the supreme queens of the Niskayuna drag scene.” Unsurprisingly, the Night Logic team can’t 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’s, and their stage shows sound identical, with a review describing Bette’s as a mix of “torch songs and obscene comedy and communion with the Great Beyond.” Like Courtney, Bette delivered spirit messages to specific audience members, who were often deeply affected.
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’s only joking; yet that she might be a vampire is “exactly the kind of thing she wants you to think.” 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’s Drag Race, Courtney disdains auditioning for them. Riches and broad-based fame aren’t her goal. She reigns over a niche market and makes Poughkeepsie a site-of-passage for fledgling queens. Maybe this satisfies her, but it’s not enough for her ever-growing following of uneasy spirits. The pissed-off ones don’t 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, “Mr. Leading Authority on the Paranormal,” thinks the dead want, Brabbick sullenly says they want “lots of things, in [his] experience.”
Wrong, lamb chop, Courtney snipes. The one thing the interstitially trapped dead want is to be “rid of their pain. To pass it on to someone else.” Kincaid thinks it’s not a question of what the dead want at all, but of what Courtney wants, which is “to build a massive fan base of people who are just as scared—and just as angry—as she is.” Why? Because “when you attract an audience of people in extreme states of mind, extreme things can happen.”
Tommy’s 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’s an extreme ask, all right, and Courtney’s followers are too few to work the magic. That’s why she needs Brabbick, even though she senses his only concern is to gain listeners. To garner attention. To make people like him
Needing to be liked, alike and hence acceptable, may be why Brabbick couldn’t hide his horror when Ophelia revealed she was a transgender woman. He’s 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’t threaten to expose Brabbick; instead she offers a way to atone for his gravest sin. Thus Courtney proves she’s not just a heartless shady bitch. The bitch does have a heart, much enlarged by the strenuous exercise given it by the spirits. That’s another thing she and Alison have in common.
Brabbick broadcasting the “chime at midnight” to a much vaster audience than Alison’s presumably creates millions of sensitives. Will the revelation of an afterlife and the all-healing power of love save the world? Brabbick doesn’t know. Neither does Courtney. The extreme happening it sparks could easily be destructive instead of redeeming.
Tune in to the next episode of Night Logic to find out!
Next week, we’re ready to find out what’s going on with Her in Chapters 21-23 of Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster.[end-mark]
The post Old-School Scream Queens: Sam J. Miller’s “Courtney Lovecraft’s Book of the Dead” appeared first on Reactor.
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