It's not my fault.

Don't blame me for this week's entry being late. Blame Ryan Murphy. Him and Brad Falchuk are the ones at fault. You can also blame Alexandra Breckenridge.

Neither my wife or I have any family in town, so for Thanksgiving we have our own tradition. We prepare a huge pasta meal and invite over friends we have who are in a similar situation. On Thursday, one of them brought over the first season of American Horror Story. You should probably blame that friend, too.

On Sunday, we were sitting around the house about to go a little stir crazy, and my lady love suggests we pop it in and watch an episode or two. I was game, because I'd heard good things about the series on Fearnet, and had been careful to not read any spoilers. At around one thirty in the morning, I went to bed cursing and grumbling that we hadn't started two hours earlier, because then we would have been able to finish the series. As it was, I had to wait all day today before I was able to get back home after work and we could sit down and pop the last disk in. I wasn't disappointed in the ending.

If it's hard to write good horror, it's really hard to do it so that it comes across effectively on the screen. Now shrink that screen to the size of a TV, hide the body parts that give the folks at the FCC seizures, and realize that you have to appeal to not just your discriminating horror fan, but John Q. Average.

Now try and do it as a series, juggling characters, plot, and keeping things rolling at the same time that you maintain those senses of isolation, dread, and excitement. As I've said before, 'Good luck.'

AHS hits us where we're most vulnerable, where we need to be ourselves, in our loves, our hates, and all the nasty little bits that we keep hidden in our own heads. It takes the people we love, the sort of people we hate, and the people we can't get away from because either we're their parents or they're our parents. That person who lives next door, the one you'd like to bludgeon to death with a spoon? Yep, that one's there too.

It does have weak points. As I said, it's hard to do a series about horror, and a couple of times I thought that it was losing that sense of the strange that is really, really important. But is that it, my only complaint? Sitting right here, having just finished the series a little while ago? Yeah, it is.

It was also great to see a least one familiar face from an older, beloved series that was canceled way too soon.

Not bad for not giving away any real plot points, eh? Now let me get back to my own writing, now that I have something else to be envious of.