Lights out for Dark Delicacies - Inland Valley Daily Bulletin

Lights out for Dark Delicacies

The Burbank horror bookstore will close its doors, though the business will live on

Del Howison, co-owner of Dark Delicacies, is getting ready to close the Burbank book and gift store after three decades. The change will provide more time for writing, acting and other pursuits, he says. David Crane — Staff Photographer

Howison says his shop has been able to weather threats like big-box competitor Barnes and Noble and online behemoths like Amazon through the immediacy of the horror genre and Dark Delicacies’ focus on it. Sarah Reingewirtz — Staff Photographer

Also an author and award-winning editor, Howison recently released a short story collection. Sarah Reingewirtz — Staff Photographer

Image

By Liz Ohanesian

Correspondent

This is a big month for Del Howison.

On Tuesday, Crystal Lake Publishing put out Howison’s “What Fresh Hell Is This?,” a collection of short stories that have previously appeared in anthologies and magazines. Later this month, Howison will do a book signing at Dark Delicacies, the Burbank bookshop that he and his wife, Sue, own.

And while all this is happening, the couple are preparing for the 30-year-old horror hub to shut its doors. The last day of sales will be April 5.

“I’m going to miss everything,” says Howison. “But I’m going to be picking up things on the other end, like more writing and acting and being able to go places with my wife or just sit on the patio and have a beer. I’m not high maintenance.”

Sue, who wasn’t at Dark Delicacies for this interview, and Del were both horror fans before opening the shop.

“She was basically into the Stephen King, Dean Koontz school of horror, and I read a lot of the more obscure, small-press kind of things,” says Howison. “We both enjoyed horror movies.”

The shared literary and film interests led them to a convention, where they sold items from their horror collection at a small table amid the comic book and trading card vendors. Sales were solid enough to prompt them to open a brick-and-mortar shop in 1994.

Unlike other specialty stores that combined horror with genres like science fiction or mystery, Dark Delicacies kept the focus on horror.

Certainly, there’s more than enough variety within the genre where that hasn’t been a limitation. Howison, an author and Bram Stoker Award-winning editor, notes that horror is a genre particularly suited for mirroring current events.

“When the AIDS crisis first blew up, we saw a ton of vampire stories,” he says, and then notes one of the aftereffects of the Sept. 11 attacks. “We all sat in front of the TV and saw these people coming out of there covered in ash, looking like zombies,” he explains. “If you put it together, you’ll see that the big rise in zombie stories, zombie novels, zombie movies, zombie TV shows happened in the 9/11 time.”

That, he notes, is a key difference between horror and other genre fiction. “Horror is very closely connected to current events, whereas sci-fi, maybe it’s about the future. Fantasy, maybe it’s about an imaginary world,” says Howison. “Horror is about us.”

The store’s laser focus was also to Dark Delicacies’ benefit when threats to small business arose.

“We beat the battle of the big box stores, like Barnes and Noble and Borders,” says Howison. “Then we beat the Amazon threat that came through when it first started.”

As for the latter, Howison surmises that there was something about brick-and-mortars that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos didn’t get.

“He didn’t know that people liked to browse because you can’t browse on Amazon,” says Howison. “You can look something up by the title or the author, but you can’t see what’s on the shelf three books over. I don’t know anyone who has gone into bookstores and hasn’t discovered something that way.”

Plus, Howison adds, you can’t inhale the scent of a bookstore when you’re shopping online. “Bookstores smell like books, and that is one of the two best smells out there,” he says. “The other one being puppy breath.”

Dark Delicacies, though, has long been more than a bookstore and, in some ways, that’s been the secret to its success. When asked what is popular with today’s readers, Howison responds candidly. “Right now, I think reading is way down, No. 1, unfortunately.”

People still pick up the classics, he says, and readers are heading toward shorter works, typically novellas and novelettes, but he doesn’t know if it’s because of decreasing attention spans. “Entertainment in terms of film and DVDs and that sort of thing has far overtaken books in sales here because they can multitask,” he says.

The store does stock much more than books. There are vintage film posters, display cases full of spooky gift items and shelves full of movies, which are typically tied to the frequent DVD and Blu-Ray signing events held at the store.

Over the past 30 years, Dark Delicacies has welcomed everyone from Ernest Borgnine to Guillermo del Toro. But it’s not just about the actors and horror luminaries who have stopped by the shop.

Loyal customers have followed along as the store moved through four Burbank locations. Travelers from Massachusetts to Japan have made Dark Delicacies a destination on their L.A. vacations. Meanwhile, the storefront has also served as a meeting spot for hearse owners and a venue for weddings and funerals.

“This is their clubhouse,” says Howison. “That’s the word that keeps coming back.”

While the clubhouse will be closing, this isn’t the end for Dark Delicacies. Howison just renewed the business’s trademark and says online sales will continue, along with convention appearances and pop-up events.

“It’s not really retirement. It’s the closing of the brick-and-mortar, but we’re still going to be working,” he says, pausing before adding, “when we want to.”