My new novella/short story collection,
Drag You Down, is now available from Amazon in eBook and paperback formats.
I've had a long career as a journalist, and now I'm making my foray into the world of fiction. After much consultation with others in the horror genre, which, duh, is my chosen one, at least to start, I have decided to take a two-pronged, or hybrid approach to my attempt to become an author. Hybrid seems to be the path most writers take these days. That means they both self-publish and publish traditionally. Since the former is a lot more accessible than the latter, it seemed logical to start there.
The namesake story is about a man who dies but is resurrected by his vindictive wife, a woman who enjoyed making him miserable and who also happens to be an actual witch. He escapes and wanders into his old hangout, where his bar buddies attempt to help him escape while trying to figure out what to do with a guy who is supposed to be getting buried the next day. Originally titled Dead Guy Walks Into a Bar, I changed it to its current title on the advice of the cover artist, the wonderfully talented
Lynne Hansen, who is not only one of the top horror cover artists in the business, but has quickly become a friend and dare I say mentor. (More on her in future posts, I'm sure.) It's part horror tale, part buddy story and contains some stuff I hope scares the crap out of you while occasionally making you laugh. It's already gotten its first
five-star review, which is pretty awesome.
The other stories include The Gospel According to Pizza Face, which is a story I thought for sure had found a home in an anthology, but sadly, it had not. It's about a small-town preacher who runs up against his old high school bully. I wrote it at the suggestion of author Frank Reddy. I posted a photo online that I took of a pizza box sitting on the side of the road with a Bible on top of it. He texted "Writing prompt," and off I went. I wrote this story well before Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing put out its submission call for
Tales from the Crust, an anthology of pizza horror. When they did, I thought, "Serendipity! I wrote a horror story that has to do with pizza, they need horror stories about pizza ... slam dunk!"
Unfortunately, it just banged off the rim. I'm guessing because the story does not revolve around pizza and maybe they wanted lots of pizza in their pizza horror. I don't know. But I do know this: After that book came out, publishers everywhere started putting notes on their submission guidelines that they absolutely do not want pizza stories. Both believing it to be a really good story (and I really think it is) and figuring I wouldn't be able to sell it for probably 10 years, I decided to add it to this collection.
The rest include:
- Billyboy - a story about murder and the deep, dark woods that ends in a Tales from the Crypt sort of way.
- Sitting Up With the Dead - set during the Great Depression, a young boy who is an outsider in his own home finds out things he didn't want to know about his father, his dead uncle, magic and more with his introduction to the old Southern tradition.
- Special Delivery - a speculative crime story in which a degenerate gambler thinks he has figured out how to rid himself of the loan shark to whom he is in perpetual debt, but things don't go the way he expected.
- I Can If I Want - a story I wrote for a contest, the winner of which would be included in the collection I Can Taste the Blood, the brainchild of one of my favorite authors, John FD Taff. The story appeared on the Grey Matter Press website (which I will link in the future; they got hacked last year and have had some serious web trouble since then, which is a shame because they are a stellar small press run by a standup guy). Appearing on the website makes it published, and therefore only eligible in the future for use as a reprint. It's a flash fiction piece about suicide, and people who've read it seem quite impressed, using words like "haunting" to describe. I'm pretty proud of it, too.
- The Party Out of Space - an extremely short flash fiction piece that originally appeared in the Mini Anthology from Alban Lake Publishing. Each author in the anthology was limited to 200 words to give their take on the same watercolor painting. (I saw Cthulhu in a clown suit, and I used the full 200 words, which I think makes mine the longest story in the book.) The anthology contains work by at least two Bram Stoker Award nominated writers, and it's only $3. Quite the bargain. It's also basically a chapbook because the stories are so short.
The next book I'm planning to finish is a full-length novel called Murder Gods. It's nearly done, and that I plan to agent/publisher shop, and hopefully hit the other, traditionally published prong of this deal.
That's it for now. Other things are happening, so more posts soon.
