I’ve been reading a lot lately; paperback and hardcover reads have been all over the place with respect to genre: biography, mystery, science fiction and thrillers. (Currently I’m working my way slowly through those old Timothy Zahn Star Wars novels from back in the old days.) But on my Kindle, I’ve been reading mostly horror.

Why? Well, mostly because horror is what I write. And I’m stalled out on a handful of projects, so I’m reading a lot. I often find inspiration in something I read. Not direct inspiration, like, I read a story and want to write something exactly like it. More like I’ll see something in there that I feel I would have gone a different direction, and that applies to something I’m working on. Or the opposite: I like what happens at a certain point and think that I could use something like that in my own story to make it go. Or I like a character and feel like introducing a similar character can move my story forward.

But also I’m reading horror because I have always enjoyed reading horror. And because I found some good reads, and have been working my way through some of their works.

Here’s the list:

• Ghostland, Duncan Ralston
• Sex and Violence in Hollywood, Ray Garton
• Darklings, Ray Garton
• Splattered Punk, Matt Shaw
• The New Neighbor, Ray Garton
• Dark Channel, Ray Garton
• The Dark Game, Jonathan Janz
• The Girl In The Basement, Ray Garton
• Violet Lagoon, John Everson (novella)
• Snow, Howard Odentz (short story)
• Bones, Howard Odentz (short story)
• The Family Tree, John Everson
• The Pale White, Chad Lutzke
• The Final Cut, Jasper Bark
• Abra-Cadaver, Matt Drabble

Some good reads in there. Some great reads in there. Three of them stood out for me above the rest: Ghostland, Sex and Violence in Hollywood, and The Family Tree.

So I was trying to figure out what I liked about them. Why did they stand out above the others? Primarily it is the characters. All of them feature memorable characters who commanded my attention, set in interesting and scary situations. In Ghostland, it’s a theme park built around real ghosts. Yes, you read that right. Science has discovered a way to detect the energy that these ghosts put off and amplify it and coalesce it so that the ghosts become visible to everyone. They’ve also been able to figure out how to trap and contain them to certain environments. Right away in Ghostland, we are introduced to the spectacle of a house being moved to the grounds of the theme park. The house belonged to a famous deceased horror author, and the main character immediately sees the writer’s ghost staring out at him as the house passes. The experience causes him to have a heart attack and he is clinically dead for a few minutes before being revived. Over the next four years, the girl who was with him, his gaming partner and secret crush, drifts away from him, but circumstances conspire to get them together for a visit to Ghostland.

I loved the two main characters and cared about them from that prologue throughout the entire book. The story is one unlikely event after another, but they work. I believed them completely. It’s a different kind of horror story. It’s a ghost story, yes, but I’ve read plenty of ghost stories before and this felt different. It’s a “serial killer” horror story in a way also, in that there are lots of crazed ghosts in this park who had no qualms about killing in their lives and won’t in the afterlife if they are allowed to, but it felt different than most of that type of story that I’ve read.

The book also has a very cool interactive guide at the end that links to information about the ghosts who are used in the book. Duncan Ralston did a ton of research to write this story, and it shows in the final product. Great story combined with interesting characters and near-perfect pacing made this book one of the best I read in 2019.

The second book is Ray Garton’s Sex and Violence in Hollywood. I didn’t know if I could call this horror, but in the end, I felt like the main thrust of the story was the horrific elements. It follows another great character, Adam Julian, who lives with his screenwriter father. He has everything he wants, but he still hates his father and thinks about killing him. He’s also having an affair with his father’s wife, and when her daughter shows up, things really go south.

There’s a lot of anger directed at parents in this story. Adam’s girlfriend also dislikes her parents. His friend Carter seems to have a better relationship with his own folks, but there’s plenty of dynamics going on with some of the bad guys as well. The violence pushes this story into horror, but it has elements of a lot of genres in it, which is probably why I enjoyed it so much. It transcends a single genre and in doing so makes the story so much richer.

The author himself says this about the novel:

SEX AND VIOLENCE IN HOLLYWOOD is much harder to categorize. My agent went crazy for that book. He shopped it around to New York publishers and each and every one turned in a glowing response, praising the book up and down. They loved it—but they had no idea how to market it. It’s not horror, although it has some horror sensibilities and its characters are devoted horror fans. There’s plenty of crime, but it’s not exactly a crime novel or mystery. It has elements of a thriller, but it’s hard to call it a thriller. It’s funny throughout, but it’s not a comedy. They had no idea how to market it, so they all turned it down with regret. It ended up being published by a small press, but he became so frustrated with the low sales that he sold all the books to me, and over the years I sold them off. Because it’s not horror, it’s never received much attention, because people expect horror from me. And yet, it’s the best thing I’ve ever written, I think. I hate labels.

I agree. As you noticed on the list, I’ve read a fair bit of Ray Garton’s work of late. I have Live Girls in paperback from several years ago and loved that one as well. It shocks me that he isn’t better known. But this is my favorite of the works I’ve read recently. It shows that horror can and does mix with most anything. The best stories work on multiple levels. This is another of those types of stories.

The last of the three is John Everson’s The Family Tree. Everything I’ve read by Everson of late has been great. He can absolutely write creepy original horror. In this one, Scott Belvedere goes to Appalachia to deal with the inn he has inherited, a unique property that is built around a huge old tree. While he’s there, he meets an assortment of characters associated with the inn and even falls in love with one of them. But the tree has some unique properties, and Scott finds out that things are not what they first appear to be. The roots of this tree run deep through his family and through the inn. And the tree needs something that only Scott can give.

This one’s straight horror that leans toward the erotic horror label. Hard to categorize it beyond that. It’s very original, I think — at least I’ve never read anything much like it. Once again, I pick a book with a great cast of characters and a compelling setting for a story that never fails to shock, sometimes even when you’re already expecting the shock. I’m not sure it’s his best (that’s probably either Violet Eyes or The House By The Cemetery) but it’s right up there.

I’d love to continue writing about these books all night but this post is already getting quite long, so I think I’ll stop here. If I get inspired, I may expatiate some more on some of the others that I really loved.

#

If you’re so inclined, take a look over there to your right on the screen, or click the MY BOOKS menu tab above and read a bit about my own offerings. I’m no Garton or Ralston or Everson, but I’m proud of my stories. The biggest criticisms I’ve heard about them from other writers is that they wish the tales were longer. I’m working on writing longer stories. I have a couple of PA novels in progress that are around 100,000 words, and I have two novels completed, both in the 50-60K range. Hopefully this year will see the publication of those two novels and their followups, which are also in progress. Thanks for reading!

#

I’ve been sort of sick since the Sunday before Thanksgiving. I had a couple of days off over that holiday, and I spent them not feeling well at all. By the following Sunday, I was feeling better, but not 100%. Just not contagious. I didn’t miss any work, and I haven’t really been staying home either. But I’m still coughing and blowing my nose like crazy.

What’s that have to do with the titular question? Absolutely nothing. I post it because I’ve been thinking about it lately. A “troll” on a Facebook group I frequent is bashing self-published authors, and suggesting that none of them can write worth a lick. That we are ruining the “industry” such as it is. One of his posts grabbed a snippet of a sample from another member’s work, and then tore it apart.

Well, maybe “tore it apart” is a little strong. He pointed out that the author used “blonde” rather than “blond” as the adjective for a character’s description, and that “mousey” didn’t mean the same thing as “mousy.” (The latter I didn’t know, actually. I assumed “mousey” would mean “like a mouse” but apparently it denotes a color while “mousy” means “like a mouse.”) He criticized some of the telling rather than showing, and I mostly agreed with his criticisms.

But did those details detract from the story being told in the work of genre fiction? I don’t know, because I didn’t read the author’s story, but in the limited reading of the sample, I was intrigued by the story.

So I started thinking: what’s the difference between good writing and good storytelling? Does something have to be written to perfect English standards in order to tell a good story? Do those “show don’t tell” rules have to be followed? Do you have to “kill” all or most of your adverbs?

Lots of us don’t have formal training in writing. I didn’t. I have been writing since I was in grade school. I always did well in writing classes, better than most of my classmates. I was a STEM guy in college and professional school, but I found the time to write a few articles for the school newspapers and even had an op-ed published in the Chicago Tribune once. (Want to read it? Here’s the link: MAN’S DESTINY IS IN SPACE. )

But I’ve also been reading since, well, since I could read. I’ve read mostly genre fiction, but I’ve read extensively in many different genres. I’ve read self-published works and traditionally published works. I’ve put a lot of money in publishers’ and authors’ pockets over the years. When you read a lot, you get a feel for the cadence of good writing. You start to “feel” when something doesn’t sound right. When there’s a better, shorter, more clear way to say the same thing. To show the same thing, rather than just describing it with words. I don’t know how to explain it. How can that be taught in a college creative writing course? Will someone with four years of classes in creative writing, and a major or a minor in the subject, be able to do it better than someone with fifty years of reading experience?

I kind of don’t think so. Good writing and good storytelling might not be the same thing, but good storytelling is improved by good writing. Good writing isn’t enough by itself, however. Imagination and passion about the story you’re telling goes further, in my opinion, than flawless writing.

No one’s writing is 100% flawless. Mine certainly isn’t. Just this post, written off the cuff with no planning, has plenty of “errors” in it. But I think it made my point.

If it’s a choice between a good story and a boring story told with elegance, I’ll take the good story almost every time.

#

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here, so of course I’m going to review a great book by author Steven M. Moore, titled Son Of Thunder. The book is quite different from most of Moore’s oeuvre (except for Rembrandt’s Angel, to which this book is a sequel). It’s art history, historical mystery, and international thriller, written in the vein of Agatha Christie’s English mysteries, and features Esther Brookstone, formerly of Scotland Yard and now retired, and Bastiann van Coevorden, the Dutch Interpol agent. That’s the twenty-first-century cast. There’s also an appearance by Italian Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli, as he helps his bishop friend track down the bones of St. John in Ephesus. And then there’s the first century cast of the Son of Thunder himself, St. John, and assorted Christians and Romans from that world, as John makes his way through the Empire to reach the burial place of Mary, the mother of Jesus, wherever that might be.

It all hinges on a painting that’s found in a piece of furniture from the fifteenth century. Is it a Botticelli? Esther is called in to authenticate the artwork, and in doing so, discovers a clue that may lead her along the path that may have been followed by Botticelli centuries ago. The mystery: will it lead to the bones of the “one Jesus loved?”

This is an extremely well-researched and well-plotted novel with familiar characters and a fun and exciting plot. Three plots, really: three stories are being told simultaneously, the timelines separated by centuries. Each was exciting and rewarding in its own way. The modern tale is a detective story, perhaps in the vein of Dan Brown, but even more it reminded me of Eric Mayer and Mary Reed’s John the Lord Chamberlain stories (set in the Roman Empire of Justinian).

I love those stories, and I loved this one also. It may be the best work I’ve read by Mr. Moore. I couldn’t put it down after a while. I just wanted to know what happened in 1st century AD, 15th century AD and 21st century AD. If I have a quibble, it’s that the parts involving Interpol that don’t directly relate to the story at hand were sort of distracting. I kept waiting for those events to tie in, but they never really did, as far as I could tell.

Because of the nature of the story and the type of characters in this novel, the pacing varies a lot. Sometimes it is straight ahead thriller. Sometimes it is introspective mystery. Each plotline called for its own subtly different style and its own pace. But in the end, it all works. The religious elements were worked into the plot seamlessly, and the art history gave it a framework to make the whole novel work. If you like historical mysteries with a touch of Dan Brown-type speculation, this is the book for you.

*****

So what’s new with me? Not much. I still have the books you see to your right available on Amazon. Four are priced at $0.99 (THE CAVE, THE NEVER ENDING NIGHT, 14 DARK WINDOWS, THE STRIKER FILES, and DIE 6). THE INN, ODD MAN OUT, and RECIPROCAL EVIL are all priced at $2.99. Bargain reads, all of them! They have good reviews and I’m sure you won’t be disappointed if you like the type of horror thriller that I write. Please feel free to take a look!

*****

I recently finished a couple of excellent reads in the horror genre. I read the first of these, titled Good Neighbors by Russell C. Connor, on Kindle. I was drawn to it by the nice cover and the $0.99 price tag. I’d never read anything by Mr. Connor before, and I figured that I couldn’t go wrong at that price, even if it didn’t live up to the cover.

It lived up to the cover, and more. What I read was an excellent novel about a man who finds himself in the midst of a religious fervor, with people who grasp at the straws offered to them by a woman instead of facing the fact that they are being driven insane by the Squall, which is a weird sound being emitted by the electric transformers of the apartment complex where they all live.

The book was published in 2015, but I saw themes at work that apply to the world of 2019 also.

All that is well and good, but if there isn’t a great story with great characters, what good is it? Fortunately, this one has well-developed characters like Elliot, the alcoholic, recently divorced school teacher who is trying to put his life back together, and Jacob, the hardass kid who had Elliot as a teacher and has his own reasons for disliking the man. There are plenty of others to care about, and I found it easy to want to know what happens to these people.

I am definitely planning on reading more of Russell Connor’s work, and I’m hoping that it all lives up to the quality of this one.

The second read was House By The Cemetery by John Everson. I’ve read a lot of Mr. Everson’s work, and I think this might be the best and the scariest so far. In it, a carpenter is hired to shore up the supports for an old haunted house at the edge of a cemetery, which is going to be opened up as a “Haunted House” for the month of October. The legends abound around the house, and they are warned against bringing the house back to life and bringing people into the structure in large numbers. It’s predicted that something very bad will happen.

Mike, the carpenter, is a great character, in my opinion. He’s got real life issues. He’s gone through a divorce and he has some issues with alcohol (like Elliot in Russell Connor’s story) and he’s been going through some slow times with his work. He accepts the job of fixing up the haunted house to make it safe for people to trample through, because he’s down on his luck and needs the work. He also is starved for affection, and the story illustrates how he accepts the things he is asked to do by building up slowly, in effect, desensitizing him to things before the culmination. I don’t want to say too much to avoid spoiling it, but I felt that, like Connor’s work, there are themes at play here that reflect the particular travails that our society is going through today. I think it’s that thematic relevance that makes both Everson’s and Connor’s works so effective.

Everson’s book is published by Flame Tree Press, while Connor’s work is self-published. Both were great reads. I have more of both authors’ works to read, but I’m moving on to Stephen King’s THE INSTITUTE next.

*****

Want to read about a group of friends at a cabin for Halloween? How jealousy gets the best of their gathering? How things can escalate to murder? Grab my novella, ODD MAN OUT, available only as an ebook on Kindle.

*****

Just a short blog post to say that I’m still writing. I was working on two other projects (a vampire followup to one that is as yet unpublished, and my space opera) but nothing was really grabbing me and the words weren’t flowing.

Then I had a dream.

I dreamed that I was at a horror writers’ convention with some big-name (well, bigg-ER names than me) writers and there was scary stuff going on. I woke up with a vague memory of it, but the idea was there. And I’ve been pecking away at that plot. I’m about 3000 words into it, and hoping I get to something juicy soon. I like my characters, and it seems to be fun to write at the moment, so I’m going with it.

I’ll get back to all of the other projects eventually as well.

I’m reading some horror as well, and I’ll try to post about the good and the so-so sometime soon.

I’ve been knocking out a thousand plus words a day for about a week now, and I finally finished one of my works in progress. It comes in at 49,300 words, just shy of fifty thousand. Which makes it a short horror novel.

If you read some of my “Ideas” posts a while back, you might remember one that described how I read a Bryan Smith novel called Last Day and sort of decided that I’d do something inspired by it. In Smith’s novel, an asteroid is streaking toward Earth, and life as we know it is about to end. Smith focuses on the removal of restraints from the worst segment of the population and the evil that they’ve wanted to do, but couldn’t because of the fear of punishment.

I took his idea but in my take, the Moon’s orbit has somehow become unstable, and it is spiraling inward towards an inevitable collision with Earth. And I also look at the removal of restraints from the worst people, people who keep their secrets well. A serial killer who thinks he’s a werewolf heads the cast of baddies. But there’s an ex-husband who’s pissed about a subpoena that he’s been served with by the ex-wife, looking for more money. There’s a bar patron who happens to be in his local hangout when the news breaks and the drunks who hang out after the less hard-core drinkers leave. And there’s a dad who’s a child molester, one who’s been stopped by his oldest daughter from preying on her and her younger sister.

There are good people, too. Sean, the boyfriend of the girl who was molested by her dad, is a good one. Andres, his friend, is another good one. Dr. Jessica Stewart, a scientist at the local University, is good, as are her graduate students.

And of course, there’s gray area for some folks.

It has the feel of an apocalyptic tale, one where humanity has to prepare for a disaster, but it’s a horror novel at its core, with the horrors being from the evil that humans can do to each other.

While it owes a debt to Bryan Smith’s novel, it’s really not much like it.

I’m going to start doing a first rewrite soon, but I need a little bit of distance, so I’m setting it aside and going back to work on something else. What, you may ask? I’m not sure. I’ll see what grabs me and drags me along for the ride.

Another in my series of posts about the genesis of my longer works of fiction, and maybe also about how a couple of shorter ones came about as well. I apologize if I’ve told these stories before, and if you’ve read them before. (Which doesn’t seem terribly likely, in any event.)

I often get ideas from reading other stories. I mentioned that I had the idea for one of my works-in-progress after reading Bryan Smith’s Last Day. In his story, an asteroid is going to hit the Earth, and so the crazies and criminals decide they can do what they want to do with impunity. I thought, what would happen if the Moon was going to hit the Earth? So I set out to write a similar story, but it became something different very quickly.

My story, The Never Ending Night, had its beginnings in a Richard Laymon novel, much like The Cave did. I don’t recall the name of the novel, but it was about a night that doesn’t end. So is mine. One day the sun just doesn’t come up. Laymon’s story focused on a girl who does whatever she does during this odd time. Mine focuses on a neighborhood block, told through the eyes (mostly) of a teenage girl. I give Laymon his props for the story’s idea, even though my work is really nothing like his.

Another horror author I’ve read is Edward Lee. He wrote a book called City Infernal in which Mephistopolis is a literal city in Hell. I liked the concept and started writing something with Hell as a real place, powered by human suffering. And those who cause extreme suffering are agents of this place. The story became Reciprocal Evil, a short novel of maybe 52,000 words. My story focuses on a college kid attending a Jesuit university in Chicago. I’m not sure I name the city and I know I don’t name the college, which allows me a bunch more artistic freedom with locations and things around campus. This kid is studying the nature of evil in his own way, and is searching for meaning in his own life. But along the way he attracts a particularly unsavory character — a serial killer. Again, it really has nothing to do with the Edward Lee story, except for the fact that I started with the idea that Hell is a real physical place, though not in our dimension.

Odd Man Out might be my favorite of my five longer works. As I’ve stated before, it began as a short story, which was written for a contest called THE PUBLICAN BRIEF. For that story, we were given an opening sentence and six random words, and we had to write a story around them. My own was this short story, which came out to about 1,600 words in length. The story was okay. It didn’t win the contest, but people liked it. I liked it; I thought it had an interesting premise: that one of a group of friends was going to eliminate another because of a conflict over a girl. I thought there was a longer story in there somewhere, and one day I started to write it.

Honestly, I thought it would be about seven or eight thousand words when I was done. But it got longer. And longer. Pretty soon it was over thirty thousand words. I think it ended up at something like 37,000 words. I couldn’t leave it where the short story ended, so it became a complete story, and is probably the one I’m most proud of.

I may have one more of these “Ideas” posts in me. I had kind of an interesting experience trying to write a short story, and maybe it too will become a novella or even a novel some day. But for now, I’m going to end this post with the usual comment that, if any of these sound interesting, the links to the Amazon ebooks are right there on your right. The Never Ending Night is $0.99, and both Odd Man Out and Reciprocal Evil are priced at $2.99.

#

If you read the post called Ideas, you see that I do have some finished stories that just aren’t ready for publication yet. If you’d like to hear about them when they’re released, please sign up for my mailing list. The link is over there at the right, near the top of the page. Or click here: Mail List. Thanks.

#