So this week I’m reading Hallowed Ground by Steven Savile and David Niall Wilson, in which a questionable (is there any other kind?) old West preacher called the Deacon sets up a revival tent in a gulch outside the little town of Rookwood.
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday 8/12/2014: “Hallowed Ground””
So this week I reached into my big folder full of rejections (and the occasional acceptance) and pulled out something new: A contract! Arriving as it did in November of 1997, this was, if I remember correctly, my first-ever contract, for a story called “The Short Route” (AKA “My Cousin Susan’s Favorite Story Of Mine Ever”), in which a tenderfoot from Back East discovers that there’s more than just cattle on his first cattle drive. The story appeared in “Vampire Dan’s Story Emporium” a tiny regional magazine published in Syracuse that ran from 1997 to 2001.
Continue reading “Random Contract: Vampire Dan’s Story Emporium, “The Short Route””
So this week we interrupt our usual parade of “Teaser Tuesday”, “Random Rejection”, and “Let’s Try To Figure Out If My Wife Is Actually Paying Attention To Battlestar Galactica Or Not”* posts to answer a few quick questions posed to me by Donna over at Donna and the Dogs. Like me, Donna is a writer, but the parallels do not stop there!
So this week I’m reading Bad Radio by Michael Langlois, in which an eternally-youthful former Army Ranger and the granddaughter of one of his old World War II army buddies have to stop a necromancer who is apparently plotting to set up a transmitter, call in an Eldritch Abomination, and destroy the world. Or something like that. At this point all I know is that the “bad radio” in question seems to be a metal ring with eight spikes on it, and it is apparently powered by sticking the spikes into the eye sockets of four people. Ouch.
So I previously mentioned that, having finished “Breaking Bad“, I have now been charged with finding a new show that can catch and hold my wife’s attention. Although there’s been no shortage of suggestions on shows that might fit the bill, those who are familiar with my movie rating system (“This movie put my wife to sleep in X minutes”) will not be surprised to hear that the search is not going well. WARNING: Minor spoilers below!
This week I’m reading Death’s Hand, by S.M. Reine, in which Buffy and her watcher Giles try to stop Glorificus the hell-goddess from destroying the … oh, wait, sorry, that was Season 5 of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer“. No, in Death’s Hand, the kopis (AKA sword) Elise and her aspis (AKA shield) James are trying to stop a hell-goddess from destroying the world by letting her Armageddon Clock get to midnight. This naturally involves fighting hordes of zombies, demons, ghosts, and at least one necromancer. Apparently no one told them they could just pay 4 mana to remove counters from the Armageddon Clock during anyone’s upkeep.
So this week I’m reading a free Kindle book called Diary of the Displaced (Omnibus Edition), by Glynn James, in which an unfortunate fellow visits a gas station bathroom and then wakes up in a nightmarish alternate dimension populated by zombies, dog-things, giant snails, and a deranged dual-knife-wielding maniac who I suspect may be Jack the Ripper. I’m pretty sure he’s not Moonglum of Elwher; he’s much too tall. Anyway, if you needed another reason to avoid gas station bathrooms, there you go.
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday 12/10/2013: “Diary of the Displaced””
So this week I’m reading a book called Desolate: The Complete Trilogy, by Robert Brumm, in which Earth is terrorized by the double whammy of a highly contagious hemorrhagic flu-like illness and giant carnivorous bad-tempered crawdads. Or something like that. Every time the space-lobsters show up I think of the Prawns from “District 9”.
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday 10/29/2013: “Desolate: The Complete Trilogy””
This week I’m reading the vampire genre classic Sunglasses After Dark by Nancy Collins, which has been edited, reformatted and quasi-updated in a Kindle edition. Why “quasi-updated”? Well there are sporadic references to modern trifles like cell phones (and even an iPhone reference was dropped in), but nobody has a computer and I don’t remember anyone doing a Google search so far in their efforts to locate missing heiress Denise Thorne (who is now the vampiric vampire hunter Sonja Blue), which betrays the book’s late 1980s/early 1990s roots. I’m not complaining (though a number of Amazon reviewers are), since I did something similar with my vampire novel Long Before Dawn, updating it just enough to hand-wave away the fact that if everyone just had their cell phones turned on, the whole vampire hunting thing would have gone a lot more smoothly. But then, if vampire-hunting goes smoothly, what fun is that?
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday 10/22/2013: “Sunglasses After Dark””
While still plodding along with finishing up part two of Shards, AKA The War of the Ravels Or Whatever I’m Going To Call It, I’m still managing to get in a little bit of reading done, mostly on free books I’ve accumulated from BookBub. This week I’m reading one called Where the Dead Talk, by Ken Davis, a horror novel set at the beginning of the American Revolution, in which an attempt to resurrect a young man recently killed in an accident by dumping him into a cursed lake goes badly, badly wrong. Call it Pet Sematary meets Last of the Mohicans meets … A Flock of Crows is Called a Murder.
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday 10/15/2013: “Where the Dead Talk””
Viscosity 