BACKROOMS, OBSESSION, and WHAM!

Once in a while, Brugger and I both feel a hankering to go to the drive-in theater in Eden, about a half-hour down the way, and last night was one of those times. Over the years, we've had some lovely experiences there as well as some that were anything but up to snuff. Happily, last night was a winner...well, until the trip home.

The Eden Drive-In has two screens—the original, full-size screen and a more recent, pint-size screen with a correspondingly smaller parking area. The Mandalorian & Grogu played last weekend and was still on for this weekend, so we decided to check it out, since we both loved the series. However, once we arrived at the theater—about an hour and a half early—we learned it was playing on the small screen (it had played on the main screen last week), and that smaller lot was already damn-near full. On the big screen, they had Backrooms and Obsession, so we figured, well, fuggit, let's check them out. I'd heard good things about both from friends and fellow writers who'd seen them, and... hey... horror movies and drive-in theaters naturally go together. Huzzah!

 

It was a beautiful evening, and as it got darker, the breeze turned chillier... and chillier. We'd had the foresight to bring layers, so... hey, we felt happier than happy to get a break from the recent once-unseasonal heat. As the sun set, the sky turned all kinds of colors, and come full-on dusk, a bright full moon hung overhead. The perfect setting for us.

 

Backrooms was, to me, utterly brilliant — rather Lynchian, I thought, as if it sprang from the darkest heart of the Black Lodge. It's kind of the inverse of real life: a nightmare film, in which conventional reality occasionally asserts itself. Obsession similarly hit a level of intensity that I found disconcerting.in the extreme. Ms. B. preferred Obsession, while I preferred Backrooms, but that was all a matter of degree. We both loved both.

 

The only tragic part of all this was that, heading home on the rural backroads, I ended up hitting a deer. We'd seen loads of them along the way, so I was driving pretty slowly, but nevertheless, one came bounding out across the road at full tilt, and that was all she wrote. So, sadly...one dead deer. The damage to my car was minimal, but it's still going to require some body work, which is an expense we can ill-afford at the moment.

 

I hate hitting animals. Almost ironically, back in 2015, Kimberly hit a deer on the way home from that very same drive-in (see "Deer Damage"). In her case, the accident caused extensive damage to her car. Perhaps ironically, we'd been talking about that incident while we were waiting for the movies to start. Alas. Anyway, I feel horrible for the deer, and despite the pain the ass, pretty lucky that the accident wasn't any worse.

 

We had such a lovely evening, we decided that it was going to be our takeaway from it. Now, we're really looking forward to another drive-in movie night.

 

Peace out.

Coming Soon: The New, Revised Edition of BALAK

The production work on the new, revised edition of my first novel, Balak, has been completed, so I'm anticipating the book release in the very near future. This will be an ebook and paperback release; the audiobook is available from Crossroad Press, though it's the original version. The legendary M. Wayne Miller has provided the artwork, and I'm thrilled with it.

 

I had posted a few details about this release in my May 16 blog entry, "New, Revised Edition of Balak in the Pipe," and as soon as I have any ordering information, I will of course share it here, there, and everywhere.

 

Also, it's kinda nice when I see this sort of thing on social media. One of Ms. B.'s friends found The House at Black Tooth Pond at her local library and was kind enough to shared it online. Huzzah!

AuthorCon VII — March 5–7, 2027

'Tis done—I have reserved a vendor table in the ballroom at Scares That Care: AuthorCon VII, coming up March 5–7, 2027, at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Williamsburg. I have attended all the Williamsburg Scares That Care events, so now, each one feels kind of like a homecoming. This past year's con was among my best ever, sales-wise and fun-wise (spoiled only by the fact that Brugger was not there because she had to go to Michigan after her mom broke her leg).

 

Guests of honor for AuthorCon VII include V. Castro, Eric LaRocca, Erin Louis, and John Skipp. I'm sure more will be added in the coming months.

 

Anyway, I'll be there (hopefully with Ms. B. this time), and I hope you will too. 

NecronomiCon Providence 2026 Is Taking Shape

NecronomiCon Providence 2026 is coming — August 13–16 — and Ms. B. and I will be there to plague the existence of everyone there. The con is spread between the Omni Providence Hotel and the Graduate Hotel (formerly the Biltmore). The programming schedule has not been finalized yet, but I will be participating on two panels and possibly (hopefully) having a reading.

 

At the last NecronomiCon Providence (2024), I stayed at the Omni, which is a fabulous hotel, but this year, Brugger and I are planning to remain a few extra days to avail ourselves of some of the nearby locales we'd like to visit, such as Salem, Massachusetts and, possibly, Newport, Rhode Island, again, which we very much enjoyed on our November 2024 visit. So, to save a bit of money, we've booked a nice AirBnB on nearby Federal Hill, which we visited on our previous trip. As any H.P. Lovecraft reader knows, Federal Hill was featured in his writings, most notably, "The Haunter of the Dark" (1935), which is among my favorites of his tales.

 

The panels on my schedule, as of now, are the following: 

PANEL: Drifting Down the River of Night’s Dreaming: Karl Edward Wagner. Karl Edward Wagner (American, 1945–1994) was a poet, editor, and publisher born in Knoxville, Tennessee. Wagner is known for his Sword and Sorcery anti-hero Kane, the Mystic Swordsman, and more contemporary horror tales that often drew on his personal demons and training as a psychiatrist. Wagner co-founded Carcosa Press and was executor of Manley Wade Welman’s literary estate until his death. He edited many anthologies, including fourteen years of The Year’s Best Horror. Our panelists discuss Wagner, his influences, and his impact on horror, fantasy, and the greater weird. Panelists: Douglass Winter, F. Brett Cox, John Langan, Jordan Douglas Smith, Stephen Mark Rainey (Moderator) 

PANEL: In Mountains Older than Bones: Appalachian Gothic. Rightly or wrongly, on America’s cultural map, Appalachia is the equivalent to “Here there be monsters”--a region assumed not only to be unknown but perhaps also unknowable–where we credulously suspend our own disbelief. Panelists discuss what defines Appalachian Gothic, good and bad examples of the genre, and why the region has such a hold on the popular imagination. Panelists:Jess Lewis, Mike Allen (Moderator), Shanna Germain, Stephen Mark Rainey, Tonya Monteforte

Note that a cruel miscreant had the gall to designate me the moderator of the Karl Edward Wagner panel. I'm not fond of moderating, and I hadn't expressed any interest in it, but, well, there it is. I had a fair amount of personal experience with Karl, particularly since he wrote the column, "The View From Carcosa," for Deathrealm magazine back in the day.

So, I'll update information about the con as I get it. Hope to see a bunch of you...to plague you with my existence. 

Sweet Revenge

No, the title of this blog entry has nothing to do with the dish in the photo, really, other than the fact that the the shrimpies you see there served as a something of a little reward for taking said revenge. Last Tuesday, after dumping Brugger at the Greensboro airport for her parental maintenance visit in Michigan, I went geocaching in the Caswell County Gamelands (see "Alone Again, Naturally") and ended up stymied by this one dastardly cache ("Slot Machine," GCGCBPQGN), despite it having a relatively low difficulty rating. I hunted the damned thing for an ungodly amount of time, all the while focused more on the information in the cache description than the coordinates, mainly because the former struck me as more vital. How wrong I was.

 

Apparently, I completely misinterpreted the information on the cache page (as did another experienced geocacher), and thus the difficulty. Anyway, the cache owner later reached out to me and shared some useful intel, so today, I ventured back down to the gamelands and walked right to cache. I mean, I didn't even have to hunt. Oy. The shame of it was that, the other day, I stood inches from the hide and somehow failed to lay eyes on it. Oy. So, actually, the title :"Sweet Revenge" might be more aptly read as "Shameful Revenge."

 

Anyway, the reason for the outing was that friend/fellow author Samaire Wynne was selling books at Danville's Festival in the Park, and she'd invited me to stop by. So, I did, after making a relatively short detour to the cache in question. Since it was lunchtime when I arrived at the park, after a nice visit with Samaire, I popped over to one of the nearby food trucks and procured the plate of vittles pictured above. The sea bugs were pretty danged good.

 

And that's the whole story. See you in the future. 

New, Revised Edition of BALAK in the Pipe

Back in 1992, after having spent several years writing exclusively short fiction, I buckled down and wrote my first novel, Balak. My agent at the time very quickly found a mass-market publisher who was interested in the book, and for a while, it looked like its publication was in the bag. Unfortunately, before I even signed the contract — as so frequently happens in the publishing business — the imprint that would have launched Balak went the ways of the wind, leaving the novel without a home. Sometime afterward, though, Wildside Press, a much smaller but prolific and respected publishing house, picked up the novel, and released it in 2000 (for reasons unknown, Amazon.com shows Balak's publication date as 2003, but that is incorrect), along with my short fiction collection, The Last Trumpet.

 

Recently, I've had a mind to do something more with the book because the character, Balak (whom I appropriated from the Bible), has played a significant role in a number of my works of fiction — including a very new one. Since Wildside Press has had the rights to the book for... OMG, twenty-six years (and has done very well with it, I'm pleased to say)... I decided to reclaim the paperback and ebook rights (Crossroad Press has the audiobook rights, and it is currently available), revise it so that it reads less like the inaugural outing of a very green novelist, and repackage it. The first step is complete, and I have also secured the rights an apt piece of art by the incomparable M. Wayne Miller, whose work adorns several of my book covers as well as numerous stories I published in Deathrealm magazine back in the day. Note that the cover image above is a dummy I created with Wayne's art; it is subject to change.

 

The long and short of it is that I am currently in the revision process, and once it's all done, Crossroad Press will release the new paperback and ebook editions (the audiobook will remain the original). I anticipate having this all in the bag in the next couple of months, so it will hopefully to precede the release of Broken Barriers, which is also in the pipe.

So, I hope this will be cause for celebration and that you unfortunate souls who were exposed to the original product will avail yourself of the new edition rather than go the rest of your lives wondering what the hell was wrong with that peculiar young writer.*

 

*Now, you may rightly wonder what the hell is wrong with that peculiar old writer.

CRYPTIDS... Thar She Blows!

KJK Publications has just released the latest anthology in their "Classic Monsters" series, Cryptids, and it includes my story, "The Devil Flies in Strix," a wicked tale of inhuman goings-on set in the Old West. At the moment, it's available only as an ebook, but the paperback is on the way very soon.

 

From the publisher:

They have always been there. Just beyond the the treeline. Beneath dark water. In the places humans don’t map.

In this chilling eighth installment of the Classic Monsters series, editor/publisher Kevin J. Kennedy turns his attention to the unknown beasts that haunt global folklore as well as current news reports, delivering a collection of relentlessly powerful horror stories.

A hiking expedition becomes a desperate flight from intelligent, pack-hunting predators that move like something almost human. A rancher locked in a brutal war with a blood-drinking creature learns that monsters do not always choose the guilty. In the aftermath of war, a broken soldier is drawn toward ancient beings that may offer salvation — or something far older and more terrible than peace.

In a quiet lake, betrayal awakens a sleeping horror that does not forgive. In isolated corners of the world, grief, guilt, and fear serve as bait for entities that feed on what makes us human.

From shapeshifting killers that predate civilisation, to underground civilisations that blur the line between human and beast, to entities that mimic sound, speech, and emotion with unsettling precision.

Cryptids are not myths. They are warnings. And once you see them, they never stop looking back.

---

Order Cryptids from Amazon.com

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Alone Again, Naturally

Well, not really alone; more a bachelor for a couple of weeks while Ms. B. returns to Michigan for another stint of looking after her parents. She had a dawn flight this morning, so we were up at 3:15 a.m. to get her to the airport in Greensboro. Her trip went smoothly, so there she is, and here I am...again. Next trip, sometime in July, I will be accompanying her. It's been quite a while since I was there.

 

Anyhoo, I decided to go after some new geocaches in the Caswell County Gamelands, a few miles northeast of Greensboro. It was a very foggy morning, and I got there right at dawn. The fog lifted shortly thereafter. I put in about four miles in pretty rugged terrain and found three out of the four new caches. The one I didn't find is probably in place, but the coordinates there were incredibly unstable—and I might have been hunting with only one eye open because...well...we got up at 3:15 a.m.

And now, I'm mystified by my computer going somehow wonky. When I booted it up a while ago, it appears a bunch of web fonts are not working on any browser. Far as I know, I changed nothing, and I've tried a number of recommended fixes, to no avail. Anyway, it's vexing me, and I would really like to get this cleared up because it's making working on the laptop difficult. Freakin' beast.

 

Addendum, 5/13: All is well with the fonts again. I dunno. Maybe some strange Google issue? Hope it doesn't happen again. 

Birthdays, Broken Ribs, and Broken Teeth

Kimberly's birthday and mine are (a few years) and one week apart, so after celebrating mine last week, it was her turn. Sadly, after the festivities last Saturday night, she tried to wrestle with me and fell off the bed, striking the corner of her nightstand and breaking three ribs in the process. So, she's had a rather painful week of it, though she's definitely improving.

On her birthday eve, we ventured to our regular Friday afternoon hangout, Hamlet Kitchen, where our friend Yvonne popped in to visit with us. Then we went for an excellent sushi dinner at Yamato Japanese Restaurant, which really hit the spot since it's been a long while since either of us have had sushi.

 

Yesterday, to begin her birthday festivities, we went up the street to visit briefly with friends Joe & Callie, who had helped celebrate my birthday last week. They have this thing called "Meat Day," for which they open their doors to just about anyone who dares enter, and Joe grills a variety of meats all day long. Brugger is not much of a Meatosaurus, but I am, so we sampled a few of the treats, which were awesome, and even Ms. B. approved.

 

From there, we headed to Greensboro, first to our regular hangout from our days in North Carolina, State Street Wine Company, and then for dinner at Pangaea Bistro, which we'd never tried before. Here, we met friends Terry & Beth, Joe & Suzy, and the "other" Mark & Kim. Yep! We definitely enjoyed the dining experience here...except, right at the end of the meal, I took a bite of very soft potato and broke a fucking tooth. Lower molar, busted right in two. So a trip to the dentist will be on the menu very shortly. Uggh.

 

To finish off the evening, we decided to return to State Street, where we hung out long enough to have another drink. We mellowed there for a good while so we'd have no worries about heading back home.

So, apart from unexpected body parts breaking, Brugger and I had damn nice celebrations this year. After all these years of birthdays, I think she's finally older than I am. Cheers!

BROKEN BARRIERS Completed!

I just slapped "THE END" on my 15th novel, Broken Barriers, to be released a bit later this year. This is the sequel to The House at Black Tooth Pond, which came out in 2025. I'll have the proofing, editing, and all that stuff to do, but the bulk of the book is finished. Might need a celebratory martini this evening!

Here's the teeny-tiniest of excerpts... 

Doctor Melissa “Mel” Crawford's deep green eyes lingered on Parrott’s for a few seconds. They sat across from each other at a small table by the front window of Willy’s Downtown Tavern, which offered a lovely view of the sprawling, two-century-old First United Methodist Church building across Main Street (the congregation of which had disapproved of the tavern’s proximity for a full half as many years). Doc Crawford had always looked far younger than her age, which he put at around forty…or maybe thirty…or maybe fifty…who knew? But since last month, several new lines and creases had formed at the corners of her eyes, and a few gray streaks ran through her short, wiry brown hair, so that she resembled a sagacious pixie. As the county medical examiner, she had borne more than her share of the FBI’s condemnation during its investigation of Aiken Mill’s missing six.

“When was the last time I trusted anyone?” Parrott asked.

“Well, you trusted me when I told you we were dealing with something wholly unexplainable at Black Tooth Pond. And when I advised you to call the FBI, you up and did it, against your better judgment. And when I said, ‘Let’s go out to dinner because you need cheering up,’ you accepted. At this point, I would have to call you exceedingly gullible—the fact that we were dealing with something wholly unexplainable notwithstanding.”

“Point taken, but our admittedly nasty intercourse with the FBI was inevitable. We were in over our heads.”

Doc Crawford snickered and raised her nearly full glass of Chardonnay. “To intercourse and being in over our heads.”

Parrott lifted his half-empty, no-longer-chilled mug of Thunder Knob IPA to touch her glass. He struck it a little harder than he intended and sloshed a smidgen of her pale gold-tinted wine onto the table. They both ignored it. A couple of seconds later, the last of his beer had vanished.

#

What? Another Barfday?!

Oh, come on. No way is it birthday time again. I'm pretty sure I turned 66 only a few days ago, and now I'm turning 67. What the fook? Yeah, I know, getting older is better than the alternative and all that, but the increasing speed at which these years keep zooming past is staggering. At this rate, I'm going to be a pile of cremains as of yesterday.

A few days back, I vaguebooked about certain hard times that were sucking out my very soul, and while I'm not entirely free of those issues, things are better. A lot better, for which I thank Yog. I'm going to say that my Birthday Eve last night was the best ever. No shit! Lately, Kimberly and I have been regularly spending Friday afternoons at nearby Hamlet Kitchen, a lovely local wine spot three minutes up the road, and so yesterday, we made it a little birthday celebration—just the two of us, but damn, it was nice. And tonight, we had good friends Joe & Callie over for dinner, drinks, and what amounted to a raucous rumble that almost resembled dancing. 

Kimberly very kindly gave one of her beautiful handmade cards for my birthday, and just above, you can see it on the living room bookcase, with a wee bit of support from Gabora and Baragon. Splendid! 

Her birthday is next Saturday, so we'll be celebrating that in some fashion as well. As you can see in the photo below, she's getting really, really old.

Oh, wait, that's the guy behind her. Sigh.

Brugger and Old Dude having a birthday eve celebration at Hamlet Kitchen

Old folks prior to the shenanigans

Made lemon-garlic shrimp for dinner

Old Dude, Brugger, Callie Hietala, Joe Keiper getting ready for dinner and whatever the hell it was that came afterward.

The whatever-the-hell-it-was that came afterward