CHILL OUT

One week to Halloween, my favorite holiday!

Barry Graham was kind enough to include my zombie novel The Night Before Christmas of the Living Dead on his list of “creepy reads for Halloween.” It’s available on Amazon Kindle or in a dead-tree edition with kick-ass cover art by my pal Vince Larue…

This isn’t a quid pro quo: When I started reading Graham’s classic Of Darkness and Light...

...one Friday evening about twenty years ago, it kept me awake and creeped out farther into the wee hours of Saturday than I intended.

HOLLY GODARKLY

Happy Valentine’s Day this Saturday everybody!

In observance of the day…

Monster-of-the-Week: …our choice this week is Holly, the vampiric central character of Blood and Kisses (Vampire Love Book 1) by J.T. Blackfriars. Available on Kindle, this short e-book—it’s Part One of a promised series—was recommended to me by my pal Barry, who has described it as “Perhaps the best vampire tale since ‘Salem’s Lot.”

Perhaps it is. I confess I dragged my feet a little on the recommendation—the vampire chick-lit genre isn’t a great favorite of mine—but when I finally dug into it, I found it a blast. Holly, who lives right here in a convincingly-depicted Phoenix, hides in plain sight, telling anyone who asks that she’s a vampire, and everyone accepts it, assuming that she’s into role playing. She sleeps in a coffin, works at a convenience store and has friends with benefits, the benefits on her end including both sex and blood donation.

Blackfrairs does a wonderful job of playing by the very traditional vampire rules. Holly has to be invited into a home, said invitation can be effectively revoked, she has to avoid sunlight and she can even shape-shift into a bat (though Blackfriars, like other authors and filmmakers, declines to explain what happens to her clothes during these transformations).

What makes it a Valentine’s choice, you ask? Simple—in the course of the story Holly falls in love, and her choice is about as star-crossed as a lover could get…

But I won’t spoil it. Suffice to say that I’m in fan-girl tizzy, on the edge of my seat for the next installment. At $2.99, the book is a real find.

GRAHAM PACKED

My pal Barry Graham has published a book of essays on and reviews of horror and noir, called When the Light-Bulb is Bare, available from Amazon…

Even if it weren’t dedicated to Your Humble Narrator—which, being Humble, I take as a great honor—it would still be worth reading.

ZOMBIE MERRY AND BRIGHT

Need a last-minute cyber-gift for the twisted, morbid degenerate on your list? Why not send them my holiday zombie novel, The Night Before Christmas of the Living Dead? It’s available on Amazon for a penny less than a buck…

A living-dead-tree edition is available, too, for a couple bucks more.

BLOGOUT

Monster-of-the-Week will be on hiatus for a while, and bloggage in general is likely to be light in the coming weeks and months, while Your Humble Narrator attempts to make some progress on a couple of pressing projects.

If this leaves you tragically bereft of anything to read, let me suggest Barry Graham’s brief, badass novella One for My Baby, available on Amazon Kindle...

This noir quickie is violent, erotic, and capped, in its jolting climax, with an unexpectedly cheeky dash of black comedy. Set, as so often with Graham, in the bars and crashpads of Phoenix, this gripping tale is about as much fun as $2.99 can buy you these days (a dead-tree edition is also available, for a few bucks more).

Have a great summer everybody!

YARD WORK

Your Humble Narrator isn’t much of a game guy. But The Kid recently put a simple game on my Kindle with which I find myself able to waste a fair amount of time. Therefore…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week the nod goes to any specimen of the seemingly bottomless supply of Backyard Zombies…

…the rather cheerful-looking undead that assail you from either side of the Kindle proscenium in the game of the same title. It is, I admit, brain-numbingly satisfying to dispatch one after another.

CHRISTMAS IN OCTOBER

Happy Halloween everybody!

Appropriate to the day, Your Humble Narrator would like to offer the great Kindle-reading public his new novel, The Night Before Christmas of the Living Dead; or, A Very Zombie Christmas…

Like my first effort, Super Eight Days, it’s available on Amazon Kindle for just 99 cents. Unlike Super Eight, it’s a gruesome, raunchy, twisted horror tale crammed with gory violence, graphic sex, warped psychology and terrible language, all set against the backdrop of Holiday consumerism. It's not for kids, or for adults with decent sensibilities.

I’m hoping that a “dead tree” edition of the book will be available soon.

The art is by Vince LaRue.

SUPER-DUPER EIGHT

Almost a year ago, I offered my first novel, Super Eight Days, as an e-book on Amazon Kindle, for a mere 99 cents.

You can read about the circumstances that led to this literary landmark here if you like, but the short version is that I wanted to get the book up on Kindle before the release of the (unrelated) movie Super 8. Thus I hastily used a draft that had never been properly edited, or copy-edited, and I didn’t take the time to give it even a cursory proof.

It turned out this version was a lot rougher and more typo-riddled than I had realized, much to my embarrassment, and I heard about it from a couple of readers, who were a lot nicer and more polite about it than they needed to be. Then came an astounding offer from my cousin Natalie Nichols, an accomplished music journalist and editor on the LA scene who certainly has better things to do with her time: She would edit/copy-edit/format the book.

This she did, brilliantly and sensitively, and it’s that infinitely less slovenly version of Super Eight Days that you can now get on your Kindle, still for only 99 cents.

A thousand, thousand thanks, Cuz. You’ve saved the family honor.

RIP to actor Dick Beals, the eternal prepube falsetto who provided the original voices of Gumby and Speedy Alka-Seltzer, among countless others, passed on at 85...