"A bastard of a good book..."

Heard today from Allan Guthrie, via Jon Bassoff at NPP. Yeah, that's right, I said Allan Guthrie, bitches.
He says of The Bastard Hand:
"A bastard of a good book. If you like Flannery O'Connor and Jim Thompson, you're going to love this."

Gator Boy: Patti Abbott's Fiction Challenge

Here's the challenge Patti put out:Scarry Night
And here's my story.

Gator Boy

Keegan had tied the rope himself, cinched it tight around the boy’s waist, had tousled the straw-blond hair and said Okay, go get ‘em, boy so he knew there was no one to blame for what happened but himself. The gators were just too fast this time.

And he could say now that he’d had a funny feeling , had a sudden flash of dread as he watched Sammy wade out into the swampy water, watched the gators on the muddy isle perk up. But that could’ve been hindsight talking.

They’d done it countless times before. The rope, the boy, the gators. Sammy would go out in the water, start splashing around, and it was never long before the gators got interested and came after him. And when they’d get close, Keegan would yank the boy back, right out of the jaws of death as it were, and as the boy scrambled up on the land Keegan would snatch up his bow and let loose with an arrow right into the gator’s head.

It worked every goddamn time.

And Keegan himself grew up doing it with his own Pop. His father had taught him how to cinch the rope tight, how to splash around in the water, how to get the gator’s attention. He had more than a few scars from his days as the Gator Boy—mostly on his legs and arms but one nice one like a jagged bolt running down his jaw.

Keegan had learned from his own Pop’s mistakes. He’d learned the best ways to minimize the danger and keep his Sammy as safe as possible.

Yeah, it worked every time.

Except this time.

The boy had yelled, They’re comin’, Pa, they’re comin’! but Keegan had allowed his mind to wander in that one split second, that most crucial second. And then the rope had slipped a little in his callused hands when he yanked on it. Those two things were all the gators needed.

One of them got Sammy by the leg, dragged him under, the whole time the boy screaming Pa, Pa, help me, Pa! and then two more dove in on him and the water turned red as they tore him to pieces. And Keegan could only watch in numb horror as his son was devoured.

He stood there on the shore forever and wasn’t positive exactly when the cops showed up. But one of them said to him, You got scars, buddy. I guess you used to do the same thing as your boy there. And you got hurt more than once, by the look of it.

Numbly, watching the gators now back on the muddy isle, full on the flesh of his son, Keegan said I really don’t mind the scars. They’re all I got left, and the cops put him in the car.

Beat to a Pulp: Round One

So I know I’m behind the curve on reviewing this book, since it came out months ago and has already been praised and lauded by readers more on the ball than me. But I’m gonna toss my two coins in the pot (to mix three or four metaphors there) and just say it anyway: Beat to a Pulp is a terrific anthology and you need to read it right away.
Mostly culled from the website of the same name (but with a few original to this collection), Beat to a Pulp, edited by David Crammer and Elaine Ash, delivers a wide array of pulpy goodness, from the hard-boiled to science-fiction to outright horror… there’s even a couple of pirate stories, for god’s sake.
Many of the writers gracing its pages were familiar to me already, and they didn’t disappoint. Charles Ardai, Hilary Davidson, Ed Gorman, Patricia Abbott, and Jedidiah Ayres all turn in stories every bit as good as you’d expect from writers of their caliber.
But there were others that I didn’t know as well that had me jotting their names down to look up more by them. I was particularly impressed by Mike Sheeter (“The All-Weather Phantom”) and Andy Henion (“Anarchy Among Friends: a Love Story”)—writers after my own black and twisted little heart.
The coup de grace of this terrific collection, however, is the closing essay by noir/pulp historian Cullen Gallagher. In less than sixteen pages he gives us a concise and entertaining history of Pulp, both as a commercial venture and as an artistic endeavor. I came away with a much better understanding of the genre my work springs from, and I’m grateful for that.
And I’m grateful to Crammer and Ash for putting out this superior collection.

The Nine Pale Men: A Grey Hawthorne Adventure

My story The Nine Pale Men went up yesterday at The Nautilus Engine.
It appears that, as of this issue, The Nautilus Engine has decided to go "all Facebook, all the time". An interesting approach, hopefully it works out for them. You can always count on good stories from them.
The Nine Pale Men is a bit different from my other stuff. A Victorian-era horror-adventure story featuring a Southern gentleman on a quest for revenge that drives him around the world and into conflict with various forces of e-veel.
If enough readers like him, I'll do more stories of Grey Hawthorne. He's a fun character to write.

New short term goal

... in the month or two surrounding the release of The Bastard Hand, my short term goal is to have stories running at A Twist of Noir, Beat to a Pulp, and Crime Factory, all at the same time.
I'd include Back Alley and Out of the Gutter as well, but both of them are swamped with submissions presently. Bummer.
What do you think? Too ambitious?
P.S.- This post gives me an excuse to have a photo of belly-dancer Rachel Brice. It has nothing to do with anything, of course. But that's okay.

Ten Little Zombies: A Love Story by Andy Rash

“Ten little zombies, walking in a line
One stepped in a campfire, now there are nine.”

The line between adorable and horrifying is a thin one. I bet you didn’t even know there WAS a line, did you? Well, there is. And Ten Little Zombies: A Love Story staggers along it like a… well, like a flesh-eating zombie.

It’s got all the cuteness of a pre-school type counting and rhyming book, and all the scary creds of a zombie flick. Imagine what sort of book George Romero might give his children, and you have a good idea about this little tome.

It’ll take you less than five minutes to read (in fact, this review threatens to be longer than the book itself), so the cover price of ten bucks might seem extravagant, but as a gift book it’s fun. Very simple black and white line drawings carry it, with the only color being the messy splotches of red blood signifying another messy zombie death—for that reason, you might want to keep this one out of the hands of particularly sensitive kids. But your average 13 or 14-year-old will probably get a kick out of it.

Dirty Old Town and other Stories by Nigel Bird

Nigel Bird hasn’t been writing short stories for long, but damn, you wouldn’t know that by the selection of gems in Dirty Old Town and Other Stories.
There’s nine of them here, and each one offers a unique little slice of filthy life. From the downbeat last day of a tormented old janitor in “Taking a Line for a Walk” to the dark and clever humor of the Ramones-inspired “Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want to Fight)”, Bird displays a remarkable insight into what makes the lowlifes and losers of the world tick.
He’s at his best with the stories written in first person, and fortunately that’s the majority of them. It’s the voice, man: it’s authentic and sincere and real, shot through with remarkable bits of insightful black humor.
Like this one, from the title story, “Dirty Old Town”, which starts with the narrator getting the bee-jeezus beaten out of him:
“It was like my birthday in reverse. They gave plenty and I ended up with less than I started with.”
That line kills me.
At .99 cents on Kindle, this is the kind of bargain you don’t wanna miss. Bird is the real deal.
Favorite stories:
“Taking a Line for a Walk”
“Dirty Old Town”
“One Hundred and Ten Percent”