I wrote a personal, potentially ugly novel that reflects how I see the world. All I can hope for is that there are people out there who appreciate it. I grew up sheltered and amongst science-minded people. I had a wild imagination and felt like no one could understand or appreciate how amazing and poignant I found the conjurations from my mind. My life experience came from watching TV and reading. But TV has always been flat to me, lacking depth, and has given all of us who grew up watching it everyday a false sense of opportunity and expectation. Books, on the other hand, are more worldly and honest, showing us the good and the bad without the false veneer of technicolor advertising. Books give us hope, not false promises. THE NEW FLESH may repulse some people. It may offend. Some may even drop it in the trash in disgust, delete it from their Kindles and expunge it from their lives. That's fine. It's not for everyone. I believe I am the kind of writer that people will either totally hate or absolutely love. I think I'll be dealing with this fact for my entire writing career, that winding path before me that spirals into the distance. Because I know I have quite a career ahead of me--a huge white whale filled with swirling prose waiting to be formed into stories of humanity and the fantastic. I didn't get this far without believing in myself. Many of you just might, however, enjoy THE NEW FLESH immensely, as I have from writing it, expunging my mind of darkness, splattered it through this creation of the imagination, dripping and pooling for your wicked pleasure. >;)
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The issue, I believe, with various people's opinions about which works of fiction are scary--and whether fiction is scary at all in some cases--are due, mostly, to what each individual finds horrific. For me, what is truly scary, is the idea that you could be walking along on a regular day and everything seems normal, and then something odd happens. At first, you might not notice, but the oddness will grow and the veneer of the mundane world will begin to slip, and you will come face-to-face with dangerous things you can't reason with, that defy rational explanation. My greatest fear is to sink into such things and become lost, that perhaps such things are more "real" than those we perceive on our happy little trips to the grocery store or the bank. Now that's scary. But others find other things scary. What about the man who stands outside your window at night grinning insanely? Or the spiders that hatch in dark corners of the house and crawl into your ears and mouth while you're sleeping to lay their eggs? Or perhaps the asteroid that is surely speeding toward the Earth with its grinning moonface of death and extinction? But most, unfortunately and unhealthily, attempt to deny and hide from their fears. As far as those naysayers who say fiction is not scary are concerned, all I can do is sigh and shake my head. If you have the imagination for it, there is fiction out there that will terrify you. You have only to look...
So these are a few titles to begin with. I'll have more for you soon enough. ;)
(My debut novel, The New Flesh, will be released by DarkFuse in the coming weeks. Needless to say, I'm very excited...) Okay, I’ll admit it right now, I’m sick and deranged. As of this writing, my parents have yet to read The New Flesh and when they do, when they read some of the more, shall we say, ‘explicit’ scenes, it’s bound to cause a rise at our next family reunion. But we’re all deranged, aren’t we? Our families make us that way—blame mom and dad, right? I used to tell my dad, jokingly, of course, that he was scarring me for life whenever he did something stupid that embarrassed me in public. But maybe it wasn’t really a joke. Everything that happens to us (especially us writer types)—whether it’s a parental guilt trip for feeding your broccoli to the dog, or a half-hazard trip to Magic Mountain, or a drunken fit of violence—ripples through our lives and makes an impact on everything we do and become. What I mean to say is, The New Flesh, in a lot of ways, is a personal novel. Melting faces, otherworldly misadventures, and insidious snuff films aside, I can easily relate to its characters, especially to our young protagonist. Jake is shy. He draws and designs games. He hangs out by himself (or with the few friends he has) in the sparse clumps of nature found in the city neighborhood. He plays “pretend” a lot. Occasionally he starts a fire… Okay, to be honest, I only did that once and I’m not really a firebug. Jake may be, but I’m not. When I was in first grade, along with the older neighbor boys up the street, I collected lighters and matches. We hid everything in a secret cove of trees and we used to light newspaper and other trash and watch the flames with fascination. Who isn’t mesmerized by fire? Then one day I lit a fire when I was by myself and I didn’t know how to put it out. I ran back to my house for a bucket of water, but, thankfully, my dad saw me through a window in the house and followed me to the fire and was able to stomp it out with his foot. It could have been bad, but it wasn’t. Fires are a real problem here in the southwestern United States where everything is dry and it hardly ever rains. My senior year in high school, the Cerro Grande fire came through Los Alamos, where I was living at the time, and burned several houses to the ground to the right and to the left of my house, which remained untouched. Fire is serious business. I was grounded after I started that fire and I never started a fire like that again, but the experience left an impression on me, it impacted my future life in a profound way, I believe. But there are other experiences that have had an impact as well. Alcoholism, I’m told, runs in my family and I’ve seen a lot of drinking and its effects on people, from over-exuberance to pathetic self-pity to violence. I’ve seen alcohol take control of people and change them. I’ve also had a few drinks myself and been a wild partier in my time. I’ve seen some things. I can still remember vividly a dream I had when I was a young child. A demon was sitting on my dresser across the room from where I slept. It wasn’t doing anything, just sitting there kicking its legs out a little, as if impatiently. It had blue skin and horns and was grinning at me. And there were other demons lined up all around the demon, my demon, as if posing for a photograph. I knew I was dreaming so I struggled to wake up. When I did finally wake up with a start and look over at my dresser, all the demons were gone except for my demon, still just sitting there, grinning and grinning. I was terrified. Then I blinked and the demon faded away. I can’t remember how old I was, but I can remember the dream perfectly. That grin, that demon’s smile, is the same grin I imagine on the Melting Man. I think part of the reason Greg Gifune, the senior editor at DarkFuse and a very fine writer himself (www.gregfgifune.com), has been so enthusiastic about The New Flesh from the moment he called me up one day to tell me he’d like to publish my novel, is because of its complexity, because of the subtext and layers of story beneath that which shines on the surface. I’m fascinated by what people perceive to be reality. But I’ll let the Melting Man speak for himself and you can come to your own conclusions: “What is real and what isn’t is a matter of relative perception, is it not? What can be made real, that’s what matters. How do you think things came to be this way? Someone had to imagine them.” Things are never what we think they are. Horror is, for me, the most compelling of genres. There's nothing quite like that creeping feeling of the uncanny, that shivering crawl up the spine, that heart-deadening pulse in your chest. It's exciting. Some people don't get it, but I've always found a really good horror novel or movie to be an experience akin to the thrill I can only assume some people get from things like sports, violent video games, and sky diving. The problem is, to begin with film, the majority of what's out there is derivative, splatterfest crap. Movies like Saw and Hostel are entertaining to a certain demographic (I enjoyed them for what they were), but do not have any lasting value. I like horror that makes you think. Literary and literate horror, that is disturbing and weird. I call these kinds of titles SLIC (Surreal, Literate, Impressive, and Creepy). Here are 8 SLIC movies (I'll get to books in my next post) to begin with: |
"Unrelenting Horror"- FREE!An award-winning author known for blending elements of fantasy with horror in his surreal, literary style. Author of WITHIN, A GAME FOR GODS and VIOLENT HEARTS.
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