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October 03, 2012

Vile Blood by Max Wilde

“The truth is I’m leaning in the direction of believing that God is dead but the Devil is very much alive.” – Father Pedro

The idea that God is dead and the Devil is running wild is one that the characters in Vile Blood have every reason to embrace. Deputy Sheriff Gene Martindale and his sister, Skye, lost their parents to unspeakable violence when Skye was still a toddler and Gene hardly into his teens. More recently, Gene’s wife and their unborn child were killed in a most gruesome manner by two members of a cult, leaving Gene, his young son, and a now seventeen-year-old Skye to cling together as a family unit.

But as horrific as their past is, their future holds far worse. When four men passing through the town decide to give Skye a hard time – or worse – one night as she’s walking home from her job at the town’s diner something in her snaps. Something monstrous, powerful, and evil. Something Skye always knew on some level was there, but which she’d fought desperately to keep contained. Something she calls The Other.

Confronted the following morning with the resulting abattoir-like scene along the side of the road, Gene knows he’s looking at something he’s seen before and had hoped to never see again. Something he knows was caused by his sister. Something he has no idea how to deal with, but knows he somehow must. Unfortunately, things go from worse to screwed when the Sheriff of the neighboring county, a man who worked the Martindale family crime scene 15 years prior, also realizes there’s something familiar about the carnage and, upon finding Skye’s broken glasses amongst the gore, makes the connection between the two massacres. →

October 02, 2012

Who the hell is Max Wilde? by Roger Smith

In a fitting kickoff to the Halloween month of October, I’m pleased to welcome author Roger Smith to the blog to talk about his doppelgänger, horror author Max Wilde. I’ve previously reviewed Roger’s thrillers Dust Devils, Ishmael Toffee, and Capture, and tomorrow will be looking at Vile Blood, the debut work from “Max.” Today, however, Roger’s gonna “riff on pen names, doppelgängers, horror comics and slasher movies.”

Vile Blood by Roger Smith In an interview years ago the great American crime writer Donald E. Westlake talked about writing his brilliant Parker novels under the alias Richard Stark. He said that when he sat down to write as Stark he felt different. Thought differently. Wrote differently.

This always intrigued me and last year, when—out of nowhere—I had the glimmer of an idea for the horror novel that became Vile Blood, I knew I could never write it as Roger Smith. I needed to access another part of myself, dredge up a very different set of memories, influences and obsessions from the ones that fuelled my South African crime novels.

So Max Wilde walked in the door one day, sat down at my computer and started writing. Before dark he slipped away but he came back the next day and the next; spent months hunched over my laptop, hammering at the keyboard like a man possessed. Then he disappeared, leaving a file sitting on my hard drive. When I read those pages I was fascinated by what this other guy had jacked into and the memories that he was stirring up.

I was a kid in apartheid South Africa in the late 60s and 70s, a repressive time. The country was run by an Afrikaner Calvinist dictatorship and hand-in-hand with their sick racial policies went a suffocating Puritanism and sexual repression. Censorship was draconian, especially when it came to sex. Forget about reading D.H. Lawrence or William Burroughs or Nabokov’s Lolita. Sex scenes in Hollywood movies were chopped out with little regard to the narrative.

But violence was okay. Violence was part of South Africa’s frontier birthright, after all. So horror novels, comics and movies slipped under the censor’s radar. →

September 30, 2012

Banned Books Week 2012: Celebrating the Freedom to Read

CBanned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read

Today is the start of Banned Books Week 2012:

Banned Books Week (BBW) is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment. Held during the last week of September, Banned Books Week highlights the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted banning of books across the United States.

Intellectual freedom—the freedom to access information and express ideas, even if the information and ideas might be considered unorthodox or unpopular—provides the foundation for Banned Books Week. BBW stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints for all who wish to read and access them.

The books featured during Banned Books Week have been targets of attempted bannings. Fortunately, while some books were banned or restricted, in a majority of cases the books were not banned, all thanks to the efforts of librarians, teachers, booksellers, and members of the community to retain the books in the library collections. Imagine how many more books might be challenged—and possibly banned or restricted—if librarians, teachers, and booksellers across the country did not use Banned Books Week each year to teach the importance of our First Amendment rights and the power of literature, and to draw attention to the danger that exists when restraints are imposed on the availability of information in a free society.

Banned Books Week is sponsored by the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, the Association of American Publishers, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and the National Association of College Stores. Banned Books Week is also endorsed by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress.

For more information on getting involved with Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read, visit their official website.

September 28, 2012

The Futility of Justice and the Persistent Agony of Loss by Sam Hawken

A little while back Rough Riders author Charlie Stella stopped by for a guest post, “Authors You Should Be Reading.” One of the people he mentioned in that post was Sam Hawken and his book The Dead Women of Juárez. I immediately put the book on my TBR list, little knowing I’d shortly be welcoming Sam for a guest post about his powerful fiction based in fact crime novel. My review will be coming next week, but today I am very pleased to turn the floor over to Sam.

Sam Hawken It’s a tricky thing, deciding to go ahead with a piece of fiction based on fact. There’s always the issue of whether the facts are broadly accepted (not always a given), and then there’s the potential to offend those for whom those facts are sacrosanct. Double these potential snags when you’re talking about events in another country, and events that affect a totally different demographic. You’re walking into a minefield.

I first became aware of the issue of the feminicidios (female homicides) in the mid-’00s. Amnesty International USA started a campaign to draw attention to the problem and it worked with me. I was exposed to a part of Mexico that had previously been closed to me as an American and I was affected. I immediately knew that I had to write about it, but it would be a few years before I figured out how and what.

For those who aren’t aware: since the early 1990s there have been a serious of vicious murders and unexplained disappearances among the female population of Ciudad Juárez, a border city directly across the river from El Paso. The city enjoyed an economic boom with the advent of NAFTA, but in 1994 the homicide rate among women jumped 600%. Something terrible was happening and no one could figure out how or why. The criminal justice system in Mexico is virtually nonexistent, with successful prosecutions of murders in some states going as low as one percent. So it went on and on. And on. →

September 25, 2012

The Wrong Goodbye by Chris F. Holm

Of course, the problem with being damned is there’s no such thing as a lucky break. – Sam Thornton

When we last saw soul collector Sam Thornton at the end of Dead Harvest he’d moved Heaven, Hell and everything in between to avert the Apocalypse and save mankind. You’d think after accomplishing something of that magnitude a guy’d get a medal…or at least a day off or something. Not quite.

See, Sam seriously overstepped his bounds as one of the “devil’s mailmen” with his actions, and as a result he’s on a sort of supernatural double secret probation with both Heaven and Hell. One more screw up or act of insubordination and Sam will be shelved – his soul deposited into “a useless body decades from expiring,” alive and aware but unable to escape. Madness usually arrives before death.

So you can understand Sam’s panic when the latest soul he’s been sent to collect goes missing before he can collect it. Sam’s pretty sure he knows who took it, a fellow Collector with whom Sam had a falling out decades ago, and he sets out to reclaim the soul before the powers that be notice he’s screwed up. What Sam doesn’t initially know is that there’s a lot more riding on him getting that soul back than just his personal well-being, and by the time he realizes it Sam’s once again in the unenviable position of being the linchpin in the quasi-truce between Heaven and Hell…and the denizens of the In-Between. →

September 25, 2012

Help Marcus Sakey Fight Pediatric Cancer

Through the end of this month, which is Pediatric Cancer Awareness Month, author Marcus Sakey is contributing 100% of the proceeds from the sales of his short story collection Scar Tissue: Seven Stories of Love and Wounds to the Team Julian Foundation, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to raising funds for childhood cancer research.

The foundation was started by The Boivin family in memory of their son Julian, who was diagnosed with an incurable brain tumor at the age of 4. Marcus Sakey, television host and author living in Chicago, is a personal friend of Brad and Nettie Boivin, and together, they are using the growing popularity of e-books to raise money for a worthy cause.

50% of the proceeds from the sales of Scar Tissue will continue to be contributed to the Team Julian Foundation beyond September.

Scar Tissue is available at Amazon as both an e-book and on audio, and for as little as $2.99 you can both help provide funds for pediatric cancer research and enjoy a great collection of stories. That’s a win all around.

To learn more about Julian and the Team Julian Foundation, visit their website. You can also learn more about author Marcus Sakey at his website.

September 24, 2012

Hello, GOODBYE by Chris F. Holm

I’m very pleased to welcome Chris F. Holm to the blog today to talk about The Wrong Goodbye (September 25th from Angry Robot), the second book in his Collector trilogy following lauded series debut Dead Harvest.

Chris Holm Not to get all writerly nuts-and-bolts on you, but when I sit down to write a Collector novel, there are two key ingredients I decide upon straightaway: the flavor (by which I mean the specific genre elements on the menu for that book) and the overarching theme or relationship I’m interested in examining. For DEAD HARVEST, the flavor was straight-up old-school pulp with a dash of wrong-man conspiracy and a healthy dose of fantasy; the theme I wanted to explore was the tragic consequences of romantic love. Hence the hard-bitten undead protagonist with a heart-wrenching back story working his damndest (pun, sadly, intended) to prove the mother of all frame-ups while being chased across Manhattan by a cadre of pissed off angels and demons both (not to mention half the freakin’ NYPD.)

Much to my delight, folks seemed to really dig it. So I suppose I could’ve gone the easy route, and used the same blueprint for book two. Plenty of writers – even ones I really like – put out entire series in which each book is a subtle variation on a theme. But I kind of felt like I’d already left it all out on the field, so to speak. That DEAD HARVEST was as lean and mean as I was gonna muster. And that to be successful with book two, I couldn’t just iterate – I had to blow the doors out, and really expand the size and scope of Sam’s world, as well as better contextualize his place in it.

To do that, I was gonna need some new ingredients. →

September 21, 2012

Dice Roll by Jason S. Ridler

“Be careful, Spar. I gotta bad feeling I’m about to kick a hornet’s nest with my boots.” – Gordon FitzHenry

Spar Battersea has not had an easy life. He pinballed through his teens and early twenties in a drunken, drug-addled, punk rock fueled haze. During that time he managed to alienate just about everyone he knew, from bandmates to friends to family and everyone in between. Yet, not even getting clean and sober helped keep Spar from finding himself repeatedly at the center of one disastrous event after another.

In the two years he’s been sober Spar’s seen his best friend die, wrangled with a nasty biker gang, been the target of both a psychopathic mime and a dominatrix with an affinity for 50′s style, nearly been murdered (twice), fought off a pack of vigilante ninjas, and been put in the position of having to kill or be killed on several occasions. Death, destruction and downright weirdness just seem to follow him like a shadow.

As Dice Roll opens, the third book in the series following Death Match and Con Job, Spar is still barely clinging to both his sobriety and his sanity while working a dead end job flipping burgers at Mama Calisto’s place. On the advice of his therapist Spar is trying to form new, positive memories to help him move beyond the tragedies in his past, and he’s been going about that by hanging out with a group of fantasy role-playing gamers he met through one of his co-workers. Not exactly Spar’s preferred scene, but what’s a guy with limited options to do?

Turns out not even gaming geeks are safe from the bad luck magnet that is Spar Battersea, as on old friend of Spar’s from high school blows back into town after a ten year absence with a serious score to settle…and a posse of Beatles quoting jujitsu trained cult members to back him up. Before he knows it Spar finds himself up to his eyes in the shit again, this time with the added bonus of a very undesired trip down memory lane. →

September 21, 2012

Mockingbird by Chuck Wendig

Potential Spoiler: Though I am not discussing anything one won’t find in the product description / summary of this book elsewhere online, do be aware that setting up the events of Mockingbird necessarily involves revealing the fate of one of the main characters from the first book in the series, Blackbirds.

Chuck Wendig “I’m the vampire and you invited me in. And I warned you. This isn’t going to be fun.” – Miriam Black

Miriam Black has a unique and unwanted talent; with one glancing touch of skin on skin she can tell exactly when and how someone is going to die. And, trust her, being constantly bombarded with visions of heart attacks, auto accidents, and murders tends to make one a little nihilistic, snarky, and foul-mouthed. However, at the end of Blackbirds, the first of author Chuck Wendig’s books to feature Miriam, things had taken a small turn for the positive in her life.

Louis, the gentle giant of a trucker whose fate Miriam altered after initially foreseeing his death, decided to stick with Miriam in spite of her rough edges and has set about trying to make a normal life for the two of them. But Miriam is anything but normal, and living in a double-wide and working as a grocery store cashier in Long Beach Island, NJ isn’t quite “taking” as far as she’s concerned.

The wheels come completely off Miriam’s wagon when, having just been fired for mouthing off one too many times, she deliberately initiates contact with her former boss in order to get a glimpse of her hopefully painful death. To Miriam’s shock, not only will the woman’s death be violent, it’s going to occur in a matter of minutes in the guise of a gunman in the store. After the ensuing fracas results in a bullet grazing her noggin, Miriam decides to get back to what she knows…wandering the country and living off her “talent.” →

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