A Lovely Mention of Southern Gods

The Old Gods of Appalachia podcast is a supernatural horror anthology that weaves eerie tales rooted in Appalachian folklore, blending atmospheric storytelling with a rich, haunting soundscape. It’s been so popular that it has branched out into other media. Once the guys that run TOGOA told me on Twitter that Southern Gods was a big influence on them, which is so incredibly gratifying to hear.

Flash forward: they put it in writing. In their new RPG manual. Which is pretty pretty pretty nice.

101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered

I’m so honored that Sadie Colleen Hartmann has included A Lush and Seething Hell in her new release 101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered which is a essential look at many modern horror classics. I'm stoked to be listed alongside amazing authors like Brian Evenson and Alma Katsu, Tanarive Due and Nathan Ballingrud, Gabino Iglesias and Josh Malerman, Paul Tremblay and Eric LaRocca and Sarah Langan. And so many more. Well, 91 more. This is a wonderful gift for those younger folks who are just discovering horror, its emotional content, but also its ability to comment on our society and the human condition.

Buy it here!

News - January 2024

Lots of stuff happening. 2023 was a year of ups and downs. Mostly downs but a few nice high points. Let’s see, maybe we should start with a bad thing. I wrote a novel during the pandemic called A Gentleman of the Carpathians and it took a year and a half to complete but after evaluation, it isn’t ready for submission. And since completing it, I haven’t really had the attention to return to it. I have a curious condition that when I hit THE END, I feel like the story is complete in my mind and everything after that is just busy work which doesn’t really help me in my chosen profession, since all the REAL work in writing is rewriting and editing. And AGOTC is a looong book.

But it’s fine. I’ll get to it again, someday. Maybe just self-publish it, warts and all. IDK, IDC. It was somewhat of a manic novel despite taking so long to write. During the course of its generation I transitioned out of working in an office to working from home, I was teaching myself how to write screenplays due to all the Hollywood interest in A Lush and Seething Hell and my other books. Also, at the time I was working on AGOTC, I was also concepting and world-building a big fantasy novel that’s waiting out in the wings eventually. MOAR BAD NEWS: On a personal note, after in the summer of 2022 I got COVID right after my mom died (not from COVID but from cancer complicated by dementia) and I never really recovered. I thought I had long-COVID but six or seven months later I discovered my heart was in Atrial Fibrillation, the dreaded AFIB, and it took all of 2023 to get the old ticker to get back into sinus rhythm. Drugs, cardioversion, and finally an ablation in October. Then the three months to recover from that operation. I’m only now starting to feel myself again. These are my excuses, yes I know, but none of us live in a vacuum.

So a big chunk of time occurred where I don’t really have anything to show despite having been fairly busy. Couple three stories in magazines and that’s about it since 2020 when Murder Ballads — my short story collection — came out.

I worked with a couple of directors developing projects, some original and others based on my work. There’s some interesting stuff happening there but you know what they say — Publishing is NO NO NO until it is YES. Hollywood is YES YES YES until it is NO. So, no idea if I’ll ever have anything to report in that sector. I’ve had works optioned but… you know how it is. The free money is nice though.

SOME GOOD NEWS!!!

Publication announcement!

In 2022, I wrote a novel called The Night That Finds Us All which I’ve documented elsewhere on this site and it will be coming out in 2025 from Putnam! In a TWO-BOOK DEAL! You can read a little more about it here. It is affectionately referred to as TNTFUA - dynomite and fuck you all - by my agent and editors.

Here’s another DOWNER: Early this year I was contacted by a very large publisher and I agreed to write an IP novel for a corporation of some ill-repute and I spent almost seven months working on a book for them only to have it unceremoniously cancelled. Why would I agree to write a novel for a large company of ill-repute? Nostalgia - that’s all I can say. I should have realized that the ill-repute is often well-deserved. I still got paid for a good chunk of the work, plus a kill fee, but still — I can’t get that time back. No gonna lie, I feel rather abused by the whole situation, since I gave that project my all, delivered everything I said I would before I said I would. Yadda yadda. Big corporations. What can you do? Nothing but remember the experience for the future.

While I was writing the countless iterations of a synopsis for the large company of ill-repute, I had a month where they didn’t get back to me so during that time I wrote a novella called Cult Classic. It has yet to be shopped. It’s a cosmic horror romp about my time working in at a television station. It’s very light hearted and in my mind feels like a 1980s horror movie, say, The Monster Squad, but with cosmic entities and potheads.

GOOD NEWS: In a kind of manic fury (probably in obstinate response to the IP cancellation), I wrote a fun, short novel called Coldboy over twenty-seven days this holiday season. Probably because I was panicking that I hadn’t produced anything in 2023 other than a novella and a couple of stories.

It’s crazy but I’ve always had success with stuff I’ve written faster rather than more deliberately. Southern Gods, both the novella The Sea Dreams It Is The Sky and the short novel My Heart Struck Sorrow contained in A Lush and Seething Hell, all were written in blasts of productivity. I’m very excited about Coldboy — it’s a departure for me, it’s very much in the vein of Max Allan Collins’ Quarry novels but with a familiar and recognizable vampire as the protagonist. Except he’s got vampire Alzheimer's. Also, it’s pretty much my first exploration in writing humor. The protagonist ended up being pretty freakin’ funny. Anyway, I’ve got the next book in that sorted out and at some point I am going to find 30 days and write the sequel. You ever write something you just feel is going to be well-received? Yeah, me neither. But this one is as close to that feeling as I’ll probably ever get.

BUT! With my new book deal, now I’ve got to write a second book for Putnam which will get in the way of Coldboy 2. Sometimes contracts are worth it! So, there’ll be a lot of my work on the horizon but it will more than likely be in 2025 before any of it comes out.

MORE GOOD STUFF: Oh, I do have a short story coming out in The Continental Literary Magazine. The Continental is a Hungarian lit mag that does themed issues. My story “The Ghost At Number One” will be in the Grotesque Issue. Number 08, I believe. The issue, not the ghost. “The Ghost At Number One” is a very mean-spirited tale of a quite unhappy marriage.

I wrote a few episodes of a narrative podcast and developed a multi-season pitch with my pal Jason Murphy called The Listening Station which is out under submission and I think it will do well when it’s produced. It’s being shopped right now but we might Kickstart it and pursue it ourselves if needs be. I’m trying to convert some of the film scripts Jason and I have written into comic scripts but that’s slow going but on my list of very important work that tends to get put on the back burner.

That’s all. I hope you’ve all enjoyed the holidays and have moved into 2024 healthy and ready for new experiences. I am not excited about this election. Actually, I’m full of dread. I can’t even.