The Town Where Bad Things Happen

Here's a preview of my tale "Incarnadine," which will appear in Turn Down the Lights, the 25th anniversary anthology coming soon from Cemetery Dance. (Brief detour: Above is Steven C. Gilberts' illustration for the special Artist and Lettered editions of the book, which for my $$$$ is a spot-on dead-solid-perfect interpretation of the story. Thanks, Steven!)

So without further ado, here's a slice of Cemetery Dance-style darkness. In the tradition of the best Coming Attractions trailers, I'll give you a peek at the monster:


The creature’s glove is off now. Five sharp metal fingers gleam in the moonlight. Then the witch is gone for another moment. Unconscious. A flash fills her skull, like wild electricity, and her mind snaps back. Swollen eyes… blurry vision… but the witch sees the thing coming her way. Wiry gait. Clanking motion. Moonlight threading through its body like a sieve. A misplaced sculpture free of some mad museum… and a misplacer of time, too -- for several more moments have vanished.

And then it happens again. Now the shambler is carrying the witch… now they are away from the trees and the riverbed… now they are climbing together on a switchback path that rises through the darkness. Yes. The clock has skipped a serious beat. The witch blinks, tries to speak through bruised lips, but words won’t come. The thing moves forward, as if in a hurry. It wears both cops’ badges now, clipped to the gridwork of its chest. And it has a head. She sees that. A rusty bucket pockmarked with holes, and… blood. Blood spills over the edges of the bucket, leaks through the pockmarked holes. And the witch hears things slapping wetly within the bucket -- things the creature harvested from the dead cops down by the riverbed.

A brain, no doubt... and maybe a heart. Again, the witch fades. The wiry shambler inclines its bucket head, and blood spills on her face, and blood awakens her.

Drip drip drip, she thinks. This is how it starts. And then the dam begins to break, like dams always do. And then the river --

Turn Down the Lights

The good folks over at Cemetery Dance announced a special project today. Edited by Richard Chizmar himself, Turn Down the Lights is an anthology celebrating the 25th anniversary of CD Pubs. I'm doubly excited about it (i.e. proud to be a contributor, and looking forward to it as a reader, too), and I'm betting you will be to once you get a glance at the TOC:

"Turn Down the Lights..." an introduction by Richard Chizmar
"Summer Thunder" by Stephen King
"Incarnadine" by Norman Partridge
"The Western Dead" by Jack Ketchum
"An Instant Eternity" by Brian James Freeman
"In the Room" by Bentley Little
"Flying Solo" by Ed Gorman
"The Outhouse" by Ronald Kelly
"Lookie Loo" by Steve Rasnic Tem
"Dollie" by Clive Barker
"The Collected Short Stories of Freddie Prothero" by Peter Straub
Afterword by Thomas F. Monteleone

Needless to say, I'm in very fine company here. Even better news -- the trade edition is already at the printer will be shipping next month. Right now you can grab a copy with free shipping over at the CD website. And since the book was just announced this morning and is already 50% sold out, you'd probably better do the job soon (especially if you want an extra-crunchy edition).

As Mr. Chizmar himself always writes in his "Words from the Editor," can't wait to "turn down the lights... and start the dance" with this one. I got my start over at Cemetery Dance, with Rich publishing my first short story and my first novel, so it's great to see things going so strong at CD all these years later... and, yep, I'm glad to be in on the action, too.

That's it for now. Stay tuned... later on in the week I'll post a little taste of "Incarnadine" for those of  you who like your sneak peeks.

A Bucketful of Shivers

My contributor's copies of a new anthology hit the doorstep the other day. Shivers VII is edited by Richard Chizmar, longtime Cemetery Dance honcho. This one features stories from Stephen King, Ed Gorman, Al Sarrantonio, Clive Barker, Brian James Freeman, Roberta Lannes, Rio Youers... and right about now I'll save myself some typing and say you can check out the full TOC right here.

My contribution is "Red Rover, Red Rover," a slice of summertime gothic. Starts off this way: "Everyone says the lake is haunted, but the boys have been looking all summer and they haven't seen one ghost." I had a lot of fun writing the piece, especially channeling the 1969 setting from my own childhood memories. Here's hoping it provides a shiver or two... just watch out for Mr. Rose.

Me? I'm definitely enjoying the book. Of course, I'm not the most considerate reader in the world -- at least when it comes to editors -- as I tend to jump around in anthos rather than stick to the playlist. So far I've read the King piece ("Weeds," adapted for Creepshow way back when), which was a perfect little fifties sci-fi creeper out of The Blob school. Also checked out Norman Prentiss' "The Storybook Forest," a sharp chiller with an irresistible "I wish I'd thought of that" set-up -- three teenagers are on the prowl in an abandoned amusement park, and before the first Budweiser's drained one of them is trapped under a giant tea cup. This one's masterful, restrained, and sly -- and it'll leave you wanting more. And just when I thought I couldn't stand to read another zombie story, here comes a very sharp one from Tim Waggoner. Nice stuff.

Anyway, so far I'm three-for-three with Shivers VII. The hardcover edition is already sold out, but you can grab yourself a trade pb right here.

Listen Up!

Check out the podcast of my tale, "Apotropaics," over at Psuedopod: the Sound of Horror. Along with "Guignoir," this was an early tale that really grabbed the attention of editors when I was breaking into the business. The story originally appeared in Cemetery Dance #11 in 1992, and I've always thought of it as a signature CD story -- in those days we called it "dark suspense," and it was the kind of story that set Rich's magazine apart from the others. Apart from that, "Apotropaics" is a story about observations, about what we know and what we think we know... and where those things can take us.

So listen. Enjoy. And, while you're at it, feed the pod!

You know what, there's even a t-shirt!

Test Drive Wildest Dreams

Thanks to Kevin Nordstrom for a great illo based on the opening scene from Wildest Dreams. Just a reminder that the one-week 99 cent sale on the WD eBook is winding down.

So click on over to Cemetery Dance and order up. And if you'd like to give the novel a test drive, you can check out the "Look Inside" link for the first chapter-and-a-half over on the Amazon page. You'll find out why the little girl in Kevin's illo isn't quite what she appears to be, but you won't find out what the stranger -- who just happens to be a hired killer named Clay Saunders -- has in that backpack. You'll have to order up to do that little trick... and thanks to all of you who've already done the job.

The 99 Cent Dream

Just wanted to thank everyone who's grabbed a copy of the Wildest Dreams eBook, on sale from Cemetery Dance this week for 99 cents. Yesterday over at Amazon, the book hit into the high 800s on the sales rank and charted at 19 on the Horror Bestsellers List.

Nice. Gracias! I appreciate it!

Most of all, I'm glad Wildest Dreams is getting a chance at a bigger audience. It was originally published as a 500 copy signed limited-edition, and those can disappear pretty fast. I'm glad folks who've been waiting for a less-expensive edition will now have a chance at it, and I hope you all enjoy it -- of the novels I've done, Dark Harvest and Wildest Dreams are my favorites.

Wildest Dreams: 99 Cents!

For the next week, my novel Wildest Dreams is discounted to just 99 CENTS at the Cemetery Dance Store, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. This one's usually $4.99, so now's your chance to grab it if you missed the 500-copy limited edition (which is long out of print). Click on over to the CD store and buy direct, or use the links on that page to get to the online merchant of your choice.

Here's the flap-copy-orific scoop on Wildest Dreams, a dark-as-tar novel of hardboiled horror:

A storm is coming to Cliffside, California, and with it comes a killer.

His name is Clay Saunders, and he walks in two worlds. Born with a caul, Saunders sees ghosts. But to him, the world of the dead is very much like the world of the living. It's a realm of eternal pain -- inescapable and relentless -- that cuts as deeply as the razor edge of the hired killer's K-bar knife.

Saunders has spilled blood on Florida sand, and the snow-covered Canadian prairie, and the black lava of Hawaii. His latest target is Diabolos Whistler, leader of a satanic cult. Exiled in Mexico, Whistler is alone when Saunders stabs him just above the first vertebrae... alone, except for the mummies stacked like so much cordwood in his library.

But the living who await the killer's arrival in Cliffside are more frightening than the decayed corpses of the dead. There's Whistler's daughter Circe, a tattooed siren who leads Saunders to a bed of iron and satin... and Circe's bodyguard, a seven foot student of Egyptology whose sarcophagus rests in a redwood pyramid... and Janice Ravenwood, a medium with a startling hidden gift.

And there's a little girl, a ghost held prisoner by vengeful revenants. Only Clay Saunders can save her. To do that, he must bridge the worlds of the living and the dead in an unforgettable climax of darkness and blood.

Another Dance in the Cemetery

Slippin' into Darkness is this week's featured eBook over at the Cemetery Dance website. Thanks to everyone who grabbed a virtual copy yesterday after the email went out from the good folks in Maryland... judging from the numbers over at Amazon, looks like a bunch of you have done that.

To order the Slippin' eBook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, the Apple iBookstore, or CD directly, just click on this link to visit the product page on the Cemetery Dance website... and thanks. Great to see this novel available again!

Slippin' Into the Seventies

My first novel, Slippin' Into Darkness, is back in print as an Cemetery Dance eBook. That's only fitting, since Slippin' was the first original novel published by Rich Chizmar's legendary little shop of horrors back in the day. To help celebrate the new edition, I thought it would be fun to dig up a little promo essay that ran in The Overlook Connection when the book was first published. So let's backtrack to the nineties and check in on yours truly reminiscing about the seventies... and, hey, that's a double dose of nostalgia all around:

Slippin' Into Darkness is possibly the first -- and probably the last -- novel of what I have come to think of as "disco noir." This is an offhand way of saying that, yes, the book is pretty dark in terms of mood, style, characterization, and nasty plot twists (that's the noir part); but besides that, Slippin' has a lot to do with the decade in which I came of age, the 1970s (that's the disco part).

While deciding what I wanted to do with my first novel, I realized that no one had written much about the days of Jimmy Carter, Donna Summer, The Six Million Dollar Man, mood rings, and the undisputed queen of jiggle television -- Farrah Fawcett-Majors. I already knew that I wanted to write about my hometown -- Vallejo, California --but I was having trouble finding my way home, so to speak. I needed something that would bring the place alive for me.

What better way to do that then revisit the past? One afternoon I got out a stack of old albums put out by K-Tel and Ronco (the same people who brought us the Veg-A-Matic) and made myself a tape of seventies hits. I hadn't heard those songs, literally, since the days when I'd cruised V-Town in a big ol' gas-guzzling '66 Dodge Monaco equipped with an 8-track player (the Dodge took twenty bucks worth of leaded and a quart of oil every week, and you had to wait in line for the privilege of filling up in the days of the energy crisis). I mean, the music on those discs wasn't that old, but it had literally disappeared from the airwaves, and that surprised me. There are oldie stations that feature the hits of the fifties and sixties, and you'll catch plenty of Eagles, Elton John, and Jim Croce on mellow rock stations, but listening to those scratchy records told me that the music of my youth had gone south in a big way.

Hey, I know what you're saying. C'mon, Norm, it was disco music, after all. Good riddance. Thank God for little miracles, right?

Well... I hate to say it, but listening to those songs stuck a chord in me. Whether I wanted to admit it or not, I realized that I had somehow stepped over one of life's little lines without noticing, the one where you suddenly discover that you're old enough for nostalgia.

Songs I'd hated when I was seventeen were making me grin ear-to-ear at thirty-four. Even the most jaded among you must admit that "Kung Fu Fighting" actually is pretty entertaining, especially when you realize that little sucker went to number one on the charts back in '74. Like Don King says, "Only in America."

But my interest was fueled by something more than just simple nostalgia -- I began to notice some recurring themes in the tunes of my youth. I was delighted to find that some of the songs on those old albums were... hot damn... pretty dark and nasty all by themselves.

Hearing War's "Slippin' Into Darkness" again not only gave me the title of the book, it sent a chill up my spine that set those creative synapses firing. Pretty soon I picked up on a theme that really started things rolling for me -- a sub-genre of songs about guys who found perfect lovers only in their dreams ("I Like Dreamin'," "Dreamweaver," "Undercover Angel," etc.). Those songs started me thinking about a guy who had never recovered from a high school infatuation, an infatuation that never amounted to much until after high school was over and the girl had become someone else entirely. Along with this, there were several songs about women you'd best be advised not to mess with ("Lady Marmalade," "Evil Woman," "Bad Blood," "Bad Girls"), so I decided to create some bad girls of my own. And if that wasn't enough, running in those worn groves was a trail of wild violence both physical and psychological (the aforementioned and admittedly goofy "Kung Fu Fighting," plus assorted bad-intentioned funky stuff such as James Brown's "The Payback," Curtis Mayfield's "Superfly," and The O'Jays' "Back Stabbers").

So, after letting all this simmer in my brain for a little while, I started writing. I wrote about the past, about a group of characters who graduated from Hogan High School in 1976, the same year I did. I wrote about what happened to them in the intervening years, how they never quite found the lives they'd been looking for when they were eighteen. I wrote about their secrets, and the bad things they did back in '76, and they good things they failed to do, and how the past returned to haunt them in a tense twenty-four hour period, from midnight to midnight on April 8, 1994.

I made use of the tools of noir and suspense fiction, lessons I'd learned from the Gold Medal writers and the dark dreamers who have followed in their wake. Along the way I discovered a few surprises I think you'll enjoy -- a game called graveyard baseball, a haunted drive-in movie theater, and a dog made from the bones of a dream. Still, I think the single thing that influenced every aspect of the book -- plot, mood, theme, characterization -- is the soundtrack.

When I finished Slippin Into Darkness, I was surprised to find that I'd written a ghost story. But it's a ghost story born in the seventies, those comparatively carefree days of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll.

Carefree -- that's what some of my characters told themselves back then, in the days before AIDS, crack, and (horror of horrors!) rap music.

It's a ghost story you can dance to... if you remember how to do the hustle, that is.