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.

Big Mac

Just finished a new short story. Can't say much about it right now, because the anthology is in stealth project mode pending the publisher's announcement. The good news is that the finished product should be out fairly quickly.

Apart from that, I'll just say that the story is called "Incarnadine." Imaginative port of embarkation? I had the idea that I'd write "Macbeth" in five days, masquerading as a small-town noir. Yep. In about 3,000 words, too. There's a bucketful of hubris for you.

Anyway, I gave up on the whole Shakespearean thing fairly quickly... at least in a literal sense.

But I did keep the blood.

There's plenty of that.

Stay tuned.