Cemetery Dance Publications

We Interrupt This Author…
Interruption #4: Tim Lebbon
by Joe Howe

Interviewing authors is a tough job. Matching them drink for drink in sleazy bars, violent confrontations when the questions probe too deep, making permanent enemies. Well, I mean, it isn’t that way for me, I just sit here in my comfortable chair and ask questions of gracious and accommodating authors, but for those poor souls who are assigned Nicholas Sparks or Stephanie Meyer, they’re gonna lose some teeth. (Just kidding, Twilight fans. Please don’t burn down my house.)

Welsh author Tim Lebbon has been making waves in the horror field since the publication of his first book Mesmer in 1997. His awards for his fiction include the Bram Stoker Award (for his short story “Reconstructing Amy”), the August Derleth Award (for his novel Dusk) and the Scribe Award (for the novelization of the film 30 Days of Night). His current release from Cemetery Dance is the short story collection Last Exit for the Lost. Tim lives in Monmouthshire with his family, and took time from his busy schedule to answer a few questions.

Joe Howe: Your recent collection from Cemetery Dance is Last Exit for the Lost, 19 of your shorter works in a 560 page volume. Tell us a little about this book.

Tim Lebbon: It’s my first collection since 2003’s White And Other Tales Of Ruin (which was a novella collection from Night Shade Books), and collects my best short fiction from 2000 to 2006, as well as the novella “In Perpetuity”from Night Visions 11. It also contains “Pay the Ghost,” which Dennis Iliad is soon to direct for Sidney Kimmel Entertainment. I don’t write nearly as many short stories as I used to, which is a shame because I love doing them, so this collection is a bit of a milestone, and I’m very excited to see it out at last. Even though timewise it stops around 2007 (when the two original stories were written), it gives a pretty good cross-section of the sort of stuff I write. If a new reader asks “what should I read of yours” I usually point them to one of my collections, and now there’s this new one to share. There’s a new collection coming soon from PS Publishing, too, collecting my work from 2006 to 2010 (with some original work on there). I suspect that might be the last for a few years…

JH: In a recent discussion I had with a friend about your work, we agreed that you are one of if not the best contemporary writers when it comes to novella-length work. Not to slight any of your other stories, but would you agree that the novella seems to bring out your best, and if so, why?

TL: Thanks, that’s very kind of you. I’m very proud of my novellas, and I’ll be writing more in the near future. I’m not sure why it is that they seem to have more of an impact than my novels, and to be honest trying to analyze this troubles me. I guess sometimes in my novels, a weakness of mine is detailed plotting and seeing the big picture. I hate planning a book, so I usually head in with an idea and see where it takes me. With novellas, it’s easier to do this and come out the other end unscathed, because although the ideas can sometimes be as complex as those for a novel, getting there is quicker.

I’m also quite an impulsive writer—and very fast, once I’m in the flow of a story—and I think an intensive writing period suits a novella more than a novel. If it’s flowing well, I’ll write a novella in a week then be exhausted. Not so easy to remain as focused and energized for the duration of a novel.

JH: You are the most prominent Welsh writer of horror and fantastic fiction working today, in a lineage that goes back to the great Arthur Machen. In past times, the English viewed Wales as a land of dark magic and sorcery (see Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I). Is there something in Wales and being Welsh that lends itself to dark and fantastic fiction?

TL: Machen is one of my favorite writers, so thank you. Wales is certainly steeped in history, myth and legend, and perhaps that bleeds from the rocks into the writers who live here. As for me, I’m deeply affected by landscape, and the place where I’m lucky enough to live has some of the most beautiful countryside in the British Isles. I take daily walks in the local woodland, and that certainly recharges batteries and sometimes helps me see my way past, or through, a problem I might have come up against in my writing. From my front window I can see the Sugarloaf mountain, a beautiful scene. I’m very lucky. I’ve always been interested in humankind’s interaction with the natural world, and I guess living where I am, I’m well-placed to see many of the effects.

JH: You are a prolific writer. At what point in your career did you look at what you had written and say “I am a professional writer, and this is my future”?

TL: Making the transition into doing this for a living was a very gradual process. I guess I’ve known since a very early age that I’ve wanted to be a writer, and I worked hard at it all through my twenties, seeing short stories, novellas and my first novel or two published. I’ve been earning a living doing it for almost eight years now—four of them still doing some part-time work, and the past four years writing full-time. It has its pressures—my first month without a paycheck was a bit of a shock—but the positives outweigh the negatives by about, ooohhhh, seventeen million to one.

JH: You are from the UK, but a sizeable proportion of your audience seems to be in America. Do you find that some themes don’t translate as well across the Atlantic, and do you find yourself tailoring your work for those of us who spell “colour” without the “u”?

TL: I certainly don’t tailor my work any particular way, I just write the story I most want to tell. My first few horror novels were set in the UK and published in the USA by Leisure Books, and ironically my new SF/horror novel Coldbrook was first sold in the UK, and is set almost exclusively in the USA. Locations suit the story, or the idea. There’s that interesting language barrier that pops up in editing sometimes, and my good friend and collaborator Chris Golden often screams at me “turn on US spelling, for f***’s sake!” I keep it off just to annoy him. I like him having to cut out all those ‘u’s

JH: What should we look forward to seeing from Tim Lebbon in the future?

TL: Right then…

Out on 27th July (the day before my birthday!), the new Hidden Cities novel with Chris Golden, The Chamber of Ten, and next year sees the fourth book, The Shadow Men. Later this year Bantam will publish my new stand-alone fantasy novel Echo City, and Orbit will publish that in the UK next year. Also next year comes Coldbrook in the UK, a huge SF horror novel. And then HarperCollins in the US will publish the first book of mine and Chris Golden’s series The Secret Journeys of Jack London, called The Wild. This has also sold to Fox 2000, and Chris and I are writing the screenplay right now. There’s another movie going into production this fall, Pay The Ghost (mentioned above). There’s a collection and a novella from PS Publishing, and a few other things still under wraps. Busy times ahead, but exciting times too.

JH: Thanks, Tim.

Joe Howe was born, raised and lives in Alabama and has been a horror fan since he read his first book—Dracula. When not wasting your tax money as a government employee, he reviews good books and (mostly) bad movies on his website http://deadinthesouth.blogspot.com as his web alter ego Kent Allard. He previously worked as a history professor and a lawyer, and has already heard your lawyer joke.

The Author’s Voice, Episode #3: Attitude II
by Martel Sardina

Last time, I offered the writers out there a few tips on how to make their book signings successful. But writers are only one side of the attitude equation. I believe in that old adage “the customer is always right” most of the time. However, there are times when the “customer” is wrong. There is nothing worse than being excited to meet your favorite author at a signing or a convention and having the interaction end badly.

I attended the World Horror Convention for the first time in 2005. In addition to being a reader/fan of almost every author in attendance, I was also a fledgling writer who was desperately seeking to be published. A combination that could kill a career before it ever had a chance to get off the ground. I’m sure that I’ve made almost every mistake that I’m about to list. Fortunately, many of the authors/editors/publishers I’ve met over the last five years have been gracious and forgiving when I’ve done something “wrong.” But here are some tips to help you, the fledgling writer or the reader/fan, navigate personal interactions with your favorite author/editor/publisher with grace.

For readers/fans:

1. Abide by the rules of the event – There are reasons why signings might be limited to the author’s most current release or a certain number of books. If you have more books that you would like the author to sign, ask politely if that is possible but don’t be upset if the author has to decline the request. Everyone’s time is valuable and limited. As much as an author might love to sign every edition of every book he’s ever had published, there are a myriad of reasons why he can’t accommodate your request at this time.
2. Don’t spoil it for the rest of us – Believe it or not, there are people out there who haven’t read all of Author X’s books, including the latest release, prior to attending the signing. While you’re chitchatting in line, try to keep your reviews “spoiler free” for those who aren’t uber fans like you.
3. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion – If you read one of Author X’s books and liked it, feel free to spread the word. However, if you didn’t like the book, it would be better to share your opinion in a private conversation, letter or e-mail, rather than in front of a group of potential readers or fans at a signing or convention.
4. Timing is everything – Assess the environment you are in before interrupting a conversation. In a convention setting, it’s generally ok to approach someone at the bar and strike up a conversation or ask politely for something to be signed. Don’t interrupt someone when they are on the phone or if they are in the midst of a one-on-one discussion with someone in a semi-private area of the hotel. You could be interrupting a business meeting or a pitch session with an agent. Keep after-panel interactions short and to the point as the author may have other places he needs to go.

All of the above apply to any audience members, but here are a couple of additional tips for fledgling writers:

1. Create a professional mirage – You’re a newbie. But you don’t have to make newbie mistakes. Know who you are talking to and what you are talking about. Do your homework. Learn the lingo of the industry.  Agent? Editor? Publisher? Small Press vs. Vanity Press? Advance vs. Royalty? If you don’t know what these terms mean, look them up. One of my favorite blogs for writing advice is J.A. Konrath’s A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ .
2. Listen and learn – Authors/editors/publishers are generally willing to give new writers advice. Take advantage of this opportunity by asking good questions. As mentioned above, do your homework first. Most convention websites provide a list of Guests of Honor and attendees. Many will provide links to the GoH and attendee websites. Research the people you want to meet prior to the event so you can ask questions that are more thought provoking than “How did you get your start in publishing?” or “Where do you get your ideas?”
3. Desperation does not lead to publication – Do not hound every person you meet to read and/or critique your manuscript. Your writing will stand for itself given the chance. Do what professional writers do – Write, edit, submit, and repeat as necessary.

I hope that learning from my mistakes will help you make a good first impression when the time comes. And if you do happen to make a mistake of your own from time to time, don’t dwell on it. Apologize and make amends if you can. Otherwise, do your best to learn from the experience and move forward. Good luck!

We Interrupt This Author…
Interruption #3: Greg F. Gifune
by Joe Howe

We’re back with another short author interview. Our requirement is that the author has a current or forthcoming book from Cemetery Dance and no currently enforceable restraining order against me. It’s embarrassing to say which one is the more restrictive, but in my defense, Cemetery Dance publishes a lot of writers.

The author we’re pulling away from work this time is Greg F. Gifune. A Massachusetts native, Greg is the highly-regarded author of such works as The Bleeding Season and Children of Chaos. His current release from Cemetery Dance is Catching Hell.

Joe Howe: Your new release from Cemetery Dance is Catching Hell. Tell us a little about it.

Greg F. Gifune: It’s set in 1983, and is about three young actors and a stagehand from a summer stock theater who take off from Cape Cod to visit a resort in Maine as a kind of last hooray before they either go on to college or move to New York City to chase their dreams. On the way, they encounter a bizarre storm and wind up in a peculiar town that seems to be stuck in the 1940s. But the town is anything but the quaint and harmless little hamlet it appears to be at first glance, and once they become trapped there they realize the locals are harboring some horrible secrets and that they’ll have to fight their way out to survive the night, or risk falling prey to a cycle of depravity and violence at the hands of a demonic creature so horrifying few will even speak its name.

JH: Compared to many of your peers, you are quite prolific (Your website shows 14 books written by you). How do you manage to be as productive as you are without sacrificing quality?

GG: Do nothing but work and have virtually no life? No, seriously, it may appear that I’m a bit more prolific than I really am, as I’ve been writing professionally now for more than a decade full-time, so when you spread my list of published novels out over a 10 or 11 year timeframe it’s probably not quite as impressive. And also, usually (not always but usually) my novels sit in my head literally for years before I write them, so by the time I’m putting them to paper I have a solid grasp of what I’m doing with it and what I want. Still, I have managed to produce a good amount of work, you’re right. Much of that has been because I’ve been in demand from the publishers I’ve worked with so I’m very grateful to them and the fans for that. I’ve learned how to juggle projects and to do the things required of a professional novelist these days, and to do them in a manner where quality is not sacrificed. I also work very hard at what I do and strive for that quality. The harder I work, the more it pays off.

JH: Now that you’ve been writing for a while, how has your style changed over time? Does the process come easier to you now?

GG: Although it took time to find my voice and develop my style, because I wrote for years before I ever wrote a novel, I was able to have both established by the time I did. Since then I think my style has remained the same, more or less, but it has evolved, and continues to (hopefully for the better). The only thing is that I’ve had to speed my process up a bit, which is not entirely natural for me, but it’s a shift I’ve learned to live with because it’s necessary.

JH: Everyone wonders what the chef eats when he’s away from his restaurant, so what do you read for entertainment? Who are some of the writers who have had an influence on your work?

GG: Unfortunately I don’t have the time to read for pleasure like I used to, but when I do have the time I tend to mix it up between fiction and nonfiction. I have very eclectic tastes when it comes to just about everything, so it’s a wide range in both. I read The New Yorker too, have for years, and I enjoy that. As for writers who have influenced me, there have been many, but I rarely list them because I always forget some. Here’s a few: Virginia Woolf, Jim Thompson, Tennessee Williams.

JH: Writing can be lonely work, and sometimes it takes a while to receive positive reinforcement for what you do. What made you decide on writing as a career?

GG: Very true, writing is very isolating at times and can be very lonely, and it’s also (at times) a very brutal business. I never really decided on it though, it decided for me. I’ve always known what I wanted to do, always wanted to be a writer and an actor, and from the time I was a little kid, I mean, I don’t ever remember not knowing what I wanted to do. I studied, worked in and pursued both for years. Sounds corny but it’s true, it’s who I am. The literal decision came in my early 30s, when I decided if I didn’t commit and really go after a career as a writer, I never would. So I did and fortunately it paid off.

JH: What should we be looking for in the near future from Greg Gifune?

GG: More novels coming later this year and next, and recently I’ve had quite a bit of interest from Hollywood (and some indi filmmakers as well) regarding several novels of mine, so we’ll see what happens there. My website is probably the best way to stay on top of things: www.gregfgifune.com.

Joe Howe was born, raised and lives in Alabama and has been a horror fan since he read his first book—Dracula. When not wasting your tax money as a government employee, he reviews good books and (mostly) bad movies on his website http://deadinthesouth.blogspot.com as his web alter ego Kent Allard. He previously worked as a history professor and a lawyer, and has already heard your lawyer joke.

Stephen King wants you to help him build his empire! “After 36 years (give or take) of writing stories, I find myself hungry—not for food, but for power. I’ve decided to build a virtual empire, but I need your help. Please pitch in and help me feed my insatiable appetite for grandiosity.” For more details, see his post here.

Just over a week to go (July 9)  until the premiere of Haven on SyFy. This is the TV series inspired by The Colorado Kid. Here’s an article about filming in Nova Scotia. Here’s a video of the cast discussing the series. This link has synopses of the first four episodes.

Full Dark, No Stars is still several months away, but here is the Amazon/UK description of the book and its stories:

‘I believe there is another man inside every man, a stranger…’ writes Wilfred Leland James in the early pages of the riveting confession that makes up ’1922′, the first in this pitch-black quartet of mesmerising tales from Stephen King, linked by the theme of retribution.  For James, that stranger is awakened when his wife Arlette proposes selling off the family homestead and moving to Omaha, setting in motion a gruesome train of murder and madness.

In ‘Big Driver’, a cozy-mystery writer named Tess encounters the stranger is along a back road in Massachusetts when she takes a shortcut home after a book-club engagement. Violated and left for dead, Tess plots a revenge that will bring her face to face with another stranger: the one inside herself.

‘Fair Extension’, the shortest of these tales, is perhaps the nastiest and certainly the funniest.  Making a deal with the devil not only saves Harry Streeter from a fatal cancer but provides rich recompense for a lifetime of resentment.

When her husband of more than twenty years is away on one of his business trips, Darcy Anderson looks for batteries in the garage. Her toe knocks up against a box under a worktable and she discovers the stranger inside her husband.  It’s a horrifying discovery, rendered with bristling intensity, and it definitively ends ‘A Good Marriage’.

Like Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight, which generated such enduring hit films as The Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me, Full Dark, No Stars proves Stephen King a master of the long story form.

For those of you interested in such details: 1922 is 96 manuscript pages, A Good Marriage is 63 manuscript pages, Big Driver is 82 manuscript pages and Fair Extension is 25 manuscript pages.

Here is King’s report from his visit to the set of season three of the FX series Sons of Anarchy. He has a cameo in the third episode. He will play a quiet loner who appears in Gemma’s (Katey Sagal) time of need. The producers learned that King was a fan of the drama, so they reached out to him for a possible cameo.

Here’s the video of King’s unannounced “visit” to Good Morning America during Justin Cronin’s appearance to promote The Passage.

A NY Times Review of Blockade Billy, with interview. Billy’s darkness is not as frightening as many of King’s characters. “At least Steve avoided turning him into a vampire,” [King's agent] Verrill said.

Recent Entertainment Weekly columns:

• Stephen King on the Blood’s a Rover audiobook
• The Most Obnoxious TV Commercial. Ever.
• How Armageddon Anticipated the BP Crisis (Damon Lindelof of Lost came up with the same idea. He tweeted: “Apparently, I just psychically plagiarized my idol, Stephen King. Yet, I am mortified that we both think Bruce Willis is our only hope.”

Here is a good write up, with pictures, of the recent LA event where King was presented a Literary Award At The 15th Annual Los Angeles Public Library Awards Dinner

We Interrupt This Author…
Interruption #2: Tim Curran
by Joe Howe

Here we are for the second in our series of short interviews with horror authors, following the success of the first one (I define success as: Didn’t get fired, didn’t get sued. Set the bar of success low, and you won’t have to deal with disappointment, kids). Our latest author to interrupt is Tim Curran. A resident of Michigan, Tim Curran is the author of the acclaimed novels Dead Sea and The Hive. His most recent book is The Corpse King, now available from Cemetery Dance. Tim’s home on the web is www.corpseking.com. Here are a few questions with which we bothered him.

Joe Howe: Tell us a little about The Corpse King. Am I correct in assuming Burke and Hare were a partial inspiration?

Tim Curran: Yes, definitely. Those two are the most famous of the 19th century Resurrection Men. So I certainly had them in mind. During my research of grave robbers I came across a fellow named Ben Crouch who operated out of London as part of the Borough Gang as it was known. He was a real entrepreneur of the dead. Not only did he and his friend Joseph Naples supply corpses to order for the medical schools, but they ran something of a cadaver supermarket—skeletons, body parts, entire corpses of men, women, and children preserved in vats in their makeshift warehouse which was in a cellar, I believe. They ran the truly first medical supply house in the UK. Crouch was known as “The Corpse King” which I, of course, stole for my novella title. I based my graverobbers, Clow and Kierney, upon Crouch and Naples to a certain extent, though I moved the action to Edinburgh, the traditional home of bodysnatching ever since Burke and Hare and Robert Louis Stevenson’s story.

Nearly everything that happens in The Corpse King is based upon firsthand accounts of the time. Although most of the Resurrection Men were illiterate, some either told their tales to others or wrote them down themselves. I read quite a few of these and was amazed at the morbid, gallows humor these guys had. I incorporated that into Clow and Kerney. Other than my supernatural ghoul—the Corpse King of the title—there’s nothing truly imaginary in the book. Edinburgh in the 1820′s was a horrible place of overcrowded slums, rampant infectious disease, child labor, rats and lice, poverty and crime. Life was cheap. People worked fourteen hour days in linen mills with machinery that was extremely dangerous and when you lost a limb or were too sick to work, you were replaced that same day. It was no wonder the girls turned to prostitution and the boys to crime…including grave robbing.

JH: You live in the U.P. (the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, for those not in the know), known for being remote and sparsely populated. Do you find this helps set the mood to write horror fiction?

TC: I think so in some ways. Winters are long and harsh up here and it’s not unusual for towns to get completely shut down for days because of blizzards sweeping down from Lake Superior. It can be a very eerie, surreal experience. Up in the Keweenaw—or the Copper Country as locals call it—the winters are so severe that it’s pointless to shovel the snow so they have tunnels connecting the buildings. When I wrote my novel Hive, all I had to do was step outside on a dark January night with the wind howling and the snow flying, the windchill down to twenty or thirty below, and it was very easy to channel Antarctica.

The woods up here are another factor. They can be very weird and primeval when you’re deep out in them by yourself. Algernon Blackwood tapped into that very well with stories like “The Wendigo” and “The Willows.” There’s these very disturbing moments when you’ll be out in the forest, miles from the nearest logging road or fire-cut. The birds are singing, insects droning, wind up in the trees…and then, nothing. It’s like somebody threw a switch. Dead silent. No wind, no birds, nothing. And you wonder what causes something like that. It’ll make your skin crawl.

Besides those two factors, there’s a lot of eccentric characters up here. When I was a kid there were remote villages where the locals still spoke Finnish and French, and the old Cornish copper miners—Cousin Jacks, they were called—would spin pretty wild tales out of their native Cornwall.

JH: It’s easy to see by the titles of some of the anthologies in which your work has appeared H.P. Lovecraft is a source of inspiration. Who are some of the other writers who have influenced your work?

TC: Lovecraft, along with Robert E. Howard, was one of the first authors of the weird I came across as a kid so I’ll always be standing in his shadow to some extent. I’ve been influenced by just about everyone from Ray Bradbury to Jack London, James Herbert to Elmore Leonard. I’m a big fan of Simon Clark and Ramsey Campbell and I honestly think that Thomas Ligotti is probably the greatest writer of the weird since H.P. Lovecraft. I’m absolutely in awe of that man.

JH: Speaking of things that influence you, what are some of the things other than books which stimulate the writing process for you?

TC: Just about anything, I find. Like most horror writers I tend to unconsciously look for shadows and weirdness in just about everything. I see two men hauling crates into a house and I wonder what’s in them. I find an abandoned shoe in the woods and I wonder what happened to the person who wore it. I see a lake by moonlight and I wonder what might crawl out of it. I watch a movie or a TV show and the whole time my mind is making the connections, plotting out what will happen next and how it will end. And when it doesn’t work out the way I thought, sometimes, if my idea is powerful enough, I have to write it the way I think it should have been done.

JH: There was some talk a while back about your novel The Hive being optioned for film. Is this still a possibility, or has that opportunity passed?

TC: No, that’s all done with. I had two different production companies looking at it and they both backed out. What they promised and what they delivered were two different things. It did not leave me with a real upstanding opinion of the people in that business. I’d love to see Hive made into a movie, but I’m honestly leery of the whole process. I guess I wouldn’t believe it until I got a check in my hand!

JH: What’s on the horizon for Tim Curran? What projects are you currently working on?

TC: I just finished writing up the afterword for my short story collection, Bone Marrow Stew, which will be published in winter 2011 by Tasmaniac Publications of Australia. I’ve been publishing stories since the mid-’90′s and always wanted to do a collection of them but I held back because I wanted it done the right way. And now, thanks to Steve Clark of Tasmaniac, it’s being given the royal treatment in a hardcover, lettered edition with a wraparound cover and 10 awesome internal illustrations by the great Keith Minnion. Simon Clark, one of my favorite writers, is doing the introduction. I’m very excited about it. If it sells well enough—and I hope it does—there’ll be a volume two. There’s two original stories in the book and 15 reprints from anthologies and small press magazines, many of which are pretty hard to come by now. It opens with my very first short story and goes on from there. Other than that, I just wrapped up the second Hive book a couple months ago and that should be out from ESP in late summer/early fall. I’m also working on a collection of my zombie stories for Severed Press that’ll be bookended by two new novellas. The latter of which I’ll be returning to Lovecraft for a Herbert West story concerning his exploits in World War I. Let’s see, I’m working on an alternate world/steampunk vampire novel, another about a necrophiliac, another about veterans of the Iraq War who can read the fears in your mind and externalize them, and still another about a life-eating car haunted by a demon. There’s others, but you get the picture: I like to keep busy.

Joe Howe was born, raised and lives in Alabama and has been a horror fan since he read his first book—Dracula. When not wasting your tax money as a government employee, he reviews good books and (mostly) bad movies on his website http://deadinthesouth.blogspot.com as his web alter ego Kent Allard. He previously worked as a history professor and a lawyer, and has already heard your lawyer joke.

Norman Prentiss Reads From His Novella Invisible Fences
By Michael M. Hughes

It’s June, but it feels like Halloween.

Norman Prentiss stands at a podium inside The Shoshana S. Cardin School in North Baltimore, preparing to read from his recently released novella Invisible Fences (Cemetery Dance Publications, 2010). The room is large and bright, with standard issue beige walls, fluorescent lights, and vintage posters of Orioles heroes Frank Robinson and Eddie Murray. But the black-robed, skeletal Grim Reaper hanging above Prentiss’s head hints that the story he is about to tell will fall on the darker end of the literary spectrum.

The lights lower, and Prentiss begins. “There’s an invention for today’s dog owners called an invisible fence,” he reads, laying bare the book’s central metaphor. He describes the Pavlovian system for keeping dogs from straying with carefully delivered painful shocks, then lifts his eyes from the page and gazes directly at his audience. “But it seems a bit cruel to me.”

Doctor Prentiss, as he is known to is students, teaches English at the private Jewish high school, and he looks like the stereotypical warm and fuzzy high school teacher—graying goatee, wiry glasses, mirthful eyes, and an infectious laugh. And he is warm and fuzzy, at ease and joking among the hundred or so people, including more than a handful of his students, who turned up at his reading on a warm Sunday evening. But as he continues, what unravels is a story that is anything but nice—a deeply disturbing tale of a young boy, Nathan, caught in the tight trap of his parents’ poisonous fears.

Prentiss’s voice is quiet and reserved, but enticing as much for what it withholds as what it reveals—I have a secret, and it’s not a pleasant one, and I’m going to let you in on it.

“When I was growing up, my parents invented their own kind of invisible fence for me and my sister. All parents build some version of this fence—never talk to strangers, keep close to home after sundown, that kind of thing. But my parents had a gift with words and storytelling. . .”

The only sound in the classroom is the low buzz of the air conditioning. With barely a hint of what is to come, Prentiss has built his own storytelling fence around his captive audience.

Invisible Fences comes at a time when Prentiss is gaining a significant readership and recognition (he won the 2009 Stoker Award for his short story, “In the Porches of My Ears,” which also appears in the anthology Best Horror of the Year). It’s to his credit that the psychological phantoms that emerge are more frightening than the supernatural monsters or deranged murderers found in much contemporary horror fiction. The fears caging in young Nate are horrifying because they are familiar—dope fiends lurking in our collective childhood woods, waiting to shove syringes full of corruption beneath our skin; a dark stain in the shape of a run-down kid on the street, where the cleanup crews couldn’t soak up all the blood; and the screeching jigsaw in the workshop seemingly begging for a finger to sever. When I was a kid, those phantom fiends and dismembering blades were more terrifying than any ghost, vampire, or boogeyman, and Prentiss skillfully weaves into his tale the barriers that well-meaning adults build to protect their children—and the dangerous results of fanatical over-protection.

Are the horrors within our minds real, and can they attain a form of objective reality? Can ghosts from our past take physical form, or are they phantoms of perception? Invisible Fences doesn’t offer easy answers, but instead plunges us into the disintegrating reality of the grown-up Nathan as he finds himself literally and figuratively trapped in the darkness of his past.

The reading ends with a story told by Nathan’s senile father, a gruesome metaphor for the dark secrets we try to cut away from ourselves, only to find that they always come back. Like any good reader, Prentiss leaves his fans wanting more, and as the line for signed copies stretches around the room, it’s clear they do, indeed, want to discover the rest of the macabre secrets enclosed within Invisible Fences.

Visit the product page for Invisible Fences to learn more about the book or to place your order.

The Horror Enthusiast #2: Hautala Boogaloo
by Robert Brouhard

Hello again fellow readers, and welcome to the second installment of The Horror Enthusiast. Like most, if not all, of you I recently read and enjoyed Stephen King’s Blockade Billy, but that isn’t what I am going to talk about today. I also joined in the excitement about Justin Cronin’s The Passage coming out as a limited edition from Cemetery Dance and being sold out within a couple of hours of being announced, but that also isn’t what I am going to talk about.

There is another awesome thing that has happened recently; I started getting multiple packages of Cemetery Dance books that I pre-ordered, and I feel like it is my birthday every time I get to open one (on a cool note: my birthday is in May, and I actually got two of my pre-ordered Cemetery Dance books on that day, score).

Out of all the ones that have been delivered though, nothing has excited me more than having Rick Hautala’s Occasional Demons arrive on my front porch. I have treasured having Rick Hautala’s last couple of Cemetery Dance collections, Bedbugs and Four Octobers, in my library for a couple of years now. Seeing Occasional Demons right there next to them makes my collection feel…more complete. I am also a fan of Glenn Chadbourne’s panel-filling artwork, and that makes this book that much more special.

When Occasional Demons arrived, I opened the well wrapped package right at the front door and did a little happy dance. After watching my “Hautala Boogaloo” of joy, my son looked at my wife and said, “Did Daddy get a Cemetery Dance book?” Yes, even at 5, he knows me quite well. My wife just nodded and distracted him while I took the precious tome to my library to give it a “quick” look through.

I turned on my lamp and sat in my big recliner. I cracked Occasional Demons open and listened to it squeak with the anticipation of being read. This book was so fresh from the printer that I could almost still hear the press rolling. I smiled when I saw Rick Hautala’s and Glenn Chadbourne’s signatures on the limitation page. Then the new book smell filled my nostrils as I became lost within its pages for the next few hours.

Occasional Demons is a huge collection of Rick Hautala’s short stories. Almost every story has a related illustration by Glenn Chadbourne. There is also, maybe as an inside joke, an evil imp illustration every once in a while throughout the book (get it… get it… the demon drawings happen occasionally…get it?). The book collects stories from the last 20 years, and you can really get a feel for Mr. Hautala’s writing and his need to tell great stories.

Mr. Hautala chose not to introduce every story, but he did write a great little introduction to the book that will give you some neat insights on some of the stories. I always read the introductions to books the second I get them into my fumbling fingers because it makes me feel like I know the book better after that.  When I flipped through the rest of the book, I ended up reading a few of the short stories at random just because the illustrations caught my eye and really interested me. I normally read short story collections at a rate of one a night. This way I get a chance to digest the story completely, sleep on it, and think about it at work the next day (or even discuss it with my co-workers). I’ve really enjoyed the variety of stories that I have read so far in this book. Yes, I haven’t finished it yet because I forced myself to slow down and enjoy the book (I love having the ability to relax and go with the flow of a book). With the stories being written at different times in Mr. Hautala’s life, you can feel the different experiences, maturity, and the levels of perception throughout it. This complexity of story choices and styles makes this a great collection. Almost as a bonus for Mr. Hautala’s longtime readers, there is a large smattering of his “Untcigahunk”/“Little Brothers” stories near the end of the book. For those that don’t know what an “Untcigarettesarebadforyouhunkaburninlovewhatzit” (ha ha) story is, this is sort of a mythos that Rick Hautala created and he goes back to it once in a while. There are also a few of Mr. Hautala’s collaborations including one that he wrote with his kids (that got censored by its original publisher for being too extreme–see the book’s introduction for more details on this).

Glenn Chadbourne’s detailed line drawing artwork is the kind of art that I can get lost in. The full page panels in this book, a lot like Mr. Chadbourne’s work on The Secretary of Dreams books, will make you do double takes and maybe question your ocular facilities. Does that tree have screaming horrific faces in it? Are those evil bloody skulls in the ground? Is that Rick Hautala next to that creepy ominous lighthouse? There is a fun factor in most of Glenn Chadbourne’s work, and I think that is why I like it so much. You can see that the man enjoys doing it.  He also seems like he is obsessed with filling his panels with detail. Sure this can make the art busy, but it also gives the reader an extra bonus of enjoyable time spent with the book. Seeing those little details and the labor that Mr. Chadbourne put into each piece of art, is a thrilling experience. This book shows that he has the ability to draw a beautiful haunting woman, a scary as Hell creature from beyond, and a frog that will haunt you. His drawings in this book can make you smile, and they can also make you not want to stare too long as the hairs on the back of your neck begin to tingle in fear.

The powerhouse combo of Rick Hautala’s excellent short stories, Glenn Chadbourne’s killer artwork, and Cemetery Dance’s production values make this Limited Edition book a must have and must read for my fellow Horror Enthusiasts.  You won’t be disappointed in this terror filled tome.

(Editor’s Note: Copies are still available of Occasional Demons, but they’re selling fast and we don’t expect them to last for long.)

The Author’s Voice, Episode #2: Attitude
by Martel Sardina

When I thought about what topic I wanted to cover next, book signings was not at the top of the list. But I changed my mind after hearing an interview with an author on a local radio station earlier today. The author, who shall remain nameless, was complaining about the way people act at book signings. He seemed particularly offended by customers who would come up, ask questions about his book, perhaps even pick up a copy and look it over, and then walk away without making a purchase. After listening to his description of how these interactions went down, I wasn’t surprised to learn that he felt book signings were a “waste of time” and that his sales were less than stellar. Before the interview ended, I was certain that I wouldn’t be seeking out this author’s work anytime soon, because this author had a problem I’m hoping to help others avoid…he had a BAD attitude.

As much as writers might hope that people buy books based on the quality of the writing, that isn’t always the case. Now don’t get me wrong, quality is important and writers should strive to write the best book they possibly can. But in order to get a leg up in the sales department, here are a few things writers can do to make the signing/book selling experience a success:

1. Be Approachable – When a potential reader/customer wanders up, greet them. Thank them for stopping over to take a look at your wares. Smile. Don’t look at your watch, your cell phone, or make negative comments about being at the bookstore/convention/event.
2. The Pitch – Once a potential reader approaches you and asks for more information, give it to them in as concise a manner as possible. Describe your book’s premise in a few sentences. Compare your book to other books that are similar to yours.
3. The Response/Rejection – Potential readers will either be interested or they won’t. If a reader isn’t interested, ask them what they like to read. If you know of a book that is more suited to their taste, suggest it. Not everyone is going to want to read your book. But giving the reader a suggestion is a way to show that you are personally interested in helping that reader find a good book. Whether or not they like your suggestion, chances are they’ll remember you.
4. The Response/Acceptance – If a potential reader likes what they see and buys your book, be sure to genuinely thank them for the sale. Give out a business card and ask the reader to e-mail you to let you know whether or not they enjoyed the book. Many readers will be happy to share their opinions and some might be tickled by the invitation to do so. Another way to make yourself memorable.
5. Be Positive – No matter how well or poorly the event is going, no matter how you feel physically/emotionally that day, the biggest favor you can do yourself in terms of attracting potential readers is to be positive. Don’t complain about the location, the drive to get there, the crowd or anything else for that matter. Many people read to escape from the mundane, give them something (your book) to be excited about. Leave the rants about everything else at home. Be as nice as you possibly can to everyone who approaches you, regardless of whether or not they buy something. And be sure to thank anyone who stops by to hear your pitch for his or her time.

Following these tips won’t guarantee every signing/event is a monetary success for the writer, but they will help make these events a pleasurable experience for the potential readers. And if writers succeed in being the kind of person who is able to draw people in, it won’t be long before the monetary success fo

From Dusty Shelves #2
by Lisa Morton

A guy just came into our store and asked for books on werewolves.

Now you might immediately think this would be a cause for rejoicing, as in, “Hail and well met, fellow appreciator of the darker side!”

Except you’d be forgetting one thing: My store happens to be near Hollywood. In fact, I think we’re the closest used bookstore to virtually all of the major studios and production companies. This is usually a good thing, as it means lots of extra business for us—not only do film people have money to spend, but those who work as prop-masters or set decorators frequently need peculiar prop books or yards and yards of decoration books. Sometimes we even rent the store out to film shoots.

But there’s a particular type—middle-aged, nice haircut, somehow sleek even in shorts and T-shirts—that just screams Screenwriter.

So, when one of those guys (like the one who just left here) asks for books on werewolves (or H. P. Lovecraft, or Elizabeth Bathory, or the Loch Ness Monster, or…), my skin crawls for the wrong reason. “Just how are you going to rape another beloved horror legacy?!”, I want to shriek at them. “For the love of God, let the monsters rest WELL!”

They won’t. So I don’t scream. I’ll sell them some books, my bookstore will stay in business…and hopefully their latest crappy riff on Dracula or Area 51 or mutant sharks* won’t get made anyway.

(*And now you know what a big fat hypocrite I am, because I once wrote a movie about mutant sharks. I even used some books from the bookstore for my research. You presumably had more sense than to watch it in any of its interminable airings on the SciFi Channel. Thank you for that.)

Learning the Tricks of the Trade
by Sunni K Brock

When Jason and I met in 2003, we were both working in high-tech. I was a Microsoft geek, and he was a photography and digital imaging expert for Fuji Film. We were both frustrated artists: Jason wanted to be a filmmaker, and I wanted to use my imagination for something more than just user interface design.

A little over a year later, we moved to Los Angeles to follow Jason’s promotion at Fuji. I worked for a few media related tech companies (one of them a spin-off of the Lucas empire which required me to commute to the Bay Area twice a month), and we worked on amassing equipment and knowledge. Jason had some ideas about the early science fiction scene in L.A. and wanted to write some scripts about it. When we met Ray Bradbury and Forrest J Ackerman at San Diego Comic-Con, it seemed a good time to start. Jason and I thought we should cut our teeth with a documentary, so JaSunni Productions was formed and we started filming some of the genre legends of the area. As our Forry documentary started to take shape, we kept hearing more and more about Charles Beaumont. In fact, so many people told us we should do a Beaumont documentary first that we eventually switched gears.

As we got more into the process, we decided that we needed more time to work on our projects. Jason and I needed to get away from working for other people, and we needed to move away from L.A. for a while. We moved back to Vancouver, WA and made regular trips across the West Coast to finish filming for our documentaries.  During one of those trips, we interviewed George Clayton Johnson, who told us that we should talk to William F. Nolan. “He’s living up there in Bend, Or-e-gon. God knows what he’s doing up there.”

Bill Nolan was one of our last interview subjects, but he has since become a close friend and invaluable resource in understanding “The Group”.  Listening to Bill’s stories and meeting with Roger Anker (the official biographer of Charles Beaumont), gave me enough context to get at the daunting task at hand: turning some fifty-plus hours of raw footage into a movie.

I read somewhere that an experienced editor spends about an hour working on the project per minute of finished film. This was my first feature length project. It took many scrap piles. It took hours and hours and hours of meticulous note taking to log every interview. It took several false starts. It took a few years.

I looked at my role as honing in on the story. Jason set the vision: he had an idea of how he wanted to start the movie (after we scrapped an earlier cut based on feedback from John Tomerlin and a few key others), and he wanted lots of dynamic visuals to break up the talking heads. We agreed that we didn’t want to copy Ken Burns; we wanted something of our own style, and we wanted it to be self-guided without an omniscient voiceover. We wanted it to be intimate, personal – the story of a man.

Contrary to what some critics may believe, I am not a frustrated animator; I’m not all that interested in animation, but I can do it competently if forced – and Jason V Brock can be a damned demanding director. I would no sooner finish a short sequence and show it to him, than he would say, “I like this but can you make it spin around and angle it…” Sure, just give me another four hours and I’ll have that five seconds just the way you want it…

The most enjoyable aspect of working on a film is uncovering the story from the raw footage. Like Michelangelo said about sculpting, “I saw the angel in the marble, and carved until I set him free.”

Jason and I are proud of the result. There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. It’s a tale of the life of man who was full of drive and passion, and manages to inspire even in tragedy.

But what would the public think? To paraphrase a popular indie film handbook, “You’ve made a movie. So now what?”

We had an early screening of the rough cut (well over two hours long) at the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland, OR. The audience seemed to love it. Potential programmers for other venues and festivals wanted it shortened to 90 minutes.  Now we have two versions of the film: we screen the 90 minute version on the circuit and sell the longer Director’s Cut on DVD.

We read many articles and books about promotion and distribution. We watched Official Rejection – a documentary about film festivals. We pondered the issue of where to give up the “World Premiere” cherry.

The Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, CA (part of American Cinematheque) was absolutely perfect! We fit right in with a weekend Charles Beaumont tribute. They believed in us and our film: it was a great feeling and a vindication of years of effort. We lined up a ten day event schedule in Los Angeles, printed posters, postcards, and ruthlessly promoted online. Five days before the event, we visited the theater. We wanted to see the poster on the marquee. We wanted to make sure the Blu-ray copy was playing OK for them. We wanted to pinch ourselves and make sure it was real.

We parked off Hollywood Boulevard, and walked into the courtyard of The Egyptian. Behind the glass, on the back wall, beyond the lights and the red carpet, there it was – Charles Beaumont: The Short Life of Twilight Zone’s Magic Man, on a big movie poster! We checked the schedule: everything was in place. We posed for each other and took photos in front of the placard. We peeked into the glass doors.

Then, from out of nowhere, a very large black man in a tight black shirt with an earpiece started towards us. For a moment, I wondered why the theater needed a bodyguard, and then I realized that there was an entourage gathering at the entrance. They were all wearing tracksuits, one had a giant afro, and there was a tall skinny guy with sunglasses – Snoop Dogg!

“You’ll have to step back, we’re taking some photos here,” said the big bodyguard.

So what’s a woman to do when facing the nerves of a pending movie premiere and being kicked out of the theater by Snoop? I turned to Jason and said, “I want to go find some new shoes…” We managed to make it past the crowd that was now gathering on the sidewalk to gawk at the Dogg posse, and headed down to the myriad of shops.

***

Nearly a week later: it was less than an hour before the official start of the premiere and people were starting to come into the theater for the signing of The Bleeding Edge (the anthology that Jason and Bill Nolan had co-edited, which included new/unpublished content from every living Twilight Zone writer) that had been arranged before the movie.  I stayed busy selling books, jumping up for photos, and greeting authors and guests as they arrived.

Jason and Bill signed copies of The Bleeding Edge along with authors George Clayton Johnson, Earl Hamner, John Tomerlin, and Cody Goodfellow. Marc Scott Zicree mingled and signed copies of The Twilight Zone Companion. Jason was running around like crazy. People kept coming. I kept selling books. More people kept coming.

Later, after an introduction by the programmer for The Egyptian and Aero Theatres, Grant Moninger, Jason went to the front to introduce the documentary and I escorted friends and authors to the balcony. The theater was nearly full (over 400 people turned out). I was amazed at the interest in our little film…

It’s hard enough to walk in stiletto heels, let alone down a carpeted staircase in a darkened theater. I have a secret preference for them I’ll admit, though. “Sunni’s wearing stripper shoes!” William F. Nolan announced as we were all posing in the lobby of the theater for the photographers and moving into the auditorium. Thanks, Bill.

The lights went down, the place fell silent as a five minute preview of our next film, The AckerMonster Chronicles (the Forry Ackerman doc) rolled, and Jason made his way to sit next to me and Diane O’Bannon (wife of the late Dan O’Bannon) in the Egyptian’s amazing balcony. Finally, it was time to start the film. I hoped that the people here would like it as much as at the Lovecraft festival. I crossed my fingers and prayed that any technical difficulties were minor.
The opening credits looked great! The Blu-ray gods were smiling it seemed, or perhaps it was Ray Bradbury’s well wishes from the day before (he was schedule to speak, but was unable to attend due to an injured leg). In any case, it seemed to be playing well. People chuckled at Rod Serling’s snarky remarks interspersed with the beginning titles. I sighed in relief.

There were moments in the movie where I planned to gauge the audience reaction: the part where John Tomerlin is laughing so hard that he has tears in his eyes and he turns to his wife, Wilma and they both smile; the hilarious interchange between Nolan and William Shatner regarding the shooting of The Intruder; the underwater sequence to simulate a near-drowning incident. Would they get it? Would they laugh and gasp and snicker and hold their breath in all the right places?

They did. And it was wonderful.

Afterwards, the theater played George Clayton Johnson’s, “Your Three Minutes Are Up” based on his moving short story about receiving a late night phone call from beyond in which the long-deceased Charles Beaumont encourages George to get back together with the remaining members of ‘The Group’:  William F. Nolan and John Tomerlin.

As the end credits rolled, we took our places at the front of the theater for the question and answer session moderated by Marc Zicree. As I climbed onto a stool, I looked out at the seats. A few people were leaving, but most of the audience stayed to participate (including radio great Norman Corwin and his personal assistant, Chris Borjas). I was shocked at how many people were in the front row – press and media people with cameras and recorders, from American Cinematheque, to the L.A. Times and many genre magazines and web sites! Wow. This was it.

Fittingly, George, John, and Bill – the surviving core group, took their seats alongside me. Marc Zicree introduced us and started the session as Jason came up.

Marc talked about Charles Beaumont and his influence on the genre. George, Bill, and John told stories about the group and how Chuck compelled them to do things. Jason and I related how we came to know them and what it was like to create the movie.

A lot of bulbs flashed. Questions were asked and people were really interested. Afterwards there was a round of applause and a crowd started forming at the base of the screen. We signed autographs and shook hands. We posed for pictures. We set up interviews for later.

We had done it. We had made a movie and had a premiere – and now we were getting a great reaction! We even sold enough books and DVD orders that we actually broke even on the trip. Success. Phew!

But we still have a long road of festivals and special screenings ahead of us, and much incurred debt to satisfy (we completely self-financed the films, and in spite of what people may believe, we’re not wealthy)… Negotiations and legal fees… Late nights screaming at crashing render jobs and fiddling with finicky tape decks…  More flame mail with angry film producers over he-said, she-said insider politics and delicate egos… Tempers have flared, tears and laughter have flowed, feedback has been great, and reviews have been mostly excellent.

But alas, we aren’t out to make a fortune (we’ll never make it back, in fact) or become A-listers (that kind of fame is fleeting anyway). No, we wanted to make an impact on intelligent people and influence the influential. We want to tell stories that need to be told. This is our freshman effort, and we’re proud of it. Is it perfect? No, but what ever is? As Jason likes to say, “Always have a follow-up ready,” and we do have more tricks (and treats) in store.

Stay tuned.

The Horror Enthusiast #1
by Robert Brouhard

Hel*ack*…hold on a second…breathe, Robert… Brrrreeeeeath. Okay, I am ready…. I hope…

*tap tap* Is this thing on?

Hello readers of the Cemetery Dance Insider Newsletter! I am broadcasting this from my home library in the good old state of Oregon. As I sit here amongst my shelves of horror literature (and pulpy goodness), I can’t help but be scared out of my mind at how many people may be reading these words…right here…right now…but I am also thoroughly thrilled!

Like many of you, I am a devout reader of horror, terror, suspense, and more. I am one of those guys that you might see at the coffee shop, at work, or somewhere else that always has a book in his hand (and, usually, his nose within). I love to discuss books and films with my friends and on Internet message boards. I am also a lover of nicely made hardcover books. When I discovered Cemetery Dance a few years ago, I was shocked and amazed at what I had been missing. I discovered well crafted books that don’t fall apart on the third or fourth reading, new-to-me authors that deserve to be read and enjoyed by thousands (or millions) more readers out there, and a staff that answers questions with amazing speed.

With Cemetery Dance, I started with one of their illustrious “grab bags” (okay, a few of their “grab bags”), and I was blessed with a nice stack of gorgeous books by authors that I knew and many others I had never even heard of before. The great thing was that I enjoyed every single book. Cemetery Dance’s unique choices of excellent stories, wonderful new-to-me voices, and just plain beautiful books have kept me coming back to them over and over.

So, what will “The Horror Enthusiast” have in it for you? Well, I’ll be discussing and gushing about current and future releases from some of my favorite presses, of course! I’ll try to stick to one book per column, but you never know what malevolence lurks in my typing fingers. I hope that you will find some future nuggets and good reads contained herein. I also hope you will look forward to it. I know that I am.

We Interrupt This Author…
Interruption #1: Rick Hautala
by Joe Howe

Writing is a solitary endeavor. Your favorite authors toil alone to produce the fiction that keeps you going. Here we reward them by…interrupting their precious writing time with a few questions. The first author we will annoy talk with is Rick Hautala.

Since the publication of his first novel, Moondeath, in 1980, Rick has been at the forefront of horror fiction. His latest book is the Cemetery Dance volume Occasional Demons, his first collection of short stories since Bedbugs, which was selected by Barnes & Noble as one of the distinguished horror publications of 2000.

Joe Howe (pictured right): Everyone is looking forward to your forthcoming book Occasional Demons, your first short story collection since 1999. Tell us a little about the book.

Rick Hautala: At the time I signed the contract, Occasional Demons included every story I had written and published to date that wasn’t in Bedbugs, but since then, I’ve got enough stories for a third collection, which Rich and I are talking about CD doing…What’s unique about this collection is that it includes all the “Little Brothers” short stories and a handful of stories I wrote as collaborations with friends and two of my sons…The artwork by Glenn Chadbourne is, as always, stunning, and I hope the stories don’t disappoint. I have a few personal favorites in the collection, but I won’t say what they are. That’s like trying to pick your favorite child.

JH: The publication dates on the stories in this volume range from 1987 (“Every Mother’s Son”) to 2010 (“The Call”). How has your style changed and evolved over this period?

RH: Well, for one thing, I stopped writing my stories with crayons, so that’s an advance. Seriously, though, I’m not sure how my style has evolved or changed, other than I hopefully have gotten better each time out. Writing is a tough “craft” as well as an “art,” and no one ever really masters it. If they say or act like they have, they’re delusional. Even the simplest advice, like drop the passive voice whenever you can, will hit you with the force of a religious revelation if you’re ready (or need) to hear it. Of course, I have worked to eliminate passive voice, and useless intensifiers (…like “really”), and make the environment more active (…like instead of saying “She heard a dog bark in the night” becomes “A dog barked in the night.”) But overall, I just try to do the best job each time out, and know when I finish something it could always have been better…Resting on laurels or repeating past successes to the point of self parody are the pathways to creative death.

JH: It is the “Who cuts the Barber’s hair?” question, but readers always seem interested in what a writer reads for his own amusement. So, what does Rick Hautala read these days when he wants to kick back and relax?

RH: Sad to say, I don’t read much fiction. After writing fiction all day, I need to blow the stink off, as it were, so I read a lot of non-fiction–history, biography, political books. For fiction, I do a lot of what I call “social reading,” which means I read books written by friends of mine so I can tell them I read their new book and loved it. (Speaking of which: I read Chris Golden and Mike Mignola’s book Baltimore and loved it!) And as I get older, I find myself drifting back to sf, fantasy, and horror I read when I was young. Kind of a nostalgia trip, probably. Of course, I will always read and savor James Lee Burke’s writing. Hands down the best writer working today. And of course there are other writers who, when I read them, make me think I want to do that!

JH: Your career spans from the early days of horror as a separate genre in American publishing, through the horror boom and bust, the rise and fall of the major lines and the growth of the small press. You’ve seen contemporaries come and go, and you’re still standing. To what do you owe your longevity?

RH: The Finns have a word for it: “Sisu.” The positive spin is that a Finn will stand tough and do whatever needs to be done, no matter what, but the negative connotation is that a Finn is too damned stupid to stop doing something even when the odds are stacked against him or her. Look, writing is hard work, and it never gets easier. If anything, it gets harder, and the economy can take a toll. If your sales figures start to flag (and mine have gone up and down), you have to reinvent yourself. I think it was Harlan Ellison who said (this is a close approximation): “Writing is easy; it’s staying a writer that’s hard.” You have to develop your craft and you have to expand your horizons and challenge yourself every time out. (re: my “past success–self parody” remark). And the material has to stay fresh and exciting for you, the writer, otherwise it becomes a drill, a routine which will bore you and your readers.

JH: And finally, Maine is one of the smaller states in terms of population. In the horror fiction field, though, it’s as big as California. Is there something about Maine that lends itself to dark writing? What is in the water up there?

RH: The glib answer is “Stephen King’s success.” Writers who have never visited the state set their stories in Maine and more often than not get it wrong, wrong, wrong! Sure, setting is important to a story, and Maine (and all of New England, being the oldest colonies…if we ignore the Spanish in Mexico and the Caribbean) has its creepy places. But a writer has to write about what he knows. Imagination is only one element. To really get a story, you have to know the bones of the land and the people who live there so your story rings true and–hopefully–will be universal enough to reach readers even in, say, Europe (which has its own share of creepy locales). The only thing in the water is…well, I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.

The Author’s Voice, Episode #1:
The 3 R’s: Reading, (w)Riting and Readings
by Martel Sardina

Greetings to my fellow Cemetery Dance enthusiasts! I’d like to welcome you to the introductory installment of my new column “The Author’s Voice” for the CD newsletter. And I’d like to

thank the folks at CD for giving me the opportunity to inform and hopefully entertain you along the way.

Like you, I love to READ and have a particular affinity for horror fiction. Though these days I’ve been spending a fair amount of time in the world of science fiction, due to being one of the Submissions Editors over at Apex Magazine.

I also love to (w)RITE. I know many of you share that common interest as well. From time to time, I will share tips/tricks that I’ve gleaned over the years. Full disclosure here, I am not an expert. I started writing with the intent of being published in 2005. But in that time, I’ve sold several short stories, poetry, and many non-fiction pieces. I am an Active Member of the Horror Writers Association, and a Contributing Editor for Dark Scribe Magazine.

And finally, I love to hear authors READ from their works. I’ve spent many hours listening to authors reading aloud to a live audience. Enjoying that experience as an audience member at conventions and places like Chicago’s Twilight Tales and NYC’s KGB Fantastic Fiction led me to volunteer to coordinate the Reading Café at the World Horror Conventions in 2007, 2008 and 2010.

So what can you expect to find in future installments of “The Author’s Voice”? I’ll be covering topics that pertain to The 3R’s, as described above. Short reviews of books I’ve read, information about upcoming releases that I’m looking forward to reading, writing advice, reviews of live readings and podcasts. And…???

If there’s a topic you’d like to see covered or a question you’d like to ask, please let me know. Send your ideas or questions to me at: madpoet7@gmail.com.

I’ll be back soon with my first “real” column. Until then, I’d like to leave you with one of my favorite quotations about reading. It applies to my life as much today (if not more so) as it did the first time I heard it:

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”

– Dr. Seuss

From Dusty Shelves #1
by Lisa Morton

“Wow, it must be great to work here.”

Those of us who are employed as independent or used booksellers are used to hearing that. I get it at least twice a week. What it actually means is: “Wow, I wish I had a job where I could just read all day, and occasionally engage in meaningful and enlightening conversation with literate, articulate fellow readers.”

I thought I’d break this column in by discussing the reality of the second-hand bookseller’s job…and giving you a small taste of the true horrors you’re in for every few weeks here.

First off, imagining that booksellers just read all day is roughly akin to thinking that chefs eat all day. Granted, there are plenty of hefty chefs and well-read booksellers, but we don’t get that way on the job; we get that way because we do it at home, after working our asses off for at least eight hours a day.

And lemme tell ya, those asses really do get worked, because bookselling is a physically demanding job. My bookstore, the Iliad Bookshop in North Hollywood, is a medium-sized store of 5,000 square feet. With constant phone calls and customers looking for books, I recently calculated that I walk an average of two miles a day at work. Don’t get me started on box-lifting and ladder-climbing.

And then there are the physical hazards encountered in the process of buying books: Mold. Dust. Primordial life forms. Some of the books folks bring in have been in their garages since the Industrial Revolution. Nothing quite so fun as reaching into a box and feeling many multi-legged things scuttle up your arm (yes, some of those things are poisonous, although so far we’ve all avoided any hospital trips). I’ll still take those vermin compared to the drunks and junkies selling books for that next fix or drink.

But here’s the really weird part: It IS great to work here. Yes, we have the public to deal with, and a weekly paycheck that wouldn’t buy lunch for a Goldman Sachs exec, and fungi-covered crates of crap to paw through…but every once in a while those boxes of crap reveal hidden treasures. There, among all the moldering textbooks, is a gorgeous Arkham House edition of SKULL-FACE AND OTHERS by Robert E. Howard, complete with that glorious dust jacket. And hey – that guy piling Tolkien books on the counter is Guillermo del Toro, and it turns out he and I share a mutual love of Theodore Sturgeon. And y’know, even that foul-smelling guy muttering to himself in the corner might find his way into my next story.

I love my day job. But y’know, the little old lady who just told me she wants to work here is better off at home with her tea and her Agatha Christie. This ain’t a job for the weak or faint-hearted. Here’s hoping that you’ll find it as interesting as I do.

“Things are happening and they are happening fast,” Stephen King says about recent news articles about developments in a possible Dark Tower adaptation. “Any reports you see might be taken with a grain of salt for the next couple of weeks. You will know the news from the official source as soon as we are able to post it,” the official source being www.stephenking.com, of course. The announced plan has Ron Howard directing a movie or movies for Universal, scripted by Akiva Goldsman, produced by Brian Grazer, that would then lead into a TV series.

Mick Garris will be directing a four-hour miniseries adaptation of Bag of Bones that might air on network television sometime next year. “Bag of Bones is something we tried to do as a feature for two or three years,” Garris tells Dread Central. “But the way features are now, if it’s not about teenagers or a sequel or a remake, forget it. We wanted to do something much more adult and passionate than studios are making now. It’s a ghost story for grown-ups. Television is the only place you can do that.” Check out a video of his conversation with Dread Central.

Speaking of video, here’s an hour long video of King at the Cultural Center of Charlotte County, Florida. As part of his appearance, he reads the short story “The Old Dude’s Ticker,” which is only available in The Big Book of NECON.

Did you see a familiar name in the early pages of Blockade Billy? One “Ben Vincent,” who hits one out of the park? Hey, people have fared far worse in Stephen King novels. I was thrilled to be Tuckerized this way. By the way, the Scribner edition of this story will also contain the Shirley Jackson Award nominated “Morality,” originally published in Esquire. The audio version is narrated by Craig Wasson, to whom King devoted his April 23/30 Entertainment Weekly column. You can hear an excerpt from the story here.

The SyFy TV series Haven is in production in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Canada. There’s a brief teaser here. The pilot is directed by Adam Kane and stars Emily Rose,  Lucas Bryant, Eric Balfour, Richard Donat and John Dunsworth. The show premieres on July 9.

We’ll use this page to post some photos and updates about the shipping of the 1st Edition, 1st Printing of Blockade Billy by Stephen King, but mostly we’ll be processing orders, printing labels, packing books, and shipping as fast as we can!

Monday, April 26, 2010, 7:29 AM Update:
As of this morning, Mindy has finished processing all of the “new” US orders since the book began shipping, so we’ll be shipping those orders today and tomorrow.  We are working our way through the thousands of Non-US orders, but it will take time.  Thanks for your continued patience!

Thursday, April 22, 2010, 1o:48 PM Update:
We’re now into “this week” for US orders and also working on the Non-US preorders.  Thanks for your continued patience!

Wednesday, April 21, 2010, 10:31 PM Update:
We are now over 98% done shipping the US preorders and we’ll finish the stragglers tomorrow when we start shipping the “new” orders from this week.  We’ve also started on the Non-US customers.  For Non-US customers, if you originally paid via PayPal you will need to pay your shipping invoice before your copy ships. We will send you that PayPal invoice as we reach your order.  (Credit card orders will be charged automatically as we get to your order. We will contact you if there is a problem with your card.) Non-US shipments will take longer to prepare and process due to the customs paperwork and the additional trips to the post office required to ship them.  Thank you for your patience.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010, 9:44 PM Update:
We are well over 90% done shipping the US orders and we’ve started on the Non-US customers.  We have over 1,000 MORE Non-US orders for this title than we’ve ever had for any book in 22 years of publishing and it will take us time to get through them all.  We appreciate your patience during this process!

Since we were starting on the Non-US orders this morning, it was only fitting that Les Ryan and Ruth Curran from the UK volunteered their services to pack for a few hours since they’re stuck in the States and unable to fly back to the UK.  They were joined by Norman Prentiss again and everyone did a terrific job.

Monday, April 19, 2010, 8:02 PM Update:
Well, we’re not done for the day yet, but I figure now is as good as a time as any to update this page.

The local Postmaster — who, for the record, has always been awesome — went above and beyond today.  He just showed up with a couple of empty mail trucks this afternoon.  We had warned him of how much shipping we’d be doing this week, so he wanted to help make things move as smoothly possible.  In the end, we only had to make one trip in the cargo van and the pick-up truck instead of the 3 or 4 trips we had planned for.  He saved us a lot of time, which we were able to use to process another batch of orders.

Over 5,000 orders went out the door today, but as some people are discovering in their mailbox, we actually snuck about 500 orders to the post office on SATURDAY.  One customer in Oregon somehow received his order this afternoon, which must be a record for media mail.

We couldn’t send shipping confirmation emails for this first batch of orders until this evening, but those emails are sending now.  If you receive a shipping confirmation today, it means your copy has indeed gone out.  If you receive the email tonight and you already received your copy, um… surprise!

Many more orders are going to be shipped tomorrow, which is the official publication date.  In the meantime, here are two shots of Cemetery Dance magazine associate editor (and recent Bram Stoker Award winner!) Norman Prentiss packing in our warehouse.  This is way outside his job description, but he happily drove up from the city to help anyway.

Sunday, April 18, 2010, 9:50 PM Update:
No new photos to post right now, but the tower of shipping containers by the dock door is really impressive.  We’ll make sure we get a shot before we start loading a borrowed cargo van for the many trips to the post office tomorrow morning.  We’ve packed about 4,000 orders now (many for multiple copies) and will be back at it bright and early tomorrow.

Saturday, April 17, 2010, 9:41 PM Update:
We started around 8 AM and most everyone is heading home now.  We are making great progress on the orders (tons of processing is done and over 3,000 copies have been bagged) and we plan another long day for tomorrow.  Please note that it is far too late to combine your orders, etc, and if you call or email asking for an update on where your order is in the process, that only takes away time we could be using to ship your order.  Here are some new photos:

Friday, April 16, 2010 Update:
The books are here, we’re processing paperwork like crazy, and bubble-bagging of the books has begun.  We have over 7,500 individual orders to ship (some for 2 or 3 copies) and we’ll be working all weekend to get them ready for next week.  We have extra help coming in both Saturday and Sunday to assist with the packing process and we plan on working 12 hour days to get a head start on the week ahead.  Below are some photos of the first box of books we opened, a couple of the pallets, etc.

Of course the big news is the pending publication of Blockade Billy, a novella or novelette or novelesque, or something like that. It’s a baseball story with a twist, published by CD Publications this month. Of the book King says, “”I love old-school baseball, and I also love the way people who’ve spent a lifetime in the game talk about the game. I tried to combine those things in a story of suspense. People have asked me for years when I was going to write a baseball story. Ask no more; this is it.” The story reveals the secret life of William “Blockade Billy” Blakely, a man who may have been the greatest player the game has ever seen, although today no one remembers his name. He was the first — and only — player to have his existence completely removed from the record books. Even his team is long forgotten, barely a footnote in the game’s history. As you read the story, be on the lookout for a character with a very familiar name…

Scribner plans to release an audio version of the story in May. Publishers Weekly says (in part): this suspenseful short is a deftly executed suicide squeeze, with sharp spikes hoisted high and aimed at the jugular on the slide home.

The four stories contained in King’s next book, Full Dark, No Stars are:  1922 (The story opens with the confession of Wilfred James to the murder of his wife, Arlette, following their move to Hemingford, Nebraska onto land willed to Arlette by her father),  Big Driver (Mystery writer, Tess, has been supplementing her writing income for years by doing speaking engagements with no problems. But following a last-minute invitation to a book club 60 miles away, she takes a shortcut home with dire consequences), Fair Extension  (Harry Streeter, who is suffering from cancer, decides to make a deal with the devil but, as always, there is a price to pay), and A Good Marriage (Darcy Anderson learns more about her husband of over twenty years than she would have liked to know when she stumbles literally upon a box under a worktable in their garage).

King says that he “originally used Hemingford Home in The Stand because I wanted to put Mother Abigail in the American heartland. That’s Nebraska. Hemingford was in the right place. … I love Nebraska and keep going back to it in my fiction — when I’m not in Maine, that is.”

Haven, the new SyFy series inspired by The Colorado Kid, will premiere on Friday, July 9. “It’s definitely based on the characters of ‘The Colorado Kid, but I would say it’s about a girl named Audrey [Parker], who’s an orphan and becomes an FBI agent,” star Emily Rose says. “She ends up getting sent on this case up in Maine. When she goes up there, she kind of starts having these things happen to her, and she sort of starts feeling like she’s been called home. Paranormal things happen, and some exciting things happen for her, and it’s not only her unraveling this murder case, but kind of unraveling the case of herself, honestly. It’s pretty fascinating.” Lucas Bryant and Eric Balfour also star in the series.

Dolan’s Cadillac is now available on DVD and Blu-Ray. My advice: rent it or skip it. I’ll have a full review in an upcoming issue of CD magazine.

Recent Entertainment Weekly columns: Stephen King on the Academy Awards, and Stephen King on the Kindle and the iPad. You might also be interested in Stephen King’s scary list: commercial radio, contemporary country music

Back From ‘The Edge’
By Sunni K Brock

How many living legends can you cram into one small bookstore on a Saturday afternoon? An amazing number, it turns out.

Saturday, February 20^th, 2010 saw legendary writers alongside up-and-comers at the mega-signing event for The Bleeding Edge anthology at Mystery and Imagination bookstore in Glendale, California. Editors (and contributing authors) William F. Nolan (Logan’s Run; he had just received a Lifetime Achievement award from the Horror Writers Association) and Jason V Brock (Charles Beaumont: The Twilight Zone’s Magic Man), hosted the event in cooperation with book shop owners, Malcolm and Christine Bell.

Brock had earlier dedicated the gathering to the memory of Dan O’Bannon (Alien), who contributed to the book and was scheduled to attend the signing before his untimely passing in December 2009. In his stead, his wife, Diane, chatted with all of the writers and the store had a portrait up in his honor.

In attendance were authors Ray Bradbury, George Clayton Johnson, John Shirley, Earl Hamner,  John Tomerlin, Cody Goodfellow, James Robert Smith, and Lisa Morton. Appearances were also made by John Skipp (The Light at the End), Pete Atkins (Clive Barker’s A-Z of Horror),  Dennis Etchison (The Dark Country), Paul G. Bens (Kelland), Paul J. Salamoff (Logan’s Run: Lastday), and many other writers and Hollywood insiders. Although Richard Matheson (I Am Legend) was unable to attend, he received birthday greetings via a phone call.

The event was a huge success, both in sales (nearly 100 copies of The Bleeding Edge were sold!) and excitement (by estimates, over 300 people). It was covered by Famous Monsters of Filmland, and the local newspapers. John King Tarpinian kept the crowd in line with threats of “Soylent Green” for those who didn’t keep the order. Fans were lined up out the door and down the block to get their copies inscribed, as author/fan Paul G. Bens became a volunteer crowd controller, noting that the Fire Marshall was concerned about the throngs of eager patrons jammed into Mystery and Imagination. James Beach, the publisher of Dark Discoveries, was also assisting with crowd control and mingling with the authors and fans.

The Bleeding Edge has been called “A Landmark Anthology” by the genre press, and certainly this was a landmark signing. Ray Bradbury wore his medal for Arts and Letters from the country of France and signed for over two hours while warmly greeting his fans.  Best known for Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, and Dark Carnival, Ray invited everyone to attend his musical, Wisdom 2116 playing in Pasadena that evening.

Many fans lined up to see Norman Corwin (On a Note of Triumph), a radio great and contemporary of Orson Welles. The 99-year-old was chipper as ever and also signed copies of his book, Thirteen by Corwin.

George Clayton Johnson, co-author of Logan’s Run, writer of eight episodes of The Twilight Zone, and the first Star Trek original series episode to be aired, sat next to Corwin. The self-proclaimed “Dog without a Collar” greeted enthusiasts with vigor, and signed with his trademark doodle and dated copyright.

John Shirley, whose contribution entailed a ghost that follows a family home from Costco, was equally inundated with fans. Readers also snatched up Shirley’s novel, Bleak History, to get autographed copies.

Co-editor Jason V Brock rounded out the authors at the front of the store. Fans and colleagues congratulated him on the fine book, his editorial debut – and the overwhelming success of the event.

There were so many authors at the event (over 14 including surprise guests), that an additional line was formed for more writers to be seated in the second floor of the store. Upstairs, James Robert Smith, whose novel, The Flock, has been optioned by Don Murphy for a summer tent pole movie release, was blown away by the number of people. Cody Goodfellow (Perfect Union) and Lisa Morton (The Castle of Los Angeles) were equally astonished by the turn out and the company they were keeping.

Earl Hamner (The Twilight Zone, The Waltons, Falcon Crest) enthusiastically penned his name and chatted with numerous aficionados in his warm Southern drawl. John Tomerlin, who helped create The Twilight Zone’s classic, “Number Twelve Looks Just Like You”, signed alongside William F. Nolan. “This is the biggest signing I’ve ever attended for a single book!” exclaimed Nolan. Tomerlin concurred, adding that his hand hurt from signing so many times.

Marc Scott Zicree, television writer and author of The Twilight Zone Companion, noted that, except for Richard Matheson, all of the living Twilight Zone writers were present.  “You’ll never see all these people in one place again,” Marc said to Jason during the group photo session. James Robert Smith kept repeating: “This is amazing! Amazing!”

There will be another signing opportunity for The Bleeding Edge in Los Angeles at The Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, prior to the world premiere of JaSunni Productions’ documentary Charles Beaumont: The Twilight Zone’s Magic Man. The signing will begin at 2pm, with the movie starting at 3pm.

Brock and Nolan plan to follow-up The Bleeding Edge with another anthology based on cross-genre fiction and featuring authors writing out of their comfort zones. The next book is titled The Devil’s Coattails and should go to print Fall of 2010.