By Gary Kriss
Pssst!
Hey—come here for a minute. This is gonna be a little personal, but don’t be embarrassed: we’ve all been there. You’re sitting next to a stranger and desperately searching for a smidgen of small talk, a few right words to break the ice. Well search no more, Pilgrim—the cavalry has arrived! The next time you find yourself in this awkward situation, lean over slightly, establish eye contact, smile and—man, is this great!—casually say, “do you know it takes the same amount of force to rip off a human ear as it does to tear through 12 sheets of regular bond paper?”
Is the ice broken? Hell, it’s shattered! Obliterated! And you’ve got author William Todd Rose to thank for being generous enough to share this insight about what he’s learned from writing. Oh, he’s learned a couple of other things as well, including that there’s an enthusiastic readership for his distinctive—all right, offbeat—approach to thrillers. That group, which includes devotees of Zombie Lit who claim Rose as one of their own, will undoubtedly grow with this month’s release of THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY INFECTIVE PEOPLE (Permuted Press).
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After Camilla is murdered, an ancient spirit possesses her, to use her body as its tool of vengeance. Tortured by visions of murdered women, she is thrust into a world of terror as she seeks a way to rid herself of the nightmare she has become.
Her dead flesh hungers however for a substance that only exists on the breaths of criminals. Their tortured souls fill her, complete her, injecting her with more energy than she ever possessed while living.
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By J. N. Duncan
I’d like to welcome multi-published David Salkin, author of FOREVER HUNGER, his latest release, filled with thrills, chills, and romance. A graduate of RutgersUniversity, David is involved in the politics of his NJ town, and an avid scuba diver. A lifelong writer, David has written in many genres, and as you will see, believes no story should be confined within such rigid boundaries. So, without further ado, let’s get to those questions!
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By Dana Granger
Fans of dark, thrilling horror tales are in for a treat this December. That’s the release date of Brett Talley’s THAT WHICH SHOULD NOT BE. Set in the universe created by H.P. Lovecraft, THAT WHICH SHOULD NOT Be is the story of Carter Weston, a student of history and folklore at Miskatonic University. Carter is chosen by his professor and mentor, Dr. Atley Thayerson, to recover an important artifact—a once lost book of arcane lore, the Incendium Maleficarum. As Carter departs for the village of Anchorhead, a nor’easter descends upon the Massachusetts countryside, and he is forced to seek shelter in a seaside tavern. Inside, he meets four curious men. Each one has his own story to tell, and each is stalked by the same dark forces, forces that lurk in dreams and the black void just beyond man’s imagining. As these tales unfold, it becomes clear that the tie that binds them all is the very tome which he seeks, and that Carter, the student who started the night as a skeptic, may be the only hope for mankind.
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If your taste in fiction runs toward the dark side, Anne Petty’s SHAMAN’S BLOOD delivers. It begins when a hungry demon steps into an Australian conjure-man’s ritual circle deep in a Queensland cave in 1880, and the results are far-reaching. Stuck like a wasp to flypaper, the shape-shifting terror of Dreamtime legend clings to the sorcerer’s unlucky descendants down the centuries. Now, in a modern southern town, Alice Waterston and her daughter Margaret, the last of the bloodline, confront the demon from the Outback shadows. Can Alice figure out how to send the dimension-hopping Quinkan back where it belongs before it makes its final desperate move? Her long-dead father may have left her the means, if she has the nerve to use it!
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“This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang…but a bite.”
In NY Times bestseller Jonathan Maberry’s latest thriller, DEAD OF NIGHT, a prison doctor injects a condemned serial killer with a formula designed to keep his consciousness awake while his body rots in the grave. But all drugs have unforeseen side-effects. Before he can be buried, the killer wakes up. Hungry. Infected. Contagious. Small town cop Dez Fox and her partner JT are caught in a wave of murder as everyone they know and love die…only to rise again as the ravenous living dead. If Dez and JT can’t contain the plague inside the town limits, the infection will spread beyond all control.
Jonathan Maberry is a NEW YORK TIMES best-selling and multiple Bram Stoker Award-winning author, magazine feature writer, playwright, content creator and writing teacher/lecturer. His books have been sold to more than twenty countries. He’s also the most prolific author I’ve ever met:
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On October 4, 2011, Samhain Publishing will release my novel Wolf’s Edge. It’s the fourth book to feature Milwaukee homicide detective Dominic “Nick” Lupo, after the previous novels, Wolf’s Trap, Wolf’s Gambit, and Wolf’s Bluff. The paperback release of Wolf’s Edge is slated for January, 2011.
Since I have a foot in both the thriller and horror camps, it’s understandable that my fourth novel in the series begun with Wolf’s Trap (a Bram Stoker Award nominee in 2004), would continue to tell parallel past and present stories about Detective Lupo. Now, it’s not a leap for you to know that Nick Lupo is also a werewolf, often trying like mad to make his lycanthropy pay off in his police work – and often failing miserably. Wolf’s Trap told the stories, alternately, of Nick’s infection and, in the present, of Nick’s epic struggle against a revenge-driven serial killer who knew his dark, unbelievable secret. I tried very hard to keep the werewolf parts credible and logical, and to be true to the sort of noir-thriller aesthetic I longed to practice. The novel was well-received enough that the publisher asked for more. How often does that happen? (Samhain will re-release Wolf’s Trap in March 2011.)
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by Virna DePaul
Someone is trying to open a portal to Hell, and some others will do anything to stop it.
Or so they say.
Jake Hatcher, lying low in Southern California, isn’t all that surprised when he’s asked to jump back into the battle between salvation and damnation and stop those bent on raising the forces of darkness—it’s just why and by whom that’s unnerving. Especially when it’s put to him as an offer he can’t refuse.
A former nun named Vivian Fall believes that a Hellion has escaped the infernal regions and returned to earth on an unholy mission—to unleash the forces of damnation on an unsuspecting world. Only Hatcher has the experience to track such a being. Only Hatcher has dealt with those who likely to know what what’s really going on. And only Hatcher can get close enough to it—because the Hellion happens to be his own brother.
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After the death of his wife, Bruce Holden moves to the quaint coastal fishing village of Mulberry with his son, Jack. He is hoping for a fresh start, but the locals greet their arrival with mixed reactions, from friendliness to open hostility. Bruce puts it down to them being outsiders, but when a tourist is killed while swimming, the real horror is unleashed. There’s something ravenous in the sea. Something that’s coming ashore in search of prey. Now Bruce and Jack find themselves embroiled in a nightmare where humankind is no longer at the top of the food chain.
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In Mike Sirota’s Fire Dance, the dead still dance in the fire that consumed Concordia Sanitarium over a century before. Deep in the Anza-Borrego Desert in Southern California, the spirits of the sanitarium – patients and doctors alike – are trapped between this world and the next, forced to reenact the terrible scene that took them so many years ago. When Mark Alderson and Tracy Russell stumble upon this ghostly scene, they begin the strange project of ushering the dead from their endless dance to their final rest. But there is one spirit they have not taken into account: Bruno Leopold. A violent murderer in life, now in death a mindless spirit of destruction – when he finds a vessel to possess, a body to use at his will, who will stop him?
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The smoke ring rose, higher and higher, changing shape as it went, until it disappeared into a cloud that moments ago had looked like the caboose of a train, a cloud that now began to change, to mold and meld, to twist and turn and take on the shape of the thing that had entered it. This thing, this dark entity, hung frozen in the sky, calling those chosen few out from their houses, their bars and their factories, calling them forth to face what waited in that dark and foreboding night.
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Two hellish years. In Joe McKinney’s Apocalypse of the Dead, that’s how long it’s been since the hurricanes flooded the Gulf Coast, and the dead rose up from the ruins. The cities were quarantined; the infected, contained. Any unlucky survivors were left to fend for themselves. One boatload of refugees manages to make it out alive—but one passenger carries the virus.
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If you ask Harry Shannon why he’s done all the many things he’s crammed into his 62 years, the author is likely to just wrinkle his cowboy eyes, shrug and tell you, “I have to give my mind something to eat, or it eats me.”
A recent biography notes Shannon has been an actor, a singer, a songwriter, a music publisher, a music supervisor, a film executive, a mystery, thriller and horror novelist and is now a counselor in private practice. Oh, and that he’s also published around two hundred songs, eight novels, dozens of short stories, two novellas, one movie script and a partridge in a pear tree.
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By Mark Terry
David Wilbanks and Mark Justice have written a sequel to their novella called DEAD EARTH: THE GREEN DAWN. The new book is DEAD EARTH: THE VENGEANCE ROAD. Justice says, “Dave got the ball rolling when he told me he wanted to team up on a book that dealt with zombies and mutants. The first book had plenty of zombies (and aliens), and in the new one, we up the ante. While DE: TGD fell more in the area of small town horror, the new novel is ‘Mad Max’ cranked up to 11.”
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Medallion Press publishes Desperate Souls, the second volume in my horror thriller series “The Jake Helman Files,” as a trade paperback on October 15th. The series began with Jake Helman’s origin story,Personal Demons, which won the IPPY Gold Medal for Horror, and continues with Cosmic Forces in 2010 and Tortured Spirits in 2012. Audible.com recently acquired the audio book rights to both Personal Demons and Desperate Souls. I’ve plotted a total of six novels in the series, but hope to continue writing Jake Helman chillers for a long time to come. This project started for me two decades ago.
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Jonathan Maberry is making the transition from bestselling thriller writer to brand name. He’s written a Stoker Award-winning Horror series (The Pine Deep Trilogy), the wildly-successful, genre-creating Joe Ledger thriller trilogy (Patient Zero, Dragon Factory and next year’s King of Plagues) which has been called “Michael Crichton meets 24,” and which has been snapped up by Sony Pictures for development as an ABC Television series. Along the way he’s also written dozens of short stories and essays and a string of nonfiction books, the last five dealing with myths and legends of the supernatural, such as the Stoker Award-winning Cryptopedia (2007). Comic book fans know him from his work onPunisher, DeadPool, Black Panther and many other popular Marvel series.
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By John Darrin
“Are you saying I look like a bear?”
That was the question Bill Gagliani asked me in response to an ill-conceived statement I’d made which he might have misunderstood.
“No, no. Of course not. Why, you remind me more of, uh, George Clooney than a bear.”
What else would you expect me to say to a rather large man who studies exotic weapons and writes books with ‘blood-drenched finales’?
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Jeannie Holmes is a native of southwest Mississippi. Before receiving her Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of South Alabama, she worked in a variety of interesting fields, including medical records, independent auction houses, and owned a small handcrafted jewelry business. In addition to working on the sequel to Blood Law, she received her Master of Arts degree in English in December 2008 and lives in Mobile, AL with her husband and four neurotic cats.
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