Life events surrounding the release of my novel Conquer: Fear Of A Black Cat prevented me from doing a proper post about it, so I’m rectifying that here.
My not-so gentle readers will remember John Conquer last appeared in the self-titled collection CONQUER, which included his debut stories from Occult Detective Magazine and some new offerings I wrote to tie the book together into a sequential narrative a la MERKABAH RIDER.
John Conquer is a hip occult detective, tussling with all the jive ass low down haints 1976 Harlem has to offer. A Vietnam vet, ex-cut sleeves gangster, and the scion of New Orleans Vodoun queens and Hoodoo kings, Conquer has fought vampires after hours in the Harlem morgue, tangled with a popobawa sex demon conjured by a vengeful prostitute, wrestled a slip-skin hag preying upon the members of a gay Vodoun hounfort in Brooklyn, gone toe to toe with a bow and arrow killer with all the powers of a bull gorilla, and saved graffiti taggers from a monster stalking the NYC subways.
In the full length sequel novel, FEAR OF A BLACK CAT, John is called upon to solve the murder and mutilation of his foster mother, Mamalawo Consolation Underwood, by the estranged son of his worst enemy, the so-called Devil of Harlem, Hoodoo gangster kingpin King Solomon Keyes. John is ready to burn down the boroughs to find the doer, but his twisting investigation leads him to uncover a plot by a sinister and old-rooted occult organization to strangle a people’s magical revolution in its infancy. What do rec room parties in the Bronx, white supremacists, and The Son of Sam have to do with all that? Read the book and find out, sucka.
I dove deep into the history and folklore of 1970’s NYC in this one, and it certainly turned out to be one of the most intense and deeply rewarding writing experiences of my career. Sometimes I tap into a kind of mystical correspondence when I’m researching and writing a book, an instinctual creative flow that leads me down unexpected pathways and makes surprising connections of seemingly disparate elements to deposit me at an ending even I can’t always predict. This has never been truer than in the writing of this book. Stuff came to me from the far corners of the ether and just demanded to be talked about. It’s the longest I’ve ever taken to write and the longest I’ve ever produced, but I promise if you take the journey with me you won’t be disappointed by the destination.
Here’s an excerpt –
—————————————————————————————————————-
Conquer unfolded the map and squinted at the spot he’d circled in Park Hill. Alta Avenue. Last known location. As good a place as any to start.
He went up Ludlow, turning up the collar of his coat even though the sun was beating down. A flush faced, mean-looking young cracker with a beer gut stood in the doorway of a bar and clenched his fists. He said something to somebody behind him, something Conquer couldn’t hear. But he got the gist of it when two or three bleary-eyed, greasy-haired punks staggered into the sun to frown at him.
He thought back to his Black Enchanter days, bopping into enemy territory, busted windows and black doorways crowded with kids ready to defend their turf. But he was by himself, no brothers to back him up. He had the .357, but pulling a pistol in this neighborhood, even just to wave it and scare some ofays off would bring the swine down faster than a 747 with no flight crew on his black ass.
He heard some bullshit comments, not loud enough to get his full attention, and kept walking, till they were drowned out by the ravings of an old bag lady cawing like a crow about Mexicans on the corner. When she got an eye full of him, she changed her tune, and her screams of ‘nigger’ followed him up the block like an alarm klaxon alerting the neighborhood.
Maybe he hadn’t thought this thing through. One thing was for sure. If a Nazi skinhead had a home address anywhere, Yonkers was a good bet. This town was whiter and meaner than a New York winter.
Following the map, he reached an incline and the character of the neighborhood changed from blue to white collar. The bars and liquor stores gave way to tree-lined Undercliff Street, a woodsy buffer that wound up the hill up through the trees and deposited him into an exclusive residential area of emerald lawns and black iron gates. A grinning, red-lipped little concrete lawn jockey held a lantern in ghastly salutation, like a glossy, tarred over corpse marking the boundary of a sundown town.
Good old Jocko Graves, the Faithful Groomsman. Conquer wondered if the owner liked to repeat that bullshit story about the loyal little black boy who waited with George Washington’s horse on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware and froze to death in the night rather than desert his post (or light a goddamned campfire). Old Massa George had been so moved by his slave’s heroic sacrifice he’d supposedly immortalized little Jocko in statuary form and set him at the gate to Mount Vernon. Sure, that coal black skin, those swollen, watermelon sucking Sambo lips; they all made for a really touching memorial; at least as flattering as the big bronze one they had of Washington himself on Wall Street.
The houses here were of the big, gabled type, and the white-faced ghosts who haunted them hovered in their front yards, pretending to wipe down their blindingly expensive cars or water their lush rose gardens even as they marked him with icy eyes or surreptitiously retired to their kitchens and drew the blinds.
Conquer sweated beneath his jacket, behind his ears, and down in the small of his back. All the hoodoo in his pockets meant nothing here. The weight of the gun was a millstone, contraband that would land his ass in a world of hurt if discovered. He’d be dead before they ever saw his license.
He’d been driving around with Pope under the cover of the Me No See’um oil for so long he’d gotten lazy; forgotten the fundamentals of being a black man outside of Harlem.
Park Hill, Yonkers, presumably one of the seven hills mentioned on the welcome sign, sure as hell wasn’t Harlem. It wasn’t even New York City. It was a whole ‘nother world, way past the boundaries of civilization. He was a foreigner. More, to the backwards, spray-tanned natives bedecked in pastel clothes, glittering Rolexes and Ray-Bans, he was an unwelcome invader trespassing in their ancestral lands, threatening their sacred traditions with his high culture, turning his broad nose up at their bland foods, their strange, arrhythmic music, and lusting over their pale, skinny women.
The quivering scouts were beating their tom toms, though he couldn’t hear them from the sidewalk; the whir of rotary dials and the muffled mutterings of ‘suspicious character’ and ‘weird black guy’ were passing along the phone lines to muster their barbaric headhunters to war. Even now the leather-clad savages were probably scrambling, observing their preparatory rituals, donning their fetish stars, arming themselves with their primitive clubs, loading their quarrels of blunt, lead headed missiles, working themselves into a berserker frenzy, all set to drive out and drive down the Other, to spill his blood for the glory of their white, heathen gods.
Conquer shivered deep down, kitchen bristling when he came in sight of his destination. There was no doubting it.
If The Man had a house it was the one at 87 Alta Avenue.
The monstrosity of a home sat on the top of the hill in a cluster of trees like Dracula’s summer pad. It must have been five stories. No doubt you could see the Hudson River and the whole city clear on down to the edge of the Bronx from the top of the turreted grey tower at its center. A tall lightning rod poking up from the tip of the witch hat had probably brought Frankenstein and his lady much joy. It put King Solomon’s Sugar Hill pad to shame. You could probably fit his palace in the foyer of this one. All arching stone work, shingles, and wide, stained glass windows, it was too big to be a church and was probably older than any church in the city. The only god worshiped here slept in the master bedroom. It didn’t conform to any rules of symmetry Conquer understood. The architecture was as sprawling and out of control as its owner’s ego, thousands of square feet. There was a broad stone balcony; it must have been a hundred feet long, at least three peaked roofs, and a tall chimney that looked like it might have been imported from Auschwitz.
Who built a castle in Yonkers of all places?
Even among the Tudor mansions and Queen Annes it was out of place. It had no frontage to speak of, just a little semicircular drive right off the street wishfully obscured by three meager bushes. There was no fence around the place, no sloping drive. You could walk up and knock on the door.
Conquer stood there gawking at it, wondering what to do next.
The skinhead who had shot up Hekima Books, one of Mama Underwood’s killers, had come to this house. It didn’t make sense. He could picture the dude he’d chased leaning in a downtown Yonkers doorway, conversing with oily mechanics and muttering under his breath about ‘black bastards,’ ready to tag a synagogue with the spray can in his jacket pocket, but here? Whoever owned this pad would make a piece of white trash like that take both his feet entirely off before he’d let him walk on the carpet.
There was no Chevy Nova with a .357 magnum hole in the taillight parked out front. No cars at all. What was this place? Who lived here?
Conquer put his hands in his pockets and stared up at the monstrosity. He wanted to laugh at the ridiculousness of the thing, but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Something in that structure looked down on him. Something old. It seemed to grin and call him ‘boy’ in that special elongated lazy twang that recalled broad white verandas and cotton fields and got his blood boiling over.
He suddenly wanted to kick the door in and drag whatever was inside there looking at him out into the twentieth century, but he was afraid, deep down in his soul, that it would be like poking a lion in the face.
Or maybe a wolf. A big white wolf.
Then he saw the Yonkers police squad coming around the corner, creeping slow, like a sly predator sneaking up on him through the tall grass.
The hyper-awareness of his immediate surroundings, which he’d mislaid at the appearance of the house, returned.
He focused on the squad and tensed. No Detroit steel armor to keep him safe. No Me No See’um oil to keep him hid. He was exposed to the red and blue eyes of this blue and white stalking him. Any minute those eyes would flash and the beast would leer and bare its .38 caliber fangs….
Coming out August 11th (on a definitely related and significant day in history) is the full length novel sequel to my blaxploitation occult detective collection CONQUER….
CONQUER: FEAR OF A BLACK CAT.
It’s 1977 and gods and demons stroll the red-hot streets of the N-Y-C. The Summer of Sam is in full swing when the fortune teller who raised John turns up dead and mutilated in her kitchen. Conquer vows to turn the Five Boroughs upside down in order to find the doer.
Is it the elusive .44 Caliber Killer?
Is it the Devil of Harlem, King Solomon?
What do block parties in the Bronx gotta do with the price of bread?
Is John finally in over his afro?
Betta read the book, sucka, and find out!
Here’s the cover, by Kevin A. Johnson, with design by Shawn T. King.
My first short fiction collection, Angler In Darkness, is now up for preorder in ebook formats. Release is scheduled August. The print version will follow close behind.
These are 18 stories running the gamut from fantasy, to dark adventure and horror, some in print for the first time, with a great cover by M. Wayne Miller and design by Shawn King.
A frontiersman of bizarre pedigree is peculiarly suited to tracking down a group of creatures rampaging across the settlements of the Texas Hill Country…..
A great white hunter is shaken to his core by a quarry he cannot conceive of….
A bullied inner city kid finds the power to strike back against his tormentors and finds he can’t stop using it….
Outraged plumbing plots its revenge….
Here Blackfoot Indians hunt the undead, the fate of nations is decided by colossal monsters, a salaryman learns the price of abandoning his own life, and even the Angel of Death tells his story.
Currently available for preorder in a number of fine e-retailers.
An ancient trigger gene buried deep in humanity’s DNA is sporadically activating, evolving select humans into something superhuman. Influenced by comic-book culture, many of these ‘chimerics,’ as they have been dubbed, have taken on costumes and adopted codenames. Organizations have risen up to either train, exploit, or police chimerics, and the world is at odds about their very existence. Emergence collects eight tales, each with a unique perspective on what it might be like to be superhuman in today’s day and age.
In Perennial, teen heartthrob Jim Cutlass, young star of the popular Peter Pan-inspired TV show Peter ‘N Wendy, arrives on set having discovered the existence of an insidious ring of Hillywood power players routinely sexually abusing his underage costars. Intending to confront the show’s producer, he is instead caught up in a planted explosion which kills the entire cast and crew…..except him. Cutlass’ latent supergene activates to protect him, and he finds himself imbued with the powers of his famous alter ego. Presumed dead, he goes underground for years, assuming the mantle of Pan and operating from the shadows to root out and bring to justice purveyors of child exploitation wherever it occurs.
When a destructive supervillain attacks downtown La Futura and Pan is the only hero around to stop him, Cutlass, physically unchanged from his days as a teen actor, finds himself thrust unwillingly into the spotlight, setting off a storm of controversy in the media as the apparently the world’s first superpowered child. He also attracts the attention of enemies he didn’t even know he had…..
Pan of Perennial began ten years ago as a character in a PBEM (that’s Play By E-mail – basically a turn-based roleplaying game entirely text-based) game that included one World Fantasy Award winning author and an ENnie Award winning game designer (still waiting for all that greatness to rub off on me) and a slew of other talented guys, and seriously kept me from losing my mind while doing hard time in an office cube at the most miserable job I’ve ever worked. In fact, a major sequence toward the end is directly inspired by a scenario that came up in it, which lends credence to my claim that RPGing is one of the best leisurely exercises a writer can participate in. Seriously, I came up with more story concepts gaming than I ever go out of two years of college writing courses. Merkabah Rider’s setting was first fleshed out in this very same PBEM group.
I’ve always been a big fan of James Barrie’s novel, and I had just read Kensington Gardens when the idea of a Peter Pan themed superhero who couldn’t age came into my mind. After the game ended I kept the idea simmering on a back burner for a decade, adding little bits to it over the years in light of Andrew Birkin’s JM Barrie’s Lost Boys and Amy J. Berg’s documentary on Hollywood’s history of child actor abuse, An Open Secret.
Helping to develop the shared world of Humanity 2.0’s been pretty satisfying and I hope Perennial does its share in bringing Ragnarok’s shared universe to the public eye. I also encourage you to look further into the efforts of HERO.
“For those just tuning in, the death toll in the rampage across southern La Futura now stands confirmed at ninety five,” the anchorman said, shuffling papers and pressing his index finger to his ear. “Reports say it began when an unidentified man collapsed in front of Federal Station thirty minutes ago. We now know this man to be the Alpha-level chimeric Lance Lattimer, a former Wall Street futures trader better known by his psychotic and violent alter-ego, Tantrum, which manifested during Lattimer’s attempted suicide leap from the roof of the New York Stock Exchange three years ago. During that initial outbreak, Tantrum left over two hundred New Yorkers dead by his psychokinetic powers. Our correspondent Patty Park is live from the scene in Chinatown this evening. Patty?”
Patty Park crouched behind a police barricade of scurrying SWAT, strands of her black hair strewn half across her face, the light from her cameraman making her dark eyes shine like those of a terrified animal facing down a roaring Peterbilt.
“Mitch, historic Coronel Street Market was destroyed in the first few moments of Tantrum’s attack. We don’t know how many people lie buried in the rubble at this point. He’s moving up Hill Street in the direction of Roger Stadium. We’re right in his path. The police are attempting to rally with two armored cars from the Bulwark Division Station.”
“Patty, what about superhuman response?” Mitch asked.
An explosion caused Patty and the police in the background to duck down instinctively, and a fine white powdery mist descended on them, dusting them like a layer of sugar.
“Still no word from TCA hero A-Frame. He departed the charity ball he was attending up north in Port Haven with The Brown Thrasher and Pecos as soon as word reached them, but it could be up to an hour before they arrive and…”
“What about the LFPD’s new P.O.N.E. unit?”
“Word is they’re stuck in traffic on the southbound 504. You know, none of them are fliers, so…”
Two ugly, dark armored vehicles with mounted battering rams rumbled past the camera and Patty spun, gesturing frantically for the camera to follow their progress as the cops cheered them on.
“Get this! Get this!” she shouted.
The camera swung to track them as they tore down the deserted street. Hill Avenue cutting through Chinatown was part of the annual Chinese New Year parade route. Everybody was used to seeing it littered with those paper cap wrappers and the remnants of streamers and red firecracker bricks, but not rubble. The numerous businesses, eateries, warehouses, and junk shops selling battery powered waving cats, cheap Japanese swords and lacquered chopsticks to the undiscerning tourists south of University Street had simply ceased to exist. It looked like Hiroshima. Broken glass littered the streets, and here and there red, vaguely human shaped splotches that were all that remained of the people who had run screaming from the leveled buildings blossomed on the pavement like Banksy-style street art. The block was flattened. Water from orphaned pipes spewed into the air, and plumes of black smoke spread across the dark sky.
In the center of it, advancing up the street, floating lazily ten feet in the air and slowly turning, was Tantrum. Bright, devil red, a huge, distended cranium filigreed with thick pulsing veins like a Telosian on Star Trek. Besides the huge bald head, he looked exactly like a weirdly floating buck naked infant, an evil version of the benevolent Star Child of Arthur C. Clarke, constantly wailing, screaming, a high, inhuman shriek.
And wherever that scream was directed, the masonry of buildings scattered, and flesh and muscle flew from the bones of unfortunate bystanders, until their skeletons collapsed and blew away to powder and ash.
Case in point, the two armored cars barreling at full speed towards the frightful enfant terrible.
The noise of the engines, or maybe the flash of their headlights, caught Tantrum’s attention immediately and he looked at them and screamed, little dimpled fists trembling before his downturned, scowling face.
The pulse of psychic energy that emanated from that tremendous brain was visible as a heatwave distortion. As soon as the bar of the energy tide struck the two vehicles, the armor shed from them like sheep’s wool before the shears. The chassis and engine exposed, the bolts fastening them together hung suspended in the air for a moment before the whole affair clattered to pieces. It happened too quickly for the crews inside to scream. Their deaths were instantaneous, but terrible, and even the practiced hand of the cameraman flinched from the sight and returned to record Patty Park’s horrified reaction as a second fine mist rained down on her and the cops around her. This one dotted her skin and raincoat scarlet.
She wheeled aghast at the camera, tears mixing with the blood running down her cheeks.
“Oh my God! Oh my God!”
The camera cut back to Mitch Brenner manicured and coiffed safely in the studio, hand to his mouth in mock concern.
“Patty. Are you alright?” he asked stupidly.
“What’s that?”
The feed cut instantly back to blood soaked Patty as she pushed the camera physically back toward the hellish Tantrum.
“Shoot, Bobby! Shoot!” she urged.
A figure descended quickly out of the sky. Small. Slight. No more than a child, really. The police spotlights caught the green of his strange costume. He was dressed like a masked Christmas elf, with a belted green leather tunic and gauntlets, some kind of green bodysuit, and a peaked, Robin Hood-style cowl. His appearance would’ve been ridiculous if it hadn’t been so unexpected.
“Hey, kid!” the newcomer shouted in a shrill pre-teen’s voice, as he stomped a heavy manhole cover with one foot, sending it spinning in the air. He caught it one hand and cocked it back like a Frisbee.
Tantrum revolved in place to face him, turning his destructive power from the barricade and from Patty Park and her crew.
The kid in green sent the manhole spinning. It collided with Tantrum’s forehead and the killer infant went flying head over heels, smashing through the front window of a Chinese restaurant.
“Get the hell out of here!” the kid yelled directly at the cops as the camera zoomed in tight on his beardless face, on the blue eyes flashing through the holes of his pointed cowl.
On his couch, in his home in Mogera Hills, Nico Tinkham sat bolt upright, knocking over his bowl of Cheetos and splashing Coke across his hardwood floor.
I’ve been releasing a story a month to $5.00 and above backers on my Patreon page since Janurary of this year. Currently, five bucks gets you access to eight short stories, some never before published anywhere else.
For the month of August, I’ve put up The Theophany of Nyx, a Lovecraftian tale of a plumber on an Army base bearing witness to the collapse of the Earth’s first lunar colony and the dark days that follow.
EDIT: Whoops! Due to a technical glitch, I’ll be recording that interview this Monday instead.
In just a bit I’ll be on Thorne & Cross Haunted Nights LIVE talking about Andersonville, With Sword And Pistol, and whatever else I can get in. Come give a listen. If you miss it, no worries. I’m told the show will remain up at the link below.
I’ve never been particularly athletically inclined. I did a little bit of basketball in middle school (I was terrible), the usual PE stuff in high school, and for a very brief period in college, some jogging and biking.
In high school though, I did discover and gravitate towards a certain group activity that in the 80’s was sort of a subcaste in terms of popularity strata, so far off the accepted social map as to be nearly clandestine (we gamed with a guy on the football team who the first day made me swear never to tell anybody he played -a secret I have upheld to his grave), and that was roleplaying games. First Dungeons and Dragons, the old gateway drug, then Cyberpunk, Rifts, Shadowrun, and Vampire: The Masquerade.
In college I ‘graduated’ from playing games to running them. I ran a West End Star Wars game for about two years, and I truly believe that this past time was instrumental in my development as a writer.
Thak fails his Wisdom save.
There’s something about tabletop roleplaying that develops the storytelling ‘muscle.’ It’s not just a buncha guys and gals huddling over a table snickering about elves. I really believe it’s a re-enactment of the primal form of human entertainment; sitting around in a group, telling stories to each other. Now we’ve got lightbulbs instead of a fire, and we chow on cylinders of Pringles and Diet Coke (though in my heyday it was Captain Morgan’s rum) instead of smilodon meat and fermented fruit juice (well, in some circles, that probably hasn’t changed much).
What part of “interactive gaming” is not a lie?
Roleplaying games sharpen the mind, quicken the pulse, and they’re a riot. Best of all, a tabletop game can’t be done alone, which dodges a troubling trend in entertainment geared towards youth. I love video games. As a multiple-kid-parent with a full time job and a burgeoning writing career, plug and play has been a godsend in terms of my own personal relaxation. I even worked in the video games industry for a little while. However, despite the interactive gaming tagline, you’re basically just staring at a screen for hours on end. The anonymity allows a lot of unsupervised, underage kids to spew a lot of horrendous garbage they would never dare say to a person whose eyes they could look into, and conversely, rather than teaching a kid to deal with somebody they might encounter in life who doesn’t have any social skills for whatever reason, you can just mute the little a-holes. Again, kind of foments universal disconnect rather than advancing the whole brotherhood of man concept.
But then at the beginning of this year, a friend of mine coaxed me back into rpging (D&D specifically) at the Local Gaming Store, and it’s been a revelation. Much more satisfying than vegging out to GTA (though I still do that too when I have the time).
Anyway, then Extra Life came along. As I mentioned, I have never been athletically inclined. I don’t run unless I’m being pursued or chasing down one of my toddlers, so I’ve watched the charity marathons some of my friends participate in a bit wistfully. I’d like to do something like that, I’m sure they’re having fun doing it, but it’s just not in my wheelhouse.
But this is.
Here’s the nitty gritty, straight from the mouth of the Extra Life bot –
“My local Children’s Miracle Network Hospital treats thousands of children each year, regardless of their family’s ability to pay. These kids are facing scary stuff like cancer, cystic fibrosis, and injuries from accidents to name just a few.
On October 25, 2014, I’ll be participating in this huge worldwide celebration of the social impact of gamers of all kinds from video games to board games and tabletop RPG’s! It’s my sincere hope that you’ll find it in your heart to support my efforts with a monthly pledge or one-time gift that will go directly to my hospital.
Your donation is tax-deductible and ALL PROCEEDS go to help kids.
I need your help to reach my goal. Please make a safe, easy donation online today. Click the “Support This Participant” button on this page to get started. Thank you so much for supporting my efforts!”
My friend and I will be participating in a 24-hour marathon session of the new fifth editions of Dungeons and Dragons this October the 24th at a local gaming store, JJ’s Gaming Lounge in Chatsworth. It’s a mad little endeavor that I hope will raise awareness of the heinous problems the less economically fortunate and infirm children of our country face daily when it comes to finding the affordable healthcare many people with more stable lives take for granted.
I’m blessed that my own kids are healthy and that the safety net of a medical plan is there for them if they need it. I want to show that gratitude now by giving back in a small way. My chosen charity is the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, altruistic folks who can always use a helping hand helping others. I believe the D&D team for Extra Life has already pledged something over one million dollars total, so it’s not just a lark.
Please, if you have the means and are so inclined, catch the link below for a similar version of what I just posted here and the more-important donation button.
This is the true story of the most spectacular failure of my life, the time I went for broke,swung for the fences, and made a feature film.
It was a ten day shoot, cost around ten thousand dollars, and clocked in around 89 minutes. It was a western.
It was Meaner Than Hell.
I moved from Chicago with my fiancée and son out to Los Angeles in the hope that I’d be able to make a living writing screenplays. I’d gone to school for it, graduated from Columbia College in Chicago with a degree saying I could do it, but had no ins. I spent my first two years out here temping at a major mortgage company, pretending to be busy in a cube, alternating between the same two pairs of beige slacks and basically hating my life.
Then in 2005 or so, Kaiser Permanente Hospital intervened in my future by buying the apartment building we’d been living in (we were now married and I had a little girl) and giving each of the residents $8500 to facilitate their move.
If I were smart, I would’ve put that money towards a down payment on a home which in the intervening years would have nearly quadrupled in value. We could’ve sold that house and lived almost anywhere in the country in comfort.
But I got the brainy idea to use the money to shoot an independent film. It was fresh off of Robert Rodriguez’s Rebel Without A Crew and my head was throbbing with Elmore Leonard stories, Blood Meridian, Leone and Corbucci.
Really, I think the idea germinated in the 20th Street Writers Group, an informal group of aspiring screenwriters who met irregularly of which I was a member.
I had once met Christopher McQuarrie, the writer of The Usual Suspects, the weekend before he won the Oscar, and he advised me to never pay attention to budgets or limit your writing according to what could be done conceptually. “If your script has to be filmed on location in space, don’t worry about it.”
So all my scripts had gone that route, big epic things that only Cecil B. Demille or James Cameron could put together. A biopic about the abolitionist John Brown, a post-apocalyptic adventure about a kick ass trucker out to avenge the death of his dog, a story of rugby players in World War I Scotland.
But with this money coming in, and with my dear wife willing to take the plunge with me and let me use the kitty for this crazy movie, I started writing to a budget, thinking about what I could pull off. I came up with a cool concept for a western that I was sure was gonna revitalize the genre. It was dirty, brutal, clever, like Chato’s Land and The Great Silence had a baby that was adopted by Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. Westerns of late, I thought, had become bogged down by reality. I wanted to bring the coolness back to them, the muddy, bloody brawls and the insanely rich tough talk that led to the big shootout. I wanted to write a thinly veiled love story between two guys where the much anticipated kiss was a gundown.
I took the title, Meaner Than Hell, from a Johnny Cash song, and a line uttered by the nearsighted kid in Unforgiven. A sadistic bounty hunter Tope Mullins, ambushes wild bespectacled outlaw Picaro’s gang and kills them all around the campfire one night. He shoots Picaro in the foot to induce him to share the location of the loot from his last robbery before he turns him into the authorities (adding a ticking clock element as Picaro’s foot begins to mortify). Unfortunately when they wake up in the morning, Indians have stolen all the horses, and they have to make their way back to civilization on foot, contending with the threat of attack, the harsh elements, and of course, each other, the whole way.
I wrote the thing in a couple weeks, shared it with the writer’s group, and sure enough, one of the guys in it, who would go on to become my Assistant Director, said, “I think we could shoot this ourselves.”
I took it as a sign.
Plans kicked into high gear.
I had gone to school with an absolutely brilliant cinematography student. He lived out in LA now, worked as a set electrician. He agreed to do it for five hundred bucks.
One of the guys in the group was a pretty talented SFX guy, another an editor with a home editing suite.
My dad had a collection of black powder revolvers.
My mother and wife were both talented seamstresses.
So I asked my aunt for an advance on my inheritance, got an HD camera for $3,000, put out a call for actors in Variety, and spent a year gathering props and costume material, and scouting Death Valley and unincorporated Lancaster.
I had a very talented group of guys respond to the casting call (though my ad for honest-to-God Native American actors went unanswered) and filled most of the bit parts with friends, expanding other roles as I went to give the guys that didn’t get cast in the principal roles more to do because I just thought they deserved it.
I budgeted the thing, set aside eleven days to shoot. Two of my best and oldest friends kicked in money and scheduled time to come out and help me with the thing, playing partially obscured Indians and corpses when needed and hoisting equipment.
As game time approached, I started to run into bumps.
First, with maybe two months to go, my extremely talented DP bailed for the chance to go be an electrician on The Gridiron Gang (I think it was). He took a much better paycheck than I could offer, and continues to work steadily in the industry to this day on A-list productions as a Gaffer, Cameraman, and Electrician. So be it. I lost his eye. I frankly think we all did.
He lined up a meeting with a friend of his, but the guy advised me to ditch the idea of making a feature and just concentrate on a short film. I recalled an anecdote Martin Scorcese related about how he made a short film and got it in front of some executive who shrugged and said, “Now go make a feature.” I was eliminating the middle step, I thought. Besides, I’d shot four shorts in college. I hadn’t come out to LA to make more shorts.
So I decided to shoot the thing myself.
More money for the budget, I figured.
Then, the whole cast and crew….I won’t say they totally mutineed on me, but we had a disagreement.
During a read-through of the script I mentioned that I intended to shoot the entire picture without live sound and foley all the dialogue and sound FX later.
Nobody wanted any part of that.
I argued that this was the way spaghetti westerns had always been shot, but I guess nobody liked the idea of trying to dub voices in later. The big worry was it would look stupid and amateurish, like a badly dubbed kung fu movie.
I think this was the part where I failed my movie. It was mine. Mostly my money, my vision, but I caved. If nobody wanted to do it that way, what could I do?
I scrambled to research boom mics and sound equipment, and I think, in the end, I was ill-prepared to shoot live sound and the end result suffered for it. The rattling of shingles on an old cabin by a howling desert wind can be evocative, but not when your actors are shouting over it. The sound quality of Meaner Than Hell varies pretty wildly from scene to scene.
But, mea culpa. I was the director, I shoulda put my foot down, but I didn’t.
So game day comes. My oldest friend flies in from Illinois and we bug out about how we’re shooting a movie in California over a table of In ‘N Out.
I gather up the actors, we drive out to the desert, shoot the first scene in a dry culvert.
My two principals are a great couple of guys.
Tope
Playing the bounty hunter Tope Mullins is Thomas Crnkovich, a guy whose father actually coached one of my relatives in football or something way back in the day, but who is twenty years older than me and whom I’ve never met, though we’re weirdly from the same general area. I could not write Tom as a character if I tried. When he sent me his portfolio, it included pictures of him wrestling with fucking tigers. He had worked for a time as a wild animal trainer for the shows in Las Vegas. He was a funny, funny guy, into Alice Cooper and his van. He was my pick for Tope from his first audition. Skin like leather, crazy eyes, I think his biggest role had been in Sgt. Kabukiman NYPD. When I asked him in his audition what the first thing he had to do when training wild tigers was, he answered, in his Eastwoodian hiss, “Well the first thing I hadda do was teach the tigers not to kill me.”
Picaro
My pick for Picaro Gonnoff was a tough one. I left the ethnicity, nationality, body type, appearance, everything entirely to chance. I wanted to craft the role around the actor I chose. It was a hard pick for me between three guys, one of whom nailed the dangerousness of Picaro, the other who nailed the Tuco-esque craziness and humor, but only one of whom I thought could portray the balance between the two – be a charming, funny asshole one minute and be grinding his heel in your face the next. That was Jared Cohn (credited as Jared Michaels). Jared had a Colin Ferrel kinda look, but he brought this outrageous faux-southern accent that just won me over. He sounded like a guy that had gotten the shit kicked out of him at an early age and learned to kick back when you weren’t looking. After I selected him for the role, I tailor made the character’s backstory for him, and wrote in some lines to incorporate who he was. I don’t know if a badass Jewish outlaw has ever been portrayed in film before or since, but that was Picaro/Jared.
Anyway, the guys were a little worried about my ability to point a camera in the right direction, and I remember Thomas asking to review the first shot after we’d done it. I remember it was a long take of the two of them stumbling down the gully into the foreground. It began with lots of negative space which the characters then gradually filled as they approached. I was proud of it, and apparently it alleviated their fears, because they both crowed over it and never questioned my framing again.
Film school, bitches! And extensive storyboards!
Well, storyboards which I swiftly abandoned as the day wore on and the light in the gully began to fade.
The second problem I ran into was my own insane scheduling. I really thought I could cram all these scenes into a set number of hours. I didn’t take sleep deprivation, egos, setup times, and getting lost driving in the freaking desert at night without GPS into account.
I reverted to a simple three shot set up for most of the early campfire scenes (one shot of each speaker, medium shot of the two of them).
I killed my minivan battery probably three times running the lights off of it. I remember too that Thomas had a hard time delivering his lines over the sound of the engine which he swore he could hear (but nobody else could) and we had to keep backing the van up behind boulders until he was happy. At the end of the shoot, my buddy Tom threw the wanted poster prop into the fire.
“WHAT THE FUCK DUDE?!” I hollered, snatching it out.
He had thought we were done with it. But eh, since it’s plucked off a corpse later, the big burn mark wound up looking cool. Happy accidents.
By the time we finished the initial shooting, it was dawn.
We pitched some tents and slept out there for about three or four hours and I got them up again to shoot the rest.
Two of the guys who had been rendered corpses needed to leave, but one of them was in the shot and I had to shoot several takes around the guy lying there dead and eventually getting scalped. Nightmarish.
I also remember this was the day my good friend Jeff Carter was scheduled to show up at the extremely remote cabin location of Ballarat in Death Valley to render a couple of the guys into living corpses for a dream sequence. The shoot felt so bad, I nearly abandoned the idea. We were far out of cell range, and I assumed because Jeff hadn’t heard from me, he would stay home. I very nearly went home without heading to the cabin, but decided at the last minute to do it anyway.
When we showed up at the cabin, something like three hours late, Jeff was sitting there with his makeup kit on the porch of the little store run by the only two residents of Ballarat, a rawboned old father and son pair. I had to hide my freakin’ tears when I pulled up because I had nearly left him there and he had showed up to do his part. God bless that guy. We didn’t even end up using the ‘zombie’ shot, but we heard a passel of crazy ghost stories about Indian spirits in the mountains and jet fighters from Edwards Air Force Base crashing out in the dead lake where Charles Manson’s van still sat mired in the alkali.
That first day, nobody talked much on the drive home, and when I climbed into my bed I broke down when my wife asked me how it was going (did Sam Peckinpah cry like a girl so much while shooting The Wild Bunch? He probably just got drunk a lot – I wasn’t budgeted for booze) . I remember saying I felt like I was trying to paint with boxing gloves on. I was in over my head.
The next day one of the actors slept late and we lost an hour knocking on his door and windows. We drove back up to the desert and had another grueling day/night shoot, but my AD Elliott McMillan, God bless HIM, suggested we not drive back and instead get a cheap hotel room out in the desert and thus get an early jump on the next day.
That was one of the most fun nights I ever had. It was Elliott, Jared, Tom, and I with my buddy Tom from kindergarten drinking beers and half-watching a monumental Dodgers game, laughing over Tom’s crazy sex stories and just being a buncha guys.
I think it was the next day’s shoot at the cabin that was one of the best days of my entire life.
I don’t know if you’ve ever made a movie, or seen something you’ve written adapted by actors, I mean…RIGHT.
At this point in the story, Tope and Picaro are holed up in a remote cabin. They have a heartfelt moment in the night, sharing their personal stories of killing and mayhem (this is the scene I think most suffered from live sound as the wind wouldn’t die down and we had to keep stopping to accommodate the jets flying maneuvers in the distance). When Picaro tries to shoot Tope, they wind up beating the shit out of each other (in my storyboards, their crazy brawl across the cabin floor is portrayed like a sex scene with clenching hands and tangled feet – I don’t think it came through in the final project) and at this moment the Indians decide to attack. Tope kills an Apache in the doorway and they both look on in shock as the guy’s corpse is whisked away by an unseen comrade.
Tope makes some remark about ‘His squaw must’ve had supper waiting’ which causes both of them to forget their enmity for the moment and share an honest laugh. And in the middle of that laugh, Picaro produces a hidden Derringer and blasts Tope through the face.
It was written to be a jarring moment, and of course I knew it was coming, but Jesus Christ, I swear, when it did….when Jared and Thomas played it PERFECT on the first take….I nearly ruined it by hissing an appreciative “FFFFFFUCK!” at the end of the scene. Haha.
I don’t know. Seeing that, something just clicked.
We had to beat the sundown to get the rest of this sequence finished. At first Thomas didn’t wanna roll around on the ground, which had old nails and glass scattered across it. So I, in a t-shirt, dove down to the ground and rolled around first to show him it was OK. I don’t know if it was OK but you wanna hear the funny part? You know what made me do that? It was a line from a Larry Hama GI Joe comic – or maybe it was the cartoon. But General Hawk told somebody ‘Don’t order men to do anything you aren’t willing to do yourself.’ And that stuck with me through years and years of adulthood, and reared its head in my mind at that moment.
Or maybe it was something from Patton’s War As I Knew It.
I don’t know.
Magic day
But after that, and after I expressed such unbridled exuberance for what they were doing, it was like all of us were on the same page, and we were killing it. We zipped through the scenes. And Jeff was there, and he had to create a blossom of blood – a bullet hole in the side of Tom’s face, and it seemed like slow, meticulous work that was taking forever while I shot what I could of Jared. A gust of wind blew a cloud of particles into my wide angle lens and I unscrewed the thing and handed it over to my buddy Tom (from kindergarten). We were revolving, hunched around that cabin, grabbing the footage like war photographers.
In between takes I was jumping in place urging Jeff to hurry up with the makeup, saying it looked good enough, but professional as he was, he urged me to shut up till he got it right – till Thomas’ face was a mess of hamburger and powderburns, leaking Kayro all over the place.
We shot the hell out of that scene and it was goddamned beautiful. So beautiful that years later, when I brought a promised DVD copy of the finished product to the two guys that ran the Ballarat story, I walked through that ruined cabin (half of it is collapsed now), and I started crying like I had PTSD or something.
That day, I was a filmmaker. I was a freakin’ auteur, wearing every damn hat on the tree.
When we finished, the sun was plunging into the desert and all the land was painted orange, and out of the mountains a flock of bats came spiraling out across the desert to light on a wading pool the residents kept out there behind their trailer. They whipped all around you, little flying mice, swarming erratically but taking no interest in you.
We were all of us buzzing. It was utterly awesome and one of the best days of my life.
We shot under a railroad trestle, Elliott mimicking Jeff’s makeup on Thomas’ face perfectly. I shot him pursuing a ghost through the stark, over exposed desert while Thomas assured my two year old daughter Magnolia that all that blood was just because he’d cut himself shaving.
We shot out near the Kill Bill church.
We shot Thomas’ last scene on a hilltop – the big climactic gunfight. It looked great, but I made the mistake of telling him he could keep the black hat that was part of his costume, so when he was supposed to get drenched in blood, he kept protecting that goddamned hat.
We applauded his last scene, and moved on the next day to the mountains near Bodie, California, where a perfectly preserved 1880’s mining town sits up there as part of the National Park Service. We spent the night in some absolutely freezing cabins (one of which John Wayne had apparently stayed in at some point), my friends playing guitar and drinking beer, smoking weed with the cast. Stayed up late, had a great time, got up at the crack and went to shoot the final scenes of the movie on the steps of a period church.
Now as I mentioned, I couldn’t get any real live Indians for the shoot because none responded to the casting call. So I put my eldest son in a black wig, and my buddy Dan, who is Mexican, and a guy named Maeis who was the only guy that came to the Indian casting and was Middle Eastern or something. On the ride up there I spied an Indian Casino, and I had the guys walk through there and offer seventy five bucks to anybody who’d come to the two hour shoot, suit up, and participate. I budgeted for three guys. Jared brought me one, a guy named Richard Sallee. But damn if he didn’t look the part.
We put him in Apache costume, and set him front and center to offset the questionable Indians. I think he worked out great. Plus he got paid three times what I offered him since he was the only guy there.
Meaner Than Hell was a wrap. The back of my van looked like we had birthed a calf back there.
We moved into a slow editing process.
I inquired into getting the rights to two professional songs, Johnny Cash’s God Is Gonna Cut You Down for the credits (which we originally cut the ending to) and Bill Monroe’s haunting My Last Days On Earth, which I envisioned as the recurring theme throughout the picture, and which we cut the trailer to.
But the price was, in the words of the Duke, “absolutely re-god-damned-diculous.” It was almost two thirds of my entire budget. So I picked up a guitar, having never played before, brought a Jaw harp and a harmonica to my buddy and editor Ryan Gerossie’s apartment, and somehow he mixed the disparate elements together into a cohesive theme which you hear now on the soundtrack. We attributed it to John McGovern, a portmanteau of his relatives and mine, but that’s us. Believe it or not, I was originally in talks with Vince ‘Rocky IV’ DiCola to do the score, but it fell through.
We ended up having to foley some of the sound in a makeshift sound booth that basically consisted of Tom Crnkovich, Jared Cohn, and Robert Vertrees taking turns in Ryan’s hallway with a microphone and pillows and towels stuffed under the doors. I think those scenes have some of the best sound work of the movie.
SFX, we had a blast doing those, selecting various gunshots (at one point Elliott and Ryan put this ridiculous cannon explosion over the shot of Jared’s Derringer going off which made all of us lose it hysterically). We did Rebel Yells, officer calls, volleys of fire, Indian screams, all from a Westwood apartment.
We shot pick ups out in the desert, and even brought the desert home to Ryan’s back alley for the shot of Picaro’s foot getting a bullet (it was actually, I think either my foot or Ryan’s).
We premiered the thing at a bar in Hollywood. Thomas and Jared showed up with their character’s hats. Jared introduced me to a few people who never called me. I got the drunk on hard hard liquor for the very last time in my life, until I puked up my guts in the street afterwards. It surprised me the people that turned out for the thing – old coworkers, friends of friends. It surprised me who didn’t show too.
I didn’t get to give a speech or anything before the movie ran for the only audience it ever had. I kept everybody waiting up to the last possible minute, affording no time for a proper introduction. I don’t know that I had anything to say. I think maybe by that time I hated Meaner Than Hell. It wasn’t precisely what I wanted to accomplish, and I was sick of it. Much of the crew had stopped believing in it, dismissing it as crap. I guess a lot of it is.
In the intervening years it garnered no attention. I submitted to all the big indie festivals and a lot of the small ones. Nobody wanted it.
I had, in my mind, taken the best shot I could, and nobody had turned their head. Nobody had noticed it. It sat on Ryan’s computer. I made half hearted attempts to put it on Netflix and Amazon over the years, but always turned to other projects. Thomas would call me out of the blue and ask about it now and then. Everybody had their DVD’s. Every actor had been paid (except Alex Bakalarz, who played the wounded soldier – I owe him fifty bucks for the two hour shoot still). I couldn’t even look at it anymore.
And over the years, as my tenuous connection to the film industry dwindled and my fiction writing began to supersede it in terms of success, Jared’s, conversely grew. I started doing script work for his projects, and now the guy seems to be directing a movie every other month. I see him on Netflix and all over Facebook, shooting in freaking Thailand. His movies show up in my newsfeed, getting reviewed on major websites. He’s a driven guy.
Thomas….last year, Thomas called me again. “This is Tope,” he said, as always, and by God he was.
He told me he was playing Dillinger, in an indie film shooting back in the Midwest, where he was currently living. He asked me about Meaner Than Hell as always, and about any other projects I had going. But I was just writing novels now and had nothing for him.
Elliott and I had such plans for Thomas. One late night ride back from the shoot we talked about how we wanted to do a kick ass Lone Ranger movie, and Thomas and Lance Henricksen would play the Cavendish brothers. Thomas would be a Lash LaRue type character with a bullwhip. When I was still writing scripts, I put a role for him in an unrealized zombie project, as a cantankerous caretaker of an amusement park. I even talked about redubbing Meaner Than Hell the way I wanted, if I could get Thomas and Jared together to do it.
But around Memorial Day Thomas got killed by a train, almost out of nowhere. Well, out of nowhere for me. That guy palled around with tigers. I thought he was unflappable, untouchable. The obituary said it was deliberate, though. I don’t know. Friends of his I’ve talked to doubt it. I don’t know what I think.
My affection for Meaner Than Hell grows with each subsequent viewing now, though.
It’s no masterpiece, but I really believe there is a good movie in there. Maybe I should have shown the Indians more. Maybe I should have cut the dialogue down. My biggest regret about the whole thing is that I feel like I failed the talent involved. There was a great group of guys that gathered together and believed in this thing while they were doing it, and in the end, I guess they got nothing from it. Or at least, it wasn’t something they felt proud of, could point to, or that (perhaps most importantly) got them more work.
But I’ll tell you what. I firmly believe that at the fifty five minute mark to the end, I made almost exactly the movie I wanted to make. It’s right there. It started for real on that day I wrote about above, when I nearly ruined a take with my own excitement.
And how many people can say they did that?
I like Meaner Than Hell. How can I not?
Anyway, if you want to watch it, we finally put the whole thing up on Amazon Prime. You can watch it here. And if you get bored out of your mind, fast forward to the 55 minute mark I guess and give it a half hour of your time.
It’s a very slow burn, but I lit it with the help of some good friends.
is the author of sixteen novels (including the acclaimed weird western series Merkabah Rider) and dozens of short stories. He is an independent filmmaker, award winning screenwriter, and sometime Star Wars contributor.
Born in Indiana, educated in Chicago, he resides in the Los Angeles area.
Want An Autographed Copy?
Send an e-mail to emerdelac AT gmail DOT com for details.
Look On My Works, Ye Mighty, And Despair (stuff I’ve written – click on each cover to read more)
13TH
THAT AT WHICH DOGS HOWL AND OTHER LOVECRAFTIAN STORIES
CONQUER: FEAR OF A BLACK CAT
Rainbringer: Zora Neale Hurston Against The Lovecraftian Mythos
Conquer
The Knight With Two Swords
Bond Unknown (featuring Mindbreaker)
Angler In Darkness
Monstrumfuhrer
Perennial
Andersonville
With Sword And Pistol
Coyote’s Trail
Terovolas
Merkabah Rider: High Planes Drifter
Merkabah Rider 2: The Mensch With No Name
Merkabah Rider 3: Have Glyphs Will Travel
Merkabah Rider 4: Once Upon A Time In The Weird West
Buff Tea
Star Wars Insider #147 (featuring Hammer)
Star Wars: Fists of Ion: Memoirs of A Champion Shockboxer (formerly a Hyperspace Exclusive at Starwars.com)
So Uncivilized: Great Gunfighters In Star Wars Part I
So Uncivilized: Great Gunfighters In Star Wars Part 2
Slugthrowers: Popular Music In The Star Wars Galaxy Part 1
Slugthrowers Part 2
Head Like a Jar, Appearing In Call of Poohthulhu from April Moon Books
‘The Colors Of A Rainbow To One Born Blind’ in Tales From Arkham Sanitarium
‘Express’ in Midnight In The Pentagram
The Adventure of The Three Rippers in Sherlock Holmes and The Occult Detectives
Brown Jenkins’ Reckoning in Tails Of Terror
Summer of Lovecraft
The Pulp Horror Book of Phobias (Featuring A Stroke of Lightning)
Transmissions From Punktown (featuring Blueshift Drive)
18 Wheels Of Science Fiction (featuring Hit/Run)
Occult Detective Quarterly Presents (featuring Conquer Comes Correct)
A figure descended quickly out of the sky. Small. Slight. No more than a child, really. The police spotlights caught the green of his strange costume. He was dressed like a masked Christmas elf, with a belted green leather tunic and gauntlets, some kind of green bodysuit, and a peaked, Robin Hood-style cowl. His appearance would’ve been ridiculous if it hadn’t been so unexpected.
Delirium Tremens 