Cover Reveal: THAT AT WHICH DOGS HOWL (and other Lovecraftian stories)

“We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight.” – H.P. Lovecraft

Coming soon from Raven’s Canticle Press is my second fiction collection, this one focusing on my Lovecraftian output, THAT AT WHICH DOGS HOWL AND OTHER LOVECRAFTIAN STORIES.

Tom Brown has done the cover art and it’s lovely –

The TOC contains a number of my previously published stories, and a couple never before seens…

THE WOODS OF EPHRAIM (from Sword And Mythos) – King David’s Mighty Men pursue the rebel Prince Abasalom into a strange forest.
THE LADY OF THE AMOROUS CITY (from Cirsova Magazine #4) – Sir Kay and his adopted brother Arthur accept a quest to free a mysterious lady’s distant city from the terrors of The Fish Knight.
BY UNKNOWN HANDS (from Shadows Of An Inner Darkness) – A pair of murderous conmen in 1920’s Oklahoma pick the wrong Native woman to bilk for her oil rights.
BROWN JENKIN’S RECKONING (from Tails Of Terror) – The Cats of Ulthar convene to determine how best to deal with the vile creature leading a midnight army of rampaging rats in Arkham.
THAT AT WHICH DOGS HOWL (New) – The events of The Whisperer In Darkness as experienced by its canine protagonists.
IT CAME TO MODESTO (from Atomic Age Cthulhu) – An outcast teenager is rescued from a terrific drag racing accident by a peculiar doctor and his silent granddaughter.
SNEAK PREVIEW (New) – A Hollywood schlockmeister bets on a blacklisted German avante garde director to deliver the horror movie that will fund his passion project.
THE CRAWLIN’ CHAOS BLUES (previously published) – A pair of bluesmen travel to the crossroads to call up the Devil and summon something much much worse.
FIVE TO ONE (from Summer Of Lovecraft) – A fringe professor uses a student riot at Miskatonic University to distract from his occult ritual atop the library.
THE BOONIEMAN (from World War Cthulhu) – A Green Beret unit on a Cambodian forward firebase during the Vietnam War arrives too late to save a Montagnard village from massacre and bears witness to the awesome vengeance of an adopted Tcho Tcho tribesman.
BLACK TALLOW (from The Dark Rites of Cthulhu) – A translator visits the home of an affluent acquaintance to help translate a puzzling book that will grant the ritualist the deepest desire of his heart.
ANAPARAGOGI (New) – Hell Week for the pledges of Miskatonic Unviersity’s most prestigious frat.
THE THEOPHANY OF NYX (from Fading Light: An Anthology of The Monstrous) – The moon cracks open and discharges a cloud which soon obscures the sun.
THE ALLCLEAR (from Return of The Old Ones: Apocalyptic Lovecraftian Horror) – In the far future, a primitive underground society prepares to send its annual voluntary sacrifical offering to the surface….only to have the previous year’s volunteer miraculously return.

Preorder info when it becomes available.

Merkabah Rider Shirts

T-shirts featuring Juri Umagami’s art for the Merkabah Rider series are available on Teepublic.

Just a heads up that the Have Glyphs Will Travel shirts are on sale for thirteen bucks for the next two days.

https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/8526740-merkabah-rider-have-glyphs-will-travel-cover?store_id=162326

M. Wayne Miller’s Interior Art for Merkabah Rider 3: Have Glyphs Will Travel

While I’m plugging away at my John Conquer novel and trying to sell this weird western wuxia book, I thought I’d pop in here and show you guys one of the pieces M. Wayne Miller did for the interior of the forthcoming Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel, which ought to be out in a month.

Here’s a look at the art for The Mules of The Mazzikim, which features Lilith and her boys come to pay The Rider a visit.

The Lost Claddagh Ring of Playa Juanillo

Today’s date is October 4^th, 2018. If, while combing Juanillo Beach outside Punta Cana, Dominican Republic or snorkeling or just wading around, you’ve found a man’s ring matching the one pictured (that’s a golden Claddagh design with a woven, encircling braid over a platinum band), with an inscription on the inner band that reads S.L.B. to E.M.E. and the date March 2^nd, 2002 within, oh….1-60 years of today, please contact me through emerdelac@gmail.com. It has great sentimental value. It’s the ring I was married in, you see, and I wore it as I held my three children for the first time. I’d love to know it turned up.

If you’ve happened upon this ring at some later date, maybe in the far flung future….well, you might be wondering what the story is behind it. I put this up as a courtesy. I don’t know about you, but I dislike untidy ends and unresolved mysteries.

I’m Ed Erdelac, and I write under the full name Edward M. Erdelac, to differentiate myself from my father, who is Edward Gerald Erdelac.  As of this writing I’ve done thirteen novels, and short stories all over the place, a couple times for Star Wars, if that’s still a thing. If this is a complete digital footprint, you can see all that elsewhere on the page. I set out to be rich and move mountains, but I’m just about the most outwardly unlucky person on the earth. You will probably think me losing my wedding band after it riding sixteen years safely on my finger is evidence of this. Here I am, pictured the day before. The ring is out of frame and I am blissfully unaware of the disaster impending. It was actually my birthday on the 28th. Hah!

I lost it clowning around in the waters off Juanillo Beach. It was our first trip out of the United States. My wife was a bridesmaid and we accompanied a dear friend and her family on a big honeymoon excursion to the Caribbean.  Funny enough, the bride joked to my wife to go and check on her new husband, see if he had lost his brand new wedding band yet. We’d had about a half-dozen pina coladas a piece and were just horsing around. I was trying to master a paddle board when my wife waded up, wearing that red swimsuit pictured here, and with a look of shock and a bright smile, held up her hand and pointed to her wedding band.

It took me a minute to figure out what she was trying to say, then I looked down and saw the white stripe where my ring had been since the day we’d married at Starved Rock State Park in Illinois during a blizzard, surrounded by a handful of our closest and most steadfast friends and family at the time. I’ve spent nearly seventeen years with that ring. Sure I’ve taken it off, but it’s never fallen off. I’ve swum every day of the summer with my kids and it hasn’t slipped off. I’ve surfed in Los Angeles and it stayed with me.

I sobered immediately, no longer a besotted Bilbo, but a mumbling, wide-eyed Gollum. I got the groom’s snorkel and mask and went to my hands and knees. I think I must have spent thirty minutes crawling along the bottom of that stretch of beach, clawing at it with my hands, praying to God it would somehow show up, knowing it wouldn’t, the only sound my own breathing and the occasional invocation of ‘Jesus.’  Today my back is lobster red and starting to raise into boils. I tried like hell to find that thing you’re holding.  I sifted through the muck of sargasso piled on the beach for another ten minutes, until the excursion guides from our hotel, the Al Sol, told me we flat out had to go. They took pictures of my wife’s ring, assured me that would keep an eye out for it.

I was the last one to leave the beach.

My friends consoled me, telling me we could get a new one made, they had connections to good jewelers, etc.

We’re not well off people by any means, so the monetary loss is almost as significant as the sentimental one. I have no idea what it costs to make a ring like that today. I’m not a successful writer by any visible measure. I think, if you’re reading this from the far future, it may be a more difficult feat to find a copy of one of my (lucky) thirteen novels than it will have been to have extracted this old wedding band from the piles of wet sand at the bottom of the Caribbean, or under eons of Dominican beach.

But, that’s who I am, or who I was. I liked telling stories, and this was the story behind that mysterious ring.

Oh also, my wife and I designed it. We wanted a Claddagh and a winding knot to represent the interconnectedness of our two lives, how we were weaving them together.  Claddaghs only came with a plain band. Funny enough, on the boat ride out to Juanillo, we explained all this to the groom. We were proud of the design. Moreso because we had a guy in Los Angeles make them for us, and a couple years later Seth Rogen’s character in the movie Pineapple Express gave it to his girl. When my wife Sandra stopped in the jeweler’s later, she saw the musician Vince Neil pictured with one behind the counter.  She asked in amazement if that were our design, and the jeweler sheepishly admitted it was. I guess he thought we were gonna sue him or something, but we just sort of laughed it off. It was a good story to tell, and I like telling stories, like I said.

Now let me tell you the best story out of this whole thing, which is not a story I told, but the story my wife told to me as I sat tearful and crushed on a rowdy bus of drunks heading for Hoyo Azul, The Blue Hole, a 300ft deep subterranean pool at the foot of an I-don’t-know-how-tall cliff at Scape Park, our final destination that day.

I had wanted to give those rings to our grandchildren someday, and I had, in my mind, ruined it.  I’d lost a precious heirloom and though I didn’t say it to her, I felt like the whole incident was emblematic of how I had regarded my marriage and my life up to that point. I had taken it for granted, not paid it enough attention or appreciated it, and it had slipped away.

I’m not a great husband, you see. I’ve never been unfaithful to my wife; this isn’t that kind of story. But in my heart, I have been selfish, or self-centered. I live out lives in my mind. I daydream. And between worrying over those inner worlds, and raising three kids, and just occupying my time with trivial things to wind down, I think I am very often a neglectful husband. I am sometimes short tempered, and befuddled by the world. I half-listen, and I miss things a lot.

But this I heard.

Sandra told me that our marriage wasn’t a piece of jewelry. She said that when she came out in the water to pester the groom and then saw the lack of ring on my finger, she was only sad an instant. She looked at me, and at the ocean around, and the waves on the beach, and instantly accepted that it was gone. Even as I started cursing and snatched the groom’s mask and snorkel and dove into the water, she knew I would be there till the bus left, because that was how I was, and what I had to do. She resolved not to interfere, but was already going over in her mind how to replace it.

She’s practical and unflappable like that, and that’s maddened me and others around her in the past, but we’re all wrong.

On the bus later, holding my hand across the back of this pretty Brazillian guy taking endless selfies with his just as pretty boyfriend, and much later at a dim outdoor restaurant, she told me, in answer to my sobbing lament that I had wanted the kids to have our rings, or their kids to have them, she told me the rings were just metal, and we put too much worth into material things. What matters is the stories behind them. The stories are how our children will remember us to our grandkids. Stories remembering love with humor and irony and affection and even sadness; those are the things our descendants will treasure, long after the last person to touch that lost ring is gone.

So we got off the bus and we held hands and walked through the jungle, and one of the bridesmaids told me we could have a party and renew our vows when the new ring’s made, and that now we had a reason to return here, and I said, “Yeah, with a metal detector.”

Sandra said we will melt down her ring and use a portion of it to cast the new one for me, so it’ll still be the sixteen year old metal that we joined our lives with symbolically.

Sandra’s story is a better one than mine, even though she’s never written a book yet (she’d probably nail it if she did). She grew up in the housing projects of Chicago where she had nerve damage in one ear from some kid shooting off a pistol too close. She lost her mother at sixteen, had a son by a boy who didn’t stay around, her father went off elsewhere. She raised herself, and her son Jonathan, got her GED, and a university education around the time we met. Early in our marriage she got her Master’s, and she spends her days as a Marriage and Family Therapist opening a heart as big and warm as the Dominican sun to total strangers, helping them sew their lives back together like the interwoven band on our wedding rings. I actually learned over the weekend that the bride, her first boss here in California, hired her having been impressed by her story. She handed out custom made robes to her bridesmaids, with nicknames she had given them. Sandra’s is ‘Bootstraps.’

She’s the strongest, loveliest, wisest woman I’ve ever known.

And that’s why, despite all my outward misfortunes, despite being an unsuccessful writer and losing my wedding ring in the ocean, I’m the luckiest man alive.

We dove off that whatever it was height into that icy blue water, the cleanest I have ever known, which the guides told us could turn back the clock ten years if you stayed in for a half an hour. When I came out, the hurt over that lost ring was fading a little, though today its imprint hasn’t quite faded from my finger.

I have not lost our love, after all, just a ring. My wife Sandra Lynn Botello is the queen of my heart, and I keep her inside, as the two hands of the Claddagh touch the crowned heart of the ring.

So if you’re reading this from the future and we’re gone and you’ve found this ring, I hope it brings you joy. Buy yourself a good life with it if you can, or give it to someone who matters to you. Tell them the story behind it, and make a good story with it going on. It was actually Sandra’s idea to post this all over the place. She said I should leave a good digital trail for whoever finds it in the future.

So pass this around.

Hasta luego.

ADDENDUM:
(I’ve got an update to this post now….read here)

Merkabah Rider: High Planes Drifter Is Now Available

After a long hiatus, Merkabah Rider, the greatest weird western about a Hasidic gunslinger tracking the renegade teacher who betrayed his mystic Jewish order of astral travelers across the demon haunted Southwest of 1879 is back in print and Kindle on Amazon.

Featuring new interior illustrations by M. Wayne Miller and cover art by Juri Umagami.

“Ed Erdelac’s  Merkabah Rider is equal parts Tolkien, Leone, and Lovecraft and yet manages to remain completely original, and that is quite an accomplishment. This is a FANTASTIC series. – Geof Darrow, Eisner Award winning creator of Shaolin Cowboy and Hard Boiled.

“The Rider is a fabulous character, in all senses of that word, and Erdelac’s a fabulous writer. High Planes Drifter contains all the demons, ancient gods, and gunplay a lover of weird westerns could want, but told from an angle no one else has touched before. Where else are you going to find a Jewish Doctor Strange packing heat in the old west? Nowhere, that’s where. This is crazily entertaining stuff.” – Daryl Gregory, award-winning author of Pandemonium and Spoonbenders

“Riding out of the Old West comes the Merkabah Rider, a Hasidic gunfighter who owes his provenance as much to the nasty inhabitants of Elmore Leonard’s westerns as he does his piousness to Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane. This highly original episodic series breathes new life into the overworked western with tight action, inglorious heroes, and unpredictable plots.” – Weston Ochse, award-winning author of SEAL Team 666 and Scarecrow Gods.

“I don’t have any hesitation in calling Merkabah Rider: High Planes Drifter the pinnacle of the Weird West genre, and one that will be hard to surplant.” -Sci Fi and Fantasy Reviewer

“Edward M. Erdelac’s Merkabah Rider: Tales Of A High Planes Drifter is without reservation one of the best Weird Westerns to roll into town in the last decade, if not the best.” – Cory Gross, Voyages Extraordinaires

 

Now available! Give it a read, tell your friends! Thanks, all!

https://www.amazon.com/Merkabah-Rider-High-Planes-Drifter/dp/1721011234/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1531386889&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=erdelac+merkabah+rider

Angler In Darkness Is Out!

My first story collection, Angler In Darkness, is out now.

From the front cover:

From the back cover:

EDWARD M. ERDELAC, Author of Andersonville, Monstrumführer, The Van Helsing Papers, and The Merkabah Rider series presents his first collection of short fiction, spanning nearly a decade of fishing in the sunless depths of the imagination, some brought to light here for the first time.

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.

EIGHTEEN ‘CATCHES’ FROM AN ANGLER IN DARKNESS

Now I decided to take a page from Punktown author Jeffrey Thomas’ promotional playbook and post the first paragraph/line of each story, one a day till release, so here are the openings of all eighteen stories…

Day 1 –
First story up is exclusive to the collection – The Mound Of The Night Panther, about a French trapper who discovers the ultimate fate of the lost Native American city of Cahokia…

Auguste Oudin had come down the Father of All Rivers to Illinois from Quebec three years ago in a forty foot canoe with the Seminarians and Henri DeTonti as a courer des bois, paddling, signing, and trapping for the young priests.

Day 2 –

Today it’s Killer Of The Dead, the first story I ever sold, about a pair of Blackfoot Indians tracking down the gang of vampires who slaughtered their village.

The boy puts his back to the tipis with their warm, glowing bellies, and he feels the smooth, cold stones beneath the trickling surface of the creek with his toes. The water is black but for the fat hunter’s moon reflected lazing amid the wavering stars. He is not afraid to be alone. He thinks the night shadows hide nothing that is not there in the day.

Day 3 –

Today we have Bigfoot Walsh, a weird western about a group of Texas Rangers sent to investigate a series of bloody killings in the hill country, and their tall, shaggy chief scout who, it turns out, is peculiarly suited to the task….

It was a cool spring night when the Texas Rangers rode out of the dark into Fredricksburg.

I remember because the people were out lighting the bonfires on the hilltops, and one of the Rangers, a dirty youth with rusty hair, asked me what they were for.

Day 4 –

Today it’s the first line of Devil’s Cap Brawl, which is about a Central Pacific Railroad crew dynamiting a mountain and releasing an immense creature long trapped within. A mysterious Chinese rail worker comes forward to stop it. It’s a weird western send up of 60’s Godzilla/Gamera movies with a dash of TV’s Kung Fu thrown in….

Joe Blas was so called because his papist upbringing in Drom, County Tipperary, had given him a knack for devising the most ingenious blasphemies anyone on either side of the Sierras had ever heard.

Day 5 –

Spearfinger, about a Cherokee policeman who chases a fugitive murderer up a mountain and comes down with something much worse.

Jimpsey Waterback knocked a spark from his pocketknife with a chip of flint and fanned the handful of smoking grasses with his hat till a single tongue of flame blossomed.

He hated to start a fire, but it was cold up on the mountain tonight. There was a cutting breeze hissing through the pines, causing the bones in his hands to quiver like hammer struck wire. He hoped his pursuers didn’t see or smell the flame. He had a long way to go before he got to Arkansas. The round, windy moon shining like a bullet hole in black canvas was working against him.

Day 6 –

Today it’s In Thunder’s Shadow, a story about an archaeologist in the field during the Bone Wars of the 1870’s tracking down an Arizona legend about a thunderbird, and the wily old hunter who’s not content with fossils.

September 25, 1876

To Professor O.C. Marsh, Yale College, New Haven, Connecticut

 

I have arrived in Delirium Tremens in Arizona Territory and met with the Drucker & Dobbs Mining Co.’s geologist, Elvin Planterbury, who contacted your office about the fossil he discovered in their main copper shaft. Fortunately Mr. Planterbury was able to preserve the specimen before it was broken up and sold off for the price of a few drinks. It is, in my opinion, a tarsal fragment from a large pteranodon (most probably longiceps). I have personally never seen a fossil so well preserved. Work in the mine has necessarily not been halted to await my arrival, and examination of the location at which the fragment was uncovered is impossible. I intend to survey the sedimentary substrate of the upper area of the surrounding Huachuca Mountains. I have hopes that should it prove fruitful, my work might warrant the assignment of a team from the Geological Survey. I was able to purchase a quantity of dynamite from the company as well as sufficient provisions and gear, but I shall likely require more funds to ship any samples I find for your appraisal.

Day 7 –

Today, in The Blood Bay, Jonas, living on his estranged father’s ranch after the death of his mother, pines for a wild, blood red mare. His father will only let him keep her if Jonas can get her to eat….

Jonas stood with his foot on the bottom rail of the breaking pen fence between Clem and Panos, watching Henry bust a three-year-old appaloosa the afternoon his daddy, Famous Fallon, rode up with the bay mare strung behind.

Famous had run out on Jonas’ mama when he was four years old and it drove her to drink. She’d often told him this, and his Grandma said it was so.

Day 8 –

The Exclusive, about a dogged frontier reporter in the last moments of his life who lands the interview of the century with history’s most accomplished killer –

Tom Cotter was no man to be trifled with. He had rustled Mexican steer along the border into a sizeable herd in his youth, and had built himself an empire as one of the first outfits to drive cattle to the Missouri railheads, putting beef in the bellies of starving soldiers during the War Between The States. He owned a good chunk of New Mexico, and was a king among cattlemen. There were senators that doffed their hats to him, and he in turn did their dirty work on occasion, sending out his hired villains to execute foreclosures on land he didn’t own, and gunning down those who tried to resist. He had a beef contract with the local Indian reservation which he rarely fulfilled, yet the government money filled his war bag every month on schedule just the same.

Day 9 –

Tell Tom Tildrum is the tale of a great white hunter relating a story of personal horror to gain membership in a strange, exclusive London club –

“Were the squabs to your liking, Captain Howe?” Bertrand asked, dabbing the grease from his lips with his napkin.

In truth, they had not been. I have never much appreciated the philosophy behind pigeons à la crapaudine; squabs masquerading as frogs. It’s a silly French concoction, a holdover from the old days when papists insisted that their fish be made to look like beef to ease the Lenten fasts. I’d had it once before, the first time I’d dined with the Prestons at Mundui on Lake Navaisha. A preposterous dish. I like my swine arse up and my pigeons on their backs. I’d said so before. That was why Kiki had taken such a liking to me. The American infatuation with plain speaking, I suppose.

Day 10 –

Mighty Nanuq is about an Inuit shaman passing on the secret of his power over Canada’s state sanctioned kaiju to his dubious nephew –

Hal Anawak shook hands with Lt. Governor O’Dea and smiled for the cameras, the bulbs popping off like a chain of lightning among the gathered crowd on the lawn in front of Governor’s House. Luckily his hooded eyes were naturally thinner than a white man’s. Nobody would know he was closing them.

George LeDuc would have thought that was hilarious.

But George was dead.

Day 11 –

A Haunt of Jackals, where a Mossad agent witnesses an attack on Israel by a pair of rampaging giant monsters instituted by a sinister enemy….

And I will cut off your carved images and your pillars from among you, and you shall bow down no more to the work of your hands; Micah 5:13

The jeep bounced along the rutted country road through the sultry Itapua countryside several kilometers north of Hohenau, packed with four men in dark clothes and harnesses strapped with weapons. Though it was a moonless Paraguayan night, the headlights were off, the driver trusting to the dual tube AN/PVS-5 nightvision goggles he wore.

This wasn’t going to be like Eichmann.

Day 12 –

This one’s from The Better To See You, a story I wrote from an idea my daughter had, an alternate telling of Little Red Riding Hood.

The girl watched her mother pack the last of the sandwiches into the pink picnic basket. She slipped the Cincinnati baseball cap her father had given her (because it was her favorite color; she had no interest whatsoever in baseball) onto her head and snatched up the wicker handle just as her mother closed the lid.

Her mother’s hand slapped down over her’s.

The girl looked into her mother’s eyes.

Her mother held up one finger.

“You know Grandma’s not well these days.”

Day 13 –

Today we have an excerpt from Conviction, the story of a persecuted kid in Chicago’s notorious Cabrini Green housing project who suddenly finds the power to strike back at his tormentors.

“Hello, Abassi,” the lady say, when I sit down. “My name is Daniela Orozco. Now, can you tell me why you were referred to me today?”

I just shrug, even though I know.

When she open the folder and slide the piece of paper with my drawing on it, I look down at my busted shoes.

“Your teachers are concerned about you,” she say, though I know really they just worried about they own selves. “Abassi?”

I look up, and her eyes are on me. I look away, but every time I come back, she still looking. She pretty.

“You’re a very good artist, Abassi,” she say.

Nobody never tell me I good at anything. It feel good. I wish the picture was something nicer.

I drew it in history class. We was learning about the minutemen. In the picture in the book they wore GD colors and they was all strapped in the street like they was bangin’. I thought about Lateesa. I drew the minutemen blowing up, like they swallowed bombs. Their triangle hats was on fire, their heads come off, some of ‘em. I drew my own punkinhead self in there too. I shouldn’t have. If I’d of left that out, nobody would’ve said shit.

“You told the teacher these were the minutemen,” she say, with her pencil on the bloody bodies. “But who’s this down here?”

She point to the little boy with the big head and the busted shoes.

I don’t say shit.

Day 14 –

Today we have ‘Crocodile,’ a story about a Pizza Hut cashier at a Flying J truck stop who falls madly in love with a vampire she meets in the parking lot. But vampires aren’t like the ones in the books she reads.

Gwendolyn could not entirely suppress the girlish shudder that began in the pit of her stomach and somehow spread through her torso to the tips of each extremity as Brendan took her hand in his and led her toward the forest.

Brendan.

Her dark angel.

Her Peter Pan.

His hand was cold, as if scoured by a winter wind, though it was a sultry August evening after a rain, the remains of it rising as steam off the moonlit pavement and hanging in the air. Yet despite his coldness, wherever he touched her, warmth spread as if kissed by an noontime sunbeam.

She followed him. She would follow him anywhere. Particularly tonight.

Day 15 –
In Philopatry, a Catholic priest contacts an old altar boy turned hitman and ex-convict, having learned the identity of a serial murderer stalking a South Boston neighborhood….

Nobody at O’Malley’s Bar took much notice of the old priest who came in from the stone cold November night, brushing the rain from his black hat and his dripping beige topcoat. It was a Tuesday, so there weren’t too many people there to take notice. The men were in their drink. The local stylenes, cackling their lipstick stained cigarette laughs crossed and uncrossed their cheetah print legs and paid him no more than a glance. Priests were like a fourth class of male, more unavailable than a married man or a queer even. O’Malley himself would only raise his eyebrows at the entrance of some colored guy from Roxbury. As long as this baby sprinkler paid for his drinks he didn’t care.

Day 16 –
Here’s the opening to Sea of Trees, a tale of a depressed Japanese businessman who wanders into the infamous suicide forest and learns the afterlife doesn’t offer the escape he had hoped for….

Manabu stepped out of his car and let the door close. He did not take the keys. The car was a rental and the Tocoo! agency in Fujiyoshida would want it back.

He took the hiking trail out of the parking lot and walked for an hour into the woods before he came to the No Hiking Beyond This Point sign and stepped over the rope to pick his way among the tangled roots
.
His mother had told him as a boy never to play in Aokigahara Forest, the Sea of Trees, because it was haunted by the miserable ghosts of those that every year wandered in here to die. It had been going on since back in the old days of the daimyos when the destitute families around Mount Fuji used the woods for ubasute, abandoning their elderly infirm to the elements in times of famine, to spare the remainder of the household.

Manabu’s mother had told him the Ubasuteyama story once.
This wasn’t in Aokigahara, but in Nagano somewhere. There was a famine, and a boy chose to carry his crippled old mother up to the mountain to leave her in the woods. He carried her very deep into the forest, perhaps thinking to lose his conscience too.

When at last he set her down, he saw that he might become lost himself on the way back down.

“Don’t worry, son,” croaked the old woman. “As you carried me, I spread out my hands and broke off the twigs of the trees. There is a trail of the broken ends behind you now to follow home.”

Manabu’s mother had ended this story by clasping both sides of his pudgy face in her hands and promising him that she loved him as much as the old women in the story had loved her son.

Manabu’s mother was two years dead now.

Day 17-
Almost there! Here’s an excerpt from Thy Just Punishments, the story of a South Boston priest who hires himself out as an occult hitman to the Irish mob to support his gambling habit….

The steady flow of sins petty and titanic, real and imagined, droned in hushed whispers through the confessional screen, punctuated each time by a myriad of variations on the Act of Contrition;

“O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins because of Thy just punishments, but most of all because they offended Thee, O Lord, who art all-merciful and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace, to sin no more.”

Father Tim O’Herlihey half-listened, doled out Hail Marys and Our Fathers, muttered out rehearsed advice when prompted, and checked the passing of every other minute on his watch, fighting to keep from laying his head against the finished wood wall and snoring. He squinted at his racing form and wondered if he could hit the ATM and catch the Blue Line down to Suffolk Downs in time for the last run.

The Bishop had promised him a new priest this month, just in time for him to saddle the poor bastard with Saturday confession and free him up for next month’s Belmont Stakes Day.

Of course, first he had to pull a stake together. There had been questions about the lightness of the parish’s tithe last month. He had thought he’d had a sure thing with this maiden horse Norfolk Enchants, but the stupid nag had busted its leg on a turn and thrown its jockey over the withers, losing to Peony’s Envy.

Day 18 –

The capper story, The Wrath of Benjo, is a take on the Japanese legend of the tsukumogami; that useful inanimate objects gain sentience after a hundred years. But what happens when they fall to disuse and can no longer serve their purpose?

Benjo wept bitterly as the rain struck the barred windowpane. 
Long had he gone hungry counting the tiles on the floor, staring at the dirty white walls, at the chromed hinges and latches of the gray stall doors. He had marked his time by the disgraceful yellowing of the paper rolls as they grew old, brittle and angry. He would council them to keep heart, to maintain their cleanliness, remember their duty and be watchful, but after many years the hunger and resentment had at last seeped into his heart too. The paper had shriveled and gone silent.

Even the attendant had ceased coming. He had resorted to cleaning himself as best as he could.

“Useless! Useless!” His cries bounced off the empty walls for the thousandth time, matching the lightning and the thunder.

For many years he had wiled away the lonesome hours imagining the luxuries he would bestow upon his next guest, if ever one came.

But that dream had died long ago. He knew only the ravenous hunger now….

 

Order here –

Hear The Eagle Scream In Horror Library 6

 

My story Hear The Eagle Scream is debuting in Farolight Publishing’s Horror Library Volume 6, edited by Eric G. Guignard.

Stories include –

Garrett Quinn – I’ve Finally Found You
Jackson Kuhl – Cartagena Hotel
Stephanie Bedwell-Grime – The Exterminators
Connor de Bruler – Il Mostro
Tom Johnstone – Oldstone Gardens
Bentley Little – The Plumber
Kathryn E. McGee – The Creek Keepers’ Lodge
Josh Rountree – Snowfather
Jeffrey Ford – Five Pointed Spell
John M. Floyd – The Red-Eye to Boston
Raymond Little – Elsa and I
Rebecca J. Allred – Mother’s Mouth, Full of Dirt
Darren O. Godfrey – D.U.I.
Sean Eads – Predestination’s a Bitch
David Tallerman – Casualty of Peace
Marc E. Fitch – The Starry Crown
Vitor Abdala – Instant Messaging
JG Faherty – The H Train
Dean H. Wild – The Gaff
Jayani C. Senanayake – Kalu Kumaraya (My Dark Prince)
Lucas Pederson – We Were Monsters
C. Michael Cook – The Night Crier
Thomas P. Balázs – Waiting for Mrs. Hemley
Jay Caselberg – The Ride
Ahna Wayne Aposhian – Old Hag
Carole Johnstone – Better You Believe

Here’s an excerpt from my story, which concerns an old rancher taking on a drifting hired hand in Depression-era Texas against his better judgment.

*************************************************************************************

It was not uncommon to see men on the road, what with that son of a bitch Hoover in the White House. Jim Thiemann did not stir when his old eyes first caught sight of one, even when the ragged man paused at the chicken wire and wagon wheel gate that separated the Longview Ranch from the rest of Scurry County.

He did cease rocking in his chair and put his hand to the double barreled shotgun leaning against the porch rail when the man lifted the gate and started trudging up to the house.

Just in case.

Jim had a long time to watch him, but it wasn’t till he was about halfway up the road that his failing eyes could make anything out other than his tall, slim shape. The details gradually coalesced as if surfacing from a murky depth.

He had a growth of beard, dirty blonde, and his coveralls were patched, as were the elbows of the corduroy coat slung over his shoulder. There was a beat up hat, what Jim’s daddy had always called a ‘goin’ to hell hat,’ tilted on his head at an angle Jim didn’t much care for, and ratty shoes whose soles flapped like chatty old spinsters when he walked, kicking up half the dust in Texas. The setting orange sun lit the dust like smoke from a brush fire.

“Hello there, brother,” the man called cheerfully as he came to a stop.

“Hello yourself,” Jim replied. He didn’t care for that ‘brother’ talk straight off. In this country you called no man brother who was not, and old men went by ‘sir.’

“You’ve got a sign on your gate says you’re lookin’ to hire a man,” said the stranger.

“I know it. I put it there.”

“Well, I’m your man.”

“You ain’t even asked what kinda work it is.”

“If it pays somethin’ more than stale bread or a can of peas, I’ll do it.”

“You ever worked around a ranch?”

“In California.”

“You know what a fence rider is?”

“Yeah.”

“What is it?”

“Somebody to restring wire, dig postholes, mend gaps.””

“If it weren’t for this goddamn arthritis I’d do it myself. As it is, I can’t keep a cow on the place. What stock I got left’s grazin’ up in them hills,” Jim said, throwing a twisted thumb over his shoulder to indicate the grassy uplands behind the house. “About forty head. The fence needs to get fixed before you can even start bringin’ ‘em down. You get your pay when the job’s done, food and a place to sleep till then. But don’t let me catch you slackin’ to prolong your meals, or you’ll be out on your ass.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

“What’s your name?”

“Horace Greeley.”

Jim stared at the younger man a minute.

“Why do I know that name?”

“He founded the Republican Party. My pa was a tried and true Republican.”

“If you’re greenin’ me right from the get-go….”

“Brother believe me, I wouldn’t do that,” said Horace, showing his gritty palms. “Not in the state I’m in.”

“Alright, well the first thing you got to learn is in Texas you don’t go around callin’ your boss ‘brother.’ You call me ‘boss’ or ‘sir’ or ‘Mr. Thiemann’ or ‘Jim.’”

“Fair enough,” said Horace.

“Second thing is, that hat might be alright for workin’ in the orange groves, but it ain’t gonna make it here. After you go fetch that help sign off the gate, you can come on up to the house,” he said, rising out of the chair. “We’ll get you some proper headgear.”

Horace’s smile fell at the sight of the shotgun, which he apparently hadn’t noticed before.

“Don’t worry. It’s for coyotes. And tried and true Republicans,” Jim said, rubbing his aching back.

Pick up Horror Library Vol 6 here –

Angler In Darkness by M. Wayne Miller

I was gonna wait till the titles were in place and all, but rather than mar it with my name, I thought I’d give you all a sneak peak of M. Wayne Miller’s art for my forthcoming short fiction collection Angler In Darkness.

I love working with Wayne because while the development of my own art skills was arrested somewhere around my Freshman year of high school, I can float him a meager sketch of what I want and he delivers it so close to how I actually see it in my mind it’s uncanny. He may as well be mind melding with me. The late great Norm Rubenstein introduced me to Wayne when he got him to do the awesome wraparound cover for my Van Helsing novel Terovolas. I only sent him a text description, but he absolutely nailed what Norm and I both envisioned.  

Later, I was nervous sending him a sketch of what I envisioned for my story The Boonieman in World War Cthulhu as I didn’t want to offend him as an artist, but he took the bare bones I sent him and just…well, turned it into art. 

Anyway, without further ado….

Awesome.

Check out Wayne’s work here.

http://www.mwaynemiller.com/

 

Andersonville On Tour

Reviews for my new Random House-Hydra novel Andersonville are coming from Lit Reactor, Publishers Weekly, and Examiner as well as Goodreads and so far they’re pretty positive across the board.

Gef Fox interviewed me about the book at his blog and the always friendly folks at Fantasy Book Review lent me some space there to talk about the development of the novel, so please check those out.

Andersonville is doing the rounds of a slew of blogs across the ether, so please take a look at these fine sites. They’ll be featuring reviews at the appointed times or thereabouts.

TOUR STOPS:

Monday, August 17th: Stephanie’s Book Reviews….100 Pages a Day

Tuesday, August 18th: Fourth Street Review

Tuesday, August 18th: Bibliotica

Wednesday, August 19th: The Reader’s Hollow

Wednesday, August 19th: Tynga’s Reviews

Thursday, August 20th: A Book Geek

Monday, August 24th: Bewitched Bookworms

Tuesday, August 25th: Kissin’ Blue Karen

Wednesday, August 26th: Kari J. Wolfe

Thursday, August 27th: No More Grumpy Bookseller

Friday, August 28th: Vic’s Media Room

Monday, August 31st: It’s a Mad Mad World

Tuesday, September 1st: SJ2B House of Books

Wednesday, September 2nd: Historical Fiction Obsession

Thursday, September 3rd: Kimberly’s Bookshelf

Friday, September 4th: Jenn’s Bookshelves

Monday, September 7th: From the TBR Pile

Thy Just Punishments in That Hoodoo, Voodoo That You Do from Angelic Knight/Ragnarok

Today editor and author Lincoln Crisler delivers another bouncing baby anthology, THAT HOODOO, VOODOO THAT YOU DO: A DARK RITUALS ANTHOLOGY with the help of Angelic Knight/Ragnarok Publications, the same fine folks who’ll be bringing you my novella collection WITH SWORD AND PISTOL this August.

The book has a great lineup (and an excellent cover by Shawn King and Joe Martin) –

“Sa fè lontan / Long Time, No See” by Sarah Hans
“Young Girls Are Coming to Ajo” by Ken Goldman
“Into the Mirror Black” by Tim Marquitz
“Severed” by Brandon Ford
“Afflicted” by A.J. Brown
“A Little Bit of Soul” by Craig Cook
“Coughs and Sneezes” by James K. Isaac
“Secret Suicide” by Amy Braun
“Wounds” by Greg Chapman
“Sturm und Drang” by Jeff C. Carter
“Shades of Hades” by E.J. Alexander
“For Love” by DJ Tyrer
“Gingerbread Man” by Rose Strickman
“Johnny Two Places” by Mark Mellon
“The Seed” by N.X. Sharps
“Late Payment” by Jake Elliot
“Masquerade” by C.A. Rowland
“Lessons from a Victory Garden” by Jason Andrew
“The Projectionist” by Timothy Baker
“The Right Hand Man” by J.S. Reinhardt
“Paper Craft” by Leigh Saunders

For my own offering, THY JUST PUNISHMENTS, I reached back into my own Roman Catholic upbringing for a tale of murder and (I hope) laughs.

It’s inspired by a throwaway line by Ward Bond in THE QUIET MAN (“I’ll read yer name in the Mass!”) which refers to the old belief that reading the name of a live person in the requiem for the dead portion of the Mass will result in their untimely death.

I was an altar boy in a Polish parish, and for this story, recalled a lot of the various draconian sisters, slightly inebriated priests, and disapproving old parishioners I have known.

THY JUST PUNISHMENTS concerns the matter of South Boston pastor Father Tim O’Herlihey, a bitter old racehorse aficionado who feeds his gambling addiction by regularly enacting a dark and blasphemous ritual under the noses of his parishioners, reading the names provided to him by a contract killer for the Southie Irish mob and then splitting the profit with him when the victims wind up dead. But when the neighboring parish closes for renovations a crotchety old lady named Mary Ladhe starts paying peculiarly close attention to his doings, and Father Tim finds himself matching wits with a lady of the Old Country, of the Old Magic….

Here’s an excerpt.

————————-

Twenty bucks later he had a black rooster in the kitty carrier and was on his way back to the church.

The sun had gone down and Eladio had locked up the church, but Father Tim had his keys.

He locked the door behind him, went into the sacristy, and changed into his vestments, taking the old red iron knife that had been his great uncle’s from the lock box at the bottom of his closet. He took the carrier out to the altar and lit the candles.

He laid out the chalice, missal, and the black corporal, and began the orate fratres.

“Orate, fratres, ut meum ac vestrum sacrificium acceptabile fiat apud Deum Patrem omnipotentem.”

The greatest injustice to the Roman rite had been the Vatican’s abandonment of Latin. His uncle had always told him that old words had power, and English diluted that power.

He had loved the old Latin mass since his boyhood, and as an altar boy had not confined himself to the responses, but memorized even the priest’s words. Indeed, he had imagined himself not a mere server, but a kind of acolyte in the sacred traditions, a boy-priest on a mystic path. He sometimes fancied in his most blasphemous moments that the opulent house of God with its marble floors and golden accoutrements was his own throne room.

Then once during a particularly early mass, he had mistakenly dashed the silver paten against the edge of the altar and the Holy Eucharist had fallen to the floor. Just a clumsy, daydreaming boy’s mistake, but the entire congregation had let out a collective gasp that had colored his cheeks and ears.

The disapproving scowl of Father John as he stooped over to retrieve the Host by hand had solidified his embarrassment, and to make matters worse, Sister Doligosa had slapped him in the sacristy when he’d returned to change out of his cassock after mass.

“You serve like a cowboy,” the wrinkled old woman had scolded.

He’d been eleven, and run from the church with stinging tears.

He’d been something of a bad boy after that, smoking, profaning, drinking, fleeing wholly from the church in frustrated anger. He had decided that in that moment of innocent clumsiness, he’d been afforded a glimpse at the true nature of so-called believers; that they put more stock in pomp and ritual than in the true love of God.

Hypocrites.

Yet his dear mother had been worried at his turn around, and sent him off to spend time with his great Uncle Patrick, a priest himself from the old country, though of a decidedly different kind than any he’d ever met before or since.

Uncle Patrick had seen the anger in the boy, and one day coaxed the story of why he’d all but abandoned his faith.

To Tim’s surprise, Uncle Patrick had said;

“It’s entirely right you are, Tim. The world is populated wholly by dumb bleating sheep with no understanding whatsoever of the power of the Mass. The Mass is nothing less than magic, Tim. Magic passed down to us from the agents of the gods. And through it,” he said, touching the side of his red nose and winking one sky blue eye, “those with the knowing can bend the will of the angels to our own purpose.”

Tim recited the sursum coda,  sang the trisanctus and the hosanna, and then unlocked the carrier and took out the twitching black cockerel.

Now, with relish, he lifted the clucking chicken high with the iron knife and recited the consecration, the ultimate blasphemy, naming the fowl the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ.

The knife was a relic of the Old Religion, Uncle Patrick had said, given to a monk named Finnian by one of the legendary Tuatha De, the magic folk of Old Ireland, Tuan mac Cairill.  The story was that the monk had sought out Tuan and preached the Gospel to him. Tuan had told the monk of his own gods, and that the monk Finnian had realized the folly of Christianity, and pledged himself to Tuan’s instruction. Tuan, knowing that Christ had conquered his people, saw an opportunity to keep their memory alive and strike at the Church from within. He bestowed Finnian with the sacred sacrificial knife, and the monk became the first of a secret line of priests who paid lip service to Christ but honored the old gods, and perverted the Mass to their ends whenever they could.

And so Tim had become the latest of that ancient line.

He passed the sacred knife of Tuan beneath the beak of the rooster and lets its blood piddle into the chalice.

When it was drained, he raised the brimming cup of blood and the dead animal carcass again to the empty church and proclaimed;

 “Per ipsum et cum ipso et in ipso est tibi Deo Patri omnipotenti in unitate Spiritus Sancti omnis honor et gloria per omnia saecula saeculorum.”

He recited the rest of the rite of transubstantiation, broke the chicken’s neck symbolically, and laid it on the paten.

Then, he recited in Gaelic the age old curse;

“Michael O’Bannon –

No butter be on your milk nor on your ducks a web

May your child not walk and your cow be flayed

And may the flame be bigger and wider

Which will go through your soul

Than the Connemara mountains

If they were a-fire.”

He raised the cup to his lips and downed the warm iron-tasting blood.

That night, as ever, he roasted and ate the chicken.

—————————-

I’m very proud of this story and hope enjoy it.

It can be gotten here –

http://www.amazon.com/That-Hoodoo-Voodoo-You-Anthology-ebook/dp/B00SQG9FFQ/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1422302407&sr=8-2&keywords=that+hoodoo+voodoo

Sláinte chuig na fir, agus go mairfidh na mná go deo!