Bryan Cassiday's Blog, page 12
May 19, 2016
Read Bryan Cassiday’s Newest Thriller at Kindle Scout
Here’s the link to Bryan Cassiday’s newest dark thriller Dying to Breathe on Kindle Scout at Amazon. If you like it, nominate it. Thank you!
May 18, 2016
Kindle Scout Campaign will start May 20, 2016, at 12 a.m.
My new book has been accepted for a Kindle Scout campaign, which will begin on May 20, 2016, at 12 a.m. I will provide the link so that you will be able to read the first eight chapters of my book for free at that time and for the following thirty days. It’s a new Ethan Carr thriller. Keep watching my blog entries for additional information.
April 23, 2016
American Psycho
I know American Psycho is a play now on Broadway, which I haven’t seen, but I did recently watch the movie of the same name for the second time where Patrick Bateman carves a path of blood on Wall Street.
Parts of the movie, directed by Mary Harron, are hilarious black humor, while other parts are ghoulish and worthy of Grand Guignol.
The scene where the Wall Street masters of the universe trot out their business cards and flourish them over lunch is funny. Bateman becomes irate when he sees that one of his buddies has a better card than his because it has a watermark on it. Bateman is a guy who can’t stand being upstaged when it comes to showing off his wealth and concomitant superiority.
On the other hand, the scene where he’s chasing the hooker around his digs with a chainsaw while he’s naked is grisly. The way the scene ends with the chainsaw somersaulting through the stairwell like a swimmer high-diving through the sky out of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and finding its mark is outrageous and brutal.
The movie succeeds as a horror movie more than as a comedy, since Bateman shows no signs of reforming at the end. The homicidal misogynist who uses women alternately as sex toys and murder victims will continue his reign of terror.
I’m kind of surprised the author Bret Easton Ellis hasn’t written a sequel to his novel.
April 17, 2016
Book Signing at StokerCon 2016
Bryan Cassiday will be signing books in the Dealers Room of the Flamingo Casino on Saturday May 14, 2016, at 1:00 p.m. for the Horror Writers Association’s StokerCon. Copies of his Zombie Maelstrom will be available for purchase at the Barnes and Noble room at the convention.
April 16, 2016
April 2, 2016
New Zombie Anthology in May 2016
Bryan Cassiday will be releasing a new anthology of his zombie stories together for the first time under one cover, including a brand-new story that has never before been published. The anthology will be called The Bus Stops Here and Other Zombie Tales.
All zombies all the time. The story “The Bus Stops Here” gets its world debut here. A school bus and its adult passengers are stranded in a nightmare that gets worse by the minute. In all these stories the zombie action is nonstop and lethal. During a zombie apocalypse, everybody is caught up in a Hobbesian world where life is nasty, brutish, and short. Along with graphic zombie mayhem these tales depict the lengths that individuals will go to to survive. But even the strong will have trouble surviving . . .
It’s not just the voracious brutality of the zombies, but the psychological toll they take on their human victims. Even if you’re lucky enough to survive their teeth, you may lose your mind in the process.
The Bus Stops Here and Other Zombie Tales is now available for preorder on Smashwords.
March 22, 2016
Damien on TV
I’ve been watching the TV series Damien. It’s based on the classic horror movie The Omen, which starred Gregory Peck as an ambassador and the father of the Antichrist Damien. In that movie Peck finds out that Damien isn’t really his son, who was killed by Satanists and replaced by the evil Damien, son of Satan, to grow up in Peck’s household.
As a TV series, Damien isn’t bad. It has its share of horrific scenes. But Damien, for some inexplicable reason, is a nice guy. In a recent episode he saved a child from being run over by a speeding locomotive. It seems out of character for the Antichrist to be saving children. But that’s the premise of the TV series. Damien is the reluctant Antichrist. He doesn’t want to grow up to be evil, even if Barbara Hershey, his protector, encourages him to assume his true role in life–as Satan’s son. She serves as his psychologist. She understands his true identity, even if he, as yet, doesn’t.
I don’t know how long Damien can continue to be nice. After all, this is the kid on his tricycle who crashed into his mother and knocked her over a balustrade down to the first floor in their mansion, where she broke her back and leg and ended up in traction in the hospital. Now how could such an evil brat grow up to be a nice guy who saves children from being run over by trains?
It remains to be seen whether Damien will become more evil as the show progresses. Certainly, anybody who annoys him or attacks him meets with a horrible death. His attackers tend to be members of a religious order that use special knives to try to kill him. These relic knives were introduced in the original movie directed by Richard Donner. Peck tried to kill Damien with one not long after he watched David Warner lose his head. Like anybody else, Damien has the moral right to defend himself from being murdered, and, since he’s acting in self-defense, he could still be considered a good guy.
I like the creepy atmosphere that this show has, enhanced by the Satanic choir singing in the background accompanied by frenetic organ music, which worked to the same effect in the movie. Created by Glen Mazzara, this show has potential, and I will continue watching it to see if Damien will become more evil. Don’t forget, this guy is the Antichrist.
March 14, 2016
Reading Scheduled at the HWA’s Bram Stoker Awards Convention in Vegas
Bryan Cassiday will be giving a reading from one of his zombie books at the Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Awards convention at the Flamingo Casino in Las Vegas at 9:00 a.m. in the middle of May 2016. Be sure to mark your calendars.
March 12, 2016
London Has Fallen–or maybe not
I saw London Has Fallen. London is attacked by hundreds of well-armed terrorists who want to kidnap the US president. The terrorists are all over London, and only Secret Service Agent Gerard Butler can save the day. But can he? Butler wastes terrorists by the boatload. Huge bodycount in this action thriller. It’s not up there with the Bourne movies in terms of quality because the main character isn’t as interesting as Bourne, but it’s entertaining, though implausible. Is London that poorly defended?
