Brian Pinkerton's Blog, page 2

The end in three parts

When Severed Press in Australia asked if I’d be interested in creating a zombie series for them, I had exactly two concerns: zombie and series.

As much as I love zombies, I feared the genre had worn itself out, as stale and stinky as a rotted corpse.

Additionally, all of my prior books had been standalone adventures, a personal choice. No sequels or reoccurring characters or continuity, except for the odd in-joke (a victim in Killer's Diary lives in the same building as a cast member from Vengeance).

My reasoning was that I put my characters through such extraordinary terror that I couldn’t bear to torment them again and again in multiple stories. That would be cruel.

But the more I thought about the possibilities, the more I became intrigued. Could I have some fun with it?

I asked if I could present a different twist on the zombie formula. Instead of zombies threatening humanity, what if I created a sympathetic zombie threatened by humanity? I imagined an inside-out version of I am Legend, where the protagonist is a scared flesh eater hiding in seclusion, while the living pound on his windows and doors, hungry for violence.

The publisher gave me the green light and my imagination took off.

To turn the concept into a series, I broadened the scope and envisioned a trilogy with a tidy arc. Book One presents the zombie as underdog. Book Two escalates to a power struggle between the living and growing numbers of undead. Book Three presents the human race as the underdog in a society run by zombies. A faint echo of Planet of the Apes, perhaps, with a generous dash of gruesome humor and social satire.

While I traditionally plan each book in detail before I start writing, I didn’t outline the complete trilogy all at once. In fact, Book One and Book Two ended with wild cliffhangers where I had no idea what would happen next. Solving those predicaments became a rousing challenge.

The first book in the How I Started The Apocalypse series launched in 2012. The third and final book just came out at the tail end of 2015. To commemorate the release of the last book, the first two have been rereleased with new cover art. The original “smiley” covers, cartoony in style, played up the books’ playful elements. The new covers express the sinister side of society’s crumble.

Whether you find terror or laughter, I hope you have a rockin’ good time with How I Started the Apocalypse.

After three books about the end of the world, it’s really over. I mean it this time.

Why the FBI is coming for me

The following blog post first appeared on the Leisure Books website in 2005 to promote the mass market paperback release of Vengeance. Vengeance is now available in eBook from Crossroad Press.


It’s only a matter of time. The FBI will show up at the door, two grim-faced agents in blue windbreakers, flashing badges. They’ll confiscate my computer, where the incriminating evidence gathers in the internet cache.

Yes, that’s where they’ll find a record of my excursions into chat rooms for street gang members who brag about recent killings or threaten one another with new bloodshed. They’ll see that I have prowled web sites devoted to buying and using firearms. They’ll discover that I have spent time at an online tutorial for starting a drug dealing enterprise.

And if they checked my car or writing desk, they would find ominous notes to myself, things like “shoot Douglas Decker in teeth” or “secret killing network meets at Traveler’s Inn.” If that’s not bad enough, in the basement, there’s a file filled with news clippings about abducted children. Did I mention my inquiry into human sacrifice?

Please, let me explain.

I write thrillers. But I don’t live a thrilling life. So I need to do my research. My most recent book, Vengeance, features a bunch of really evil people: a vicious gang leader, a sociopath drug dealer, a ruthless network of assassins, and, God forbid, even a lawyer. Since I am not any of these things, I go online and I go to the library. I collect information.

I also brainstorm narrative elements and plot twists whenever I have a spare moment. I scribble them on scrap paper – often while driving (kids, don’t try this at home).

If you come across a napkin with “brain crushed by Academy Award” scrawled across it, don’t be alarmed, it’s only a note for my next book. If you happen to see my handwritten checklist for kidnapping a baby, that’s just part of an outline for a previous book, Abducted.

I don’t commit or condone any of these acts or behaviors. It’s just raw material feeding the final manuscript. It’s part of my job.

So please understand all this when I am taken away by the authorities for suspicious behavior. I will probably be questioned at an undisclosed location. I might be roughed up a bit, or maybe deprived of food, water, sleep, and a toilet. In the end, they might even force me to sign a confession to put me away for good.

You can help come to my defense by explaining that I am nothing more than a fiction writer, conducting due diligence for my make-believe stories about the classic confrontation between good and evil. I did it all so that I may better entertain you and treat my subject matter with authenticity. Despite all the things you might find inside my PC and elsewhere, I am not a criminal by any stretch of the imagination.

Just don’t ask where all those Pink Floyd mp3s came from.

Abducted by Fear

The following blog post first appeared on the Leisure Books website in 2004 to promote the mass market paperback release of Abducted. My daughter enjoyed the teddy bear cover and drew her own version, seen here. Abducted is now available in eBook from Crossroad Press.


My little girl happened to see the cover art for Abducted one day on the family room table. She asked me about it. "That's Daddy's book," I told her.

"Why is the teddy bear in the street?"

"Well, it's a...mystery story," I said, choosing my words carefully.

"What's a mystery story?"

"Well, it's a...story with a lot of surprises."

That seemed to satisfy her. She gave the teddy bear another glance and ran off in search of her next curiosity.

My reply was honest, if sanitized. Abducted has quite a few surprises. They are jolting twists of the plot, plunges into unexpected places. And there is fear, a tremendous amount of fear, running throughout the book.

The story of Abducted begins with a young mother's worst nightmare. Then things really get bad.

When I was a child, only a few years older than my little girl, I loved monsters and horror. I watched Creature Features on WGN in Chicago. I devoured Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine.

Sometimes I could con my parents into letting me go to bed early and set the alarm for the middle of the night to catch such TV fare as Lon Chaney, Jr. in The Indestructible Man. (This was when you were at the mercy of television schedules, before you could record, rent or buy movies on a whim.)

As much as I loved monsters as a kid, they never really scared me. I knew that, if need be, I could probably outrun the Frankenstein monster, the mummy, or the lumbering zombies from Night of the Living Dead. I might even be able to take a whack at them with my Wiffle bat. I also knew about special effects and make-up and myth-making. I never checked under the bed.

I wasn't scared back then. But I am scared today.

I actually have more fears as an adult than as a child. I think it's because I watch the news. Terrorist attacks. Killer viruses. War. Home invasions. Sexual predators. Road rage. Domestic violence. Driveby shootings. And, yes, child abduction.

I've been told writers often confront and resolve their deepest fears through fiction. We take hold of what scares us, remove it from our heads and paste it on the page. It's a drawn-out exorcism.

The fears that I write about don't come from distant castles or outer space or open graves. I write about the fears in everyday life. My first book was about a dysfunctional office that erupts into workplace violence. My next book is about ordinary people, like you or I, driven to acts of cold-blooded murder.

Real horror is close to home. It's that odd man looking at you funny at the shopping mall. It's the car that seems hell-bent on running you off the road. It's that creepy old lady down the street. It's the jilted lover with an axe to grind. It could be someone already in your house. Right now.

If you seek thrills, I hope you will check out my books. I will do my best to see that the bad guys get their butts kicked in the end. In turn, I ask three things of you:

Be safe. Be kind. Please leave terror to the fiction writers.

And may all your surprises...be good ones.

Get captivated by Abducted

One of my most popular books is making a comeback. I’m really excited. Here’s how you can help spread the word.

Crossroad Press has released the first-ever eBook edition of Abducted, a suspense thriller about a missing child. Abducted first appeared in 2004 as a mass market paperback and has since gone out of print. In many ways, it’s the book that launched my fiction writing career.

The eBook version is live on Amazon, generating attention, but truth be told Amazon tends to give more promotional support to books with higher numbers of reader reviews. That’s where you come in.

If you have read Abducted, I hope you will post a review. If you haven’t read it...I’ve got a deal for you. David Niall Wilson at Crossroad Press has generously agreed to provide a free eBook copy of Abducted to new readers in exchange for an honest review on Amazon. Contact me with your eBook format of choice and I’ll put you in touch with him.

Mulling it over? Want to know more about this book? Here’s the official teaser from the original back cover…

Just a second. That was all it took. In that second Anita Sherwood sees the face of the young boy in the window of the bus as it stops at the curb...and she knows it is her son. The son who had been kidnapped two years before. The son who had never been found and who had been declared legally dead. But now her son is alive. Anita knows it in her heart. She is certain that the boy is her son, but how can she get anyone to believe her? She'd given the police leads before that ended up going nowhere, so they're not exactly eager to waste much time on another dead end on a dead case. It's going to be up to Anita, and she'll stop at nothing to get her son back.

Hey, you want a piece of me?

Hey, you want a piece of me?

Keep reading.

My mystery Bender just came out. It's the story of Bill Rowe, a man who might be a murderer. Or maybe not. He just doesn't know.

While out of town on a business trip, Bill wakes up to discover a naked dead woman in his hotel bed. His memories of the night before are lost to an alcohol blackout from a big city drinking binge. Forced to go on the run, Bill must piece together the events of his fateful night to prove his innocence. Pursued by mysterious assailants, he discovers he's been framed as part of an elaborate scheme to cover up a shocking secret. When they can't reach him, they go after his wife and daughter to bring him out of hiding.

Bender is a new release from Crossroad Press. As an author, it's always exciting to see a published book grow from the seeds of an idea. People often ask me about the writing process for turning a notion into a novel. In the case of Bender, it began with a couple of sentences to define the concept. That expanded into a short outline, which evolved into a sequence of notecards. Each notecard gave birth to a handwritten chapter. When I reached the final notecard and scribbled the final chapter, I had a complete manuscript.

Then I wrote the second draft. Also by hand.

This second draft is then marked up with further edits and ultimately entered into a PC for final changes. That's right, I don't touch a computer until my book is mostly done.

Why? I find it more freeing to compose on paper with pen. It's more intimate. It's less distracting. I want to stay away from the temptation of emails, the Internet, my mp3s, and all those files and folders of digital diversions.

What happens to the handwritten pages after they've been transferred to kilobytes? I give them away.

Here's a contest where everyone wins: anyone who posts something on social media about one of my books — a review, a book cover, a link to this page, anything — can contact me at pinkerton@brianpinkerton.com and I'll send you a free page from the original handwritten manuscript. It's as easy as that.

You want a piece of me? I'm happy to oblige.

This blog post originally appeared on Omnimystery News

Made in Hollywood: The ROUGH CUT book trailer

So I went to Hollywood and had the good fortune of meeting many TV and movie stars who were more than willing to provide cameos for my new book trailer for Rough Cut. Who knew Johnny Depp would help promote my book for a couple of bucks? Also, Spiderman really needs to shower between movies.

See the video here:

https://www.goodreads.com/videos/7124...

My Short-Lived Gender Change

My new romantic suspense novel, Killer's Diary, made its paperback debut this summer at the World Horror Convention in New Orleans. In this photo, you can see me standing next to a promo poster of the book cover like a proud papa.

When the book was originally conceived, I had an agent who felt the book would sell more copies and land a bigger deal if I used a female pseudonym since the main character was a woman and more women buy books than men. I actually wrote the manuscript with that likelihood lurking in the back of my mind. Eventually I changed agents and the new agent shopped the manuscript under my real name. Hell, I spent a year of my life writing that book, I wasn’t exactly eager to surrender credit to a fake person. Killer's Diary entered the marketplace as a novel by Brian Pinkerton, for better or worse.

When the opportunity arose to share this story, I got to thinking...how do readers feel about pen names? Does it matter if the author’s name is fake or even misleading? I have known many writers who use pseudonyms for various reasons, most of them marketing related (including a shift in genres or rebooting a career under a new “brand”). Some authors replace their first and middle names with initials to obscure the gender, under the perception that readers won’t buy books from authors of the opposite sex. Really?

Here’s a funny addendum. After Killer's Diary came out, a reader approached me and said, “Brian Pinkerton? Like in Pinkerton Detective Agency? Wow, that’s a great name for a mystery writer. It’s gotta be a pseudonym, right?”

This post originally appeared on Shelf Pleasure

If at first you don’t succeed…

My adventures in publishing began in the year 2000. That’s when my first novel, Killing the Boss, intrigued a literary agent who agreed to represent me to the major publishing houses. The book had a fairly experimental approach, telling its story through a collection of evidence and clues rather than a straight narrative. The agent submitted Killing the Boss to a half-dozen publishers and shared the responses with me. Here’s a sampling:

“…inventive and amusing. Although straying far from conventional storytelling methods, Brian Pinkerton is able to produce a thoughtful plot and an interesting cast of characters…” (Warner Books)

“A clever concept and I can even see it as a breezy independent film…” (Putnam Publishing)

“Here’s what Pinkerton does extremely well – he breaks the mold of murder mysteries, and he saved me from reading yet another formulaic, predictably plotted novel. Through email, interrogation transcripts, and media reports he weaves a credible story with varied characters… exceptionally creative.” (Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster)

“Smart, sharp and twisty as the best of Erle Stanley Gardner, and makes good use of the particular vagaries of our turn-of-the-century workplace… considerable talent is on display here.” (Villard/Random House)

“You really found something special in Pinkerton; he clearly demonstrates considerable talent, along with just the kind of quirkiness that too many first-time authors lack these days.” (St. Martin’s Press)

Great responses, right? Actually, no. Despite the favorable words, each publisher had a different reason for ultimately turning down the book. The editor at Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster wrote: “I am returning Brian Pinkerton’s novel… though I am returning it with praise… I’m sure you’ll find an editor who will jump at it.”

But that didn’t happen. The book didn't land a home. I was crushed. I considered giving up writing books altogether. But I didn’t.

I self-published Killing the Boss to get it out of my system. Then I started my next book, a suspense thriller called Abducted.

Abducted sold to a New York City publisher who distributed 60,000 mass market paperbacks across North America. It appeared everywhere, including Wal-Mart.

Abducted led to Vengeance, which led to Rough Cut and Killer's Diary...and I didn’t look back.

Sometimes I’m reluctant to include Killing the Boss in my bibliographies, since it is self-published, which feels vaguely like cheating, as if I didn’t “earn” the publication. But then I hear from total strangers who discover and love the book, and it doesn’t feel like cheating at all.

My first book is now reborn in the digital world. Amazon just introduced a special deal: a free eBook edition of Killing the Boss for anyone who buys the print edition. A great way to bridge publishing’s past with the present.

Barnes & Noble's Horrorfest

I was a guest author this month at Horrorfest at Barnes & Noble in Racine, Wisconsin. Christine Verstraete was one of the author participants and you can read her full blog account of the event on the site GirlZombieAuthors. Here's Christine's coverage of my talk.

Brian Pinkerton still smiles when he recalls his weekly childhood trips to the library. "My mom was a high school English teacher," he said. "My favorite memory is going to the library every week and I'd come home with a stack of books. I always enjoyed the act of telling stories."

He's been writing novels for 10 years and as a George Romero ("Night of the Living Dead") fan, wanted to write a zombie novel but as "the genre was overcrowded," he took a slightly different approach in his book, How I Started the Apocalypse (Severed Press). Chaz Singleton is a lone zombie battling for survival against a hostile humanity. He holds the fate of the world in his hands, whether he likes it or not. He is dead. He is angry. He is contagious. And he is hungry.

** And coming soon... How I Started the Apocalypse, Book Two. **

"I thought, what about having the poor zombie against humanity," he explained. So, in his book, his character Chaz, is "the zombie in the house and the people want to run him out of town."

He also took a different approach in his writing in his new book, Killer's Diary (July 2013, Samhain Publishing), a psychological horror novel about a woman who finds a journal and realizes the man she's dating may be a serial killer.

"I always had a fascination with the true crime books," Pinkerton said, wondering, "what goes on in people's minds that they can do these acts?"

Killer's Diary - author interview

The following is a shortened version of an interview that originally appeared on the web site The Literary World. I am interviewed by Lauretta Pierce.

Q. Who is Brian Pinkerton?

A. Brian Pinkerton is a guy who lives in my skin and steals my good name to write disturbing books about innocent people who get caught up in horrific crimes.

Q. How did you come about the idea to write KILLER'S DIARY?

A. I wrote up a list of potential concepts for my next novel and one of them was about a lonely woman in a coffee shop who finds a journal that might belong to a serial killer. I showed the list around and a lot of people liked that particular hook. I thought it had some interesting potential. What if the woman found the author and they entered into a romance? What if she realized the journal might hold clues to killings in her neighborhood? What if she had a vivid imagination from reading too many books? Would she be able to distinguish a real threat from paranoia? How well do any of us know the people we are close to?

I also thought it would be fun for readers to be reading the journal entries with the main character, Ellen, and feel the same anxiety and suspense.

Q. How did you come about Ellen's character?

A. I wanted to create someone who was sympathetic, isolated and desperately seeking intimacy. I wanted her decisions to be very difficult and her own. She's someone who has been timid and victimized in the past. She's forced to become a tougher person who questions her circumstances, initiates an investigation and ultimately must defend herself in ways she has never encountered.

Q. Why did you choose a book store as Ellen's place of employment?

A. During book signings for Vengeance, I asked a few book store managers what kind of character they would like to see in my next work. One of them replied, "A book store employee!" I thought, why not? For this novel, it seemed like the ideal occupation for a character who is a bookworm. Ellen loves the written word and falls in love with someone based on his passionate writing in a mysterious journal.

Q. How did you come about Charles' character?

A. I wanted to create someone Ellen could identify with - a troubled young adult with a traumatic childhood. It brings them together and they have a common bond. Will the relationship enable them to transcend their ugly past - or will it drive them into even darker depths?

Q. Will you give the readers a brief summary of KILLER'S DIARY?

A. Sure! Here's the trailer...

Killer's Diary is about a lonely young woman, reeling from a broken engagement, who works in a Chicago book store. On a cold winter morning, she stumbles on a personal journal that has been left behind in a coffee shop. She takes it home and falls in love with the intense voice of the writer.

After an obsessive search, she meets a man who might be the journal's owner and begins to date him. They enter into a passionate romance. She is drawn to him but can't bring herself to tell him about finding the journal. After each date, she rushes home to read another passage to uncover more about her boyfriend's troubled past and inner secrets.

But as the journal progresses, the tone becomes much darker. Then one night, she reads a passage that sounds like a murder confession...at the same time a serial killer is terrorizing her neighborhood.

Q. What message would you like readers to receive from reading KILLER'S DIARY?

A. Love conquers evil. But there may be a few casualties along the way.