Will Viharo's Blog, page 2

The New Vic Valentine Novel "Hard-Boiled Heart": A Murder Mystery About The Death of Dreams

UPDATE: HARD-BOILED HEART now available! BUY

Perhaps prematurely but with a positive attitude I publicly proclaimed 2014 would be "my year" back when it first began. Turned out to be wishful thinking that didn't quite pay off the way I'd hoped, though I did manage to achieve my major proactive goal of relocating from the Bay Area to Seattle, something I've been planning to do for at least a couple of years. That in itself was a Herculean accomplishment.

I succeeded against many logistical and financial odds mainly because my beautiful wife, the brilliant, talented, magical Monica "Tiki Goddess" Cortes Viharo was accepted into the PhD program at the University of Washington School of Drama, awarded one of only two full scholarships out of hundreds of applicants. This gave us a valid purpose for leaving her beloved home state, and my residence for my entire adult life. Besides a change of pace and scenery, I really wanted to move because I dig the cool, cloudy climate up here in the Pacific Northwest, but there had to be more impetus than the weather (and similar progressive/artistic culture) for such an epic transition. Monica's acceptance into this prestigious program made it both possible and practical.

We're both very happy with our new home, though we miss all of our friends and family back by the Bay. I feel very gratified (and vindicated!) that Monica is finally pursuing her life's dream of becoming a professor. But, as much as I love Seattle, my own ultimate goal perpetually eludes me: success as a writer. This has been my lifelong ambition, and at this point, given present circumstances, I may just have to learn to live without it.

The sexiest, most stylish grad student on the UDub campus Proud members of the University of Washington Club

Sure, I have a cool steady blogging gig again and have had several short stories published this year (see links down at bottom of this column), but the movie version of Love Stories Are Too Violent For Me, my single biggest professional break and career-maker-or-breaker, remains in limbo, stuck in "development hell" after finally coming so close to fruition I could literally touch it.
In case you haven't heard by now, Christian Slater has owned the option on this property since 2001, and is very passionate about the project, but despite promising proximity, we've yet to make it finally happen. 
Cruising with Christian off the coast of Miami, 2012 - one of my favorite memories, ever. Another lifetime highlight: riding the original "African Queen" in Key Largo, Fl. So close yet still so far from fulfilling this fateful encounter...It's been a long, unpredictable, seemingly endless journey that may or not finally be over, with a heartbreakingly anti-climactic non-denouement instead of a triumphant finale leading to even greater victories.

Maybe I need to accept that Thrillville Theater was indeed my professional peak, even though that was never my true dream. It did provide me with my public platform, and I made a lot of great friends via the networking, but it was really just a cool gig, nothing more. It may very well be that at this stage of the game, my wave has already crested, career-wise. At least I have Monica, which is everything I could want in terms of familial fulfillment. But if you're feeling physically exhausted and someone suggests you just need to eat something, rather than rest, they're not addressing the real issue. Two totally different needs. One does not fix the other. Still, I'm very lucky I'm not alone on this strange journey, because for a long time, I was, and it was pure hell. In fact, that personal pain provided the genesis of Vic Valentine. And pain remains my main source of creative inspiration, unfortunately.
If this is truly the end of this wildly improbable story, it will be (and already feels like) the most devastating disappointment of my entire life. I am frankly having a very rough time coping with it. My depression is conditional, not chemical in nature, with only one solution I can think of, and I have absolutely no control over that. I've tried psychiatric therapy, medication and moving to a different city and totally changing my surroundings, but this unexpected turn of events has left a void in my heart and a crater in my soul that can never be filled by anything else. It's difficult to adequately explain to anyone who hasn't experienced something similar, like suddenly losing your life's savings in a market crash or Ponzi scheme. I can't think of a better comparison. After dedicating most of my life to the pursuit of this dream, the movie - which would finally give my writing official validation and "street cred," while shedding a bright light on my entire body of work - meant literally everything to me. Now...I just don't know. I really don't.
My ship seemingly sailed into port then backed out without me, for the second time, following the Judith Regan debacle in the early '90s. It was like I was lifted out of my midlife doldrums to deliriously dizzying heights, then abruptly dropped and shattered into pieces. If nothing else breaks soon, besides my spirit, I may never fully recover. That's the hard truth of the situation as it now stands. Only Monica and my cats sustain me these days. As well as the beauty of my new surroundings in The Emerald City. We had a great summer, including a trip to Portland and my own journey to Santa Fe to rendezvous with my father Robert Viharo.
But still, I am haunted day and night by this serious setback.
So how am I dealing with this deep, dark depression? Why, exactly the way I did back in the day, before Thrillville, before Monica: I wrote another book, creatively chronicling and sublimating all of my angst into a fictional format.
The result? My first new Vic Valentine novel in nearly two decades: the aptly titled  HARD-BOILED HEART ! I've been planning on writing a sixth book in the series for a long time, though the story has been slow to develop. Excerpts have been published as vignettes in the "Nightcap" editions of Bachelor Pad Magazine, as well as the detective story anthology The Shamus Sampler 2.
Illustration by the late Sergio Avenia for "Private Dick, Public Enemy",
Bachelor Pad Magazine Nightcap Edition #1, Summer 2012
Illustration by Scooter Harris for "Space Needle Fix,"
Bachelor Pad Magazine Nightcap Edition #2, summer 2013I've been toying around with the idea of incorporating the movie deal into Vic's world for some time, but wasn't sure how to do it, given the constantly twisting true life saga. Finally it all came into sharp focus after a few months of harsh reflection and self-imposed exile in Seattle. I threw all my recent experiences into this steamy, pulpy stew, as you can ascertain from the eerily reality-resonant storyline:
PLOT SYNOPSIS: "Older but hardly wiser, Vic Valentine is in hot water again as he becomes embroiled with a movie star named 'Charlie' planning to make a film about the anachronistic private eye's tumultuous life. Trouble is, the alcoholic actor is also a serial murder suspect, complicating both Charlie's career and Vic's dreams of redemption and success. Meantime, Vic becomes erotically entangled with Raven, a voluptuous but vicious burlesque dancer, and is driven to despair by a seemingly supernatural stalker in the form of a mysterious sailor statue named 'Ivar.' Follow Vic through the mean, green streets of Seattle as he copes with middle-aged melancholia while confronting demons from his past that threaten the guardian angels of his future."
Sound familiar? Maybe, but fiction is stranger than truth. Above all, my aim with my pulp fiction is entertaining the reader, and I promise I won't ever let you down in that department. Still, I do confront some sticky, universally relatable issues head on with this new, "mature" work of art, which is not simply a cynical piece of exploitative commerce.
I sum up Hard-boiled Heart as "a murder mystery about the death of dreams." Two decades after his 1990s exploits as depicted in the five novels so far, a fifty-something Vic is confronting the fact he is not merely a hard-drinking ladies' man, per his self-proclaimed "job description" and the traditional macho traits of the noir anti-hero. He's actually an anachronistic, alcoholic sex addict. This may be the root of all his many problems. Not mine, mind you. I've long been happily ensconced in a very happy (and monogamous) marriage with a stable home life. There are often deliberate, definite distinctions between author and creation, and this is one of many, despite the obvious parallels. 
For one thing, "Ivar" is based on an actual sailor statue that was mysteriously left on my doorstep back in Alameda about a year ago. I finally found out the identity of the culprits once they confessed (old pals Mel Waldorf and Jessica Lindsey), following much publicly expressed paranoia, fearing it was some sort of voodoo curse or the obsessive act of a deranged stalker (turned out to be a little of both?), but this ingenious if devious prank did provide an interesting subplot, which Mel and Jessica claim was their plan all along. Glad I could play along with the gag...
I renamed this spooky stalker statue "Ivar" after this Seattle icon.Anyway, I'm very proud of this book and hopefully it will be published sometime in 2015. Right now it's under consideration by my friend and editor Joe Clifford, superstar author in his own right (I highly recommend his latest, Lamentation ) and acquisitions editor for Gutter Books, which reissued Love Stories in the summer of 2013. This rejuvenated interest in that out-of-print work and I was able to milk a lot of fresh publicity out of it, for which I am eternally grateful. But the fact remains, without a green light on the movie version, interest is waning again. Even with its "cult" status, it's still an "old" novel, initially published 20 years ago, so I figured it was time for some fresh blood. Vic's blood, that is, which I spilled liberally in these new pages. If I have to suffer, Vic gets it ten times worse. That's just how it works.
Though it's not published yet, I'm already cranking up the promo machine. 
First things first: the crucial cover. I was lucky enough to secure the services of the great artist Scooter Harris, my colleague at Bachelor Pad Magazine, for this stunningly stimulating artwork:

Scooter had already been creating some pieces just for fun, putting Vic (and Monica Tiki Goddess!) in the colorful realm of my favorite TV series Batman (which is finally available on Blu Ray, proving that sometimes impossible dreams do come true, I even created a Facebook page devoted to this effort). So I knew he was the man for the job, based on these fanciful pop art pieces:

Here are some early promo pieces for Hard-boiled Heart  by Scooter, leading up to his initial drafts for the final cover:
Scooter's first piece inspired my conception of the book's main femme fatale, Raven Rydell The image most obviously influenced by Raven de la Croix, my friend and
star of Russ Meyer's UP! (1976), who helped inform the character's, um, "development"


This piece was inspired by the photo below, taken at Noir City at the Castro in San Francisco, this past January - right after I found out the movie project was being put on indefinite hiatus...
my expression says it all. I loved the image so asked Scooter to use it for the back cover, leaving out
the tall stranger photo-bombing the background, since I didn't have permission to copy his visage. The final pre-pub back cover.
Fantastic "full frontal" cover art sans text.
So...we'll see what the future holds for Vic Valentine, Private Eye, a character that has been left for dead several times, but continues to get resurrected, one way or another.
Meantime, I've left behind my liquid legacy in the form of a cocktail - the "Vic Valentine" continues to be a top selling house drink down at Forbidden Island Tiki Lounge in Alameda, CA. So if you don't like to read, you can always just drink one of my Vic Valentine books...


The long, winding history of Vic Valentine in print:

Original edition of Love Stories Are Too Violent For Me,
published by Wild Card Press; 1995, cover by Tim Racer Fate Is My Pimp/Romance Takes a Rain Check (1994, self-published 2011)
Cover by Rich Black I Lost My Heart in Hollywood/Diary of a Dick (1995, self-published 2011)
Cover by Rick Lucey
Love Stories Are Too Violent For Me,
Gutter Books reissue, 2013, cover by storyboard artist Matt Brown Hard-boiled Heart, the sixth and possibly final entry in the series,
coming in 2015; cover art by Scooter Harris.
Mock poster art by Matt Brown, later used for the cover of the novel's reissue Keeping the "Christian" faith...
I still have faith, even though I've lost hope, or vice versa. I just can't tell anymore. Happy Holidays, and all that jazz. Onward 2015! Whatever it may hold for all of us. Cheers.
Fantagraphics storie in Georgetown, Seattle  Pike Place Market Seattle Center Monorail My 22nd annual Elvis holiday card
You may also dig:

WILL THE THRILL'S 50 FAVORITE HORROR FILMS

WILL THE THRILL'S 50 FAVORITE SCI-FI MOVIES

SHORT FICTION by Will Viharo


A WRONG TURN AT ALBUQUERQUE (1982) and THE IN-BETWEENERS (1987)


LITTLE BLACK BULLETS (1989) and NIGHT NOTES (1990)

PEOPLE BUG ME (2013)

ESCAPE FROM THRILLVILLE (2014)

NAKED WHORE WITH A GUN (Flash Fiction Offensive) (2013)

SUCKER PUNCH OF THE GODS (Flash Fiction Offensive) (2014)

THE STICK-UP ARTIST (Flash Fiction Offensive) (2015)

Radio reading from my unpublished novel NEON ROSE (1989)

Radio play based on my unpublished novella SHADOW MUSIC (1996)


NOW AVAILABLE from THRILLVILLE PRESS:THE THRILLVILLE PULP FICTION COLLECTION! VOLUME ONE: A Mermaid Drowns in the Midnight Lounge and
Freaks That Carry Your Luggage Up to the Room
BUY
VOLUME TWO: Lavender Blonde and Down a Dark Alley
BUY
VOLUME THREE: Chumpy Walnut and Other Stories
BUY
THE VIC VALENTINE CLASSIC CASE FILES:
Fate Is My Pimp, Romance Takes a Rain Check, I Lost My Heart in Hollywood, Diary of a Dick
BUY
The new Vic Valentine novel HARD-BOILED HEART now available from Gutter Books! 
BUY

LOVE STORIES ARE TOO VIOLENT FOR ME from Gutter Books!
BUY

THE SPACE NEEDLER'S INTERGALACTIC BAR GUIDE 
BUY
BACHELOR PAD MAGAZINE #29 featuring my regular movie column,this one on Classic Kaiju Cinema (Japanese Monster Movies) BACHELOR PAD MAGAZINE #30
featuring my regular movie column, this time "Retro Robot Cinema"!

My story SHORT AND CHOPPY and editor Craig T. McNeely's article WILL VIHARO: UNSUNG HERO OF THE PULPS featured in the premiere issue of the new pulp magazine
DARK CORNERS

My story THE LOST SOCK featured in the second issue of DARK CORNERS (Winter 2014)


My short story ESCAPE FROM THRILLVILLE as well as my Tribute To Ingrid Bergmanincluded in this issue of Literary Orphans

My Vic Valentine vignette BRAIN MISTRUST is included in this anthology:




My short story BEHIND THE BAR is included in this anthology:
 NIGHTMARE ILLUSTRATED #5includes my short story "PEOPLE BUG ME" Filmmaker Jeff M. Giordano is presenting the "Director's Cut" of his documentary about my Bay Area career as a film programmer/impresario/pulp author
"THE THRILL IS GONE" in our mutual childhood state of New Jersey on December 29, 2014
Me in one of the South Jersey towns where I grew up in the 1970s, Glassboro, during a 1998 visit.


Rough cut now online!

Will the Thrill's Top 50 Sci-Fi Movies

Image by Aaron FarmerLast month I posted my Top 50 Horror Films, so naturally this month I'm following up with my Top 50 Sci-Fi Movies. Though the genres often overlap (King Kong, Creature from the Black Lagoon, even Frankenstein), there is a clear distinction between the two. Sci-Fi is frequently more cerebral and fantastic and isn't typically as "alienating" (cough) as Horror, which has a more uncomfortably visceral impact, so its appeal is much wider, as evidenced by the contemporary box office, whereas Horror has all but vanished from movie theaters (except for all these Paranormal copycats), while Sci-Fi is experiencing yet another resurgence thanks to hits like Guardians of the Galaxy and the upcoming Star Wars reboots. Meantime, horror seems relegated to direct-to-video/cable releases and TV hits like The Walking Dead, which I watch religiously, and Sleepy Hollow, which frankly puts me to sleep. Could be Ebola and videotaped terrorist beheadings offer too much competition. I'm still generally more of a horror than sci-fi buff, though I dig Space Age iconography the most.

Anyway, my criteria for this highly subjective list is basically the same as last time: I go for style, sex and sleaze. Don't look for any high-falutin' "big idea" movies here (though a few are sprinkled in for good measure - I always appreciate quality writing, too). This is why I call myself a "Shathead" and not a "Trekkie" - I much prefer Star Trek TOS over any of the spin-offs or sequels, mainly because of the midcentury modernism, mascara, mini-skirts, and monsters (and of course the magical main trio of Kirk, Spock and McCoy). So keep that in mind.

I recommend all of these films, but this is by no means presented as a "definitive" guide to the genre. I'm no professional critic, just an enthusiast sharing my particular tastes on my own public platform. Hopefully you'll be introduced to a few flicks you're not familiar with, and you'll revel in the discovery. Bon voyage. Cheers.



1. Forbidden Planet(1956) - my all-time favorite, hands down. I really want someone to open a cocktail lounge that looks like the spectacular sets of this movie, with Robby the Robot as bartender and Anne Francis lookalikes as the waitresses.



Mock pulp cover...if only...2. Blade Runner (1982) - the ultimate futuristic film noir. Love the Vangelis soundtrack.




3. Barbarella (1968) - damn, Jane Fonda is hot in this! That opening shot alone...and it just gets sexier and more psychedelic from there. Visually true to the Italian comic strip source. One of my biggest regular hits back in Thrillville. Wonder why.


4. Lifeforce (1985) - speaking of sexy sci-fi, Tobe Hooper's exploitative space vampire epic may be the all-time topper...and yes, Mathilda May, whenever the hell she wants to...wow.


5. This Island Earth(1955) - the Metaluna Mutant is iconic, with spectacular sets in lurid color.



6. A Clockwork Orange(1971) - Stanley Kubrick's visionary adaptation of the Anthony Burgess novel remains as controversial and provocative as ever.



7. The Thing (1982) - I dig the 1951 original (as well as the 2011 "prequel") but IMHO John Carpenter made the greatest version of John W. Campbell's story "Who Goes There?", with a creepy Carpenter-esque score by Ennio Morricone really setting the ominous mood.

8. Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957) - the poster alone is iconic, and the movie is, well, fun. Bulb-headed aliens (created by the great Paul Blaisdell) with booze in their claws attack teenagers, including a young Frank Gorshin. What's not to love?


9. Dark City (1998) - more great sci-fi noir with a fascinating concept and gorgeous retro-futuristic art design, and then there's Melissa George...WARNING: WATCH "DIRECTOR'S CUT" ONLY!


10. Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965) - whenever someone asks me "what does 'psychotronic' mean?", which isn't often, frankly, I point them here...babes in bikinis, horny aliens, marauding android, hairy monster, Puerto Rico, impromptu garage "music videos"...it has it all.


11. Videodrome (1983) - David Cronenberg meets Deborah Harry. The social commentary still resonates, in fact more than ever. "LONG LIVE THE NEW FLESH!"


12. Destroy All Monsters (1968) - the Ocean's 11 of kaiju cinema.


13. Humanoids from the Deep (1980) - finally, Roger Corman actually shows the audience what happens when the horny aquatic mutated monster drags the nubile female swimmer to its underwater lair (as if we didn't know)...



14. The Angry Red Planet (1959) - surrealistic stuff, especially that rat-bat-crab-spider thinging...positively hallucinatory, long before mind-altering drugs became fashionable.




15. Mars Attacks! (1996) - near-perfect cinematic interpretation of an infamous pack of bubble gum cards. I only wish Tim Burton had included the giant mutated insects, but with Pam Grier, Jack Nicholson and Tom Jones in the same movie, no real complaints.



16. Brazil (1985) - yet more ingenious sci-fi noir. Terry Gilliam's moody masterpiece will never get old or die.



17. The Road Warrior(1981) - Mel Gibson backlash often obscures the greatness of this action masterpiece. Looking forward to Fury Road, especially since it stars Tom Hardy as Max.



18. Robocop (1987) - Paul Verhoeven's satirical horror sci-fi action classic will never be matched or duplicated, so stop trying.


19. It Conquered the World (1956) - early Roger Corman classic featuring one of Paul Blaisdell's most memorable monsters, plus Lee Van Cleef, Peter Graves and Beverly Garland.





20. Tarantula (1955) - with all due respect to Them!, this is my favorite of the Big Bug movies. I just find spiders scarier than ants, plus music by Mancini and Mara Corday...



21. Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) - Ray Harryhausen's amazing saucers were stolen by Tim Burton for Mars Attacks! But that only proves he has good tastes. They're definitive. 



22. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) - easily my favorite of all four screen versions, though the 1978 remake is close.



23. It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) - the original Alien, Paul Blaisdell style.



24. Day the World Ended(1955) - yet another Roger Corman classic with yet another Paul Blaisdell monsterpiece.


25. Invaders from Mars (1953) - a child's nightmare beautifully captured on three-strip Technicolor film.



26. Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973) - sleazy, steamy, small town/suburban space-alien sex, '70s grindhouse style. Dig.


27. Queen of Outer Space (1958) - all hail the planet of pinups! Allegedly based on a plot legendary screenwriter Ben Hecht drunkenly scribbled on a cocktail napkin, though the basic concept was previously exploited in the B classic Cat-Women of the Moon (1953). This one is in eye-popping color and it has Zsa Zsa and more high-heels so it gets the edge.


28. Wild, Wild Planet(1965) - this strange, swingin' Italian production totally lives up to that title.



29. The Time Travelers (1964) - I just really love the feel of this one.



30. 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957) - Harryhausen's Ymir rules.



31. Fiend Without a Face (1958) - stop motion animated brain-sucking brains from outer space. Yea, it rocks.



32. I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) - Director Gene Fowler Jr. follows up my favorite horror movie I Was a Teenage Werewolf with this sordid saga of a strange, suburban, space alien sex cult. Well, sort of.




33. Colossus of New York (1958) - beautifully atmospheric sci-fi robot noir.



34. Escape from New York (1983) - one of my favorite John Carpenter movies/scores, with Kurt Russell in possibly his greatest role as Snake Plissken, though he made a great Elvis, too.


35. Starcrash (1979) - I much prefer this shameless rip-off of Star Wars to the original for two big reasons: Caroline Munro.




36. Death Race 2000(1975) - brilliant satire, forget the soulless remake. Naturally I showed it in December 1999 in Thrillville at The Parkway.




37. Galaxy of Terror (1981) - another sleazy Stars Wars/Alien rip-off but with gratuitous nudity and monster sex, so it gets the nod.


38. The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) - giant bald man in diapers attacks Vegas. Love it.



39. Planet of the Apes(1968) - I dig all the sequels and even the recent reboots (everything but Tim Burton's version) but the original is still the best, IMHO. I tried showing it in Thrillville twice back in the day, but first it got help up at the depot and the second time they sent me Beneath the Planet of the Apes, with Nova's one word of dialogue, "Taylor!", inexplicably cut from the faded print.


40. The Blob (1958) - Steve McQueen was ultra-cool from the very beginning. Catchy theme song. Dig that diner, too.



41. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) - have to include this one, if only for Gort and Bernard Herrmann's chilling theremin score, but its message of universal peace (through intergalactic force if necessary) is forever timely.






42. Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959) - superb Southern-fried sleaze. Star Yvette Vickers was too sweet and beautiful to die so tragically, but she'll never be forgotten here in Thrillville.




43. Starship Troopers (1997) - big bugs, gore, and sexy, butt-kicking babes make Paul Verhoeven's adaptation of the Robert Heinlein classic a winner.



44. War of the Worlds(1953) - George Pal isn't as faithful to H.G. Wells' novel as the Steven Spielberg remake (which was pretty good) or even Orson Welles' infamous radio play, but it remains essential alien invasion cinema. (This one is interchangeable with Pal's equally excellent 1960 adaptation of The Time Machine ).


45. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984) - New Wave rock 'n' roll comic book pulp serial classic. Now where's that promised sequel...


46. The Green Slime(1969) - c'mon, one of the greatest theme songs ever! The tentacled, cyclopic rubber monsters are cool, too. And of course there's Luciana Paluzzi.



47.  The Hideous Sun Demon (1959) - the sun has a similar effect on me. I met Robert Clarke once, too, helluva nice guy. We share similar tastes in babes, too.


48. The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) - Jack Arnold's thoughtful, sensitive but action-packed adaptation of Richard Matheson's classic novel.


49. The Creation of the Humanoids (1962) - Reportedly Andy Warhol's favorite movie, and it's easy to see why: it's a talky, stagey, narratively static morality play about bigotry and social progressiveness, with cheap but hypnotically stylized "Pop Art" visuals.




50. Under the Skin (2014) - my favorite sci-fi flick of this century, and my favorite movie of 2014. It's very slow, strange and surrealistic, but...look at that poster. 'Nuff said.

The ULTIMATE erotic exotic sci-fi novel IT CAME FROM HANGAR 18! Filmmaker Jeff M. Giordano is presenting the "Director's Cut" of his documentary about my Bay Area career as a film programmer/impresario/pulp author
"THE THRILL IS GONE" in our mutual childhood state of New Jersey on December 29, 2014

Work-in-progress cut Me in one of the South Jersey towns where I grew up in the 1970s, Glassboro, during a 1998 visit.

SHORT FICTION by Will Viharo


A WRONG TURN AT ALBUQUERQUE (1982) and THE IN-BETWEENERS (1987)


LITTLE BLACK BULLETS (1989) and NIGHT NOTES (1990)

PEOPLE BUG ME (2013)

ESCAPE FROM THRILLVILLE (2014)


NAKED WHORE WITH A GUN (Flash Fiction Offensive) (2013)

SUCKER PUNCH OF THE GODS (Flash Fiction Offensive) (2014)

THE STICK-UP ARTIST (Flash Fiction Offensive) (2015)

Radio reading from my unpublished novel NEON ROSE (1989)

Radio play based on my unpublished novella SHADOW MUSIC (1996)


NOW AVAILABLE from THRILLVILLE PRESS:THE THRILLVILLE PULP FICTION COLLECTION! VOLUME ONE: A Mermaid Drowns in the Midnight Lounge and
Freaks That Carry Your Luggage Up to the Room
BUY
VOLUME TWO: Lavender Blonde and Down a Dark Alley
BUY
VOLUME THREE: Chumpy Walnut and Other Stories
BUY
THE VIC VALENTINE CLASSIC CASE FILES:
Fate Is My Pimp, Romance Takes a Rain Check, I Lost My Heart in Hollywood, Diary of a Dick
BUY
The new Vic Valentine novel HARD-BOILED HEART now available from Gutter Books! 
BUY

LOVE STORIES ARE TOO VIOLENT FOR ME from Gutter Books!
BUY

THE SPACE NEEDLER'S INTERGALACTIC BAR GUIDE 
BUY
BACHELOR PAD MAGAZINE #29 featuring my regular movie column,this one on Classic Kaiju Cinema (Japanese Monster Movies)  BACHELOR PAD MAGAZINE #30
featuring my regular movie column, this time "Retro Robot Cinema"!



My story SHORT AND CHOPPY and editor Craig T. McNeely's article WILL VIHARO: UNSUNG HERO OF THE PULPS featured in the premiere issue of the new pulp magazine
DARK CORNERS

My story THE LOST SOCK featured in the second issue of DARK CORNERS (Winter 2014)


My short story ESCAPE FROM THRILLVILLE as well as my Tribute To Ingrid Bergmanincluded in this issue of Literary Orphans

My Vic Valentine vignette BRAIN MISTRUST is included in this anthology:


My short story BEHIND THE BAR is included in this anthology:

 NIGHTMARE ILLUSTRATED #5includes my short story "PEOPLE BUG ME"

Will the Thrill's 50 Favorite Horror Films

Artwork by Aaron FarmerJust in time for Halloween (2014), here is my very subjective list of all-time favorite horror films. Naturally with useless distractions of this nature, it is subject to complete change without notice. Meantime, this provides a pretty comprehensive overview of my tastes in this genre. Generally I prefer the lurid, the lush, the sordid, and the stylish. 
You'll also notice most of my selections are of a certain vintage. My retro tastes aside, choosing "favorites" (as opposed to bests, which is never completely objective, despite one's expert qualifications) has as much to do with nostalgia as quality. Both need to withstand the crucial test of time before making the grade. Anyway, dig, or don't. In any case, Welcome to Chillville....
Check out this podcast interview wherein I discuss my Top 10 Horror Movies with "Cult Status" host Michael Cook


1.  I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) - my sentimental favorite since I first discovered it on Dr. Shock's Mad Theater in the 1970s while growing up in New Jersey. I especially love the moody score by Paul Dunlap.


2. Dawn of the Dead(1978) - George Romero's masterpiece, my vote for greatest zombie movie of all time, and Goblin's score is the definitive "zombie music."





3. Re-Animator (1985) - Stuart Gordon's pulpy, satirical masterpiece, with gore and nudity galore. The infamous "head" sequence with beautiful Barbara Crampton may be my single favorite scene in horror movie history.



4. The Howling (1981) - Joe Dante's tribute to lycanthropic cinema is the greatest werewolf movie ever made, with outstanding effects, plus the hottest campfire copulation scene in history.



5. The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) - the iconic Gill Man is my favorite movie monster. Julie Adams looks great in that swimsuit, too. I'm including the two sequels Revenge of the Creature (1955) and The Creature Walks Among Us (1956) in here, too, since I love 'em all equally.



6. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) - Bud and Lou's funniest film features Universal's top three monsters, with Bela Lugosi reprising his signature Dracula role for the only time.



7. Horror of Dracula(1958) - Hammer's quintessential horror masterpiece, featuring my favorite screen Dracula (sorry, Bela): Christopher Lee epitomizes the Count's sinister blend of suave sex appeal and vicious violence.




8. The Awful Dr. Orlof(1961) - Jess Franco's first big horror hit is also his best, an atmospheric, sensuous, Gothic re-telling of Eyes Without a Face, which is also on this list.



9. Daughter of Horror(AKA Dementia, 1955) - this hour-long horror-noir hybrid is a fever dream caught on film, with one version featuring voiceover by Ed McMahon!



10. Cat People (1982) - I know purists prefer Val Lewton's 1942 film noirish original, but the graphic eroticism and Giorgio Moroder's evocative score make this one irresistible to my lowbrow sensibilities. Tarantino borrowed David Bowie's classic theme song for Inglorious Basterds, rather incongruous in that context.



11. Day of the Dead (1985) - I actually like this one a little more than Dawn, because it's just so damn funny, as well as more intense and claustrophobic. The makeup and gore (by Tom Savini, Greg Nicotero and company) are superior, too. Dawn is just more iconic, plus it came first and broke all the ground, so I give it the slight edge. Still, I love this. Bub rules.



12. Zombie (1979) - Lucio Fulci's masterpiece - distributed as Zombi 2 overseas - is a prime example of Italian horror, with a sensational synth-score by Fabio Frizzi. The notorious underwater shark-zombie fight is probably my second favorite scene in horror history.


13. The Fog (1980) - John Carpenter's followup to Halloween wasn't as successful, but it remains one of the creepiest films I've ever seen, with another great electronic score.


14. Eyes Without a Face (Les yeux sans visage, 1959)  - a macabre masterpiece with some of the most haunting imagery I've ever seen on film, abetted by Maurice Jarre's eerily evocative, mournfully melancholic score.


15. Fade to Black(1980) - I have a lot of personal history with this one. A perfect time capsule of L.A. during the early punk rock era.



16. Fido (2006) - an ingenious and gorgeous mashup of George Romero and Douglas Sirk!



17. Rabid (1977) - David Cronenberg directs porn star Marilyn Chambers as one of the sexiest and scariest vampires ever.



18. Santo and Blue Demon vs. the Monsters (1970) - epic masked wrestler-monster rally, Mexican style, served hot 'n' spicy, dripping with cheese. Gotta love it!


19. Black Christmas (1974) - the late, great Bob Clark (Porky's, A Christmas Story) made three classic horror films in the '70s - Deathdream, Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things, and this seminal seasonal slasher masterpiece, still one of the scariest movies I've ever seen.


20. Island of Lost Souls (1932) - this atmospheric adaptation of H.G. Well's novel remains the best and most daring so far, especially for its time.



21. House of Frankenstein (1944) - Universal's first monster rally, the Ocean's 11 or Avengers of classic horror!



22. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932) - another racy pre-code classic and easily the best screen version of the Robert Louis Stevenson's immortal tale to date.



23. Mad Doctor of Blood Island (1968) - sure, Eddie Romero's infamous Filipino exploitation flicks are low-budget and lurid, but look at that poster! This sick flick totally lives up to it!



24. Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman (1971) - Spanish horror movie legend Paul Naschy's quintessential Euro-trash werewolf flick.



25. Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (AKA The Seven Brothers Meet Dracula, 1974) - Hammer, Shaw Brothers, kung-fu vampires, naked sacrificial virgins: this has it all.



26. Night of the Living Dead (1968) - George Romero's classic reinvented both the zombie and the modern horror film (while riffing off Richard Matheson's I Am Legend as well as Carnival of Souls), so it has to make any list of this nature.



27. The Werewolf (1956) - I just really dig the atmosphere of this noirish little tale, especially the wintery setting, with a particularly sympathetic protagonist.



28. The Hunger (1983) - Bauhuas, Bowie, lesbian sex, stylish direction by Tony Scott.



29. An American Werewolf in London (1981) - John Landis's classic came out the same year as The Howling and while I prefer that one as a werewolf flick, this is still the best horror comedy since Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (well, besides Young Frankenstein, of course).


30. I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957) - gotta love that iconic makeup! Plus dialogue like this: "Speak! You have a civil tongue in your head, I know you have, because I sewed it back myself!"





31. Cemetery Man (1994) - sex and zombies, Italian style. Satirical and stimulating.




32. The Vampire Lovers (1973) - my favorite lesbian vampire flick - which is one of my favorite genres - mainly because of two things: Ingrid Pitt.



33. Blood of Dracula (1957) - AIP's female flip side to Teenage Werewolf and Teenage Frankenstein is a moody little classic in its own right.



34. How To Make a Monster (1958) - Teenage Werewolf meets Teenage Frankenstein! Well, sort of. Paul Dunlap's scores for all four of AIP's teenage monster quintet make them all memorable.



35. The Wolf Man (1941) - Lon Chaney Jr. played them all (I especially love his three Mummy movies), but this remains his signature monster role. I actually really like Benicio Del Toro's reverent 2010 remake, too.



36. King Kong (1933) -  SPOILER ALERT: "'Twas beauty killed the beast...." Willis O'Brien deserves eternal props for brilliantly animating this immortal "monster." I really dig Peter Jackson's reverential 2005 remake, too.








37. The Monster of Piedras Blancas (1959) - one of my favorite Gill Man rip-offs, and love that Jeanne Carmen, too...



38. Curse of Frankenstein (1957) - Hammer's first "monster" hit remains one of their best, introducing Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as one of the greatest pairing of actors in horror history. That makeup rocks, too.



39. Frankenstein's Army (2013) - an audacious and original modern pulp-horror masterpiece. Trust me.

40. Lady Frankenstein (1971) - yes, because of all the sleazy sex. That's pretty much it, yea. Poor Joseph Cotton...


41. The Mummy (1959) - I actually love all the Universal Mummy movies, from Karloff's 1932 role as "Im-Ho-Tep" through the four "Kharis" movies of the '40s. Hammer chose to "remake" that particular series, but it retains its own uniquely Euro-trashy yet classy flavor, with Lee and Cushing reunited for another classic.



42. Evil Dead 2 (1987) - Sam Raimi's popular sequel/remake starring Bruce Campbell remains one of the funniest movies ever made. Not just funniest horror movie, but of any genre.





43. From Dusk Till Dawn (1997) - Salma Hayek. 'Nuff said.



44. Shivers (AKA They Came From Within, 1975) - David Cronenberg's first major film immediately showcased his special signature blend of horror, sex, politics and disturbing imagery.




45. Angel Heart (1987) - my favorite of my old friend Mickey Rourke's films is also a stylish combination of film noir and supernatural horror. I remember when he was telling me about the plot. "So it's a fantasy," I said. "No," he responded quite seriously. "It's not."



46. The She Creature  (1956) - sexy Marla English transforms via hypnotic reincarnation into one of Paul Blaisdell's most memorable creations.



47. Dracula vs. Frankenstein(1971) - Al Adamson's "masterpiece" was the last major film of J. Carroll Naish and Lon Chaney Jr. - a cheesy but sincere tribute to classic horror, filtered through a sleazy, dirty grindhouse lens.






48. The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1963) - my dear, departed friend Ray Dennis Steckler's low-budget classic, which I showed several times in Thrillville, with Ray appearing in person, live from Las Vegas! I donated the faded 35mm print of this film as well as his print of The Thrill Killers - both of which he left in my care - to the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley after he passed away on January 7, 2009 (the same day as the late, great Bob Wilkins). I miss them both.




49. The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962) - it's sleazy, it's cheap, it's shameless, it's public domain. What's not to love? A recent "official" release from MGM contains the alternate nude modeling scene, previously released only in Europe. Sigh.


50. Dead Alive (1992) - forget The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and all that jazz. Peter Jackson is one sick monkey, and this absolutely outrageous "zomedy" proves it.





Artwork by Aaron Farmer
NEXT: WILL THE THRILL'S TOP 50 SCI-FI MOVIES!

Check out my PULP FICTION!
  Gutter Books reissue, 2013 (cover art: Matt Brown) Giving a copy to Marky Ramone at Mad Monster Seattle, October 4, 2014 With Eerie Lee Shivers (front) and Vincent Drambuie (middle), Mad Monster Seattle


SHORT FICTION by Will Viharo


A WRONG TURN AT ALBUQUERQUE (1982) and THE IN-BETWEENERS (1987)


LITTLE BLACK BULLETS (1989) and NIGHT NOTES (1990)

PEOPLE BUG ME (2013)

ESCAPE FROM THRILLVILLE (2014)

NAKED WHORE WITH A GUN (Flash Fiction Offensive) (2013)

SUCKER PUNCH OF THE GODS (Flash Fiction Offensive) (2014)


THE STICK-UP ARTIST (Flash Fiction Offensive) (2015)


Radio reading from my unpublished novel NEON ROSE (1989)

Radio play based on my unpublished novella SHADOW MUSIC (1996)


NOW AVAILABLE from THRILLVILLE PRESS:THE THRILLVILLE PULP FICTION COLLECTION! VOLUME ONE: A Mermaid Drowns in the Midnight Lounge and
Freaks That Carry Your Luggage Up to the Room
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VOLUME TWO: Lavender Blonde and Down a Dark Alley
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VOLUME THREE: Chumpy Walnut and Other Stories
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THE VIC VALENTINE CLASSIC CASE FILES:
Fate Is My Pimp, Romance Takes a Rain Check, I Lost My Heart in Hollywood, Diary of a Dick
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The new Vic Valentine novel HARD-BOILED HEART now available from Gutter Books! 
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LOVE STORIES ARE TOO VIOLENT FOR ME from Gutter Books!
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THE SPACE NEEDLER'S INTERGALACTIC BAR GUIDE 
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BACHELOR PAD MAGAZINE #29 featuring my regular movie column,this one on Classic Kaiju Cinema (Japanese Monster Movies) 


My story SHORT AND CHOPPY and editor Craig T. McNeely's article WILL VIHARO: UNSUNG HERO OF THE PULPS featured in the premiere issue of the new pulp magazine
DARK CORNERS
My story THE LOST SOCK featured in the second issue of DARK CORNERS (Winter 2014)


My short story ESCAPE FROM THRILLVILLE as well as my Tribute To Ingrid Bergmanincluded in this issue of Literary Orphans

My Vic Valentine vignette BRAIN MISTRUST is included in this anthology:


My short story BEHIND THE BAR is included in this anthology:

 NIGHTMARE ILLUSTRATED #5includes my short story "PEOPLE BUG ME"

Screening of the Director's Cut of Jeff M. Giordano's documentary The Thrill Is Gone,
Monday, November 17, 2014, 5:30pm at the Alameda Free Library

Northwestern Noir: "The Stick-Up Artist" by Will Viharo

This is the inaugural piece for a new semi-regular series of original short fiction pieces set in and around my new hometown of Seattle, enjoy...

THE STICK-UP ARTIST by Will Viharo
Tim was a painter and photographer by trade, but the gig hardly ever got him laid, much less paid. It was time for crime.
The idea first hit him when he saw her standing on the corner of 45thStreet and 17th Avenue just outside the entrance to the University of Washington, waiting to cross the street in front of him. She was maybe 19, wearing a tight, purple turtleneck sweater and even tighter jeans with cute ankle-high brown boots, zipped up the side. As he sat there idling at the intersection in his piece of crap '70s vintage car, he imagined unzipping those boots, delicately removing them and her socks, kissing the soles of her soft, white, sweetly stinky feet, sucking on her red-painted toes, then pulling the jeans down the length of those long, lithe legs and firm, round thighs, kissing his way up to her firm, white belly but leaving on her lacy little panties while gripping that luscious, heart-shaped young ass, lifting the sweater up and over her soft, round, white shoulders, unhooking her bra, cupping her large, supple, creamy breasts in the palms of his sweaty hands, then gently arousing her pink nipples with his hungry tongue until she moaned in pleasure, her very long, very wavy brown hair cascading down her curvaceous back as he then eased his greedy fingers down the front of her panties and plunged them deep into her warm, moist – beep!


A horn honking rudely behind him disturbed his erotic revery. The girl had crossed the street onto Greek Row, lost in the swarming crowds of students by this point. Tim suddenly swerved right, blocking traffic and inspiring more angry honking tirades, nearly creating a multi-car accident as he headed up the wet, leaves-strewn street, stalking his prey. He had nothing better to do. He'd just come from Magnuson Park, standing in solitary sadness on the chilly shore of vividly blue Lake Washington, wondering whether to drown himself. This was better. At least for now.
Tim caught up with her about two thirds down the block. Fortunately she was still on the right side of the street, so when he pulled over and rolled down his window, she was there by the passenger door, just beyond reach.
“Hey,” he said awkwardly. “Excuse me.”
She didn't stop at first, so he kept rolling alongside of her, ignoring the suspicious stares from other students.


“I'm an artist looking for models,” he said. “What's your name?” It helped that he was handsome. That was really the only thing going for him at this point, but he was getting older and his hair was thinning out and his belly was beginning to bulge over his belt, so this single superficial asset (besides his increasingly useless talent) wouldn't last much longer, either.
She actually stopped and looked at him. “What's yours?” she asked assertively in response.
“Tim. Tim Racer. You?”
“Laura.”
“Laura what?”
“Laura Doesn't Talk To Creeps and Perverts.” She turned coldly and kept walking, faster now.
Suddenly there was an intrusive pounding on the driver's side window. Tim turned and saw two muscular, fat-headed frat boys in crew cuts and Huskies jerseys staring him down. He rolled down his window.
“What the hell ya want, punks?” Tim asked.
“You bothering that girl, mister?” one of the frats asked with forced intimidation.
“What's it to you?”
“We'll drag you out of that car and beat the shit out of you,” the other said. “What's that to you?”
Tim shrugged and impulsively reached down into his glove compartment and took out his fake .45, which he once used for his film noirstyled photo shoots. He pointed it out the window at the frat boys, and they took off running.

It was so easy.
Tim kept driving, looking for Laura, but she had vanished. Probably into her apartment. That meant she lived around her. He'd find her again. Meantime, he had to eat. And for food, he needed money. He didn't have any money. He hadn't sold a painting or any photographs in months. The market for his retro-themed work had all but dried up. Vintage was no longer in vogue. The distant past was no longer “cool.” He needed to find a new subject. Or just quit altogether and reboot with a different career.
That option suddenly presented itself just around the corner. There was Laura again, now almost alone on the side street, covered by a spectacular canopy of autumnal tree branches.
He pulled up beside her again, this time with his fake gun drawn. “Get in the car,” he said. “Don't run, or I'll shoot.”
She reluctantly complied. But she didn't seem remotely scared.
“What do you want?” she asked. “Are you going to rape me? If so, I'll scream.”
“No,” he said. “I told you. I just want you to pose for me.”
“Nude?”
“Of course.”
“How do you know what I look like naked?”
“I saw you. In my mind. You were perfect.”
“Are you going to kill me when it's over?”
“No. I'm not a killer.”
“What are you?”
“I told you. I'm an artist. But...a desperate one. Thank you for cooperating. I promise you won't regret it.”
She nodded and stared silently out the window, a surprisingly passive captive.
He kept driving toward his dump on Capitol Hill. He lived alone in a shabby one-room tenement located over Bimbo's Cantina on Pike Street. It was basically his live-in art studio. He slept there, ate there, and sometimes fucked there. But not recently. The local pussy had all dried up, too. At least as far as he was concerned.
“I'm not afraid of you,” Laura said as they stopped.
“I can tell. Why not?”
“Because you're just an old loser, and you knew you wouldn't have a chance with someone like me unless you pulled a fake gun on me and kidnapped me.”
“You could tell the gun was fake?”
She laughed. “Yea. Just like you. A phony.”
Suddenly he felt like he had lost control of the situation. But nonetheless, she got out of the car with him after he'd parked and followed him up to his studio apartment.
“You hungry?” he asked her as he unlocked the front security door. “There's New York Pizza just next door, or burritos downstairs.”
“I'd rather just fuck first,” she said. “We can eat after we work up an appetite.”
This is way too easy, he thought. He was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Instead, he removed her boots, and actually realized the torrid fantasy first envisioned while watching her cross the street. It was exactly like that. Only better. Because it was real. At least he hoped it was. Didn't matter now.


After they fucked, and she was lying nude and sweaty but still strangely sweet-smelling in his hairy arms on his creepy old cot, surrounded by neurotically blemished canvases, he said, “So now can we eat?”
“Sure,” she said, wiping some of his semen off her fleshy right thigh, then licking it off her long, thin fingers. “I could eat again.”
“I have no food here, and I'm broke,” he confessed bluntly.
“No problem, I have a credit card with a five thousand dollar limit. Let's go. It's on me.”

Since she was buying, he took her around the corner to the Twin Peaks style Lost Lake Cafe on 19th Avenue, next to The Elliot Bay Book Company, where he ordered all his favorite items on the menu, including dessert. She just ate a salad because, as she put it, she was watching his figure even closer than he was.
Tim was in love. Laura wasn't, or maybe she was, whatever. But this sure beat doing homework.
As they ate, he stared at her perfect, alabaster skin, unblemished by sunlight, like so much Pacific Northwestern bred flesh. He couldn't believe his pathetic mortal semen was sloshing around inside of this angelic creature, like the salmon swimming obliviously in Puget Sound. She seemed so far beyond his station only hours before, when they were total strangers. Now they'd already been as intimate as two people can be. It was simply too good to be true.
After the meal and polite conversation wherein Tim discovered Laura had been raised nearby in Tacoma by married law partners and was majoring in English at UDub just for the hell of it since she knew she'd never have to actually work for a living, given her stunning natural beauty, she reached for her purse, but he stopped her and said, “I have an idea. Instead of paying, why don't we just rob the place?”
She shrugged. “Sure, why not? That's real world experience you can't get in a classroom.”
Then Tim reached across the table and tired to kiss her, but she shunned him since she was putting on lipstick. Dejected, he sat back in his seat, but then she finished and said, “So are we doing this or what?”

Shaking, Tim removed the fake .45 from within his coat pocket and stood up on the table Pulp Fiction style. Everyone in the place froze, including all ten customers, the waitress, the busboy, the counter clerk, the manager, the cooks, and the dishwasher. Laura laughed as she went around filling up her purse with cash from the customers as well as the cash register. Then they fled outside into the rainy Seattle night.
“We better leave town,” Tim said. “We're fugitives from justice now!”
“Okay,” Laura said.
“Don't you have class tomorrow?”
“I can always drop out, no big deal,” she said. “There's no future in higher education for someone as pretty as me. It's not myfault. I don't want to be an actress, either. That's way too much work. Why don't we get married and live on the road instead? I've always wanted to travel. I mean, here in America. I've already done most of Europe and Asia and even Africa and Australia, so that would be fun.”
So she was worldly, too. Tim simply could not believe his sudden streak of impossibly good fortune. “Okay, sure,” he said. Instead of doubting it, he just went with it. Wherever this road led was better than where he'd been, he figured.
They junked his old '70s car and stole a brand new Cadillac from a nearby parking lot and headed down to Portland. Laura counted the cash. They scored over seven hundred dollars! She held onto her credit card anyway, since they'd burn through that loot soon enough.
“How old are you, anyway?” Tim asked her as they sped down the 5, the Space Needle gleaming in their wake.
“Twenty,” she said. Better than nineteen, he thought. “You?”
“Forty...five?”
“Is that a question or an answer?”
“I just hope it's not a deal breaker.”
She put her hand in his crotch as she said, “I've always liked men older than my father.”
Wow.
Tim had been born and raised in South Philadelphia and had never wanted to do anything but paint and take dirty pictures for a living. His mother and father were both insane drunks – literally – as well as frustrated artists themselves, so he had no parental guidance. Since his childhood was so fucked up, he escaped into his inner dreamworld and vowed to make something special of himself, out of sheer retribution. He earned a scholarship to NYU in the potentially lucrative field of Commercial Art but he still dropped out to work as a waiter in Greenwich Village coffee shops while he toiled away for years in utter obscurity at his chosen craft. He finally moved from New York to Seattle ten years before, chasing some elusive, apathetic tail as usual. It naturally didn't work out, but he loved the moody ambience and stayed anyway. His life didn't change like the weather, though. He was perpetually broke and despondent and depressed, taking any odd jobs he could just to get by – ticket taker/popcorn maker at the Grand Illusion Cinema (before they went non-profit and all-volunteer), Half-Price Books clerk, Scarecrow Video clerk, delivery boy for Pagliacci Pizza, Uber driver, fish tosser at Pike's Place, bouncer at both the Lava Lounge and Hula Hula, etc. He wound up getting fired form all of them, and dumped by his few short-lived girlfriends, momentarily swayed by his good lucks, but ultimately not ready to deal with his incessant insecurity and stubborn poverty. Outside of the scholarship he threw away in exchange for his foolish pride, he never had any luck his entire life – until he picked up that fake .45 and decided to point it at someone outside of his art studio. Then everything suddenly changed.
Crime paid, and got him laid. Go figure. He should've thought of this much sooner, and saved himself a lot of pointless grief and loneliness. But he was sure making up for lost time now. Sure, his dream girl was a stuck up bitch. But so what? She had good reason to be.
They stayed at the Hotel Deluxe in downtown Portland, drank fancy cocktails in the swanky on- site bar called The Driftwood Room, ate a grand dinner at Gracie's next door in the lobby, drank more in The Driftwood till they got kicked out, then they went upstairs to their cozy suite and fucked till dawn, while watching an all-night marathon of The Walking Dead on AMC.
The next morning they got up and went outside to see six police cars with silently swirling sirens surrounding the hotel. A cop with a bullhorn told them to give up. Laura screamed she'd been kidnapped. Shocked and scared, Tim reflexively pulled out his fake “lucky” gun, and his briefly charmed life suddenly ended in a bloody barrage of bullets.
The Walking Dead - Opening from Josip Kostic on Vimeo.
But it wasn't all bad. The international notoriety of his brief crime spree made his work posthumously valuable beyond his wildest dreams. His paintings sold for millions and popular magazines published featured glossy spreads of his photographs. The Seattle Art Museum hosted a major exhibition of all his work. He was the Emerald City's most infamous dead native celebrity next to Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, and Bruce Lee. And he owed it all to that fake gun – now forever on display under glass at SAM.
The cops bought Laura's story of being abducted against her will mostly because she was so hypnotically gorgeous. She quietly resumed her life as originally scheduled, went back to school and dutifully got her useless English degree, then right after graduation immediately married the first med school major/campus jock who proposed to her. It really didn't matter to her who she married as long as he was rich and could take care of her, since she didn't plan to remain faithful to him anyway. Her true love was gone forever. Her husband didn't even notice her emotional distance when they made love and she stared up at her framed, original painting of screaming nudes by the late, great Tim Racer.



AUTHOR'S NOTE: "Tim Racer" is the name of the artist who illustrated the original Wild Card Press edition of Love Stories Are Too Violent For Me...otherwise, no relation to any real person is intended (especially not me!). 

Gutter Books reissue, 2013 (cover art: Matt Brown)


MORE SHORT FICTION by Will Viharo


A WRONG TURN AT ALBUQUERQUE (1982) and THE IN-BETWEENERS (1987)


LITTLE BLACK BULLETS (1989) and NIGHT NOTES (1990)

PEOPLE BUG ME (2013)

ESCAPE FROM THRILLVILLE (2014)

NAKED WHORE WITH A GUN (Flash Fiction Offensive) (2013)

SUCKER PUNCH OF THE GODS (Flash Fiction Offensive) (2014)

Radio reading from my unpublished novel NEON ROSE (1989)

Radio play based on my unpublished novella SHADOW MUSIC (1996)


BACHELOR PAD MAGAZINE #29 featuring my regular movie column,this one on Classic Kaiju Cinema (Japanese Monster Movies) 


My story SHORT AND CHOPPY and editor Craig T. McNeely's article WILL VIHARO: UNSUNG PULP HERO featured in the premiere issue of the new pulp magazine
DARK CORNERS

My short story ESCAPE FROM THRILLVILLE as well as my Tribute To Ingrid Bergmanincluded in this issue of Literary Orphans

My Vic Valentine vignette BRAIN MISTRUST is included in this anthology:


My short story BEHIND THE BAR is included in this anthology:


Screening of the Director's Cut of Jeff M. Giordano's documentary The Thrill Is Gone,
Monday, November 17, 2014, 5:30pm at the Alameda Free Library

Early Works: "Little Black Bullets" and "Night Notes"

Here are two more old short stories of mine published years ago in a little literary magazine called Expression, during my youthful "literary period," pre-pulp, though there are small hints of the excess exploitation to come. The pop cultural references are still numerous, though my stuff back then was obsessively preoccupied with star-crossed romantic relationships, since I was such a lonely dude, working various odd jobs to survive, getting involved in a series of doomed affairs, and always writing, writing, writing...

LITTLE BLACK BULLETS by Will ViharoOriginally published in Expression, Winter 1990

He used his typewriter like it was a machine gun.
Whapwhapwhapwhapwhap. Rapid-fire rhetoric, words like little black bullets, straight to her heart.“I miss you, I need you, I love you...” he shot.
The phone rang, and he ceased fire. He let his machine intercept the message before he self-destructed.

Beep.Dial tone. Silence.
Maybe it was her after all, but she was too scared or brave or smart of stupid to leave a message. She knew he screened all his calls, especially at night, when he worked on his plays. She knew he was probably prostrate with grief on the floor, an empty bottle of gin by his bleeding side, arms outstretched like Jesus. And she stilldidn't leave a message, if that had been her and not another wrong number.
“Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,” he typed.
“I want freedom,” she'd told him three weeks before.“I want bondage,” he'd replied.“I want to travel,” she said, “alone.”“I want to stay home,” he said, “with you.”“I want out.”“I want in.”“I want me.”“Iwant you. Finally we agree on something.”“We can't share me anymore,” she said coldly.“Why not?”“I don't know.”“I don't either. Another point in common.”“I still love you.”“I still love you too. We're on a roll.”“As a good friend.” “Not as a lover?” he said, internally collapsing.“...not anymore,” she forced herself to admit.“That's sad.”“It is.” He sighed, trying not to cry in front of her, even though shewas, at least a little. “I liked it much better when we were disagreeing,” he said. “We had more to talk about, which meant more time together.”“Don't prolong the agony,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Just let me go.”“It's easy for you, isn't it? To just walk away.”“Yes and no.”“This is no time for multiple choice. You kill me, you know that?”“Bang, bang.” Her sense of irony seemed cruel at the time. Maybe it was her way of dealing with the tension, by plugging holes in it.


His apartment was like something out of Edward Hopper; stark but colorful, old-fashioned and dimly lit. And lonesome as hell.
New Age music played on a CD. It soothed him, helped him relax. He tried to sleep, but he had to get up soon anyway and start his new job, delivering newspapers to stands all around town. He hated getting up early, but it beat office work. It was in an office where he'd met her. He was an errand boy and she was doing temp secretary work. They had a brief fling after a few drinks-after-work dates, a Roman Candle affair; then he got serious, and she got lost.
She was a sculptress, molding images that pleased her, and hopefully pleased others enough to pay her rent. She felt restless, and couldn't sleep. She thought about dialing his number again, hoping he'd pick up instead of letting the machine do it, because by the time his message played – a sad blues song about waiting for his baby to call him or something – she always lost her nerve to talk. She didn't know what to say to him that didn't sound empty and patronizing and pedantic. Feelings change, people change, I never wanted a serious commitment, you know my history, we're still young, you still have your work, how about those Oakland A's? Forget it. It was like beating a dead hearse, she thought, I mean horse. Whatever.

She flipped on the TV to some old movie with Rita Hayworth called Gilda. In typical film noir tradition, Rita was a femme fatalebreaking the hearts of desperate, shady men on the fringe of society. Glenn Ford played her ex-lover, now working for her current husband, some German guy who ran a night club in South America somewhere. Argentina. Anyway, Rita and Glenn torment the hell out of each other for the whole show.
She almost changed channels, but wanted to see how it ended.

He decided to tune in an old Miami Vice episode on cable. Sonny Crocket was falling for a French woman who was really setting him up to get killed and ripped-off by her dealer-lover, played by Ted Nugent. A song called “Cry” played over the violence and deception as Nugent and Crockett shot it out; then Crockett arrested the girl on Miami Beach, cooly putting his shades on to hide his tears as she walked away with her arm around the waist of another cop.

He finished off his beer and flung the bottle against the wall. It shattered into a million pieces and shards of glass flew everywhere. He put his hand over his face to protect his eyes from the little fragments.
Her loneliness felt like emotional AIDS, and she knew it was terminal, with no known cure on the market, and she'd tried everything. Gildaended happily, with the German husband getting bumped off and Glenn and Rita going back to New York a happy couple. Only in the goddamn movies, she thought.
There was a knock at the door.
“I was in the neighborhood,” he said meekly as she let him in. “You know, to start my paper route.” “I wish you hadn't have come,” she lied.“I need to talk to you,” he said. “I don't understand why we both need to be unhappy alone. We could at least be unhappy together.”“That doesn't make any sense,” she said, pouring them both a drink. “There's nothing left to say or do. It's just over. No special reason. Things change.”“I miss you,” he whispered. “I need you, I love you...”“Don't,” she said, moving away from him, opening her door again. “You should go. People want their papers.”“So? I want you but can't have that. People don't always get what they want, do they?”“Please leave.”“Did you try calling me earlier?”“No.”“Are you lying to me?”“No.”His eyes wandered over to the figure she was sculpting, nude, twisted, in pain. “Nice work,” he said.“Thanks. It isn't finished yet.”“Missing a penis?”She gave him a cold, hard look. “Breasts.”“Oh.”“You should go.”“I'll die if I never see you again.”“Everybody dies,” she said as he walked out the door.

After he'd left, she noticed there was blood on the carpet, and wondered where it came from. She tried to clean it up, but it had stained already. She covered it up with a throw rug, pretending it wasn't there, hoping no one would find it and ask her incriminating questions she couldn't answer.  (End)



I wrote Night Notes while I was actually working as a desk clerk at The French Hotel in Berkeley, CA, circa 1989-1991. This fluffy little piece of prose poetry doesn't begin to reflect the truly epic oddness of that place, which seemed to attract all kinds of colorful kooks from around the globe. Later it was expanded into my unpublished novella Shadow Music, which was adapted for this Berkeley radio play in 1996. The themes are nearly identical in both pieces. Years later, inspired by similar experiences, I wrote and published my extremely graphic horror-noir-bizarro novella Freaks That Carry Your Luggage Up to the Room , which went a lot further in capturing the strangeness of that little hotel, albeit in a greatly exaggerated fashion.

Posted on my blog as a preview of the book, check out chapters One, Two, Three, and Four of Freaks for a striking contrast in style, tone, content and over-all approach, as well as a striking example of how my brain has deteriorated in the intervening decades. For now, here is a pristine preservation of a young, naive, hopelessly romantic mind at work..




NIGHT NOTES by Will ViharoOriginally published in Expression, Fall 1990

She took a room in The French Hotel because she wanted to pretend she was still in the south of France, happy and tan, and not back in Berkeley, broke and blue. The hotel was in a three-story red-brick building along with The French Cafe, with neon signs designating each. She liked the modern, brightly-lit décor of the rooms and the European fragrances of espresso and croissants. The overall ambience was casual, almost informal, but clean and well-kept. She pretended she was residing in a small French villa. In fact, she rarely ventured outdoors. It was early winter and raining frequently now, but that was not the reason for her self-imposed isolation. She was trying to concoct a cocoon, spending mornings and afternoons reading long, romantic novels in the cafe, and wasting away the evenings dozing and idly watching television. She hoped this would continue forever, but the sad fact was she was nearly out of money. It was almost time to face the real world again, and she dreaded it. Still, she tried to appreciate the time, and funds, she had left. After all, life itself is impermanent, she reasoned, so why worry about the future?
She fancied herself a poetess, but other than her graduate theses on the Romantics, in which she provided some updated examples of the mode from her own talented but dormant imagination, she had nothing to show for it. She realized that making a living as a poet – even a successful one – was not a realistic prospect in this day and age, in this country. One reason for her flight to France had been a vague desire to become an expatriate, hoping the spirit of Anais Nin would take possession of her heart and pen. But all she really did was transfer her dreaming from one continent to another for a few months, until her savings ran out. Now it was back to Eugene, Oregon, to wait tables and live in a rustic artists' commune and eventually commit herself (either way). Her only reasonable alternative – a nine-to-five job was not in the running – was to simply stay in this hotel and find a way to freeze time as well as her assets.
At least she had a sympathetic friend in the night clerk. He fancied himself a saxophone player, although he didn't know how to play and was too cheap, and broke (at five bucks an hour) to take lessons. But he listened a lot to Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday records, hoping their well-honed blues would, via osmosis, be assimilated by his heart and soul and maybe even lungs and lips. In the meantime, he had his job, his room, his cat, his bills, his dreams, and his records.

He hit it off right away with the poetess who never wrote poetry, since he was a saxophone player who never played sax. Secretly, he was in love with her.
“It's the thought that counts,” he told her one night as they sat listening to his blues tapes. She smoked and he drank coffee; she had in her lap an empty notebook and a pencil. She laughed at his statement, but inside she felt sad and lost. She had to find a way to justify her existence and pay her hotel tab at the same time, but soon. This was her last paid night in The French Hotel.
“Tell the owner I'm thinking about paying my bill,” she told the desk clerk/sax player.
“I'm afraid he won't even offer credit for your thoughts,” the desk clerk laughed.
“Not even a penny?” she smiled. He noticed her legs as she crossed them. She let him notice, and didn't pull the hem over her knee.
“Not that they're not worth anything,” the desk clerk said more seriously. “Maybe if you wrote them down people would pay to read them. In a book of poems, I mean.”
“Nobody cares enough about poetry to support me.”
“That's probably because you're still alive. People go for dead poets.” He was trying to balance the books and listen to the music at the same time. Invariably he screwed up the accounts. He was on notice already as it was. He was looking for another job, but couldn't find anything he wanted to do as much as play the sax in a smoky nightclub. Not even close. He had the soul but not the instrument, the vision but not the voice. Inwardly, the music never stopped. The trouble with that was only he could hear and appreciate his compositions and classic covers. If only he could live inside of himself all the time, and never come out. He'd invite the poetess in once in a while, of course. If she wanted to come, that is. He had a feeling she'd like it in there, given the chance. It was dark and cozy and he wouldn't charge rent and make her get a demoralizing job.
“My poems are too sentimental, anyway,” she said, taking a slow, sexy drag. “Or they would be, if I wrote them down.”
“Today it's sentimental. Tomorrow, it'll be poignant. That's usually how it works,” the world-wise desk clerk explained.
“I see,” she smiled. “So maybe I should just die. As a career move, I mean.”
“Don't kid around about stuff like that,” the desk clerk said. “This time of night, anyway. Gives me the creeps. They don't call it graveyard shift for nothin'.”
“Sorry.” She decided to change the subject to something livelier. “I like your taste in music.”
“Thanks. So do I.”
“Although I prefer Patsy Cline myself.”
“I like her, too. Bluesy voice.”
“Patsy Cline, Billie Holiday...ever read Sylvia Plath?”
“Nope. Why?”
“It seems you have a thing for tragic women.”
“Maybe. Maybe I do. At least from a distance.”
She took a long, pensive drag on her cig. “That's too bad. You should take a closer look sometime.” She met his eyes and they both smiled. He looked back down at the books. He'd just messed up again. What the hell – it was fate. Obviously he was meant to be a fuck-up, or a “social pariah,” in romantic terms. If he didn't move quickly, his future would catch up with him.


“Have you ever noticed,” the poetess said abruptly, “that a saxophone sounds like an orgasm feels?”
He broke the point on his pencil. “Ummm...I never really put the two together, to be honest.”
“Think about it. Hard.”
“You ever look into a mirror and watch yourself disappear?”
“Do you want to come to my room?”
“You didn't answer my question.”
“You didn't answer mine.”
“Yes, I would,” he said.
“No, I haven't,” she said.
“I've already seen your room,” he said as they walked down the long, dark hall.
“Not with me in it,” she said.
“In my imagination,” he said low, but she heard it.
“Reality's better,” she said. “Time to trade up.”
She smiled slyly as she led him to her room. He brought his tape player and the screwed-up books with him, his blood pounding with anticipation. At least one fantasy would come true tonight, he thought, and maybe it would inspire the rest to follow suit.
“Don't bother,” he said, pulling out the key to her room just before she opened it herself. He let them in and locked the door behind them.
“What if the phone rings, though?” he asked, sitting tentatively on the edge of the bed. “Up at the front desk, I mean?”
“At 2:30 in the morning?” she said, pointing at the digital clock. She'd left her underthings strewn across the bed. He pretended not to notice. She went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. “I'll be out in a minute. I'm just going to freshen up,” she called to him. He had the accounts open on his lap, and he gazed at them as if they interested him a great deal. He was slowly deciding to quit before they fired him, to save time as well as humiliation.
She appeared in a flimsy fuchsia bathrobe five minutes later. She had her hair wrapped in a towel. She massaged her scalp and dried her hair as she turned on the television.
“Why don't you have cable?” she asked absently as she finished drying her hair. Her bathrobe fell open and exposed her cleavage, but the desk clerk nervously kept his nose in his books. Was this a come-on or a put-on? For once he was more preoccupied with the present than the future.
“The owner's too cheap,” he mumbled. He turned on the tape player low, so that the volume didn't completely drown out the television.
She flipped the channels quickly, then shut it off. “Nothin's on anyway,” she said with a grimace.
“You shouldn't be wasting your time watching television anyway,” the desk clerk said.
“What should I be doing, then?” she asked ingenuously as she sat down beside him on the bed, the warmth of her thigh seeping through his slacks. She took the account book away from him and tossed it into the wastebasket.
“Why did you do that?” he asked, as she leaned even closer to him, so that her breath touched his cheek.
“I've had many lovers,” she said, leaning over him and shutting off his tape recorder. He moved to turn it back on, but she gently intercepted him, holding his hand in hers.
“If you've had many lovers,” he said hoarsely, “does that make me just another statistic?”
“I can hear you, you know,” she said.
“Hear what?” he asked, uneasy.
She began kissing his neck and unbuttoning his shirt. He didn't stop her.
“Your music.”
“You just turned it off.”
“I don't mean that music. I mean the music that has led me from one bedroom to the next, looking for its source. Sometimes I'd hear it while sitting in a bar, and a man would approach me, light my cigarette, and take me home. But I'd wake up feeling empty, hearing nothing. Then, later, when I was alone, I'd hear it again. I'd try to write lyrics for it in my notebook, to try to understand it. At first I thought I was only hearing the music from your machine when I came here, but now I realize...”
He cupped her face in his palms and kissed her, long and deeply. He looked into her dark eyes and was drawn into her little dome-covered world.
“I've imagined this moment since the first time I saw you,” he said, opening her bathrobe fully and kissing her breasts. She moaned and shut her eyes, and he leaned back onto the bed. “I'm so happy I wasn't hallucinating.”
“The music is so loud now,” she whispered. “I can't hear anything else.”
Later, after he lay exhausted in her arms, she hummed the music that had once been trapped inside his head.
“The night is full of epiphanies,” she said softly.

The next morning the manager of The French Hotel came in to find no clerk on duty. She called his home number but it was disconnected. He never returned for his paycheck.
A week passed, and the manager finally noticed that room 302 was not up-to-date on the bill. She marched up to the room and rapped on the door. When no one answered, she tried all the keys, called a locksmith, and then the owner, but no one could open the door to 302.
Inside, the desk clerk sat on the edge of the bed, shirtless, playing his saxophone as moonlight streamed through the blinds, and the girl lay beside him with her feet up, writing in her notebook. The digital clock was stuck at 2:30 a.m., but it was no longer the musician's responsibility to fix it. They did, however, have cable T.V. The night would never end.
The police broke into the room and the manager identified the bodies, already cold. The cause of death is still unknown. Late at night, some visitors to The French Hotel claim to hear music, but no one can ever find its source. The lyrics are haunting, people say.



MORE SHORT FICTION by Will Viharo



A WRONG TURN AT ALBUQUERQUE (1982) and THE IN-BETWEENERS (1987)


COFFEE SHOP GODDESS (1990) and THE EMANCIPATION OF ANNE FRANK (1991)

PEOPLE BUG ME (2013)

ESCAPE FROM THRILLVILLE (2014)


NAKED WHORE WITH A GUN (Flash Fiction Offensive) (2013)

SUCKER PUNCH OF THE GODS (Flash Fiction Offensive) (2014)

THE STICK-UP ARTIST (Flash Fiction Offensive) (2015)

Radio reading from my unpublished novel NEON ROSE (1989)

Radio play based on my unpublished novella SHADOW MUSIC (1996)


NOW AVAILABLE from THRILLVILLE PRESS:THE THRILLVILLE PULP FICTION COLLECTION! VOLUME ONE: A Mermaid Drowns in the Midnight Lounge and
Freaks That Carry Your Luggage Up to the Room
BUY
VOLUME TWO: Lavender Blonde and Down a Dark Alley
BUY
VOLUME THREE: Chumpy Walnut and Other Stories
BUY
THE VIC VALENTINE CLASSIC CASE FILES:
Fate Is My Pimp, Romance Takes a Rain Check, I Lost My Heart in Hollywood, Diary of a Dick
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The new Vic Valentine novel HARD-BOILED HEART now available from Gutter Books! 
BUY

LOVE STORIES ARE TOO VIOLENT FOR ME from Gutter Books!
BUY

THE SPACE NEEDLER'S INTERGALACTIC BAR GUIDE 
BUY My short story  ESCAPE FROM THRILLVILLE  as well as my Tribute To Ingrid Bergman included in this issue of Literary Orphans
My short story  BEHIND THE BAR  is included in this anthology:
My Vic Valentine vignette  BRAIN MISTRUST  is included in this anthology:



My story SHORT AND CHOPPY and editor Craig T. McNeely's article  WILL VIHARO: UNSUNG HERO OF THE PULPS  featured in the premiere issue of the new pulp magazine
DARK CORNERS
My story THE LOST SOCK featured in the second issue of DARK CORNERS (Winter 2014)
 NIGHTMARE ILLUSTRATED #5includes my short story "PEOPLE BUG ME"


Screening of the Director's Cut of Jeff M. Giordano's documentary The Thrill Is Gone,
Monday, November 17, 2014, 5:30pm at the Alameda Free Library

Early Works: "A Wrong Turn at Albuquerque" and "The In-Betweeners"

In response to absolutely no demand whatsoever, but in the personal interest of publicly archiving them (with a few more to come), here are two of my earliest literary works - my first and only play, from 1982, and my first published short story, from 1987.
Linda Kerridge, 1982 A Wrong Turn at Albuquerque was written when I was 19, performed once only at the Actor's Studio in West L.A. in 1982. It was directed by my father,

Ironically, I recently returned from a trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico, visiting my Pop, who now happily resides there. The title of the play was inspired by this famous Bugs Bunny bit:

My trip made me think of this play, so I dug around in a box and finally found the original neatly typed manuscript, which has been essentially lost for 32 years, publicly shared for the first time here outside of its single performance over three decades ago. Hope you enjoy it:

A WRONG TURN AT ALBUQUERQUEA One-Act Play by Will Viharo Performed at the Actor's Studio in West Hollywood, 1982

As the scene begins, we see the two principals, THE WRITER, male, about thirty and dressed casually but neatly, and THE GIRL, young and attractive, dressed conservatively but colorfully, seated in chairs parallel to each other facing the audience. The writer is pantomiming driving a steering wheel in an obvious but downplayed fashion so as not to be distracting. The girl, in the “passenger seat,” is gazing out the imaginary window thoughtfully. The lighting should be a bright blue or soft purple to suggest a nocturnal, almost ethereal atmosphere.
WRITER: Hard to believe, isn't it?
GIRL: What is?
WRITER: That I finally, you know, arrived. It's incredible, really. I just can't believe it. It really staggers me.
GIRL: It doesn't seem so terribly wonderful to me.
WRITER: I didn't say “wonderful.” I said “incredible.” But it is kind of wonderful, too, now that you mention it. Sure it's wonderful. It's fantastic, are you kidding? Success at last, after all these fuckin' years slaving away at menial crap. I mean, this is a helluva great thing, when you think about it.
GIRL: You don't sound too convinced of it to me.
WRITER: What – you think I'm not happy with all this?
GIRL: All what?
WRITER: All – my success, what else?
GIRL: You sold a manuscript that's not even published yet. Where's the success?
WRITER: In my pocket, honey. The advance.
GIRL: So? It'll be gone by the end of the weekend, probably.
WRITER: Yea, maybe. But then I'll have some great memories, won't I?
GIRL: That's success? Great memories? Anyone with a good imagination can have those.
WRITER: The book will sell, though. It'll hit. Big. Don't worry.
GIRL: Who's worried?
WRITER: Not me, baby. I'm as cool and collected as a...a really together cucumber.
GIRL: So why are we lost?
WRITER: We're not lost! (pause) You think we're lost?
GIRL: It crossed my mind. That is, of course, if our destination is still Las Vegas.
WRITER: Well, where else, sweetheart.
GIRL: I don't know. At this rate. Atlantic City, maybe?
WRITER: That's very clever. You're a very witty girl, anyone ever tell you that?
GIRL: Yes, just recently, as a matter of fact.
WRITER: You know something? I think I'm in love with you.
GIRL: Are you sure we have enough gas to get there?
WRITER: Did you hear what I just told you?
GIRL: I'm pretending I didn't.
WRITER: How come?
GIRL: How come what?
WRITER: How come you're pretending you didn't hear me?
GIRL: Hear you what?
WRITER: Don't play dumb.
GIRL: Who's playing?
WRITER: I'm beginning to get the picture. What did you say your name was, anyway?
GIRL: I didn't.
WRITER: No? When I first picked you up and all?
GIRL: I don't remember. Probably not.
WRITER: I guess you're not going to tell me then. (silence) Look! (points) There's a signpost up ahead! What's it read?
GIRL: (squinting) Your next stop...The Twilight Zone...
WRITER: You're pretty flip for a chick riding in a total stranger's car.
GIRL: You're not a total stranger. I've known you nearly forty-five minutes. In this day and age thats ground for intimacy.
WRITER: You know nothing about me except what I've told you. I could be lying, you know. How do you know I'm really a hack California writer and not a rapist?
GIRL: What's the difference?
WRITER: Have you ever been on Johnny Carson, by any chance?
GIRL: Not that I recall. Much of my past is a blur.
WRITER: You need an agent. What do you do for a living, anyway? Or should I ask.
GIRL: Don't.
WRITER: Okay, fine. (pause) How old are you, anyway?
GIRL: I could say something, but it would only bore you.
WRITER: Try me.
GIRL: Old enough to -
WRITER: - know better. Right, right. Hitchhiking out in the middle of nowhere. Jesus, what a stupid thing. Pardon my bluntness, but I've always considered it a really...dumb thing. Hitchhiking, I mean.
GIRL: So why did you pick me up?
WRITER: I thought you needed help. Either that, or...you know.
GIRL: No, I don't. What.
WRITER: Well, I mean, the way you were standing and all...I thought you might be...you know. A hooker.
GIRL: You thought I was a hooker in need of help. That'swhy you picked me up? How did you know Iwasn't dangerous?
WRITER: I still don't. But you look innocent enough.
GIRL: Yet you thought I was a traveling whore.
WRITER: No, actually I only hopedyou were.
GIRL: (smiles) Do you find me attractive?
WRITER: You? Yea...kind of. You know.
GIRL: A minute ago you said you were in love with me.
WRITER: A minute ago I was. But it wore off quickly.
GIRL: Why?
WRITER: Honestly? You're too damn weird. Nothing personal. But the truth is...I am a sucker for a pretty face.
GIRL: So you do think I'm prettypretty.
WRITER: Sure, why not?
GIRL: Why not? Because chances are nature could've made me a dog. That's why not. It happens to many girls.
WRITER: Why are you so sensitive?
GIRL: I'm not sensitive. You hardly know me and you accuse me of being sensitive.
WRITER: That's not exactly an accusation. I like it, though. It's a new side of you just come to light. I like it. (pause) Hey, uh, what didthat sign back there say, anyway? I've got eyes like a dead bat. It looked like something about Vegas.
GIRL: Try “Welcome to New Mexico.”
WRITER: Pardon me?
GIRL: That's what the sign said.
WRITER: You must be kiddingme. Please tell me you're joking, or I'm going to cry. There's no goddamn way in hell we could be anywhere near -
GIRL: Okay, okay, relax. So someone moved the sign and stuck it randomly in the middle of the desert to confuse people. Okay? I'm sorry.
WRITER: You're joking, I know it. I can tell. But that's not funny, that kind of stuff. We should've been there already, a long time ago. I can't figure out...I must've made a slightly wrong turn somewhere...but it's all right, it's all right, we'll get there. Don't worry. We'll have to hit it. Eventually. I knowwe're going in the right direction. But we are a little low on gas, though. Keep a lookout.
GIRL: For what?
WRITER: Gas, what else?
GIRL: Are we going to drill our own?
WRITER: A station, sweetheart, a station.
GIRL: Are you serious? Way out here? Only Alfred Hitchcock characters have places thisfar out.
WRITER: What are you worried about? I'mwith you.
GIRL: Is that an excuse for us to shower together?
WRITER: We're not even thatfar out, for Chrissake. We'll be there extremely soon, I promise. It's right over that horizon there.
GIRL: So's Timbuktu.
WRITER: Hey, what is this, a roast? Ease up a bit.
GIRL: I'm getting nervous. You can hardly blame me.
WRITER: Look, I've been to Vegas fifty times at least. Well, actually, only three, but...we'll be there shortly. We haveto, we've been driving so goddamn long. We have to wind up somewhere.
GIRL: Terrific, Charley. A one-way ticket to Palookaville. This must not be my night, Charley. But...someday, right, Charley? I'll have class? I'll be a contender?
WRITER: All right, all right. You'd betterbe, with your mouth. But if it makes you feel any better, I just passed some very familiar-looking cactus. Listen, why don't you just drop off and take a nap and when you wake up we'll be in front of the Hilton, okay?
GIRL: Which one? Havana?
WRITER: Hey, enough already, huh?
GIRL: What's the difference if I sleep or not? I can see desert with my eyes shut. It's embedded in my brain. I doubt if I could fall asleep, anyway. Unless I count roadrunners or something.
WRITER: You know...I find that story you fed me very hard to swallow.
GIRL: What story?
WRITER: The one about you running away from your affluent family in Vegas to find yourself in L.A and now you want to go back and make amends.
GIRL: What's wrong with that?
WRITER: I don't know. You just don't seem like the type.
GIRL: What, to run away?
WRITER: To make amends.
GIRL: (dryly) Thanks.
WRITER: No, I mean...you seem like the feisty, independent type who never apologizes.
GIRL: Maybe I just ran out of money.
WRITER: Even still...there's something very different about you. You seem like a survivor. Rather on the bull-headed side, though. Stubborn. Willful. A little, you know, of a hard-ass. Almost a complete cunt.
GIRL: Are you trying to seduce me?
WRITER: Hey, I'm just giving you an honest impression. You don't give me much to go on. If you want charm, I'll give you charm. I'm just trying to figure you out, that's all. You are a bit off-the-wall, to say the least.
GIRL: Okay. So you don't like my story.
WRITER: I didn't say I didn't likeit. What's to like or not like? I simply said it seems a little...I don't know. Phony.
GIRL: All right, so I'll think of a new one.
WRITER: You'll 'think of a new one'? Are you putting me on? You aren, aren't you. What're you, an escaped convict, right?
GIRL: Maybe.
WRITER: Maybe? Jesus.
GIRL: Would you accept a direct answer from me?
WRITER: Probably not, at this point. Forget it, it's none of my business, anyway. I'm just feeling exceptionally good because of my turn of luck lately, and was in a Samaritan-kind of mood, so I gave you a lift.
(Silence for a few moments)
GIRL: (after looking at her watch) Oh! Um...there's something...I've got to tell you...
WRITER: Yea? What? You made me jump.
GIRL: Well, it's a little difficult...
WRITER: What – you're dying, for Chrissake?
GIRL: No. You are.
WRITER: Pardon?
GIRL: You heard me.WRITER: Don't say things like that. Not even kidding around. That's a very touchy topic with me. My folks died when I was young and all that crap, so don't -
GIRL: I am not kidding around with you now. This is serious. You must treat it that way.
WRITER: Treat what what way?
GIRL: Well...you have approximately five more minutes to live.
WRITER:Jesus, I should've known. You pick up some kook and she turns out to belong to some sick cult. Am I going to be in a ritual sacrifice or something?
GIRL: Hardly. Don't panic, now.
WRITER: (panicking) What do you want with me?
GIRL: I was going to break it to you gradually, but we're running out of time. I wanted you to be loose and good-humored when the time came for your demise. But we're almost out of time.
WRITER: Speak for yourself, sweetheart. (Pantomimes slamming on brake and stopping at side of road.) Get out. Hit it. Happy trails.
GIRL: I don't think you'll want to be alone during your final moments of existence on this plane, do you?
WRITER: What the hell are you on, anyway? That Angel Dust crap?
GIRL: Not exactly. You see...um..I'm what's known as a...Guardian Angel. I was sent to accompany you during this transitional period and spare you the shock.
WRITER: (after looking at her intently) You need help. (He pantomimes starting the car again and driving off) I'm taking you to the first goddamn hospital we pass. I should've guessed you'd be a flake. A man just doesn't drive down a lonely desert highway and come across a beautiful chick who also has a nice personality. I've lost my sense of reality, I guess. Sure, you're sarcastic, but a fuckin' space case? What're you, an addict, right?
GIRL: Don't insult me. There's no cause for that.
WRITER: (fed up) Just shut up, okay? I'll drop you off in town and you can do what you want. Just don't...hurt me or anything...
GIRL: Just calm down, will you? It's nothing personal. Death happens to everyone. I'm only here to help you, not kill you. It's not my fault it's your time to go.
WRITER: All right. All right. For the sake of indulging you, okay, so you're my 'guardian angel.' So why the lip?
GIRL: You don't appreciate a good sense of humor? It's the world's saving grace, you know. Laughter is the key to survival.WRITER: Now you tell me. Sure, I appreciate a good sense of humor. But from certain kinds of girls. New Yorkers, for instance. Angels, no.
GIRL: I was only trying to conceal my identity. I knew if you thought I was a celestial being, chances are you'd have kicked me out a long time ago, or worse, you might've turned around completely and gone back home, which is not the way it's meant to be.
WRITER: Don't worry. I don't meet enough angels to be wary of them. But, so why are you telling me now?
GIRL: Like I said, we're running out of time. (She looks at her watch) Oh, dear...and I wanted to get to know you better first. Oh, well.
WRITER: You should've been better prepared. Isn't there a file on me up there you could've read? Ha, ha.
GIRL: You've seen too many Frank Capra movies. This is reality now.
WRITER: Oh, sure. You're my guardian angel, descended from out of the blue, telling me about reality. That's a peach.
GIRL: “Guardian Angel” is simply a phrase. I have to call myself something in terms you can relate to. Even my appearance is customized to cater to your limited understanding.
WRITER: Hey, don't start patronizing me. Just be straight with me and I'll play along.
GIRL: Don't you believe me now?
WRITER: No, but I'm interested, let's put it that way. You're unique, if nothing else. All right, so let's say it's my time to go. All right? And you're my 'guardian angel.' All right? So why?
GIRL: Why what?
WRITER: Why...now? I mean, I've just begun to live. I just sold my first novel, I'm feeling good, I'm feeling happy, I'm feeling fine, for the time in my goddamn life, I'm content. And suddenly you appear out of left field and want to jerk the rug out from under me. All I'm asking is 'why'?
GIRL: This is no 'why.' There simply 'is.'
WRITER: I'm supposed to kick off just when things are going nice, and I'm not supposed to ask any questions, is that it?
GIRL: Ask all you want. But everyone has their own answers, their own version of the Truth. What's yours?
WRITER: What? My version? Well, when I die, I'm going to wake up in a tremendously beautiful...coffee shop, with dozens of gorgeous waitresses at my beckon call, and jazz playing non-stop on this fantastic jukebox. How do you like that?
GIRL: What does that answer?
WRITER: Well...what happens when I go.
GIRL: Is that the only answer you care about?
WRITER: No. I also think about other things.
GIRL: Like...?
WRITER: World hunger, crime, war, cancer, disasters. You know, all that crap.
GIRL: And...?
WRITER: And what?
GIRL: What are your answers for those problems?
WRITER: Frankly, I don't have any good enough. For instance, why should I have my health and relative success and everything when some other poor schmuck, fuckin' millionsof 'em, is born with brain damage and no arms and legs and nobody to give a damn? When you think about these things, it's hard to feel sorry for yourself, even when you get depressed, which is often in my case. That kind of injustice really bothers me. Know what I mean?
GIRL: So why ask questions to which you have no answers?
WRITER: Good question. And I can't answer it, either. Good point. One for you. You're not so flighty after all. A little neurotic, maybe, but aren't we all.
GIRL: We only a few moments left, um...any last words?
WRITER: Are you still on thatkick, for Chrissake? Let it die – I mean, let it go, will you? It's not the least bit funny.
GIRL: Indulge me then, please. For just a little longer. Don't you have any regrets to get off your chest?
WRITER: If I die, I will. I'll regret death, because I'm just starting to live.
GIRL: Have you always wanted to be a writer?
WRITER: No, not always. I went through different stages. I used to want to be a professional baseball player, when I was real young. Then I switched to a superhero, then to a werewolf, then to a rock star. I had a very active imagination as a kid. I had to. I was fuckin' alone so much...never got along with anybody, really...bounced around different homes...aw, what do you care, right? Everyone's got their problems. But now at last, I feel vindicated. With my novel, I mean.
GIRL: So death now will make you a legend. A literary James Dean.
WRITER: Unless it's a flop. Then I'll just be another Lee Harvey Oswald. But I mean if I'm not around to enjoy my success, who needs it? There's other things in life, anyway. I'd miss little things, mostly. The sunrise. The sunset. Snow at Christmas, with carols and that crap. I guess I'm a real sentimental hack when you come right down to it. But so what.
GIRL: Do you believe in God?
WRITER: What's it to you?
GIRL: It may help people...explain things.
WRITER: Aw, I don't know. It can't hurt to believe in God, I suppose. You might as well. I mean, when you look at the seasons and nature and the solar system and all that miraculous stuff, you have to suspect something is going on. There's some kind of order in the Universe. I mean there's a definite system somewhere. But sometimes I get the idea that the caretaker is out to lunch, in more ways than one. Know what I mean?
GIRL: Do you have a religion?
WRITER: I used to. I was born Irish Catholic. Gave it up a long time ago, though. Religion is too much like a lottery to me. Pick the right number and you go to heaven or hell. I mean, gimme a break. If that's all that it means, forget it. I'll take my chances on my own.
GIRL: So do you have a philosophy of Life?
WRITER: I don't know. Sometimes. It changes. Sometimes I think love is the answer. Only love has never brought me anything but pain. So much fuckin' pain. So maybe life is pain, right? But naw, that's too goddamn nihilistic. Then other times I think sex is the answer. But it's too fleeting.
GIRL: So's life.
WRITER: Exactly. You know, you're beginning to really spook me a little. All of a sudden you're so serious. I can't figure you out.
GIRL: I'm just tired, I guess.
WRITER: But, anyway. I don't know. Most of the time I figure, what the hell, you live once, life is too short to take seriously. Tragedy and comedy are just matters of perspective, when you think about it. It's all in how you look at the same situation. You can either laugh or cry about it. Nothing makes sense, anyway. It's all a dark farce. Tell me if I'm getting too heavy. But you've got me going on some things I think a lot about. I go off sometimes.
GIRL: We're coming to the end now -
WRITER: (irritably) Knock that off.
GIRL: What are your views on death itself?
WRITER: What're you, Barbara Walters?
GIRL: I'm curious.
WRITER: Death is...a fantasy to me. You know. How can I fathom not existing when I can't understand existing, you know? Every morning I expect to wake up, pour a bowl of Wheaties, and turn on Bugs Bunny. That'sreality to me. I can't conceive of not being able to do that. You get so used to the routine of life, you know? It catches you up. It absorbs you. Death is no more than a distant dream to me.
GIRL: Not any more.
WRITER: (frantic) Hey, where's the road – my God, everything's dark – Jesus, a cliff! - we're going to -
FADEOUT QUICKLY.When the lights resume, the stage is dark except for a spotlight on the couple, still in their previous positions. The writer has his head bowed at first, but slowly lifts it up as the dialogue resumes. The girl is looking at hime with a peaceful smile.

WRITER (moans) Oh..what happened? (rubs his eyes)
GIRL: You've transcended. Not so awful, now, was it?
WRITER: What the hell is going on...? Where are we? (He grabs at the air aimlessly) Jesus, are we floating or something? I feel so light-headed...like I'm...stone.
GIRL: It's better than that. Don't you feel emancipated?
WRITER: Wait a minute. I have to think about this now...what happened? Did you slip me something or...I mean, I really feel funny. Like I'm dreaming.
GIRL: C'mon. We'll discuss it over a cup of java – angel style.

The LIGHTS BRIGHTEN and they are surrounded by several WAITRESSES in pink uniforms. Slowly, a blues number is heard increasing in volume. One of the waitresses has a coffee pot in her hand and a smile on her face. The writer looks around incredulously.
WRITER: (grinning slightly) I must be dreaming. (A WAITRESS hands him a menu, brightly colored, which he accepts reluctantly.
GIRL: Don't be coy. It's on the house.
WRITER: This can't be for real.
GIRL: Don't question, now. Just relax and enjoy yourself. The food's good here. Especially the Ambrosia Cake.
WRITER: I can't fuckin' believe this -
GIRL: Just watch the language, please. That's all we ask. You'll learn. You have a long way to go yet. But for now...just relax. Everything is going to be just fine. Oh, by the way....(She signals to one of the WAITRESSES, who brings her a book)...Here. You might want to see this.
WRITER: (accepting the book with marked interest) Holy shit! - I mean, uh, golly gee willikers. It's my novel! Nicely bound, too.
GIRL: It's for our special library.
WRITER: Posterity...in the hereafter. (He sets the book down and looks around him, beginning to loosen up) What's the name of this joint, anyway?
GIRL: You just said it. The Hereafter Cafe.
WRITER: Far out. (A WAITRESS pours a cup of coffee and hands it to him, and he sips it) Hm, good stuff.
GIRL: Only the best.
WRITER: (smiling broadly) Yea...I think I'm gonna like it here.

LIGHTS SLOWLY FADE TO BLACK. FINIS.





The In-Betweeners  was published in Berkeley's Daily Californian as the first in their abruptly aborted series of original fiction. It was 1987, I was 24, and I had just left L.A. and relocated to the Bay Area for the second time, bitter and desperate for a fresh start (much like when I recently moved from the Bay Area to Seattle). They published only one other piece after mine, I believe, then quickly axed the idea, sticking to articles of interest to the campus community. Editor J. Poet became a good friend of mine and I began writing movie reviews for the paper, and eventually was hired as a Classified Ad Manager. I had no idea what that means, and still don't, but I faked it for about a year. My first movie review was for Barfly, which I trashed (though I've since grown to love it). I sent it to Mickey Rourke and he told me he had it framed.

I much prefer writing fiction over movie criticism, anyway (one reason I gave up the latter long ago). Some have compared this piece to Jean Paul-Sartre's No Exit (which was not intentional as I was not familiar with that work at the time). Others have not. You decide. 

THE IN-BETWEENERSby Will ViharoOriginally published in The Daily Californian, 1987

Original illustration“You want to know what I miss the most?” the Musician asked no one in particular. It was a cloudy, breezy afternoon, and the bar wasn't even half full. The misty ambience outdoors and the rustic décor of the Dew-Drop Inn inspired the Poet to furiously scribble romantic rubbish on dozens of napkins. The Actor remained passively alert, one ear given to the rambling Musician, and one eye dedicated to the sashaying contours of the Waitress. “Well, do ya or don't ya?” the Musician repeated.
“I'm listening,” said the Actor. “Just tell me. What do you miss? I'm dying to know, really.”
“You see that? That tone of voice?” the Musician said, riled, sitting erect and abandoning his screw-this slouch.
“I'm tone deaf,” said the Actor dryly, sipping his bourbon thoughtfully, trying to imagine the Waitress nude, and what their kids would look like, and if he'd still find her attractive when he was famous.
“I hate when you pull this shit,” said the Musician, blowing smoke from his cigarette aimlessly. “I hate when you get pedestrian on me.”
“You mean patronizing,” murmured the Poet, mentally lost on a boat on the Thames, looking for his True Love through the fog.
“Whateverthe fuck I mean, I wish he'd just listen and, and, y'know. Listen,” said the Musician, tugging at the crucifix dangling from his ear.
“Just tell me what you miss, goddammit.” The Actor sighed, throwing back the rest of his drink. He summoned the Waitress for another.
“Okay, I'll tell ya,” said the Musician, returning to a reclining sprawl on the bench opposite the Actor and the intently-creative Poet. “I miss despair.”
“Have you tried sending it a postcard?” asked the Actor as he held one finger up to the Waitress.
“Fuck you,” said the Musician, returning to a reclining sprawl on the bench opposite the Actor and the intently-creative poet.
“Despair or passion?” the Poet suddenly said, but softly, still concentrating somewhere on the storm-swept Outback, looking for Her.
The Waitress, pretty, lost-looking, self-conscious, set the Actor's drink down with a quick smile, then departed. Their eyes had barely met, but the Actor felt encouraged.
Her eyes, wrote the Poet, her eyes...
“Whaddya mean by that?” the Musician asked the Poet. He lit another cigarette. The Poet's coffee was ice-cold by now, ignored into obscurity.
“By what?” said the Poet absently.
“By 'do I not miss despair but passion instead'? What the hell is thatsupposed to mean?” He sounded defensive as well as curious.
“Sshhh,I'm trying to think,” said the Poet. “Talk to him.”
“He won't listen to me,” the Musician said spitefully of the Actor, who was already forgetting the Waitress in favor of the Bartender, a frat, a loaf of white bread with a bow tie. Decisions, choices, variety. Life. Trapped. Suffocating.
“Hey, you listenin' to me?” the Musician practically yelled in the Actor's face.
“No,” said the Actor, now studying himself in the mirror behind the bar. He was noticing that he was better-looking than either the Waitress or the Bartender.
Eyes like twin oases in the wasteland of my...vision. The Poet crumpled up another napkin and jammed it deep into the pocket of his coat, not to be discarded carelessly someplace where it could be discovered and published posthumously. God forbid, he had a reputation to uphold. Such trite, trivial nonsense could ruin his place in eternity.
“All I'm tryin' to say,” said the Musician, sitting up for another shot at it, “is that...I don't know. My mind keeps going blank. I feel like...like I'm on the verge of somethin', y'know? That I lost somethin' but I don't know what, 'cause it vanished-like, you understand? Does that make no sense at all or...what? Something's missing...and...I don't feel like I've got anyplace to go, even though I've never been anywhere special yet...like when I was a little kid, I used to dream of doing gigs on the moon, for Chrissake, but now...I really don't care if I do. I mean, I care, but...in a way, I don't.”
“You're apathetic. Join the club,” the Poet said flatly, mesmerized by the blank napkin before him.
“I need another drink,” yawned the Actor, feeling his hairline, wondering if he'd be compared to Cary Grant or Jack Nicholson.
“Ask for more napkins,” said the Poet.
“You ask,” said the Actor.
“Whaddya mean, 'apathetic'?” said the Musician, refusing to have his train of thought derailed. “You mean like I don't give a shit, really, that I don't give a shit about not giving a shit?”
“Your eloquence,” said the Actor, “is staggering.”
“Think so really?” said the Musician. “Thanks. People tell me I talk like jazz sounds.”
The Actor got the attention of the Waitress. She motioned she'd be right there. She was watching the soap opera on the TV by the Bartender. The Actor wondered if they had a thing going, and if so, if he could join them. Montgomery Clift is who they will compare me to, he decided. But then a hair came out in his hand. He needed that drink.
“I feel burned-out, but not on acid,” the Musician continued. “Like I've done life already, the whole trip, even though I really haven't done anything. You know? You ever feel like that? Like you can't remember where you've been, and you don't really care where you're going?”
“The trouble is,” the Poet said quietly, “we're too young for one century, too old for the next.” She touched me in places my heart had never dreamed of. “I need more napkins,” he said. “Where's the Waitress?”
“Something's just...missing,” the Musician said, sitting back. “I feel like I'm going to disappear any second.”
The Waitress ignored the Actor's intense stare as she set his drink down. The Actor noticed she had a string tied around her finger. He wondered what she needed to be reminded of. To take her pill? She hurried away, intuitively, before he could ask.
“She seems so sad,” the Actor mused as he sipped, barely able to find his own lips by now.
“Who does?” said the Poet, looking up. “You mean – she was just here? Did you ask for more napkins? This is my last...”
“Christ, where were you?” said the Actor disdainfully. “Wake up.”
“Where did she go?” the Poet asked loudly.
“She's gone to a place where you'll never find her,” said the Actor ominously. “You'll never get your goddamn napkins now. You might as well give up and study computers. Poets starve, one way or another. Even if they get published. They're never satisfied with Life, the main source of their material. They always find something to whine about or they're not happy. Melancholia is their stock-in-trade.”

“I don't feel like anyone else cares that I don't care,” said the Musician, picking up the sax. He began to blow a few delicate notes, delicately. The Waitress, in the bathroom, began to cry at the sound of of his blue melody.
“Where the hell is she?” the Poet wondered. “This is my last napkin.”She was like a specter that haunted my memory. Her love a gentle sunset on the stark horizon of my existence... “If only I had someone to write for,” the Poet lamented.
“Stop whining,” said the Actor. His gaze had met the Bartender's. The Actor wondered if he had enough coke left for two. “You two guys make me sick. You escape into dream-worlds because you simply cannot deal with reality. You're looking for an illusion, both of you. There's no escape. This is it.You might as well learn to make the most of it.” He fought the overwhelming sense of futility in his gut.
“No one notices anything anymore,” the Musician said to the ceiling. “Or if they do, no one cares.” He went back to his sax plaintively. The Poet covered his solitary napkin with fruitless ink. The Actor got up to order his next drink from the bar.
No way to find you, no way to forget you, wrote the Poet.
The sax sounded mournful.
“I'm off at six,” the Bartender told the Actor, who was showing him his resume of summer stock work.Suddenly, the Musician stopped playing. The Poet crumpled up his napkin and threw it aimlessly. “I give up,” he sighed.
Blood trickled from under the door to the ladies' room.
“Where can she be?” wondered the Poet.
“No one's listening,” said the Musician as he put the sax back into the case. “What's the point?”
Outside it began to rain.



MORE SHORT FICTION by Will Viharo

PEOPLE BUG ME (2013)

ESCAPE FROM THRILLVILLE (2014)

NAKED WHORE WITH A GUN (Flash Fiction Offensive) (2013)

SUCKER PUNCH OF THE GODS (Flash Fiction Offensive) (2014)

Radio reading from my unpublished novel NEON ROSE (1989)

Radio play based on my unpublished novella SHADOW MUSIC (1996)

My short story BEHIND THE BAR is included in this anthology:
My Vic Valentine vignette BRAIN MISTRUST is included in this anthology:

Summer 2014: Southwest by Northwest

At Pike's Place BreweryIt's been an interesting summer - life-changing, if not exactly game-changing. At least not yet. After successfully selling our beloved, beachside Alameda condo, we finally made the Big Move North right on the Summer Solstice, driving directly to our destination from the Bay Area overnight, straight to Seattle, with our two cats Googie and Tiki snugly ensconced in a carrier cage taking up the entire back of our Mini Cooper, Monica and me switching turns at the wheel, literally driven by adrenalin and anticipation, in one long rush, like Kowalski in Vanishing Point. Fortunately our movie had a happier ending. Or beginning. An original Space Needle lighter from the 1962 World's Fair
There is a thriving indie/rep movie theater scene in Seattle, not to mention a plethora of ultra-cool cafes and incredible indie bookstores and bountiful bars. But I already knew that. That's why I'm here. In some ways, Seattle is like a condensed combination of San Francisco, the East Bay, and Lake Tahoe, where Monica and I were married back in 2001. But it's smaller, and prettier, and the pace is slower, exactly what I need at this stage of my life. I crave peace of mind as well as body and spirit. I'm still desperately seeking professional if not creative fulfillment as a writer, but that's a lifelong quest. I've finally found my new headquarters, and that in itself is very satisfying. It's just in the air, everywhere I go, from the University District to Downtown to Capitol Hill to Queen Anne and beyond. It's home, sweet home. Welcome to beautiful Lake Washington - basically my backyard! Unfortunately, July was the second hottest on record in Seattle - a bitter irony, since we moved from Northern California mainly to escape the incessant dry heat - but there were also some welcome thunderstorms mixed in for good measure, keeping the Emerald City green, if steamy, like a giant hothouse. We are very happy here. There is also a great deal of midcentury modern architecture - appropriate, given the fact the Space Needle is the city's international iconic symbol - which was a surprising bonus.  Professor Tiki Goddess in trainingMonica begins her PhD program at the University of Washington School of Drama this fall, and she is very excited. We are both looking forward to autumn. It's my favorite season, and this will be my first true autumn in decades, since the Bay Area suffers from Indian Summer in September and October, typically ruining my Halloween spirit. I was raised in New Jersey. I miss my season. I can stand the heat - but only in the summer. Bring on the clouds and rain and inspiration and famous Seattle gloom. I'm more than ready.

Below is a photographic summary of our summer in Seattle so far:
Our "sailor statue stalker" Ivar finally comes home - to Ivar's! Go A's (and Mariners)! At Safeco Field. At a favorite local spot, The Ram in University Village
At one of my many great local bars, Canon And another, Zig Zag Watching the Pacific Mambo Orchestra at one of our favorite joints, Jazz Alley Lucha and libations at Bimbo's Cantina Ivar's Salmon House, perhaps our favorite spot so far. Another favorite, the Twins Peaks style diner Lost Lake Cafe Capital Grille  is an old school thrill! At one of local celebrity chef Tom Douglas's many fine establishments, Palace Kitchen Aloha from Hula Hula! Aloha from the Lava Lounge! Aloha from Tacoma Cabana! Cheers to Batman's 75th! (Liam's Bistro) Third Place Bookstore - books, coffee, food, booze, all in one place! Grand Illusion Cinema - a thrilling throwback to the glory days of repertory cinema Representing The New Parkway at Seattle's excellent equivalent, Central Cinema Going "Ape" for the swingin' 60s landmark Cinerama Theater At SIFF's headquarters near the Space Needle The main branch of the Seattle Public Library downtown is a marvel of futuristic architecture Lounging otter-style at Seattle Aquarium Channeling Jackson Pollock at the Seattle Art Museum
Biking off all that booze on the gorgeous Burke Gilman Trail
The world famous Scarecrow Video is Mecca for film geeks

The highlight of our Seattle adventures so far - meeting wonderful artist Lisa Petrucci in the amazing home she shared with the late great Mike Vraney, founder of Something Weird VideoAnother personal milestone: I also visited my father, Pop and me, New York City, 1963 Pop and me, Los Angeles, 1978


Pop and me, Parkway Theater, Oakland, 2005
Pop and me, Santa Fe, 2014 Santa Fe Plaza With Robby the Robot for a special anniversary screening of Forbidden Planet, 
Jacques Cocteau Cinema Pop romps in bed with bombshells Gina Lollobrigida (top) and Marisa Mell in the 1968 Italian film Stuntman.

Pop in the '70s grindhouse classic Bare Knuckles
We also recently returned to Portland, one of my favorite towns. Though it isn't as cosmopolitan as Seattle, I dig the bohemian nature of this smaller burg.We revisited some of our favorite haunts, while discovering some new ones. We stayed at the absolutely incredible McMenamin's Kennedy School, a renovated elementary school with its own hotel, restaurant, several bars, pool, and movie theater, part of Portland's amazingly conceived chain of restaurant/theater resorts, which provided inspiration for Speakeasy Theaters.
Monica enjoys a cigar in the Detention Bar at Kennedy School Monica discovers some of the best donuts in the world at Blue Star At the midcentury modern oasis Gold Dust Meridian Literary Mecca: Powell's Bookstore Aloha from Hale Pele!  Aloha from Trader Vic's! Portland's oldest bar, Huber's
More old school cool, Jake's Grill One of our favorite spots anywhere, the Driftwood Room in the Hotel deLuxe, PortlandSo...not sure what comes next. Monica and I will keep following that dream, wherever that dream may lead...

Monica and me, circa 1998 In our new Seattle digs.Meantime, I need to find a job...any job...


Maybe a superhero? I already have a "beautiful Indian companion"...


Naw...I'll just keep writing. Cheers.

Daring to dream...
Teaser artwork by Scooter Harris for the sixth Vic Valentine novel "Hard-Boiled Heart," 
now in progress The "Vic Valentine" cocktail is part of  my liquid legacy in the Bay Area, served exclusively at Forbidden Island
Jeff M. Giordano's documentary about my Bay Area career, The Thrill Is Gone

"The Thrill Is Gone": Aloha, Bay Area; Hola, Seattle!

It's been a long, hard goodbye, but after several public farewell parties, the time has finally come: Monica Tiki Goddess and I are leaving the San Francisco Bay Area for good, embarking on our next and probably biggest adventure: a whole new life in Seattle, WA, where she will be attending the PhD program at the University of Washington School of Drama, and I'll...just keep writing and hoping for the best. But the misty, moody environment will be creatively stimulating, and hopefully literally and figuratively end my internal "dry spell." I am looking forward to the change of scenery as well as the change of climate. I am not looking forward to missing all of our friends, and though the bright California sunshine and arid atmosphere has become far too harsh for my eyes and skin to bear, it's been a great, fruitful run. After all, I met my wife - a California girl forever - here, so we'll be back to visit. Suffice to say, I have mixed emotions about leaving, since I've lived in the Golden State most of my adult life (1979-1985 in L.A., and since then all around the Bay Area, mostly East Bay), but most of them are positive and forward-facing, even as I ponder the dubious accomplishments of my past here, such as they may be.
Reading my story "Escape from Thrillville,"
Shashamane Bar & Grill, OaklandSometimes - actually often - I wonder if my "career" as "Will the Thrill" was even worthwhile. My lifelong ambition has been to become a successful writer. I just fell into the whole "B movie lounge lizard" thing by professional accident, not personal design, when the former owners of now defunct Parkway Speakeasy Theater asked me to create, host and program my own live cult movie show, which eventually became "Thrillville." My public identity was soon established as an impresario of outre cinema and promoter of "lounge" lifestyle and tiki culture rather than a "serious" novelist. Though I met many great people via my networking of special guests, bands and burlesque acts, it never really offered me artistic fulfillment, since in my eyes I was merely spotlighting the endeavors of others, instead of pimping my own. I pretty much gave up on my writing career during this long period, except for some freelance non-fiction articles about movies and such, since I was now "the movie guy." Now that it's all over, I'm still busy reinventing/reintroducing/reviving myself as "the pulp guy," my original vocation. Thrillville was initially envisioned as a promotional platform for my 1995 novel Love Stories Are Too Violent For Me anyway, currently stuck in development hell with Christian Slater planning to direct as well as star as my PI protagonist, Vic Valentine. Now I've come full circle. I'm just a writer - no other prospects at the moment to distract me. We sold off our Alameda condo and are now totally out of debt. It's a fresh start. 
So...what was it all for? The answer is right here in this documentary by filmmaker Jeff M. Giordano, whom I met at Forbidden Island a couple of years ago, and who approached me a few months ago about his idea for a project chronicling my exit from the Bay Area...
With filmmaker Jeff M. Giordano, Forbidden IslandThe result is this amazing 70 minute feature, filled with clips, interviews and trailers, is an amazing memento of my three decades in the Bay Area, particularly the last one, since it focuses on my public persona as "The Thrill," but also my private dreams as Will the Quill. I am deeply honored and truly touched by this amazing tribute, which preserves for posterity the essence of "Thrillville."
Dig it in its awesome entirety (when you have the chance):

The doc just had its "world premiere" at Forbidden Island Tiki Lounge - where I was alternately employed as band booker, publicist, movie host ("Forbidden Thrills"), and door man over the past five plus years - and where much of my interview was conducted. FI is also the home of the "Vic Valentine" cocktail, one of its most popular house drinks, created by Susan Eggett. I will miss Forbidden Island more than any of my Bay Area haunts. Below are some pix of this special night plus a few others from recent visits:

With Monica (above) Michael and Denise Thanos (below), Forbidden Island's 8th Anniversary, 4/14 With one of my favorite bands, The Aqua-Velvets
The premiere of "The Thrill Is Gone," 6/8/14 Drinking the "Vic Valentine" With my good friend Michael Larry and Don: hardcore With "It Came from Hangar 18" co-author and friend Scott Fulks With filmmaker Jeff M. Giordano Tiki Noir... One final Forbidden Thrill...
Like I said, this has been a protracted aloha. A couple of months ago, on April 3, the day after my 51st birthday, I hosted THRILLVILLE'S 17TH ANNIVERSARY/FAREWELL BAY AREA SHOW featuring my favorite movie, Sweet Smell of Success (1957), at The New Parkway in Oakland. It was the final time Monica Tiki Goddess and I danced to the "Welcome to Thrillville" theme by The Moon-Rays, and that I wore the official Thrillville fez from Fez-o-Rama, at least in public. For the past year and a half I'd been programming but hardly ever personally presenting a franchised version of "Thrillville Theater" at The New Parkway, with rotating guest hosts: Lord Blood-Rah, Misery Ann Mayhem, The Queen of Scream, and The Undertaker. Now that I'm gone, Lord-Blood Rah's Nerve-Wrackin' Theater, featuring this same rotating roster as well as classic horror/sci-fi movies presented in vintage style, has taken Thrillville Theater's place after a lengthy, carefully planned "grooming period." 
Below are some scenes from our final Thrillville show, as well as the Farewell Party TNP founder J. Moses Ceaser threw for us on June 8, featuring the first movie I ever booked/hosted at the old Parkway, Blue Velvet. I also threw in the 1998 SF State student film recreating a scene from this movie, with Monica playing Dorothy and me as Frank....
Will the Thrill and Monica Tiki Goddess: one last time... With my successors: The Undertaker (left), Lord Blood-Rah, Vanessa Queen of Scream, and "Gargantua" "The Thrill Is Gone..." With long time "Thrill Seeker" and supporter, Larry Kakos Meet Zooey (center) - who was actually celebrating her 17th birthday at my 17th anniversary show... Thrill Seekers wearing the original Thrillville T-shirt from November Fire... "Moving to Seattle, everything must go!"
Images created by long time supporter, Bob Ekman
And then the final, FINAL Parkway farewell... With J. Moses Ceaser, who provided some delicious chocolate cake for the crowd Monica and me in a scene from a student film, shown before the movie...
The "Thrillville" table created by longtime supporter Dan Franco lives at theater as part of my "legacy"Then on May 3, Monica conspired with Tom Wyrsch, John Stanley, Bob Johnson, and Bob Ekman to get me to attend a "surprise" ceremony at the Bal Theater in San Leandro (I usually hate leaving my house so it's hard to get me anywhere without incentive), masquerading as one of Bob E.'s legendary "Psychotronic" shows, where I was presented with the John Stanley Bay Area Horror Host Award, quite an unexpected honor....
An unexpected honor Subterfuge... Mr. Lobo appeared via Skype from his home in Pennsylvania! The Creepy KOFY movie gang taped a special big screen salute... Ms. Monster and her Melons, Tit and Tat, recorded a special tribute shown on the big screen! What a surprise! Left to right: Tom Wyrsch, Lord Blood-Rah, me, Monica, John Stanley, and Bob Johnson
With Bob Ekman, Monica, and Bob Johnson  With the legendary John Stanley and robot friend
John recently filmed a segment of his upcoming "Creature Features" doc with me at The New Parkway, too. 
Below are some random pics of us drinking our way through the Bay Area, visiting our favorite hangouts before we leave for the Emerald City forever...


My 51st birthday, Trader Vic's, Emeryville, 4/2/14:





Yet another trip to Trader Vic's, a month later... .
 
Monica's Oakland A's tattoo, her reward for getting into the University of Washington PhD program (so no one will mistake her for a Mariner's fan...


At Oakland Ink... Celebrating at Tribune Tavern  Representing...

Representing... My final pickup at Alameda Sports Cards and Comics...
At Big Wow Comics Convention, San Jose  At Big Wow with Melissa Wortman, Balrok, Webberly Ravencraft of Creepy KOFY Beach Chalet, San Francisco Oakland: Home of the Mai Tai, Not Just the Drive-By (Hawker Fare) American Oak, Alameda  Dogwood Bar, Oakland
La Pinca Azul, Alameda (Harbor Bay "branch") Hula's Tiki Bar, Santa Cruz
Trabocco, Alameda Spenger's, Berkeley, where I proposed to Monica in 2000, after we'd already booked our wedding...And back in our condo at The Capri (now sold!), having a party for our 13th wedding anniversary, 5/31/14

THAT'S ALL, FOLKS!
FAREWELL, BAY AREA And look who's following us all the way to Seattle...


And don't worry, I won't forget to "write"...cheers.



A new place to hang my hat...
BACHELOR PAD MAGAZINE #28 featuring my regular movie column now on sale!

"Escape from Thrillville" by Will "the Thrill" Viharo

"ESCAPE FROM THRILLVILLE"by Will “the Thrill” Viharo
A fanciful short story in honor of my bidding farewell to the Bay Area as I relocate my home base to Seattle...also published in the online arts journal Literary Orphans Image by Aaron FarmerWhen booze becomes the only thing that floats your boat, it's time to drain the lake.
This is why I was seriously considering hanging up the fez hat, shades and smoking jacket after 17 years in this thankless racket. Defending Thrillville from a motley assortment of mad scientists, monsters, gangsters, rapists, killers, kidnappers, and jaywalkers had definitely taken its toll on my sanity, which eventually meant sacrificing my sobriety. My giant martini glass had once been a main source of my power. Now it had become my worst enemy. Even more than lousy fashion and crappy music. Photo by Jim Ferreira I'm Will the Thrill, by the way. Lounge Lizard for Hire. I fight crime for a living. Except it doesn't actually pay anything, so I'm always broke. Cheap thrills do not pay bills. To be honest, I steal what little money I have, typically from crime scenes. Sometimes I sell the dope I've recovered. I'm not a good guy. I just act like one. I guess I'm what's known as an “anti-hero.” I'm also anti-social. I hate people. Except for the ones with nice tits. And even then, only if they're nice to me. Image by Fred LammersSuperficial appearances count. I only dress like I'm a swingin' hipster. It's all part of my fabricated public image. People don't believe what you tell them, they believe what you show them. Before I donned the snazzy duds, I was just another poor (in all senses), chronically lonesome schnook wasting his nights home alone with a good book or a bad movie. But once I found the magical Fez in a thrift shop one crazy day, my entire life changed. I soon discovered that with great power comes...you know, all that jazz. I hated the actual responsibilities of being a superhero. I'm a lazy bastard. I don't even work out. I'm totally out of shape. I didn't fit the popular profile. Plus my motivations were hardly altruistic. I was only in it for the pussy. And boy, did I score on that front. Chicks dig a cool uniform, even if there aren't any muscles underneath. The only thing that turns them on more is money. That's one superpower I did not have. But I managed to get by without out it. As long as I wore the Fez, which protected my true identity as a total loser. It was like a condom for my ego. I also found out it paid to wear pinkie rings on each fist when punching people in the face. My customized, unbreakable martini glass the size and density of a sledgehammer made an effective weapon as well. For wheels I had the Thrillmobile, a tricked out 1957 powder blue Thunderbird with leopard skin upholstery and a portable cocktail bar in the trunk, for on-the-fly crime-fighting fuel.
Rescuing damsels in distress kept me knee-deep in nookie on a regular basis, all right. If you can't get paid you might as well get laid. But now even my penis was pooped. The pilot light inside my heart had blown out, too. Inside, I already felt dead. I was just waiting for that other cuff link to drop. Photo by Jim FerreriaAnyway, one recent night I was slamming back serial bourbon shots while moping around in the Thrillpad – a single-room, pastel-painted, plushly appointed, midcentury modernist studio apartment equipped with a LP stereo system stocked with classic lounge/exotica albums; a big screen TV with a DVD player and a few dozen carefully selected old movies; a dime-store rack full of pulp novels; a closet full of backup fezzes and alternate silk smoking jackets in varying colors; a bureau with a mirror and a drawer full of black shades and pinkie rings; a hatrack where I hung my various luchadore masks for my undercover, international alias, “Guillermo El Thrillermo”; and of course a round, rotating water bed. Behind the martini bar was a portrait of the Holy Trinity: Frank, Dean, and Sammy. It was my shrine, where I went to worship when I needed sustenance from a Higher Power. And nobody got higher than those guys. The Thrillpad was my Fortress of Solitude and my Batcave combined. Except much smaller, with a lot more kinky sex toys scattered around, like tiki-shaped vibrators, edible hallucinogenic dice, and pornographic strip poker card decks.
It had been one long, wild thrill-ride. Illustration originally published in Too Much Coffee Man Magazine, 2001But now it seemed the party was over. I was a middle-aged wolf, after all. Even my sidekick, The Tiki Goddess, the most beautiful and exotic woman I'd ever met, whose superpower was seduction, didn't answer the Thrill-Phone or respond to the Thrill Signal anymore. I think she was tired of waiting around for me to marry her or something. I'd blown it. I was retiring from this racket exactly the way I'd started: alone. Photo by Jim FerreiraThat's when a beautiful brunette with familiar bangs whom I wanted to bang on the spot knocked on the door then walked in when I opened it. She was a dead ringer for Bettie Page.
“I want you to find someone for me,” she said.“Who?”“Me.”“No, I mean who do you want me to find.”“Me. I want you to find me.”“Who are you? You look just like Bettie Page.”“Bettie Page.”“Yea, that's who you look like.”“That's also who I am.”“I thought you were dead.”“So did I.”“Um...don't take this wrong, but you didn't die in your prime. You were, y'know...old.”“Exactly. Weird, huh?”After nearly two decades of facing off with everything from nympho vampires to alien hit men to rampaging robots to lycanthropic mobsters, I was accustomed to weirdness. Overly-familiar with it, in fact. This was exactly the kind of thing I was trying to get away from.Then she suddenly let out a long, evil laugh.“I'm just fucking with you,” she said. “I'm not actually Bettie Page. I'm just messin' with you.”“What? Why?”“Because. That's what I do. I'm The Mindfucker. Pleased to meet you.”“Oh...well, please to meet you too, doll.” I extended my right hand for a shake.“I'm sorry, I can't shake your hand, because that would require corporeal presence.”“Huh?”“I'm not actually here. You're imagining all this.”“How.”“Because I made you imagine it. In fact, I made you.”“Huh? But...why?“Because.I'm The Mindfucker. It's what I do. Well...see ya!”Then poof, she was gone.

I didn't know what to make of this mysterious encounter. Did she present any actual danger? A pain in the ass, sure. But an actual public enemy that needed to be stopped? Hard to say, though given her unique powers of mind control, the potential certainly existed. I was reminded of my old nemesis, The Headshrinker. She was an impossibly sexy voodoo priestess who made one head swell while shrinking the other one – basically sucking both till they were left limp, empty and useless. But last I heard she was locked up in the Thrillville Asylum. And projecting mental illusions wasn't really in her trick 'r' treat bag. I also flashed back to the notorious bitch known as The Ballbuster, but as far as I knew, she was dead. This was most likely an entirely new player. Just when I thought I was out... Image by Bob EkmanAt the time I was wearing only my wife beater, silk boxers, and argyle socks. I put on a white shirt, black slacks, skinny pink tie, aqua green smoking jacket, striped white tiger fur fez, and shades and went downstairs to the garage where I climbed into the Thrillmobile and drove around town, lost in thought, my perpetual jazz soundtrack on the radio. There was a full moon over Thrillville, which was a shadowy town even by daylight, though the sun hardly ever shone here. It was perpetually cloudy, which meant the neon signs on all the nightclubs were never turned off. And Thrillville was almost nothing but nightclubs, cheap residential hotels, diners and dive bars, all Googie style, the city council's architectural mandate. The denizens were of both supernatural and human origin, mixing and mingling and mating in general harmony until a crime of passion or opportunity was committed and I was called into action. But things had been quiet for a while, and I figured they could live without me. The question was: could I live without them? After driving around aimlessly for a while, I finally stopped at the urban tropical oasis known as Forbidden Island, the tiki lounge where The Tiki Goddess performed her nightly torch singing gig. Entertainment was her real career. She only became my crime-fighting sidekick after we were accidentally thrown together onto a case when Thrillville was being attacked by The Grunge Gang, a bunch of ugly thugs whose superpowers were bad hair, bad clothes, and bad attitudes – and they were contagious. They really rubbed her sense of style the wrong way, and she took on the task of sticking her sweet high-heeled feet right up their torn blue-jeaned asses before I jumped in and helped her. So I guess in effect I was her sidekick. In any case, we'd been close allies ever since. We slept together a few times, but I could tell she was getting serious, so I told her I couldn't see her as often, and she cooled off from the crime-fighting bit. The truth was she was getting to me and the one vulnerability a crime-fighter can't have is a loved one. I worried too much she'd become a target of my many enemies. Also, I was afraid of commitment. The reality was, she was the one and only person who knew my true identity as a complete schmuck, but still accepted me. For some reason, I couldn't handle that. The Tiki Goddess was onstage performing a moody medley in her smokey Julie London/June Christy style, backed up by the house band, a bunch of beret-wearing, bongo-beating beatniks called The Moon-Rays. I took a seat at the bamboo bar, ordered a classic Mai Tai, and waited for her set to end.When she was finished, she joined me, but with a cool demeanor that clinked around in the air between us like the ice in my glass.
“Welcome to Chillville,” I said.“What do you want?” she asked, cutting the chit-chat while nodding at the bartender, who responded immediately with a ready-made French 75.“Besides you?”“You had your chance.”“True. And I regret that choice daily. But I'm only here with one question: Have you ever heard of a super-villain called The Mindfucker?”“Sure.”“What do you mean, 'sure'?”“I mean yes, I've heard of The Mindfucker. It's been around forever. Why?”“'It'?”“He. She. It. Whatever. It assumes whatever form suits its particular agenda.”“Which is what?”“That constantly changes as well.”“So how do I find it?”“You can't.”“Why not?”“That the secret power of The Mindfucker. There is no Mindfucker. Not in singular, tangible form, anyway. That's how The Mindfucker can operate without ever being captured. He/she/it remains at large, a perpetual perpetrator, precisely because he/she/it is constantly being regenerated by his/her/its own victims, even though the victims are in fact the perps.”I couldn't believe what I was hearing. “So The Mindfucker is an eternal entity?”“Yes. It's common knowledge, really. Surprised you're just hearing about it. But then you've always been trapped inside your own head, haven't you? That fez is more a like locked lid.”“That's crazy...so how do we know The Mindfucker isn't controlling our senses right now?”“We don't.”“So...my entire life, all of my memories, this very moment, could be...an illusion? Like a dream?”“Yes.”“Even...you?”“Yes...” She leaned closer to me. The mutual attraction was to strong for either of us to resist.“Even...this?” I said.“Yes....” She closed her eyes, bracing for passionate impact...
But before our lips met, there erupted an abruptly disruptive chorus of screaming from the surrounding patrons as a swarm of moaning undead monster men (and women) with glazed eyes and drooling mouths suddenly invaded the place. I recognized them right away, especially since they all dressed alike in gray sweat pants and T-shirts with matching corporate logos, but their physical appearances had deteriorated a great deal since I'd last noticed them. A steady diet of cloned pop culture will do that to a person. Image by Aaron Farmer The Corporate Corpses, as they were dubbed by the local media, were a ragtag band of normally peaceful zombified consumers controlled by an unseen but all-powerful billionaire industrialist known as The Conformist. The Corpses were dismissed by society as sad annoyances, stumbling around the local mall, bumping into each other while shopping for stuff they'd never need, but for some reason they'd suddenly developed a taste for other human brains, perhaps because of their own cerebral deficits. That may have been The Conformist's master plan all along. But was The Conformist really in cahoots with The Mindfucker? Or were they in fact the same being?
A particularly aggressive zombie tore off The Tiki Goddess's shiny satin dress, so she was wearing nothing but her leopard skin underwear and snake-skin pumps. I found this very distracting, but it didn't detract from The Tiki Goddess's ass-kicking abilities, as she swung her magnificent gams around with lethal athleticism, kick-boxing her way through the horrible hordes, smashing the skulls of her avaricious attackers, their putrid brains spilling all over the bamboo floor. Image by Aaron Farmer So why would The Conformist’s mindless minions, normally as harmless as mannequins, suddenly morph into cannibalistic predators, feasting on human flesh? Was The Mindfucker behind this sudden, radical change of behavior? Or was this even really happening? No time to debate myself. The screams of the patrons attempting to flee the zombies sounded all too real.
I ran outside to the Thrillmobile to retrieve my own trademark weapon, the giant martini glass, then returned to join the defense against the violent assault. But something unprecedented happened: my unbreakable martini glass broke. I just dropped it on the floor by accident, and it shattered. Defenseless, I was overwhelmed by the zombies. I felt them tearing into my body and my soul. I couldn't see The Tiki Goddess anymore. One of them stabbed a metal straw right through my fez, penetrating my skull, and my brains were being sucked out right through the top of my torn scalp...
I was saved by the shrill ringing of the alarm clock. I looked at the time and groggily realized I was almost late for work. Again. I couldn't afford to get fired from another job. I hopped out of my Murphy bed and into the shower after putting on an Esquivel album to set the mood for my day, which I was determined would be special. Then I neatly combed my hair, put on cologne, and wore my best tie, even though I was only a clerk in a chain store. Maybe today was the day I'd finally summon up the courage to ask my my dream girl and favorite customer out on a date, first summoning up the courage to actually talk to her outside of the heartless transactions. Then I'd quit my job. It was time for me to outgrow reality in favor or my fantasies. I was going to spike my coffee with whiskey, as usual, but instead settled for cream, and ran down to meet my bus.
By the way, I thought I should tell you that none of this actually happened, except in my own mind. And now yours.

ESCAPE FROM THRILLVILLE as well as my Tribute To Ingrid Bergmanare included in this issue of Literary Orphans

My live reading of "Escape from Thrillville" is featured in this cleverly edited clip from  Jeff M. Giordano's upcoming documentary The Thrill Is Gone



Another excerpt, discussing my youthful friendship with actor Mickey Rourke...

Cheers from our future home base!

Images by Scooter Harris, placing my fictional PI Vic Valentine and The Tiki Goddess in the world of the 1960s BATMAN series...

My TV horror host growing up in South Jersey throughout the 1970s, Philly's DOC SHOCK! )


Valentine's Day 2014 at Trabocco, Alameda CA

Celebrating Monica's acceptance into the School of Drama PhD program at the University of Washington, at Butterfly Restaurant in San Francisco 3/14/14. With co-author Scot Fulks aboard the USS Hornet in Alameda CA for a book signing of
IT CAME FROM HANGAR 18, Grey Ghost Paracon, 2/22/14


Scenes from my final SHATFEST: TRIBUTE TO WILLIAM SHATNER,
The New Parkway, 3/20/14

William Shatner tribute clip show edited by Mark Bowen of Le Video, San Francisco:



Reading from Love Stories Are Too Violent For Me,
part of this interview for the San Francisco Weekly Melissa Wortman (top) and Webberly Rattencraft (below) of San Francisco's CREEPY KOFY MOVIE TIME plug my novel LOVE STORIES ARE TOO VIOENT FOR ME on the air ! Our own personal appearances on this show, in September 2009 and September 2010, respectively:

NOW ON SALE BACHELOR PAD MAGAZINE #27featuring my regular movie column!
I am a judge for this contest sponsored by Bachelor Pad Magazine. THE MOON-RAYS
wrote and recorded the official "Thrillville" theme song!
Lobby cards created by Sci-Fi Bob Ekman
Preparing my Bay Area exit strategy...aloha, and thanks for all the thrills, cheers!

MORE SHORT FICTION by Will Viharo:


A WRONG TURN AT ALBUQUERQUE (1982) and THE IN-BETWEENERS (1987)


LITTLE BLACK BULLETS (1989) and NIGHT NOTES (1990)


COFFEE SHOP GODDESS (1990) and THE EMANCIPATION OF ANNE FRANK (1991)


PEOPLE BUG ME (2013)

SUCKER PUNCH OF THE GODS (Flash Fiction Offensive) (2014)

Radio reading from my unpublished novel NEON ROSE (1989)

Radio play based on my unpublished novella SHADOW MUSIC (1996)


NOW AVAILABLE: NIGHTMARE ILLUSTRATED #5with my short story "PEOPLE BUG ME"
NOW ON SALE: LONG DISTANCE DRUNKS: A TRIBUTE TO CHARLES BUKOWSKI featuring my short story "BEHIND THE BAR" Order from Amazon

My story  SHORT AND CHOPPY  featured in the premiere issue of this new pulp magazine

My Vic Valentine vignette  BRAIN MISTRUST  is included in this anthology:

"Escape from Thrillville!' by Will "the Thrill" Viharo

"ESCAPE FROM THRILLVILLE"by Will “the Thrill” Viharo
A fanciful short story in honor of my bidding farewell to the Bay Area as I relocate my home base to Seattle... soon to appear in a special "flip book" edition of Literary Orphans Image by Aaron FarmerWhen booze becomes the only thing that floats your boat, it's time to drain the lake.
This is why I seriously considering hanging up the fez hat, shades and smoking jacket after 17 years in this thankless racket. Defending Thrillville from a motley assortment of mad scientists, monsters, gangsters, rapists, killers, kidnappers, and jaywalkers had definitely taken its toll on my sanity, which eventually meant sacrificing my sobriety. My giant martini glass had once been a main source of my power. Now it had become my worst enemy. Even more than lousy fashion and crappy music. Photo by Jim Ferreira I'm Will the Thrill, by the way. Lounge Lizard for Hire. I fight crime for a living. Except it doesn't actually pay anything, so I'm always broke. Cheap thrills do not pay bills. To be honest, I steal what little money I have, typically from crime scenes. Sometimes I sell the dope I've recovered. I'm not a good guy. I just act like one. I guess I'm what's known as an “anti-hero.” I'm also anti-social. I hate people. Except for the ones with nice tits. And even then, only if they're nice to me. Image by Fred LammersSuperficial appearances count. I only dress like I'm a swingin' hipster. It's all part of my fabricated public image. People don't believe what you tell them, they believe what you show them. Before I donned the snazzy duds, I was just another poor (in all senses), chronically lonesome schnook wasting his nights home alone with a good book or a bad movie. But once I found the magical Fez in a thrift shop one crazy day, my entire life changed. I soon discovered that with great power comes...you know, all that jazz. I hated the actual responsibilities of being a superhero. I'm a lazy bastard. I don't even work out. I'm totally out of shape. I didn't fit the popular profile. Plus my motivations were hardly altruistic. I was only in it for the pussy. And boy, did I score on that front. Chicks dig a cool uniform, even if there aren't any muscles underneath. The only thing that turns them on more is money. That's one superpower I did not have. But I managed to get by without out it. As long as I wore the Fez, which protected my true identity as a total loser. It was like a condom for my ego. I also found out it paid to wear pinkie rings on each fist when punching people in the face. My customized, unbreakable martini glass the size and density of a sledgehammer made an effective weapon as well. For wheels I had the Thrillmobile, a tricked out 1957 powder blue Thunderbird with leopard skin upholstery and a portable cocktail bar in the trunk, for on-the-fly crime-fighting fuel.
Rescuing damsels in distress kept me knee-deep in nookie on a regular basis, all right. If you can't get paid you might as well get laid. But now even my penis was pooped. The pilot light inside my heart had blown out, too. Inside, I already felt dead. I was just waiting for that other cuff link to drop. Photo by Jim FerreriaAnyway, one recent night I was slamming back serial bourbon shots while moping around in the Thrillpad – a single-room, pastel-painted, plushly appointed, midcentury modernist studio apartment equipped with a LP stereo system stocked with classic lounge/exotica albums; a big screen TV with a DVD player and a few dozen carefully selected old movies; a dime-store rack full of pulp novels; a closet full of backup fezzes and alternate silk smoking jackets in varying colors; a bureau with a mirror and a drawer full of black shades and pinkie rings; a hatrack where I hung my various luchadore masks for my undercover, international alias, “Guillermo El Thrillermo”; and of course a round, rotating water bed. Behind the martini bar was a portrait of the Holy Trinity: Frank, Dean, and Sammy. It was my shrine, where I went to worship when I needed sustenance from a Higher Power. And nobody got higher than those guys. The Thrillpad was my Fortress of Solitude and my Batcave combined. Except much smaller, with a lot more kinky sex toys scattered around, like tiki-shaped vibrators, edible hallucinogenic dice, and pornographic strip poker card decks.
It had been one long, wild thrill-ride. Illustration originally published in Too Much Coffee Man Magazine, 2001But now it seemed the party was over. I was a middle-aged wolf, after all. Even my sidekick, The Tiki Goddess, the most beautiful and exotic woman I'd ever met, whose superpower was seduction, didn't answer the Thrill-Phone or respond to the Thrill Signal anymore. I think she was tired of waiting around for me to marry her or something. I'd blown it. I was retiring from this racket exactly the way I'd started: alone. Photo by Jim FerreiraThat's when a beautiful brunette with familiar bangs whom I wanted to bang on the spot knocked on the door then walked in when I opened it. She was a dead ringer for Bettie Page.
“I want you to find someone for me,” she said.“Who?”“Me.”“No, I mean who do you want me to find.”“Me. I want you to find me.”“Who are you? You look just like Bettie Page.”“Bettie Page.”“Yea, that's who you look like.”“That's also who I am.”“I thought you were dead.”“So did I.”“Um...don't take this wrong, but you didn't die in your prime. You were, y'know...old.”“Exactly. Weird, huh?”After nearly two decades of facing off with everything from nympho vampires to alien hit men to rampaging robots to lycanthropic mobsters, I was accustomed to weirdness. Overly-familiar with it, in fact. This was exactly the kind of thing I was trying to get away from.Then she suddenly let out a long, evil laugh.“I'm just fucking with you,” she said. “I'm not actually Bettie Page. I'm just messin' with you.”“What? Why?”“Because. That's what I do. I'm The Mindfucker. Pleased to meet you.”“Oh...well, please to meet you too, doll.” I extended my right hand for a shake.“I'm sorry, I can't shake your hand, because that would require corporeal presence.”“Huh?”“I'm not actually here. You're imagining all this.”“How.”“Because I made you imagine it. In fact, I made you.”“Huh? But...why?“Because.I'm The Mindfucker. It's what I do. Well...see ya!”Then poof, she was gone.
I didn't know what to make of this mysterious encounter. Did she present any actual danger? A pain in the ass, sure. But an actual public enemy that needed to be stopped? Hard to say, though given her unique powers of mind control, the potential certainly existed. I was reminded of my old nemesis, The Headshrinker. She was an impossibly sexy voodoo priestess who made one head swell while shrinking the other one – basically sucking both till they were left limp, empty and useless. But last I heard she was locked up in the Thrillville Asylum. And projecting mental illusions wasn't really in her trick 'r' treat bag. I also flashed back to the notorious bitch known as The Ballbuster, but as far as I knew, she was dead. This was most likely an entirely new player. Just when I thought I was out... Image by Bob EkmanAt the time I was wearing only my wife beater, silk boxers, and argyle socks. I put on a white shirt, black slacks, skinny pink tie, aqua green smoking jacket, striped white tiger fur fez, and shades and went downstairs to the garage where I climbed into the Thrillmobile and drove around town, lost in thought, my perpetual jazz soundtrack on the radio. There was a full moon over Thrillville, which was a shadowy town even by daylight, though the sun hardly ever shone here. It was perpetually cloudy, which meant the neon signs on all the nightclubs were never turned off. And Thrillville was almost nothing but nightclubs, cheap residential hotels, diners and dive bars, all Googie style, the city council's architectural mandate. The denizens were of both supernatural and human origin, mixing and mingling and mating in general harmony until a crime of passion or opportunity was committed and I was called into action. But things had been quiet for a while, and I figured they could live without me. The question was: could I live without them? After driving around aimlessly for a while, I finally stopped at the urban tropical oasis known as Forbidden Island, the tiki lounge where The Tiki Goddess performed her nightly torch singing gig. Entertainment was her real career. She only became my crime-fighting sidekick after we were accidentally thrown together onto a case when Thrillville was being attacked by The Grunge Gang, a bunch of ugly thugs whose superpowers were bad hair, bad clothes, and bad attitudes – and they were contagious. They really rubbed her sense of style the wrong way, and she took on the task of sticking her sweet high-heeled feet right up their torn blue-jeaned asses before I jumped in and helped her. So I guess in effect I was her sidekick. In any case, we'd been close allies ever since. We slept together a few times, but I could tell she was getting serious, so I told her I couldn't see her as often, and she cooled off from the crime-fighting bit. The truth was she was getting to me and the one vulnerability a crime-fighter can't have is a loved one. I worried too much she'd become a target of my many enemies. Also, I was afraid of commitment. The reality was, she was the one and only person who knew my true identity as a complete schmuck, but still accepted me. For some reason, I couldn't handle that. The Tiki Goddess was onstage performing a moody medley in her smokey Julie London/June Christy style, backed up by the house band, a bunch of beret-wearing, bongo-beating beatniks called The Moon-Rays. I took a seat at the bamboo bar, ordered a classic Mai Tai, and waited for her set to end.When she was finished, she joined me, but with a cool demeanor that clinked around in the air between us like the ice in my glass.
“Welcome to Chillville,” I said.“What do you want?” she asked, cutting the chit-chat while nodding at the bartender, who responded immediately with a ready-made French 75.“Besides you?”“You had your chance.”“True. And I regret that choice daily. But I'm only here with one question: Have you ever heard of a super-villain called The Mindfucker?”“Sure.”“What do you mean, 'sure'?”“I mean yes, I've heard of The Mindfucker. It's been around forever. Why?”“'It'?”“He. She. It. Whatever. It assumes whatever form suits its particular agenda.”“Which is what?”“That constantly changes as well.”“So how do I find it?”“You can't.”“Why not?”“That the secret power of The Mindfucker. There is no Mindfucker. Not in singular, tangible form, anyway. That's how The Mindfucker can operate without ever being captured. He/she/it remains at large, a perpetual perpetrator, precisely because he/she/it is constantly being regenerated by his/her/its own victims, even though the victims are in fact the perps.”I couldn't believe what I was hearing. “So The Mindfucker is an eternal entity?”“Yes. It's common knowledge, really. Surprised you're just hearing about it. But then you've always been trapped inside your own head, haven't you? That fez is more a like locked lid.”“That's crazy...so how do we know The Mindfucker isn't controlling our senses right now?”“We don't.”“So...my entire life, all of my memories, this very moment, could be...an illusion? Like a dream?”“Yes.”“Even...you?”“Yes...” She leaned closer to me. The mutual attraction was to strong for either of us to resist.“Even...this?” I said.“Yes....” She closed her eyes, bracing for passionate impact...
But before our lips met, there erupted an abruptly disruptive chorus of screaming from the surrounding patrons as a swarm of moaning undead monster men (and women) with glazed eyes and drooling mouths suddenly invaded the place. I recognized them right away, especially since they all dressed alike in gray sweat pants and T-shirts with matching corporate logos, but their physical appearances had deteriorated a great deal since I'd last noticed them. A steady diet of cloned pop culture will do that to a person. Image by Aaron Farmer The Corporate Corpses, as they were dubbed by the local media, were a ragtag band of normally peaceful zombified consumers controlled by an unseen but all-powerful billionaire industrialist known as The Conformist. The Corpses were dismissed by society as sad annoyances, stumbling around the local mall, bumping into each other while shopping for stuff they'd never need, but for some reason they'd suddenly developed a taste for other human brains, perhaps because of their own cerebral deficits. That may have been The Conformist's master plan all along. But was The Conformist really in cahoots with The Mindfucker? Or were they in fact the same being?
A particularly aggressive zombie tore off The Tiki Goddess's shiny satin dress, so she was wearing nothing but her leopard skin underwear and snake-skin pumps. I found this very distracting, but it didn't detract from The Tiki Goddess's ass-kicking abilities, as she swung her magnificent gams around with lethal athleticism, kick-boxing her way through the horrible hordes, smashing the skulls of her avaricious attackers, their putrid brains spilling all over the bamboo floor. Image by Aaron Farmer So why would The Conformist’s mindless minions, normally as harmless as mannequins, suddenly morph into cannibalistic predators, feasting on human flesh? Was The Mindfucker behind this sudden, radical change of behavior? Or was this even really happening? No time to debate myself. The screams of the patrons attempting to flee the zombies sounded all too real.
I ran outside to the Thrillmobile to retrieve my own trademark weapon, the giant martini glass, then returned to join the defense against the violent assault. But something unprecedented happened: my unbreakable martini glass broke. I just dropped it on the floor by accident, and it shattered. Defenseless, I was overwhelmed by the zombies. I felt them tearing into my body and my soul. I couldn't see The Tiki Goddess anymore. One of them stabbed a metal straw right through my fez, penetrating my skull, and my brains were being sucked out right through the top of my torn scalp...
I was saved by the shrill ringing of the alarm clock. I looked at the time and groggily realized I was almost late for work. Again. I couldn't afford to get fired from another job. I hopped out of my Murphy bed and into the shower after putting on an Esquivel album to set the mood for my day, which I was determined would be special. Then I neatly combed my hair, put on cologne, and wore my best tie, even though I was only a clerk in a chain store. Maybe today was the day I'd finally summon up the courage to ask my my dream girl and favorite customer out on a date, first summoning up the courage to actually talk to her outside of the heartless transactions. Then I'd quit my job. It was time for me to outgrow reality in favor or my fantasies. I was going to spike my coffee with whiskey, as usual, but instead settled for cream, and ran down to meet my bus.
By the way, I thought I should tell you that none of this actually happened, except in my own mind. And now yours.

Cheers!

Images by Scooter Harris, placing my fictional PI Vic Valentine and The Tiki Goddess in the world of the 1960s BATMAN series...


My TV horror host growing up in South Jersey throughout the 1970s, Philly's DOC SHOCK! )

Valentine's Day 2014 at Trabocco, Alameda CA

With co-author Scot Fulks aboard the USS Hornet in Alameda CA for a book signing of
IT CAME FROM HANGAR 18, Grey Ghost Paracon, 2/22/14

Melissa Wortman (top) and Webberly Rattencraft (below) of San Francisco's CREEPY KOFY MOVIE TIME plug my novel LOVE STORIES ARE TOO VIOENT FOR ME on the air ! Our own personal appearances on this show, in September 2009 and September 2010, respectively:

NOW ON SALE BACHELOR PAD MAGAZINE #27featuring my regular movie column!
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wrote and recorded the official "Thrillville" theme song!
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