Evans Light's Blog, page 4

Mind-Boggling Interview with Evans Light. Your life will be changed forever.

BREAKING NEWS!

Mismatched Bookends has just released a brand-new, hot-off-the-presses interview with me, reclusive trillionaire playboy author Evans Light.



Read it here: http://mismatchedbookends.blogspot.co...

In this hard-hitting, all-access interview you'll learn about:

o Why I only type with my toes on Tuesdays

o My harrowing ordeal of being forced to write fish-porn at gunpoint while being held hostage by Japanese penguins

o The story of my painful recovery from sudden color blindness in my third eye

o The squeamish truth about my brother Adam Light and llamas, and his quest to produce the world's first lluman

...and much, much more!

Read the full interview here: http://mismatchedbookends.blogspot.co...

And a bonus! The person who leaves the most humorous comment on the article feedback forum will win a fabulous prize!

My Top 5 in 2013

5. Six Dead Spots

4. This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It

3. The Tent

2. What Hides Within

1. NOS4A2




Honorable mentions:

Bleeding Shadows

What the Dark Brings

Toes Up (I'll grudgingly keep nepotism out of my Top 5!)

Black Evening: Tales of Dark Suspense

The Collection

...but I'm sure I'm forgetting something awesome...I'll have to add it when I figure it out.

Halloween: It's the most wonderful time of year! (A photo blog)

I love Halloween, and the celebration of everything spooky and macabre is in full swing at the Evans Light household.



We don't go too crazy, no full haunted house makeovers or anything, but we do like to get out and enjoy the wonderful seasonal shops that pop up around the city this time of year, and I usually try to add something new and unique to our slowly growing collection of Halloween-related decorations each year.


Our first trip of the season was to a store that apparently has a Hollywood monster mask maker legend, Jim Lawrence, in residence:



Some very fine work. On my next visit I hope to make his acquaintance.





Would I love to have this MARS ATTACKS! specimen grace my home? Why yes, yes I would.
Too bad it's not for sale. Not that I could afford it if it was.




Some horrific animatronics here...this one would keep the trick-or-treaters at bay, but the several hundred dollar price tag means she won't be coming home with me.





And then we get to the stuff I'm interested in...the first-weekend-only sale items. I really like that pumpkin-headed scarecrow. And if that clown was Pennywise, he'd be in my trunk before he could say "We all float down here", but he's not, so he'll be staying here.





I also like the half-torso grandpa with the walker (on the far right), he moves something creepy, but that witch in the middle has a killer cackle and looks very high quality. She's kind of lost in the bright lights and the cluttered display, but I think she might be a little more impressive after the sun sets. And she's under a hundred dollars...hmmm...





Moving in for a closer look. She's got a pressure sensor and the book she's holding lights up with a flashing green light while she's casting spells. There's only two of her for sale, so I get the manager to hold one for me at the counter while I look around.





If I was buying myself a new costume this year, I'd probably get this one. I like illusion costumes like this.





This one wins the award for saddest costume in the store. C'mon people, do the right thing and pay Willie Nelson some money and get it officially licensed. And make it not so totally lame.





So the witch came home with us after all, and she looked just as spooky as I'd hoped in the dark!

She's positioned right inside the front door ready to scare unsuspecting visitors. I've already scared myself a few times with it.

The pranks my wife and I have been playing on each other with it by moving it into into unexpected places are growing ever more elaborate. I might move the witch to stand over her side of the bed while she sleeps tonight...no, probably shouldn't! The payback probably wouldn't be worth it. Still...





A stop by Party City afterwards seemed incredibly lame in comparison, but one of my boys did find his Halloween mask there. I didn't recognize him at first. Creepy!


And that's all for this trip to the Halloween store. Thanks for riding along.


Happy Halloween, everybody!

-Evans

Update: New Pocket Paperbook version of SCREAMSCAPES is here!

I love pocket-sized horror paperbacks, and collect them zealously.
I imagine you and a few others share my fondness for a smaller-size book to take on the go, so it is with great pleasure that I announce the release of the pocket paperback edition of SCREAMSCAPES: Tales of Terror .

You can get your very own copy right now at: http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback...

Here's the final design:






The cover art was inspired by what was likely the initial source of my desire to write weird tales of horror. When I was about eight years old and the closest thing I had read to a horror novel was THE VELVETEEN RABBIT (or possibly THE GIVING TREE, I still have nightmares about that one!), my dad and I used to sneak into the den around midnight on Saturday nights to tune in to black & white reruns of THE TWILIGHT ZONE.

He had seen most of them when he was growing up, and laying there on the floor with me in front of the old console television he, too, would turn back into a kid. We'd fiddle with the rabbit-ear antenna until we picked up the signal from the local UHF station, which would sometimes fade in and out during the broadcast, interspersing the show with static-filled cryptic messages, possibly from the great beyond.

For my dad, rewatching the episodes with me was great fun. For me - especially after I was tucked in bed and cowering wide-eyed as the lights in the house went out one by one - they were slightly more terrifying.

Watching those spooky shows while my young mind was growing sleepy caused them to blend into my nightmares and settle into the dark corners of my psyche.

They never left.

I loved being scared to death by those shows, and this cover reminds me of the good times my dad and I spent scaring the pants off me as a kid.

The first edition of SCREAMSCAPES: Tales of Terror required the larger 6x9 format to ensure distribution across retailers like Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million, but I couldn't wait to make it available in the format I love the most.

You can get your very own copy right now at: http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback...

It will also be available through other fine retailers soon.

CRY BABY - A new Goodreads-exclusive, free short story by Evans Light

This is a free Goodreads-exclusive short story.

NEW! Download ebook here: Cry Baby - ePub eBook

Or you can just read the story in its entirety in this blog post below.


Hope you enjoy it!


CRY BABY
By Evans Light


He was at it again.
I fumbled for my glasses on the nightstand by the side of the bed, tipping over a water bottle and knocking my iPad onto the floor in the process.
The blue numbers on the cable box near the foot of the bed delivered the bad news. 3:15 am.
He yelled again, louder this time, urgent.
I flipped on the light beside me.
“Nick,” I called out. “Are you okay?”
My wife was passed out beside me, oblivious to the lights and the racket going on down the hall. I thought about waking her, but figured what the hell, I’m already up.
Babbling continued in the other room, a one-sided mumbled conversation. Nick had been having sleep problems since he was little, tossing fitfully, murmuring, making raspberry noises as he slept. He had always been a little more afraid of the dark than his two older brothers, and as a concession we had let him have the bedroom in between theirs.
I turned on the light in the hallway and went into his room. I could see his silhouette in the darkness of the bottom bunk where he slept. He was sitting upright in the bed, shivering. The house was cold. Kate would often slip out of bed after I fell asleep and crank the A/C down something fierce.
I flipped the light switch by his doorway and the bright central light under the ceiling fan lit up the room. Nick didn’t move, his eyes narrowed into slits as he stared fiercely at the blank wall across from his bed, fixated on a spot just below his Minecraft poster and the bookshelf that held his Lego collection. His face was red and he was holding his breath, his Batman comforter crumpled in a heap at the end of his bed.
“Nick, it’s okay,” I said gently. “You were having a bad dream. Let Daddy tuck you back in. Nick…Nick look at me.”
It was as though I wasn’t even there. He didn’t move, his glare fixed determinedly, eyes glowing with what almost appeared to be anger.
He was turning ten this month, and I’d hoped he’d have grown out of his sleep issues by now. Melatonin had worked for a while, and we’d grown accustomed to playing soothing classical music for him and letting him keep his light on and read until he fell asleep over the summer, but school had started back last week and he really needed to get some sleep – not to mention the rest of us.
I took him gently by the shoulders and tried to get him to wake up and look into my eyes. His body was tense, muscles rigid.
“Nick, it’s Daddy. Wake up. You’re having a bad dream.”
His eyes were squinted and bloodshot, and his expression was a hard grimace, as though his fingers were caught in chinese handcuffs and he was trying as hard as he could to pull them free.
As soon as I blocked his view he pushed me roughly aside and shouted at the wall behind me.
“Don’t make me do this!” he barked out sternly, clear as day. “I don’t want to do this!”
I was taken aback. I was used to hearing him mumble and make noises in his sleep, but I don’t think he’d ever said any words that could be understood before.
I turned my head back quickly and looked over my shoulder, checking to see who he was talking to even though I knew no one was there.
No one was, but the coldness of the A/C blowing on me out of the vent in the ceiling still sent a hard shiver through me.
“Nick, wake up!” I commanded gently as I scooped him in my arms and stood up, taking care not to bash my head on the metal frame of the upper bunk as I’d done several times in the past.
The instant I took him he closed his eyes and went limp against me, as though deep asleep, breathing peacefully.
“Nick?” I whispered, but he didn’t even twitch. I carefully lifted his eyelid to see if he was playing a trick on me - he was a jokester, and I wouldn’t put it past him. I expected him to scrunch his eye closed as I touched it and then burst out laughing, but he didn’t. His eyeball was floating back and forth in its socket, the telltale sign of REM sleep. His eyeball rolled back upwards revealing the white of his eye and I let his eyelid fall back into place, satisfied that he really was asleep.
I stood there rocking him in my arms like an infant for a moment, his sixty-five pounds feeling more like a ton, and I wondered when my baby had suddenly gotten so big.
I laid him back onto his pillow, picked his Bugs Bunny up off the floor and tucked it under his arm, and pulled his Batman blanket back over him. He looked so peaceful that it was hard to imagine that he had been screaming in the darkness only moments before.
I turned off his light and headed back to my room, stopping to check the thermostat on the way. It was set to seventy-five. Maybe it was just a cold night outside? It was September, I suppose.

***

“Don’t make me do this! I don’t WANT to do this!”
The screaming was close, loud, and startled me awake in a panic.
I fumbled for the knob of the reading light next to my bed and knocked my water bottle over in the process.
My hands found my glasses and I somehow managed to shove them onto my face without poking out an eye.
The cable box read 3:15am. Talk about déjà vu.
This was last night all over again, except now Nick was in my room, standing next to his mother over on her side of the bed.
At first I thought he had tried to come and get in bed with us, as he does sometimes, and she had told him to go get back into his own bed and he was scared, thus the yelling. But Kate was sound asleep, her back to him; and he wasn’t looking at her, either. He was facing the open doorway to my bedroom, and was screaming at the darkness framed there.
My head was throbbing. I hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before because of this shit, and I wasn’t in the mood for it tonight.
“Nick, what are you doing out of bed?” I said, trying to sound stern hoping he would be more scared of me than the dark and go back to bed.
He ignored me, and instead stood clenching his fists and glaring into the hallway. For a minute the thought crossed my mind that maybe one of his older brothers was playing tricks on him in the middle of the night trying to scare him. They had seen THE CONJURING a couple of weekends before, and maybe they were trying to recreate a few scenes for their brother at home.
I’ll put a stop to that right now, I thought, and headed for the bedroom door to see what they were up to.
As soon as I took a step in that direction Nick charged forward, hands outstretched in front of him, and slammed the door closed so hard that it woke my wife up. She pushed herself up onto an elbow in bed, bleary-eyed.
Nick stood facing the closed bedroom door, his face only inches from it. His little hands were still clenched tightly into fists.
“Don’t make me do this!” he shouted again at the closed door. “I don’t want to do this!”
“What the hell are you doing?” Kate asked me, and I realized I had forgotten to tell her about what had happened the night before.
“His brothers are probably playing tricks on him. Nick, come get in bed with your mom,” I told him, and tried to turn him around by the shoulder, but his feet were firmly planted on the floor. His body was rigid, his jaw protruding through his cheek as though his teeth were tightly clenched.
“Bring him over to me,” Kate said, “I’ll hold him until he falls back asleep.”
I wrapped my arms around his taut frame and lifted him up. The instant his feet left the ground his body went limp and I struggled to hold onto him.
I carried him over to the bed and laid him down next to his mother. He was fast asleep.
“He did this last night, too,” I told her. “I think you’re keeping it too cold in here at night and he’s having trouble sleeping.” I touched the tip of my nose, it felt like a maraschino cherry straight out of the fridge.
“I set it at seventy-five before we went to bed,” she said, pulling our soundly sleeping nine-year-old baby close to her side, snuggling back into the covers.
I opened the bedroom door and went out to find any sibling troublemakers, but the other boys were in bed and fast asleep. I went downstairs to check the thermostat there, but it was set to seventy-five degrees, too – and for some reason, Nick’s Batman comforter was in a crumpled heap on the kitchen floor.

***

I was having trouble sleeping.
I flipped the pillow over, fluffed it, and lay back down. That was when I realized the hallway light was on.
God damn it, here we go again.
I patted my hand over the top of my nightstand feeling for my glasses, careful not to knock over my growing collection of half-empty water bottles on the nightstand.
I slipped them on, and the cable box’s icy-blue clock snapped into focus: 3:15am.
I sat there for almost a full minute and listened. The house was quiet.
Thank God, I thought, and settled back down onto my pillow. I closed my eyes, and exhaled a sigh of relief.
“DON’T MAKE ME DO THIS! I DON’T WANT TO DO THIS!” Nick’s voice screamed. He was close, practically shouting in my ear.
I rolled over and in the darkness I saw him standing by the bed beside me, his arms outstretched above his head. The light from the hallway glinted briefly off something long, shiny and slender clutched tightly in his fists.
Then the hallway light went out, and for a moment I thought I saw a flash of something red-eyed and smiling there in the darkness. An ice cold breath carrying a deep voice flowed into the bedroom saying, “Do it!”
Nick obeyed.
My neck tore open with stabbing fire and then I saw nothing at all.

***


I hope you enjoyed this first-draft freebie! Feel free to comment or review here: Cry Baby


Enter the Goodreads Giveaway for SCREAMSCAPES: Tales of Terror for a chance to win one of two paperback copies of my short story collection: https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...

Cover Reveal for SCREAMSCAPES, pocket paperback edition

I love pocket-sized horror paperbacks, and collect them zealously.

I imagine there are a few others who share my fondness for a smaller-size book to take on the go, so it is with great pleasure that I announce the upcoming release of the pocket paperback edition of Screamscapes .

The cover art was inspired by what was likely the initial source of my desire to write weird tales of horror. When I was about eight years old and the closest thing I had read to a horror novel was THE VELVETEEN RABBIT (or possibly THE GIVING TREE, I still have nightmares about that one!), my dad and I used to sneak into the den around midnight on Saturday nights to tune in to black & white reruns of THE TWILIGHT ZONE.

He had seen most of them when he was growing up, and laying there on the floor with me in front of the old console television he, too, would turn back into a kid. We'd fiddle with the rabbit-ear antenna until we picked up the signal from the local UHF station, which would sometimes fade in and out during the broadcast, interspersing the show with static-filled cryptic messages, possibly from the great beyond.

For my dad, rewatching the episodes with me was great fun. For me - especially after I was tucked in bed and cowering wide-eyed as the lights in the house went out one by one - they were slightly more terrifying.

Watching those spooky shows while my young mind was growing sleepy caused them to blend into my nightmares and settle into the dark corners of my psyche.

They never left.

I loved being scared to death by those shows, and this cover reminds me of the good times my dad and I spent scaring the pants off me as a kid.

The first edition of Screamscapes required the larger 6x9 format to ensure distribution across retailers like Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million, but I couldn't wait to make it available in the format I love the most.

Look for it later this month, September 2013, at fine retailers everywhere.

My Addiction to Used Books, installment #472, "Happy Labor Day Everybody" Edition

Some nice finds this week, including a first edition, first printing paperback of The Drive-In, Clive Barker's Books of Blood, Vols. 1-3, the collections Dark Delicacies II and Haunted: Dark Delicacies III, plus a very interesting behind-the-scenes Star Wars book that is currently steeply discounted on Amazon, Creating the Worlds of Star Wars: 365 Days. My horror library is fleshing out nicely. Feel free to stop by and borrow something! : )

50% discount on my latest trade paperback, SCREAMSCAPES, at Barnes & Noble and Amazon!

SALE ALERT!
Barnes & Noble is currently running an amazingly generous sale on my first book, Screamscapes, a collection of dark fiction I recently had published. At the moment they have it for only $9.02, which is almost 50% off the cover price. Not sure how long the sale will last, so if you're interested grab it fast - that's even cheaper than I can afford to offer it direct from my website store!
Any help with posting reviews of Screamscapes on the B&N website would be most appreciated as well!

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/screa...

THE LIGHT BROTHERS' Web Portal is now live!

This is your invitation to come kick the tires at THE LIGHT BROTHERS' brand-new web portal, the official homepage of authors Adam Light and Evans Light:

www.evans-light.com

We'd love to hear your thoughts and suggestions for future improvements. Check back often for exclusive content, giveaways and discounts.

(Rumor has it that Adam Light will personally ride his llama to your house and give you a hug if you share the website link on your Facebook page!)

Dark Curtains by Evans Light: FREE eBook Edition Until April 26, 2013

Link: http://www.ehorrorbargains.com/2013/0...

Please share this link with your friends! eHorrorBargains.com is an incredible site.
I check it daily, and am excited to see Dark Curtains listed there!