Philip Fracassi's Blog: PHILIP FRACASSI BLOG, page 12
April 8, 2016
Official Launch Day for ALTAR
Today, Friday, April 8, is the official release date for my new horror novelette, ALTAR.
ALTAR is available on Amazon.com for $7.99 in an unlimited paperback, and there are also a few signed copies available from the Dunhams Manor Press website for $8 each.
Synopsis:
The nostalgia of a child’s summer afternoon can be intoxicating. Tinkling ice cream trucks, games in the yard, young love, swimming pools. For one young boy and his family, days like these can be heaven. Dream-like. Like any dream, however, things can change. Heavens can fall into darkness, games turn deadly, love become hate. And the seemingly safest places of our world – filled with that sweet, sky–blue nostalgia – can curdle and implode, tearing the dream, and those caught inside it, to shreds.
Early Reviews:
“ALTAR is redolent of hard-edged supernatural horror from the golden days of McCammon and King. Nobody is safe in a Fracassi story.” Laird Barron, author of X’s for Eyes
“Philip Fracassi’s ALTAR does to swimming pools what Peter Benchley’s JAWS did to oceans. Fracassi is masterful at quickly sketching in characters to where you know enough about them to care about their fates, then tightens the tension with each new turn in the plot, until you’re racing through the pages to find out what happens next. And what happens next is a series of twists that caught me completely off-guard. Fracassi has that rare talent of putting you, the reader, smack dab in his characters’ heads, looking out their eyes, which is the best way to ride this roller coaster of a story. Highly recommended.” – Ralph Robert Moore, author of Ghosters
“Altar cooks the skin with the same baked heat of the concrete surrounding this striking story’s swimming pool. Fracassi sets a nostalgic, suburban tone, but already there are fractures in the façade. You sense something’s not quite right because the tension is already tightening. With an eye for place and detail rivaling that of a great noir film, Fracassi knows when to hold back and when to twist the knife. Fortunately for us, there’s more of the latter. Altar is riveting stuff.” – Michael Wehunt, author of Greener Pastures
“Fracassi has the ability to inject dread into the familiar and everyday, ratcheting the tension to reach absolute horror. Profoundly disturbing.” – Christopher Slatsky, author of Alectryomancer
Thank you for reading, and Thank You for the support.
April 5, 2016
Griffin, Fracassi, Wehunt
Mention from Laird Barron.
Two debut collections and a chapbook are arriving soon from Philip Fracassi, Mike Griffin, and Michael Wehunt. A cornucopia of horror and weird fiction for April/May.
image via Amazon
image via amazon, art by Michael Bukowski
art by Matthew Revert
April 4, 2016
ALTAR Limited Pre-Order Now LIVE!
Dunhams Manor Press has announced an exclusive PRE-ORDER for ALTAR!
Right now — while they last — there are 25 SIGNED copies of ALTAR available exclusively from the Dunhams Manor web store.
Unlimited, Unsigned copies will be available via Amazon on Friday, April 8.
Click Here to buy a signed copy before the general release:
Thanks for the support!
April 3, 2016
ALTAR Goodreads Page Now Live
Please take a moment to visit the official GOODREADS PAGE for ALTAR for updates, giveaways and upcoming reviews.
ALTAR will be released Friday, April 8.
Thank you for the support!
March 31, 2016
ALTAR
I am extremely excited and humbled to announce the upcoming release of my new horror novelette — ALTAR — which will be available in an unlimited paperback edition from Dunhams Manor Press.
ALTAR will be released on April 8, 2016 and will be available via the Dunhams Manor Press website and through Amazon.com.
ALTAR is a story about a young boy, his sister and their mother, who decide to visit the community swimming pool for an afternoon of leisure and play in the warm summer sunshine, only to have things go… well, it is a horror story, after all.
The cover art, by the terribly gifted Matthew Revert, is below.
Here are a few blurbs from some of my early, first readers:
“ALTAR is redolent of hard-edged supernatural horror from the golden days of McCammon and King. Nobody is safe in a Fracassi story.” Laird Barron, author of X’s for Eyes
“Philip Fracassi’s ALTAR does to swimming pools what Peter Benchley’s JAWS did to oceans. Fracassi is masterful at quickly sketching in characters to where you know enough about them to care about their fates, then tightens the tension with each new turn in the plot, until you’re racing through the pages to find out what happens next. And what happens next is a series of twists that caught me completely off-guard. Fracassi has that rare talent of putting you, the reader, smack dab in his characters’ heads, looking out their eyes, which is the best way to ride this roller coaster of a story. Highly recommended.” – Ralph Robert Moore, author of Ghosters
“Fracassi has the ability to inject dread into the familiar and everyday, ratcheting the tension to reach absolute horror. Profoundly disturbing.” – Christopher Slatsky, author of Alectryomancer
And, now, the cover. Thank you so much for allowing me to share this with you. I could not be more thrilled to be releasing this creature into the world, and I genuinely hope, from the depths of my heart, that it does nothing short of terrify you.
March 24, 2016
Review of MOTHER from Dark Musings
Mother is a novelette written by Philip Fracassi and published by Dunhams Manor Press. It’s a high quality chapbook which has been beautifully produced. The author is new to me but the reason for that is provided in a note at the end of the book which states that this is his first foray into horror. Thankfully, given how much I enjoyed Mother, it also promises that it won’t be his last.
It’s the story of a marriage in crisis, college sweethearts Julie and Howard marry straight after graduation but their relationship begins to falter soon after. The narrative is told in first person by Howard – and in a most effective way, as his thoughts and opinions are all too apparent with the author skilfully presenting a character damned by his own words. Howard is not a nice man and it’s clear that the breakdown of the marriage is as much down to his own personality as anything else. He’s a man seemingly incapable of empathy or sympathy with anyone – his concerns are only for himself.
As an attempt to salvage the marriage, (and clearly never having watched Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist), the couple buy a house in a remote location surrounded by woods. The attic room is converted to a studio where Julie can work on her art. When Howard discovers his wife in her studio surrounded by black candles and mysterious symbols drawn onto the floor, things begin to get strange. Credit is due to the author here for the way in which he handles the “reveal” as to what the symbols mean – writing a lovely passage with a great closing line.
The incident heralds a change in Julie however, romance – it seems – blossoms once more, resulting in pregnancy and the arrival of a son – named Howard after his father.
Then things get really strange…
No spoilers here, suffice to say that the horror really ramps up in the closing scenes of the story as it’s revealed that little Howard may not be the only offspring to which Julie is mother…
I really enjoyed Mother – beautifully constructed, it’s a perfect combination of literary writing and full-on horror. I hope that the author makes good on his promise that this won’t be his last foray into the genre.
You can – and should – buy Mother here.
See the original review here.
Love, Marriage, and the Weird: A review of Philip Fracassi’s MOTHER
Review for MOTHER from Muzzleland.
Published by Dunhams Manor Press
Available Here
Review by Billy Lyons
There comes a time in almost every marriage when one’s spouse seems remarkably different from the person they married. The person you thought you knew better than anyone else on earth becomes a stranger, and you wonder if you ever knew them at all. Fortunately, many such marital crises resolve on their own with little or no damage to either party. But there are exceptions. A horrifying example of one such exception is found in Mother, the terrifying new novella from Philip Fracassi.
Mother is the story of Howard and Julie, who meet in college and find happiness in each other’s arms. After three years together, they marry and move far away from their college town to West Virginia (in itself a terrifying proposition), where they hope to build a happy life together.
Unfortunately, things go wrong almost from…
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March 23, 2016
“Mother” (Review)
Review for my novelette MOTHER.
More Dunhams Manor Press! After this, I’ll be reviewing two other Dunhams books – The Operating Theater by Christopher Ropes and Alectryomancer and Other Weird Tales by Christopher Slatsky – before moving onto The Witch.
Mother
by Phillip Fracassi
The Gothic genre goes largely unappreciated these days. Before Lovecraft and Machen and Smith introduced their unique pseudo-occult blend of weirdness, it was Poe and Radcliffe and Hawthorne, who wrote sweeping romanticisms of passion, hatred, and fear. It can be hard to find an equilibrium between these genres, as the Weird is predicated on abandoning all former conventions, while the Gothic has a definite vibe to it, favoring more traditional terrors to the highly unusual forces that appear in its daughter genre. But somehow, Philip Fracassi has managed to do it. Mother takes the mystery and intrigue of classic Gothic tales and blends it with the outside forces of the modern…
View original post 488 more words
March 6, 2016
The Reality of Screenwriting
I watched this video this morning, and if you have any interest in writing a screenplay, I highly recommend you take five minutes to watch it as well. Let me know when you’re done, then come on back…
Finished? Good. Now, let’s talk reality.
While this video is wonderful and inspiring, I can also see how it would be intimidating and daunting. So let me say to you now: This is not a very realistic idea of how most screenwriters work. It’s how most screenwriters would WANT to work, given unlimited time, creative freedom and financial resources.
Most screenwriters work on weekends, nights, and on precious days off. They work in Starbucks using software that mocks the index card process and a forty-foot long table. They do their research on Google and at used bookstores. They scramble to assemble a movie between taking their kids to school and working ten-hour days at their crappy job.
Screenwriting, like any creative endeavor, is a passion. You can do it without having a kitchen the size of the Getty Center, and you can do it without having 12,000 index cards that are color-coded and typed out in meticulous detail (I don’t even know how one types on an index card).
Screenwriting does involve research, and organization, and time, and revisions upon revisions. But it also involves day jobs, and kids, and producer notes, and studio changes, and director changes, and actor changes, and modifying to budget, and modifying to location. The core story will hopefully always be pure, but those precious note cards, as seen in this video, are not something the people financing, marketing or acting in your movie will really care about.
Have a great idea with an original hook, create amazing characters that shine and have REAL dialogue that defines who those characters are, challenge the audience with your story-telling, and then be FLEXIBLE, because your baby is about to be pulled a hundred different directions by people whose job it is to finance a movie, market a movie, and bring your vision to life. That’s YOUR team and they’ll be in that giant kitchen with you, moving your cards around in order to bring your story to life.
All this to say that we all have our own process in bringing our ideas to life. Each one customized especially for us, as individuals, catering to our time, and schedule, and desire. And there are realities beyond the writing itself that involves the realities of the film-making process that every screenwriter needs to be ready for. Because screenplays are not novels, they are frameworks showing other people how to do THEIR work, blueprints that you will be handing over to a director architect who will put their own spin and vision on your story, hopefully creating something even better than what you’ve already dreamed up, hopefully making your story shine.
So find a Starbucks, fire up the internet, and get to work. Sell your hook to someone, anyone, that wants it. Then be ready to hang on while your story is pulped and re-created as a glorious new creature, one that even you, the writer, could have scarcely imagined.
Because that’s reality. That’s how it works.
February 7, 2016
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