Michael Patrick Hicks's Blog, page 4

The Sundowner’s Dance by Todd Keisling

[Note: This review originally appeared at FanFiAddict on February 20, 2025.]

Reeling from the loss of his wife, retiree Jerry Campbell decides it’s time for a change. The house he and Abby called home is too big and filled with too many memories. He wants to retreat and spend what little time he has left in solitude. Fairview Acres, a retirement community in the Poconos, looks like the perfect escape. But no sooner than he’s moved in does the strangeness begins. His sleep is disrupted by late, all-night parties and strange noises that sound like somebody is walking across his roof. His neighbors seem a little too invested in his life and punctuate their concerns with strange phases, like the oft-spoken “By the moon’s eye.” And then Katherine, another widower who may be suffering from dementia, appears on his doorstep warning him about the worms and insisting he leave Fairview while he still can.

Slowly but surely, the oddities begin to pile up, and author Todd Keisling does a sublime job of ratcheting up the tension and creeping paranoia that provides The Sundowner’s Dance with a pervasive sense of dread. Obviously there’s more going on in Fairview Acres than meet’s the eye. The community itself is built in the bowl of a meteor’s impact crater, with the meteor itself a prominent feature on display at the heart of Fairview. And then there’s the nightly parties and the mysterious drink the revelers consume, a concoction they refer to as a “potion.”

The Sundowner’s Dance reads like a lost episode of The Twilight Zone by way of The Prisoner, seamlessly mixing cosmic and cult horror and topping it off with a thick dose of small-town conspiracy vibes. Keisling perfectly paces the plot, slowly revealing the various aspects behind these horrors and the history of Fairview Acres in a way that keeps the pages effortlessly turning.

While those mysteries are intriguing on their own, they’d be nothing without Jerry and Katherine, and the bond that forms between them. Personally, I found a hell of a lot about both these characters to be relatable, and much of what they went through felt incredibly familiar, at times uncomfortably so. There’s a raw honesty to the way Keisling writes about depression, anxiety, and dementia that make it clear these are all topics he’s personally experienced or has otherwise impeccably researched. I know from following Keisling across various social media sites that he’s personally acquainted with depression and anxiety. I’m not sure how much he’s dealt with elder care and coping with a parent’s dementia, but I suspect based on what I’ve read here that he certainly has more than a passing familiarity.

Like Jerry and Keisling, I’ve also suffered from depression and anxiety for the bulk of my life. Although Jerry didn’t realize what he was dealing with mentally and emotionally until he was in his fifties, it wasn’t until Abby entered his life that he had a support system to help him cope and to encourage him to see a doctor and find better living through chemical assistance. So much of Jerry’s story not only rang true but mirrored so many of my own experiences and thoughts, from being an introvert seeking solitude to realizing the simple truth that I probably wouldn’t still be alive if not for my wife’s love and care. “Abby had made him feel strong and capable,” Keisling writes, “had cheered him on when the chemicals in his brain were hellbent on destroying him from the inside.” I’ve lost count of how many times my own wife has done this for me, and I can only imagine how lost I’d be without her. Keisling captures these feelings of being so lost and adrift at sea eloquently and accurately.

I lost count, too, of how many times I nodded in recognition at Keisling’s portrayal of dementia and the reactions of those left to cope with an afflicted loved one. Dementia’s a terrible, frightening ailment, and Keisling is spot-on in his description that it can steal “a personality, a soul, and left a stranger in its place,” in addition to robbing one of their dearest memories and leaving them confused, lost, paranoid, and angry. Dementia turns the person you once knew so well into a radically twisted stranger. One character recollects to Jerry about a time their dementia-addled father pulled on a gun on them, not recognizing him and convinced he was there to steal the old man’s stamp collection. Although my own father was unarmed, I couldn’t help but recall the time he was convinced I had come home to kill him and steal his silverware, and then, just as fast, mistook me for somebody else entirely. On another occasion I was peppered with questions because he thought I was his long-deceased brother, and then ranted at because he was convinced his various illnesses were the result of a conspiracy between Russia, China, and Al-Qaeda. My dad never warned me about worms, or that the moon is watching, like Katherine does, but Keisling’s handling of dementia certainly rang uncomfortably true with my own lived experiences.

Is there a more fitting topic for horror than the process of human aging? Of the tortures and transformations once must endure, or to bear witness of in others? Of the losses one accumulates across a lifetime until you’re left alone with only your grief and your memories? And that’s not even getting into the abuse and exploitation of the elderly, and how growing old and frail and ever-more reliant on others makes one a ripe target for predators and scam artists, a topic that lies at the heart of The Sundowner’s Dance. Granted, the predatory relationship here is far more Lovecraftian than the poorly worded emails from Nigerian princes offering grandma a huge inheritance if only she responds with her SSN, and at least twice as insidious.

A lot of what makes that danger work so well here is just how grounded it all is. Fairview Aces and its inhabitants feel familiar. We all know that nosey neighbor, and we’ve all dealt with the disturbances they can bring, from loud music and late-night parties to shooting off fireworks until 1:00 AM on New Year’s without a care in the world about how their actions might affect those around them. We know the greed and ego and selfishness of these types of communities and the people in them. Jerry and Katherine, they feel real, and their growing friendship is natural and naturally charming. They’re not just characters on the page, but familiar faces with stories we can relate to. The narrative is informed by so much real-world, lived-in experiences, not to mention earnest tenderheartedness, that we can’t help but go along for the ride once Keisling starts to unearth the dark, rotten underbelly at the core of this piece of Americana and expose it in the moonlight. And that moon’s eye everybody speaks of? Well, as Tom Cullen might say, M-O-O-N, that spells trouble.

July 2025… Or, what you may have missed since… March?! WTF.

Time has been slipping by me faster and faster as I get older. It got really bad during the pandemic — I suspect it did for a lot of us — and has been wonky ever since. I’m never quite sure what day, week, or year it is anymore and find myself having to double-check just to make sure. I’ve caught myself dating things years that are wildly out of synch with the calendar, as if my body reflexively wants to write 2018 or 2019, forgetting that the whole last five or six years actually, you know, happened. It’s like those pandemic years at the height of covid exist in some kind of time capsule that is, itself, removed from time. Some of this has to do with the drudgery of living under an insane, dementia-addled, authoritarian regime and Trump’s unrelenting blitzkrieg upon the media and the country as a whole. Vox wrote about this effect during the first Trump administration, which feels like a hundred years ago, and we’re feeling similar effects again as we try to grapple with the fact that it’s only been six months and a handful of days since he was inaugurated again after a failed insurrection back in January 2020, which was at least a half-century and about 80 gazillion constitutional crises ago.

Of course, age has a lot to do with it, too, I think. Not that I’m particularly old, but I’m definitely not as young as I once was and my body is keen to remind me of that with some ill-timed injuries, like throwing my back out while putting on socks a couple months ago and leaving me bedridden and in pain for several days. I’ve had to pay much more attention to my health, and my heart especially. My workout regimen has helped me lose a ton of weight, but has also given me a serious case of tendonitis in my right elbow and some occasional shoulder pain. Some days, when the weather changes especially, my back acts up from when I fractured a vertebrae fifteen years ago, and my knees start to complain.

Last month I turned 46. My youngest has begun to note, with regularity, that I have more gray in my hair and in my beard than brown. I’m not bothered by the number or the gray hairs. I’m more shocked that my oldest will soon be 10 years old and I have absolutely no idea how that whole decade went by so quickly. Of course, I also recently saw some movie site put up their worst pictures of the last 25 years list and was both shocked and appalled that the 90s were entirely absent! How could that possibly be? Well, the list covered 2004 to 2024, and I was forced to realize that the 1990s was thirty years ago and that it is currently 2025. What the hell happened?

Probably a lot of the same shit that kept me from sending out this supposed-to-be monthly newsletter, which I’ve been absent from since the end of March. So, hi there! No, I haven’t quit writing (again) or reviewing, much to the dissatisfaction of my detractors. I’ve simply been existing and trying to be content, which isn’t always easy.

That last newsletter lost me some subscribers, possibly because I stand against AI, railed hard against Mark Zuckerberg for stealing damn near all my books via a pirating site instead of paying for them in order to feed his plagiarism machine, and being anti-Trump. Over on BlueSky I’ve been added to a blocklist called “AI-Hater Brigade,” which I’m quite proud of and hope to be blocked by many, many, many more techbros and talentless hacks and talentless techbro hacks soon! So, for those of you just joining in now, and who may have missed the obvious sentiments in many of my writings here and elsewhere, allow me to reiterate just so we’re all clear. Fuck AI. Fuck Trump. Fuck Mark Zuckerberg, and the rest of his traitorous billionaire class, and especially Elon Musk. (Reminder, too, that there is no such thing as an ethical billionaire, nor is there such a thing as ethical AI use.) If this bothers you, the unsubscribe button is at the bottom.

Phew. OK. Now that all that’s out of the way, what have I been up to?

Reading, of course, and plenty of reviewing. I’ve covered a heck of a lot books over at FanFiAddict since I last updated you all some months ago. You can get caught up on all that below.

But first, the obligatory book promo, because I am, first and foremost, a starving artist in need of some book sales and I hope you’ll find some stuff to pick up.

I’m excited to announce that my all of my books are currently heavily discounted as part of a promotion on Smashwords for the whole month of July as part of their Annual Summer/Winter Sale! This is a chance to get my books, along with books from many other great authors, at a discount so you can get right to reading. The bulk of my works are 75% off their usual retail price, with short stories available for the low, low price of absolutely nothing at all. You can grab those free. And you’ll be able to download the ebook file to save to your computer and keep forever, without the hassle of some corporate oligarchy deciding you no longer own the books you buy.

You will find the promo here starting today, July 1, so save the link:
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/vi...

Please share this promo with friends and family. You can even forward this email to the avid readers in your life!

Thank you for your help and support and, as always, Happy reading!

NEW REVIEWS

It’s been a busy few months for me over at FanFiAddict since the last issue of this newsletter, so let’s dive in. Here’s what I’ve read and reviewed over there since March.

Zombie Bigfoot by Nick Sullivan

Zombie Billionaire by Nick Sullivan

Overgrowth by Mira Grant

To Those Willing To Drown by Mark Matthews

Veil by Jonathan Janz

Cathedral of the Drowned by Nathan Ballingrud

Stay on the Line by Clay McLeod Chapman

A Game In Yellow by Hailey Piper

King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby

Looking back over these last few months, there’s been some truly stellar reading. I have to give particular shoutouts to Janz, Piper, and Cosby for their phenomenal new releases. King of Ashes is available now, but there’s still a bit of a wait for Piper’s and Janz’s new books to drop in August and September, respectively. Do keep an eye out for those and, if you haven’t already, be sure to preorder. They are absolutely excellent books! One of these days, I’ll actually get around to crossposting those FFA reviews to my site…

As for what all else is keeping me busy, aside from work, wife, and the kids?

Currently reading: I just finished S.H. Cooper’s upcoming Bottling His Ghosts, which releases in two weeks from Raw Dog Screaming Press. I’m planning on starting in on my digital ARC of Tim Lebbon’s Secret Lives of the Dead. Beyond having absolutely killer cover art, this one’s been getting a lot of advance buzz and has been billed as a work of folk horror noir, which excites the hell out of me. Look for reviews on these soon!

Currently playing: Death Stranding 2 (PS5)

The first Death Stranding was polarizing amongst gamer and game reviewers, but I found a hell of a lot to love about it and thought those who derided it as being nothing more than a walking sim really missed the mark. I’m only a few episodes into the new game (each level is broken down by episode and I think I’m on episode 6 currently) and have been blown away by it. This is the first title I’ve played that feels like a next-gen console release that fully harnesses all the power and beauty the PlayStation 5 is capable of. The graphics are stunning, and at times completely jaw-dropping. There have been several instances already where I find myself staring at the scenery and appreciating the beauty of it all, particularly in the game’s Mexican desert-set opening. A few of the game’s moments have been just as emotionally powerful, as well. It’s the type of game that makes the case for videogames as art, and I am loving the hell out of it.

That’s it for now, folks. Presumably I’ll be back in August with more reviews to share with you, and maybe some other tidbits and/or rantings.

If you’re in the US, have a safe and happy July 4!

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones

Publication Date: March 18, 2025 | Saga Press | 448 pages

[Note: This review was originally published at FanFiAddict on Feb. 28, 2025.]

Nobody writes like that Stephen Graham Jones. That’s not hyperbole, just simple fact. Jones’s voice and style is unique, and his stories unfold in an intensely conversational way, utilizing stream of consciousness, occasional tangents, and prose and dialogue that can prove circuitous and sometimes confusing until an act or deed provides clarity (or the reader just figures it out on their own). As a Blackfeet Native American writer, Jones brings the oral tradition of Indigenous storytelling to his writing, and in doing so has carved out a distinct and special space within the horror genre, writing books that are unlike anything else out there.

His style makes for a comfortable bedfellow with the epistolary technique, with The Buffalo Hunter Hunter unfolding across a series of journal entries from 1912, many of which concern the life of Blackfeet Indian Good Stab and the events of 1870 and the years following that made him the undead man he is. Good Stab has come to the church of Lutheran pastor Arthur Beaucarne, who records the confessions shared with him over a handful of months. The overarching mystery, of course, is why Good Stab has chosen Beaucarne as his confessor and what unites these two men, especially as skinned corpses are discovered in the snowy banks around Miles City, Montana.

On the surface, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a revenge-driven vampire story. The afflicted Good Stab hunts the mountains and prairies for those who have attacked his people and who are hunting buffalo in an effort to eliminate the Native’s dependent on the animals for their survival. There’s plenty of bloody violence, of course, befitting a 21st Century vampire book, but there’s a heck of a lot more going on between the covers here.

What The Buffalo Hunter Hunter really is, is a piece of history being told through the lens of slow-burn historical horror. It’s America’s story, of land stolen, of murders committed, of genocide enacted in the name of white supremacy, as told by the victims of a nation founded on their blood and tears. As one character writes late in the proceedings, “This is an Indian story…and you’re on Indian land whether you admit it or not.” And the vampiric Good Stab, well, he’s “the Indian who can’t die…. the worst dream America ever had.”

Jones’s latest certainly arrives a timely moment with contemporary American politics being what they are. Right-wing school boards and Moms Against Literacy orgs across the country have, for years now, been working to strip history classes of actual historical content and ban books from their libraries in an effort to help make white America even more coddled and unchallenged by facts, the existence of other races and cultures, and the sins of our forefathers. Rather than confront the multifaceted truths of America’s heritage and legacy, the answer of these fascist-loving nutjobs is to sanitize and whitewash the past and silence everyone else. All of which helps make The Buffalo Hunter Hunter a necessary and vital breath of fresh air, as well as a reminder about the power of truth in fiction and the importance of reading diverse voices. It’s awfully crazy that in order to get a better understanding of American history in 2025 and the horrors inflicted upon Indigenous peoples we have to turn to a vampire book, but that’s where we’re at nowadays in post-truth USA where simple facts are decried as woke and evil.

There’s a necessary and righteous undercurrent of anger at the (un)beating and deeply empathetic heart of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter as Jones challenges readers to confront one’s complictness in a violent and ugly past. This may be Jones at his absolute best, too, reminding readers of just how potent a literary powerhouse he can be. By the time he lays all his cards on the table late in the game, it’s one hell of an emotional sucker-punch that has been preceded by a number of incredible moments that eventually give way to startling revelation. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter has long, sharp teeth to sink into readers, but more importantly, it forces you to think and feel. If you disagree, you might want to check your pulse.

Trog by Zachary Ashford

Publication Date: March 11, 2025 | Unnvering | 104 pages

Note: This review was originally published at FanFiAddict.com on February 14, 2025.

Sometimes you just want some fun, good, old-fashioned monster mayhem chockfull of gore and dismemberment. Enter Trog, by Zachary Ashford, a bit of Aussie B-movie schlock in print form from Unnerving Books, a release that would have been right at home in their now-defunct line of yesteryear-tribute Rewind-or-Die novellas.

Fifteen-year-old Aisha and her family have only just moved into their new and deeply secluded home in the outback when they find themselves under assault by a trio of masked maniacs. As if that weren’t enough, there’s all these strange noises coming from below the house, deep beneath a hidden hatchway that leads into an underground cavern. What else are a bunch of thrill killers to do but investigate and make whatever’s left of everybody’s now much-too-short lives an even bigger hell as they unwittingly let a captured beast loose?

Ashford wastes no time in laying waste to, well, everything. We get a brief set-up involving Trog’s capture and confinement to kick things off, and then it’s off to the races for roughly a hundred pages of gnarly violence and bloody slaughter. The premise is streamlined-simple: take The Strangers, mix in some family dynamics, add in a hungry, hungry cryptid, and presto-chango, Trog.

Viewers of The Strangers will recall the chilling reason for that flick’s psychos terrorizing a young couple as “Because you were home.” Ashford covers similar ground with his thrill killers here, who insist their motives boil down to little more than sheer enjoyment. It’s a way for them to cut loose and party hearty, with their de facto leader explaining to his captive audience, “I want to kill you because it’s fun. This isn’t a political statement. It’s entertainment.”

We eventually learn, of course, that this isn’t quite 100% true, but for the vast majority of Trog it’s easy enough to accept this as a mission statement for both the killers and the book itself. In fact, given recent political turmoils on- and offline, the lack of deep, in-your-face politicization in Trog makes for a welcome, and occasionally cathartic, just-in-time escape from the real-world and its multiplying crises. Still, Ashford subtly weaves in a commentary on naturalism versus capitalism and the war between the haves and have-nots, not to mention those caught in the middle. Trog himself is a monster transformed against his will by another’s pursuit of financial excess, and who finds himself torn by memories of a more natural and peaceful existence against his now-insatiable hunger for human flesh. In the end, money makes destructive, and self-destructive, monsters of us all, even moldy Aussie offshoots of Bigfoot.

Granted, for every moment of potential deep reflection, there’s about a dozen instances of splattery, gore-caked violence, brain slurping, and intestines spilling to keep any potential opining about Marxist philosophy far at bay, all of which is nicely wrapped around a young heroine’s story of trauma survival and unlocking her inner badass. This is, after all, entertainment!

The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig

Publication Date: April 29, 2025 | Del Rey | 400 pages

In 1998, a group of high school friends enter the woods of Bucks County, PA to go camping... or, as teenagers are more apt to do, go "camping," which is to say they went into the woods to fuck and get fucked up. But in the midst of all their drugs and booze revelry, they stumble across the peculiar sight of a staircase in the woods. Just a staircase. There's no accompanying house, or the remains of a house that was, to indicate some perfectly normal reason for this staircase to be there. It's weird. So, of course, one of the teens climbs up the steps and... disappears. He didn't fall off the other side or pull some fancy sleight of hand to prank his friends and jump scare them in the woods. No, what he does is just completely vanish right off the face of the earth. Gone gone.

In the present day, the remaining friends, now long-since disconnected and grown apart, are reunited by a new tragedy coupled with the discovery of another strange staircase in the woods. This staircase is an opportunity for them to find out what happened to Matty, to find out if he's even still alive off in somewhere else, and maybe to save him, to put right what all fell apart so many years ago. And up they all go, up, up, and away, right on into hell.

The Staircase in the Woods is an unremittingly dark exploration of liminal spaces, fractured friendships, and the inner lives of this group of people that used to be friends but who have grown into almost-but-not quite strangers. In some ways, it's a haunted house story, but author Chuck Wendig does a marvelous job of inverting familiar tropes to give us something fresh, interesting, and next-level with its exploration of game mechanics and simulated reality philosophizing.

Mostly, though, it's a haunted people story. Theirs are stories about being lost, of being abandoned, of what it's like to be hollowed out and filled with darkness. The characters -- Nick, Owen, Lore (short for Lauren), and Hamish -- are all bleak figures with scarred childhoods, the better in which to mine for misery. There's deceit, depravity, suicidal ideation, self-harm, drug and alcohol abuse, addiction, child sex abuse, animal abuse, parental neglect, murder -- you name it, it's probably in here to some degree.

And that's not even getting into the pure, distilled scenes of nightmare fuel surrounding such heady topics. Did I mention this book is dark? The Staircase in the Woods may be the bleakest and darkest work Wendig has created thus far, skating up to the edges of, yet skirting around (but not necessarily away from), abject nihilism. That last bit could certainly go either way, sure, because throughout it all there's a certain measure of hope, but one can't help but wonder what happens when hope hits a wall, and how much a friendship, even one that's been reforged from its fractured remains, can truly withstand.

For me, it's those questions of endurance that made The Staircase in the Woods so damnably compelling. I found myself trapped by this book's gory hooks, but it was the human elements that truly captivated me, the relationship dynamics, their responses to each new piece of unraveling information, and their puzzling over what exactly was happening to them, whether or not they'd figure it out and how, and what then? I couldn't help but recall the tagline to the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, "Who will survive and what will be left of them?"

I couldn't help speculating, too, on other pieces of media that The Staircase in the Woods exists in conversation with. Wendig taps into a serious House of Leaves vibe, sans all the heavy extracurricular homework, not to mention Reddit creepypastas and The Backrooms, with overarching shades of Richard Matheson and Stephen King, the latter if only because every current-generation horror writer exists in the shadow of King, whose continuing work and legacy reaches oh so very far and wide that it becomes impossible not to touch in some way, shape, or form, even if only incidentally. The Staircase in the Woods is a shifty, shifting hodgepodge of inspirations that ultimately come together in unique, and uniquely infectious, ways, inside and out. It cuts and crawls its way into you, burrowing into your heart and mind, twisting and changing as it grows deeper inside you, and isn't that just the best kind of horror?

March(ing) into April: A Look Back

As March began to wind down, The Atlantic published their article about Meta’s massive, wide-scale book piracy ring used to train their generative-AI platform, Llama 3. Just in case you don’t know, Meta is owned by Mark Zuckerberg and, under this umbrella, includes the social media sites, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. They stole the bulk of my published works to use in their bullshit AI training with the intent of feeding my writing into their little griftomatic plagarism machine to teach their generative computer software how to write like a human being. A quick Google search shows that Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth is currently 201.4 BILLION dollars, making him the third-wealthiest human being on the entire planet Earth. And he’s out there fucking stealing ebooks. And let’s be clear about this right up front — it absolutely is criminal what Zuckerberg has done here. I am not throwing around words like “stealing” or calling this a “piracy ring” lightly. This is theft of intellectual property resulting in loss of income for me. As television writer and producer David Slack noted on BlueSky after news broke, “If your business model doesn’t work without stealing other people’s work and violating copyright law on a massive scale, then you’re not in business. You’re in organized crime.”

Alex Resiner writes in his article, “Meta employees turned their attention to Library Genesis, or LibGen, one of the largest of the pirated libraries that circulate online. It currently contains more than 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. Eventually, the team at Meta got permission from “MZ”—an apparent reference to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—to download and use the data set.”

Mark Zuckerberg, a man who is, again, the third richest person in the world, stole my books. He authorized his minions at Meta to steal my books. And not just mine, either. They stole a lot of books, from a lot of authors, including works that haven’t even been published yet! Maris Kreizman at LitHub writes about Meta somehow having gotten its hands on digital advanced reader copies (otherwise known as galleys or ARCs) available only on legitimate sites like NetGalley or Edelweiss (both of which I use in my work as a book reviewer, FYI), summing it up with the most evergreen subheading ever with “One of the Richest Companies in the World is Stealing From the Rest of Us,” and closing with “the work of individual artists is being used and denigrated in order to benefit a class of people who don’t care about the art and fear no consequences.” When I began writing this piece, on March 20, my BlueSky and Facebook feeds were literally filled with other authors complaining about their works being stolen and the income lost as a result of one of the richest men in the world stealing our shit, and it hasn’t let up much in the days since. The works they stole from me personally range in price from 99c to $4.99 USD. This is, apparently, too rich for the blood of Mark Zuckerberg, a billionaire. And not just a billionaire, but a billionaire more than 200 times over. Add on to that Meta’s valuation which, as Kreizman notes, “is currently $1.56 trillion, which seems like it would be more than enough to pay licensing fees.”

According to Garry Lu over at Boss Hunter, if you worked 24/7 non-stop without ever taking a break while earning $10,000 an hour, it would take 2,281 years to earn $200 billion, “Meaning to have his sort of wealth today, you’d have to start all the way back in 261 BC.” Another estimate shows that, spending $1 million per day, it would still take you 544 years to spend $200 billion. That’s how insanely wealthy Mark Zuckerberg is.

On Amazon, for each of my books that sells at $4.99, I get $3.49. I would need to sell roughly 57,142,857,142 copies of a single title to earn $200 billion. When you start looking at the number of how many copies the average book sells, let alone what your average indie sales are like (FYI not a single title of mine are even close to reaching that average), you begin to realize just how fucking laughable selling that many copies is. It’s never going to happen. Even Stephen King is only at 400 million copies sold across the entire breadth of his body of work (and Meta stole 200 of his works, by the way. You can look that up if you’re curious.). Selling 57 billion copies just ain’t ever going be a thing for me, especially when there’s only 8 billion on this planet. I’d be happy to be able to just earn a living from my writing alone, but even that possibility alone is ridiculously small and unlikely as an indie horror author, and even less so with all these dipshits stealing it instead of paying the already super-low price tag I put on my books.

But Mark Zuckerberg? That motherfucker has $200 billion lying around and he’s still stealing shit. This seems like a good time to remind you all that there is no such thing as an ethical billionaire. They’re all wage thieves at the end of the day. Every fucking one of them. Mark, Elon, Bezos, Trump, the whole fucking lot of them didn’t get where they are by being honest, responsible businessmen. They got where they are because they fucked over everything and everybody in and out of their way in order to line their pockets. And then, after all that, after raking in money hand over fist and rigging the game so nobody else can ever have a shot, they then decided, you know what, let’s steal some books from these hard-working, little-paid authors, these indie motherfuckers who probably don’t even break even on their self-published works. Because we got ours, so fuck them. Fleece ‘em, rape ‘em, skin ‘em alive — that’s the philosophy of these ultra-wealthy cretins, their one and only guiding principle in life. Because that’s the one thing all these rich fucks have in common — they just take, take, take, take, take, and then once they’ve hoarded every goddamn thing they possibly can, they still manage to find something else to take, something so far beneath them, from people they’ve never heard of, who don’t make one iota of difference to them, from people so far beneath them they wouldn’t even know you’re pissing on them to tell them it’s raining because they’re so far down the piss doesn’t even hit them! It just fucking evaporates in the atmosphere, that’s how fucking far down authors like me are from Mark fucking Zuckerberg. One of the richest men on earth, stealing my fucking books, just because he can.

The one small thing about all this that gave me a chuckle was the fact that they apparently did not steal my anti-fascist, Fuck Trump splatterpunk horror book, Friday Night Massacre, to use in their training. Gee, I wonder why that might be?!

Naturally, there’s not much I can do about this in the end. He’s beyond fucking rich, while I’m roughly a missed paycheck away from becoming a hobo. The rich live in a different world from the rest of us. They exist in an entirely separate ecosystem from us. They live by completely different rules and are, in fact, above any such rules that would see any one of us condemned under the strictest penalties possible. They are, in short, the fullest and most perfect living example regarding the existence of two entirely different Americas. He stole my books, stole the money right out of pocket. The horses are out of the barn and the door is left standing wide open. All I can really do in response is to delete my Facebook and Messenger accounts, delete my Instagram account, and get rid of Threads, which I rarely used to begin with. There is absolutely no reason for me to use these products and platforms anymore. Why the fuck should I? I'm at a complete and total loss as to why I should stay on Meta platforms knowing they've pirated damn near everything I've written and published -- nearly every indie book I've put out there, along with several anthologies I've been included in. All stolen. Income lost. And that's not even getting into all the right-wing bullshit Zuckerberg has engaged in. Yes, I'm pissed off. You’re goddamn right I am. Why should I keep engaging with and using platforms that literally steal money right out of my pocket? To stay is to acquiesce, and that just reeks too much of battered person syndrome for my liking.

I’m fucking done. Leaving is all I can do, so that’s exactly what I’ve done. I can stop giving them my clicks. I can stop having their horseshit ads served to me, which is about all these sites were good for nowadays anyway, since their algorithms no longer show you the actual, real-live friends and family and assorted other people you follow, instead populating your feed with suggested accounts from brands and influencers that have paid to have themselves advertised to you. History suggests I won’t be missing out on very much. I left Twitter soon after Musk took over and turned it into a Nazi propaganda machine, and I sure as fuck haven’t missed that shit at fucking all. Facebook has been carving a similar trail, and the very few times I’ve logged into Threads show that to be a right-wing cesspool as well. All I can do now is deprive them of my information moving forward and hope that I will be included in the Kadrey v. Meta class action lawsuit filed against Meta for their copyright infringement. Zuckerberg may not be able to afford my ebooks and has to resort to petty theft to obtain them, but I can certainly damn well use some of that Meta money, so bring on the class action lawsuit, I say, and let’s make ‘em bleed.

Where’s my fucking money, Zuck?

TLDR:

Anyway, if you’re looking for me on social media, or are wondering where I’ve disappeared to, the only place you can find me nowadays is on BlueSky. This is the only social media platform I will be using and engaging with, until such time as they, too, prove themselves wholly unfit for my support as a user.

I know there’s really very little I can do to prevent my work from being pirated, by either the poor, the rich, or people who just want free shit, but there is something you can do. If you’ve ever read a pirated copy of my work, or if you have pirated my works for others to read, or have used a generative AI platform that has been trained on my stolen works, you can buy me a coffee and we’ll call it even.

And also:

FUCK AI   KINDLE UNLIMITED REMINDER!

Just a friendly reminder to Kindle Unlimited readers that all of my independently published works will be exiting Kindle Unlimited on April 16, so if you’re a KU reader you better hurry and get those borrows in quickly! Soon after this expiration date hits, all of my works will be going wide and will be available on all other ebook platforms, like Nook, Kobo, Apple Books, Smashwords, and elsewhere, including right here on this site.

My own digital store will be opening up April 18 with everything I’ve published available for you to buy direct, giving you complete control over the EPUB edition of each book for storage and safekeeping on your personal devices. Bonus, if you buy direct from my store, you won’t ever have to worry about another billionaire taking my books off your ereaders. Peace of mind is a good thing!

Two of my books have already gone wide: Borne of the Deep (The Salem Hawley Series, Book 2) and The Horror Book Review Digest Volume 3. You can grab either one via your preferred marketplace right now, or wait until April 18 to buy them from my store.

On the review front, March was a slow month for me. My wife and I took a small vacation mid-month, which I took as an opportunity to do some pleasure reading free of review commitments and to get a bit more caught up with R. Scott Bakker’s The Aspect-Emporer series by way of the third volume, The Great Ordeal. I enjoyed it, but it also felt like a lot of prologue to the fourth and final book in this series. I hope to finally get this series wrapped up this year, after taking a decade-long break between the second and third book, but I feel like I say that a lot and am never quite able to follow through… but this time I mean it! Again!

I did manage to get two reviews posted over at FanFiAddict, which I encourage you to check out.

Rhino: The Rise of a Warrior: A Hell Divers Novel by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

Inhsopitable by Ali Seay

I’m expecting April to be a bit more productive, reading-wise.

Currently reading: Zombie Bigfoot by Nicholas Sullivan

Currently watching: Rebel Moon (The Director’s Cut), Jack Ryan (Season 4) and various cooking competition shows

Currently playing: Star Wars: Outlaws (PS5)

That’s it for now. See you next month, gang!

February in Review

Image by Cullan Smith via unsplash

Time’s a funny thing, isn’t it? On one hand, I can’t believe how quickly February flew by, but on the other hand I can’t believe we’re only two months down into 2025.

That said, February was a pretty busy month. For starters, I joined the staff of reviewers over at FanFiAddict and already have a handful of new reviews under my belt over there. I’ll give a recap of all that shortly, down below.

The other big thing to happen were some behind-the-scene updates as I prepare to exit Kindle Unlimited next month. My entire bibliography will be leaving KU effective April 16. Some titles are making the exit a little bit sooner than others, as I decline renewal options to enroll them for another 90 days, but April 16 will be the absolute drop-dead cutoff for my stuff as it pertains to Kindle Unlimited. Everything will still be available for sale, but more importantly, everything will be for sale everywhere and, if all goes well, for borrowing digitally from your local library via OverDrive, CloudLibrary, and (eventually, fingers crossed!) Hoopla.

You’ll also be able to purchase the EPUB ebook files for my titles directly through my website, giving you complete ownership over the books you buy rather than any given retailer’s arbitrary licensing of my works. Come April 16, you’ll be able to find them all in the ebooks shop. Of course, all these books will available elsewhere, too, including the Amazon Kindle storefront, Apple’s iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and pretty much everywhere else you can think of.

A couple of titles have already escaped containment from KU, including my latest release, The Horror Book Review Digest Volume III. You may recall I ran into several snafus with Amazon in releasing this title back in January, which is what prompted my decision to finally go wide (or, more actually, return to going wide, as I had done before, a number of year’s ago). Well, I was able to work around whatever issues Amazon had with this release and, in doing so, got it listed everywhere else, too. I’m chalking that up as a win! You can now find The Horror Book Review Digest Volume III at a number of stores right now!

For those who may have been introduced to Salem Hawley back when The Resurrectionists was available wide, you can now find the second book, Borne of the Deep, at a number of other storefronts beyond Amazon. It’ll be available direct through my website April 16, but if you’re a Kobo or Nook reader, you can find it over there now. It should be appearing in the Apple Books storefront soon!

SALES

Before I exit Kindle Unlimited in April, I figure now’s a good time to have one last hurrah with Amazon’s scheduled promotions. Beginning Monday, March 3, all of my horror titles (minus Borne of the Deep) will be on sale for only 99c, along with my two science fiction titles, Convergence and Emergence, which make up the DRMR series duology. You’ll be able to find all my 99c titles beginning Monday morning on my Amazon Author Page. Just be sure to sort by Price: Low to High to get all the discounted titles.

NEW REVIEWS

February kicked off with two new book reviews here at the blog.

The Night Birds by Christopher Golden

Where the Bones Lie by Nick Kolakowski

And then things shifted into high gear as I began contributing to FanFi Addict, starting with a guest post reviewing Chuck Wendig’s The Staircase in the Woods before joining on as a full-fledged staff writer immediately following.

The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig

Trog by Zachary Ashford

The Sundowner’s Dance by Todd Keisling

Phengaris by Anna Orridge

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones

What’s been most surprising for me is that, with only two month’s into 2025, I’ve already read a handful of titles that will no doubt be some of the best releases of the year. Granted, some of these won’t be out for some time yet, and I actually read The Staircase in the Woods at the tail-end of 2024, but goddamn. I expect to be seeing this one, Chris Golden’s, Todd’s, and Stephen Graham Jones’s latest releases making a lot of Best Of lists later this year, along with Clay McLeod Chapman’s Wake Up and Open Your Eyes. This is shaping up to be a very, very, very strong year for the horror genre and we’re only just getting started! We’re eating good this year, Horror Fam! I’m sure I’ll have much more to say about all this as we prepare to close out 2025 (you know, presuming we make it that far and haven’t been dragged into nuclear conflict in World War III: The Search for Ukrainian Minerals so Donnie-boy can show Putin what a big, big boy he is! Fuck, it’s going to be a long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long year).

See y’all next month, I hope!

Where the Bones Lie by Nick Kolakowski

Publication Date: March 11, 2025 | Datura Books | 400 pages

Nick Kolakowski really gets around, genre-wise. Although he has plenty of crime capers under his belt, with books like Payback is Forever and his Love & Bullets series, it’s his few - and excellent - horror novellas that I first became acquainted with his work, specifically Absolute Unit and, later, Beach Bodies. And let’s not forget his awesome Friday the 13th X Groundhog Day riff, appropriately titled “Goundhog Slay,” in the Monsters (Dark Tide Book 5) novella collection. Indeed, Kolakowski has found a pretty sweet spot as a crossover author in his own right, effortlessly hopping back and forth between crime and horror and mixing up the two on occasion (The Boise Long-Pig Hunting Club and its sequel, regrettably, remain unread in Mount TBR, along with Maxine Unleashes Doomsday, and I can only imagine what those books must entail based on their titles!).

With Where the Bones Lie, Kolakowski turns his attention to the old reliable of crime fiction, the private detective, albeit in a round-about way, which fits Nick’s style to a T. Dash Fuller is a former Hollywood fixer. Got a celebrity you need dried out before dying of an OD just before making the publicity rounds for a new flick or big-budget streaming series? Or maybe the celeb has already OD’d and the cause of death needs to be adjusted to something more palatable by way of favors made to the police and medical examiner? Or maybe it’s the body of a rando the celeb was hooking up with that has sadly expired and now needs to be hidden? Or, hell, maybe you just need some paparazzi kneecapped. Dash is your guy. Or was, anyway. Dash is reformed and failing at being a stand-up comedian because, funny enough, he’s not all that funny. This means, of course, he’s broke and making fast food door deliveries and Ubering folks around isn’t making ends meet. Enter his old boss, Manny, with one last job. One thing leads to another, yada yada yada, and pretty soon Dash find himself involved with Madeline Ironwood, who has hired him to find out who murdered her drug-running father, Ken. Ken’s skeleton, you see, has recently been discovered in a barrel that had been sunk in a lake, but climate changing being what it is, said lake is no more, wildfires are ravaging the landscape, and all kinds of secrets are finding their way back into the sun.

Kolakowski’s opening pages set the stage for an interesting dilemma — what happens when you’re really good at doing bad things? For Dash, it’s a personal crisis that results in stomach cramps best relieved by punishing amounts of alcohol and snark because he is, after all, a not-quite private eye of the hard-boiled tradition, and because healthy coping mechanisms make for poor drama. Both Dash and Madeline make light of the fact that finding out what happened to Ken is cheaper than therapy, but there’s an unmissable truth in such jokes. Both have long-standing, albeit wildly different, issues in need of resolution. For Dash these are brought to the forefront as Manny reenters his life and dredges up a past that Dash finds impossible to escape, and which has literally crippled him with guilt. During the course of his investigation into Ken’s disappearance he suffers a panic attack. His dreams are waking nightmares that make for fitful sleep. He sees a black-clad figure in a skull mask stalking him wherever he goes, a figure that may or may not actually be there.

Dash makes for an interesting character study. He’s impulsive and self-assured in his skills, but so riddled with doubt and guilt that he can’t keep doing all the things he’s so good at. His talents have made his existence a living hell. But it’s not until Madeline enters the picture that he finds a pathway into do-goodery. Former footnote of an actress Madeline makes for an equally intriguing foil, and it’s clear Kolakowski had a lot of fun writing these two. She’s a wildcat, and there’s a natural charm to the repartee between her and Dash. It’s refreshing, too, to see their relationship founded on mutual respect and professionalism, rather than the typical ‘will they or won’t they’ tropes often found in similar set-ups.

Where the Bones Lie subverts just enough of the usual expectations that it feels fresh and enjoyable, and Kolakowski puts a unique spin on the private dick character with his focus on mental health and finding balance in a truly off-kilter world. With shades of Robert Crais’s Elvis Cole novels by way of Jordan Harper’s outstanding Everybody Knows, Kolakowski delivers an intriguing PI page-turner that reminds us just how dark sunny California can get.

Odds and Ends

Image by Amador Loureiro via unsplash

Last month, I wrote about the difficulty I encountered with publishing The Horror Book Review Digest Volume III on Amazon. Fast forward to February, and hey, guess what? The Horror Book Review Digest Volume III is now available on Amazon. Wonders never cease. Anyway, you can buy a copy of that over there now, or you can continue to buy direct from me right here on this website. Bonus! If you buy direct from me, more of that money comes to me instead of lining the pockets of a billionaire who clearly does not have the best interests of American democracy at heart.

Speaking of buying direct from me… All of my books will be exiting Kindle Unlimited effective April 16. All of my books will be available for direct purchase through this website by Friday, April 18. I’ll also be working on going wide and expanding distribution of my ebooks to include a wider net of platforms, including Apple, Nook, Kobo, Hoopla, Overdrive, and everywhere else I can. Hopefully these ebooks will also make their way onto Bookshop.org via Draft2Digital, since they’ve recently expanded their platform to include the sale of ebooks.

In case you weren’t aware, print editions of my books are already available on Bookshop.org, along with Barnes & Noble, and can most likely even be special ordered by your local bookstore if you ask them nicely. I’ve also set up an affiliate account with Bookshop.org, and will be including a link to purchase books through them in my reviews whenever possible. Purchases made through the Bookshop.org links included on my site will earn me a minor commission that will help support this site and my future publishing endeavors.

I’ve added a Cool Links page to the site, which you can find up at the top menu. Right now, there’s just a handful of sites listed, places I visit regularly and/or authors or podcasts I want to show some support for, or just think are cool and would like to help spread the word.

On the review front, my first guest review for FanFiAddict went live today for Chuck Wendig’s The Staircase in the Woods. If you like the sounds of this one, you can preorder a copy right now. (Remember what I said about that Bookshop.org affiliate link?) I’ll share the review here in a week or two, most likely, but for now go give FanFiAddict all the clicks and check out the other great reviews and reviewers over there. My TBR has grown tremendously over the years thanks to these guys and gals, and they’ve become my go-to hub for scifi, fantasy, and horror recs, which is why they’re included in that Cool Links page up above.

That’s it for now!

The Night Birds by Christopher Golden

Publication Date: May 6, 2025 | St. Martin’s Press | 304 pages

Christopher Golden’s The Night Birds hit a few particular sweet spots for me. I’m a sucker for sea-based horror, so to have the setting be the hundred-year-old, rusting hulk of the Christabel, marooned off the coast of Galveston, TX, immediately make me perk up. To sweeten things even further, the Christabel isn’t just a marooned ship, but one that has become reclaimed by nature and turned into a floating forest as mangrove trees have taken root and grown through the ship’s decks. It’s a marvelous visual that I think the book’s cover has only partially managed to capture, as Golden’s writing makes it clear — or maybe it’s just my imagination — that the ship has become positively wooly with wild vegetation. Whatever the case, the Christabel makes for one hell of a striking locale. To top it all off, the story takes place during a seriously, wickedly violent tropical storm. Well, gang, I love me a good storm setting, too, and between the monsoon Golden conjures up here and the crashing waves breaking against the hull of the Christabel, I’m kind of surprised The Night Birds pages aren’t soaked all the way through and dripping everywhere.

The Galveston storm, however, isn’t the only thing wreaking havoc and bringing on a long night full of violence aboard the Christabel. One other aspect really drew me into The Night Birds, and that’s the subject of the horrors at play here. Witches. Witches galore. A whole nasty coven, with one single, solitary demand — the life of a newborn baby recently hidden away in the ship’s cabin.

Ruby and Mae have been on the run with this child, having only just fled a black magic-fueled assault that has led them to Charlie Book’s dock slip. Book is a researcher for Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, and the floating forest of the Christabel has become both the focus of his work and his de facto home. Ruby is his ex-lover, and when she turns up in desperate need for help, with a child that is not her own, he cannot possibly turn her away. They need shelter from the storm and a place where nobody would think to look for them, and Book knows just the right place to ride out the evening. But then the birds begin to circle overhead with predatory intent, and the witches that Ruby and Mae have been fleeing are much closer than expected.

The Night Birds is Christopher Golden at the absolute top of his game. I freaking loved this book, but even just saying that feels like I’m selling it short. The story is masterfully executed, its pacing both precise and exciting. Details are crisply delivered, and rather than ever feeling like a barrage of an infodump these moments serve the story perfectly and help to ratchet up the tension. In a way, it’s like watching an expert artisan watchmaker. Springs are deliberately, carefully coiled to deliver a high level of torque to turn the gears, while keeping everything perfectly balanced. One gears turns another, and another, to keep the hands moving. It looks simple and deliberate enough from the outside, but underneath, there’s so much machinery and moving parts, all so carefully crafted to make it all work. (I am, obviously, not a watchmaker, expert or otherwise, but hopefully this analogy works well enough to get my point across, imprecise though it may be. My apologies to watchmakers everywhere.)

Golden works hard, too, at building characters to care about. Book and Ruby’s relationship is underscored by tragedy and bitterness, and while they’re forced together into tight quarters under less than ideal circumstances, I found myself rooting for them. Even the secondary characters are nicely developed, and I found myself growing quickly attached to Otis, who runs the boatyard and wants nothing more than to be left alone to read his mystery novels and listen to the waves crashing against the docks. I get Otis. I understand Otis. But what really sold me was Golden’s exploration of witch lore and the utter monstrosities he has concocted here. Golden’s no stranger to witches, given his work with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Mike Mignola’s Hellboy and Baltimore comics, not to mention co-editing the anthology Hex-Life: Wicked New Tales of Witchery with Rachel Autumn Deering, but his take on witchy gals in The Night Birds casts this coven in a unique candlelight. These ladies are unapologetically vicious, and I dug the hell out of them for that.

Bottom line: The Night Birds is horror craftsmanship at its best, and one of my first no doubt about it, hands-down favorite reads of 2025 thus far. Golden’s latest is tense and exciting, full of wonderful little surprises along the way, and by the time the violent climax rolls around it becomes impossible to step away from.