Where Do We Go Now? (Part 1)
As we lurch into a society of nonreaders (which is to say that there are a minority of actual readers, while everybody else is apparently not reading much at all anymore), I face my new efforts with trepidation. I hope people enjoy the WIP super-series as much as I enjoyed writing it.
But odds are always good that it'll fall into the void like most everything else I've written over the past 22 years or so, when I became serious about novel-writing.
Much like the Ben & Jerry's "flavor graveyard", here's another tour of my assorted fictional flavors, which I'll break into multiple parts, because there are a lot of entries to make...
HORROR NOVELS (6)
THE WOLFSHADOW TRILOGY (SAAMAANTHAA, THE HAPPENING, NORM): My take on werewolves, my first trilogy, darkly comic (to me), and riffing on hipsterism, American cultural decline (also, rather prescient on the fascism we're dealing with right now), sadly underappreciated in the world of werewolf fiction.
CHOSEN: My own take on a zombie apocalypse with a pinch of neo-Lovecraftian monstrosity in its midst. My purest horror novel, utterly unappreciated, but still one of my favorites. This novel held what I considered commercial promise at the time -- a group of brave survivors in the fictional Pennsylvania town of Ludlow (inspired by Sewickley, in case you wondered), against a menace few can fully comprehend but which consumed the town. Stephen King's 'SALEM'S LOT (a favorite from my childhood) certainly inspired this one.
SUCKAGE: My take on vampires, darkly funny, a kind of minion's memoir and an exploration of emotional and narcissistic abuse and survivorship. I dearly loved this book, and while it got appreciated in some indie reviews, it was absolutely entombed by indifference that still haunts me to this day. It was intended as an antidote to the anodyne "sparkly" vampires that were the rage at the time -- I wanted to be the vampirism back in vampires, and I succeeded, for what that's worth.
THE CURSED EARTH: I had big hopes for this big book, which was a gonzo brick of humor and folk/cosmic horror. I had so much fun writing this book, and with the mushroom horror of it melded with witchcraft, conspiracies, gangsters, killer clowns, and psychedelia, I thought it would find fans somewhere, but, like all the others, no dice. It launched into the void, a technicolor tale that found no audience. I still stand by this work as my horror masterpiece among my novels, but everybody else seems daunted by that 480-page size of it, so off into the void it has gone, with all the others.
The horror novel journey for me began with SAAMAANTHAA and ended with THE CURSED EARTH, covering a span of around 12 years of writing for me. While there may be a tale or two to tell that could be called horror, I'm effectively done with horror novels in this life. I did my part, contributed my share to the genre, and almost nobody read these books.
It's why it's led me to the belief that I'm perhaps too gleeful/positive/liberal/upbeat for horror readers. I like the darkly funny more than the gory, which might put my thoughtful horror far out of bounds of what most people want. Not sure. I believe in all of the above books, but they never found their audience.
Next up, the novellas...
But odds are always good that it'll fall into the void like most everything else I've written over the past 22 years or so, when I became serious about novel-writing.
Much like the Ben & Jerry's "flavor graveyard", here's another tour of my assorted fictional flavors, which I'll break into multiple parts, because there are a lot of entries to make...
HORROR NOVELS (6)
THE WOLFSHADOW TRILOGY (SAAMAANTHAA, THE HAPPENING, NORM): My take on werewolves, my first trilogy, darkly comic (to me), and riffing on hipsterism, American cultural decline (also, rather prescient on the fascism we're dealing with right now), sadly underappreciated in the world of werewolf fiction.
CHOSEN: My own take on a zombie apocalypse with a pinch of neo-Lovecraftian monstrosity in its midst. My purest horror novel, utterly unappreciated, but still one of my favorites. This novel held what I considered commercial promise at the time -- a group of brave survivors in the fictional Pennsylvania town of Ludlow (inspired by Sewickley, in case you wondered), against a menace few can fully comprehend but which consumed the town. Stephen King's 'SALEM'S LOT (a favorite from my childhood) certainly inspired this one.
SUCKAGE: My take on vampires, darkly funny, a kind of minion's memoir and an exploration of emotional and narcissistic abuse and survivorship. I dearly loved this book, and while it got appreciated in some indie reviews, it was absolutely entombed by indifference that still haunts me to this day. It was intended as an antidote to the anodyne "sparkly" vampires that were the rage at the time -- I wanted to be the vampirism back in vampires, and I succeeded, for what that's worth.
THE CURSED EARTH: I had big hopes for this big book, which was a gonzo brick of humor and folk/cosmic horror. I had so much fun writing this book, and with the mushroom horror of it melded with witchcraft, conspiracies, gangsters, killer clowns, and psychedelia, I thought it would find fans somewhere, but, like all the others, no dice. It launched into the void, a technicolor tale that found no audience. I still stand by this work as my horror masterpiece among my novels, but everybody else seems daunted by that 480-page size of it, so off into the void it has gone, with all the others.
The horror novel journey for me began with SAAMAANTHAA and ended with THE CURSED EARTH, covering a span of around 12 years of writing for me. While there may be a tale or two to tell that could be called horror, I'm effectively done with horror novels in this life. I did my part, contributed my share to the genre, and almost nobody read these books.
It's why it's led me to the belief that I'm perhaps too gleeful/positive/liberal/upbeat for horror readers. I like the darkly funny more than the gory, which might put my thoughtful horror far out of bounds of what most people want. Not sure. I believe in all of the above books, but they never found their audience.
Next up, the novellas...
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