SOMETHING EVIL

In five days it will be Halloween, and to commemorate the occasion I am releasing my first full-length novel since 2023, Something Evil. As I write this, my long-suffering editor and pal, Michael Dell of One Nine Books, is toiling away on all the coverage, formatting and other details which are utterly beyond my comprehension, to make sure the various versions are up and running by the promised release date of October 31, 2025.

If you follow me here on Antagony, you know that I have promised (or threatened, depending o your view of my writing ability) to work in every genre before I cash in my chips and go to that Great Writer's Place in the Sky, and I feel I'm well on my way. My Cage Life series falls under crime / thriller / suspense / mystery and modern Noir; my Sinner's Cross series is historical fiction; The Chronicles of Magnus is alternative reality, dystopian, nonmagical fantasy or sci-fi, and speculative fiction in one shot. And my short story anthology Devils You Know forayed into the realm of horror. But note the word "foray." The thirteen stories enclosed in the book examine many of the darker aspects of the human condition, including the intersection of horror and humor we call "black comedy" or "tragicomedy," but they are hardly exhaustive. It was in the hopes of diving deeper into one of my favorite genres of both fiction and film that I wrote Something Evil, Volume I.

Now, to clarify before we go any further, Something Evil is actually two shortish novels, hence the "Volume One." It scales in at 300 pages. It will be followed by a second volume, also of two novels, and then by a third, which may comprise two or more. Whether it stops there or continues I have not yet decided, but six of the books in the series are already written, at least in second draft form. It's my plan to release a volume every Halloween until 2027, or until the story exhausts itself. So beware: if you happen to buy the thing, understand you are embarking on a multi-year journey. And as they say in many horror movies, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

The basic premise of Something Evil is this: archeologists from an American university, excavating a ruined old witch prison in Scotland, discover a "bog body" in the peat marshes nearby: a bog body is a corpse almost perfectly preserved by the humic acid, cool temperature and lack of oxygen in the bog. Nothing about the discovery of the body makes any historical sense: the 400 year-old burial rite suggests both a ritual humiliation, an abiding respect, and a desire that the corpse shall never rise again. The so-called "Cipher" is shipped off to America in a containment unit for further scientific study. And that's when things get ugly. On Halloween night there is a terrible massacre at the university, perpetrated apparently without motive by one of the archeological students, and the few survivors of the rampage are deeply and understandably traumatized. Gathering almost a year after the slaughter, they resume their study of the Cipher, each nursing their own pain and grief and guilt. But no sooner have they committed to cracking its secrets than the perpetrator escapes the asylum to which he has been committed, apparently to resume his grisly handiwork. But is he really responsible, or is there another force at work here, something vastly more powerful, with an agenda of its own?

Something Evil is my attempt to combine the two major horror genres, slasher and supernatural, into a single storyline. It is also my attempt to populate a world with fully drawn characters who have depth often lacking in horror stories, where many characters are merely fodder for the madman's knife or the monster's drooling jaws. Although I began these novels before my time as a victim's rights advocate, one of my main goals was to delve into the area nearly all horror stories ignore: aftermath. Most horror novels and films either end with the protagonist dead or bloodily triumphant: we seldom get to see the months, the years afterward in which they struggle to return to "normal life" while battling their own inner demons. In the first book, we see our heroes at their pre-tragedy peak; in the second, we see their struggle to piece new lives out of the broken wrecks of the old.

Another goal of the series is to explore the nature of evil. This is a massive undertaking and it may very well be that I am inadequate to the task. After all, this is a problem with which mankind has grappled as long as we have had language, and perhaps before; who the fuck is Miles Watson to offer answers? Well, I can at least answer that: what I am looking for is not actually an answer to why evil exists, but what we believe it to be. I wanted to examine the concept of evil itself, in the spiritual sense, and then the way it manifests differently in every human heart. The villain of Something Evil does not possess its victims: it simply frees whatever inner darkness that exists in their souls. One memorable exchange from the 1985 Michael Mann movie THE KEEP (one of my all-time favorites), kept coming to mind as I slogged away on these novels, year after year after year:

NAZI OFFICER: What are you? Where are you from?
DEMON: Where am I from? (amused) I am...from you.

It is my hope that readers of these novels will enjoy them on both levels: i.e. as pure horror-entertainment, and also as a spiritual-intellectual examination of evil. But if that is too ambitious, I hope you just find it all, you know, spooky? The phenomenon of why human beings enjoy having the shit scared out of them is a complex subject, best explained by Stephen King in his famous essay "Keep the Gators Fed" (taken from his underrated nonfiction work DANSE MACABRE) but for my money it doesn't really matter. The fact is, we do enjoy it...hell, we even pay for the privilege. Maybe it's because, as King suggests, we need vicarious terror to both satisfy our primal bloodlust and release pent-up fears without actually risking our lives in the process. I dunno. What I do know is that if you've enjoyed my other works, any of them, you may very well find you enjoy these, too...even if you have to keep the lights on afterwards.