TARANTULEECHEN
06/29/2013 UPDATE: a new publisher (details soon) has acquired this novella with a tentative release date of late 2013/early 2014. I feel like a Spring Breaker. Thank you, world and, readers, prepare yourself for the beast.
I am currently shopping my latest novella, TARANTULEECHEN, an homage to 1980s/90s B-movie/exploitation cinema that features a cheerleader punk band, a most gruesome and hungry monster, an ornery sheriff and his sidekick, plus a whole of hardboiled action, sorcery, gore and punk rock. This 19,000 word novella is looking for a good home with the right publishing house. Please contact me for more. Thank you.
Here is an excerpt from TARANTULEECHEN:
It’s late—the hum of night crickets.
A two-story farmhouse.
Shlurp-clmp-shlurp-clmp: a beastly form, wiggling too many limbs, drags across the lawn toward a shed and enters the dark.
Behind us, slippers shuffle and a throat clears, mumbling grumpy, gravelled spite. A shadow, a man.
Frank Donner throws open the front door, his chin gleaming stubble in the moonlight. He’s all silver hair and bifocals, a lumpy old bastard. Donner scans, squints, leans on the porch beam, hands in his pockets. It’s nothing, only:
Smoke drifts horror-jitters over the yard.
The shed glows green.
He folds his arms, spits. Suddenly—
The shed is a series of fizzles, pops, cracks like bone grinding metal.
Donner grits his teeth.
The roaring shed morphs to a growl.
He unsticks himself from the porch beam. “Can smell you in there,” he says, “and I want you to go back to where you came from.” He coughs. “Counting to three—you, you understand? Leave. This. Family. Alone.” He doesn’t count to three, instead pushes his dentures further into place and clacks.
The thing in the shed ejaculates a splat.
“Wrong night,” he says. “End this legacy.”
The thing farts.
“Crabdammit!—”
The front door bangs open, slippers on stairs, index finger on book spines. Donner’s weathered hand yanks out a leathery hardback, ancient, faintly glowing green. Those dentures clack, suck dust. He bites his lip, searches inside. He’s muttering. Nervous hands fumble page to page and suddenly stop. “This ends,” he says, tapping the text, “right here.”
Over his shoulder, a bay window frames the yard. Curtains flutter and we focus past them on the monstrous form, how it has emerged from the shed, backlit, ominous, and ready, but it just looms for now, a heaping chunk like smokey knives made of bile.
Lightning snaps the shed.
Those appendages warble, shimmy slow; the beast disappears in a snarl.
The front door kicks back open for round two. Donner stands armed with the book and ready to read. He tips it open, rakes chin stubble—thunderclaps—and grins. He’s found the right page. “Got yourself into a heap,” he says, shuffling to the shed. “Not your fault, still—a fucking heap and this is it.”
He looks up to the sky. He stares ahead at the eerily quiet shed.
Each step is a Morricone harmonica wail of reverbed tension.
Cold creeps over Donner when he stands at the shed door. It’s time, he thinks, time to put a stop to this. He clears his throat, looks down at the opened book and then, his mouth shooting right into our very soul, as if in some kind of witch-trance, growls out, “Beast of the Wretch, and Misery-Monger of the Ceaseless NightFrost GloomHole, I summon your return to the Caverns of UrOoze, to the Vomitous Hail and Sleet Stench of the Vile Clench Rod. May Fire Suckers eat your Soulless Corpssssssssss—.” Cough.
He breathes, stands unsteady, phlegms up snot. Otherwise, it’s quiet. Over, he thinks. It’s finally over. Let’s study this turd.
He yells, “kiiiiiyaahhhheeeeee,” Bruce Leeing open the shed door, but that beast, those appendages, those razored claws, all of its hulking girth stands close, too close, dripping, waiting, just grinning evil down on poor Donner.
Donner turns the page, there is more: another stanza—unread.
Unfinished. Too late.
Gulp.
It strikes—hard.
