Reaching: Finding a Direction

So I'm about 5k words into my new novel BLUE AUTUMN. I'm already jumping around, writing piecemeal–a section here, a bit of dialogue there, a paragraph to fit in someplace toward the end. It keeps the work flowing but it scatters me all over the place. I have to consciously dial myself down, try to get into the zone, kill off the distractions.

This one is something of a new direction for me, I suppose, although it's full of themes I've used before. But the atmosphere and attitude are a little different. More honest in some ways, more reflective in others. It's odd to take a different storytelling position after all these years. It's a reach but I'm not sure in what direction. Am I reaching farther? Or higher? Or just out that way instead of out the other way?

What's the damn thing about? Good question, glad you asked. I've been trying to come up with an answer, and I'm still not quite there.

The basic set-up: Eight years ago, 17-year-old Dash was waiting at a train crossing when a car whipped around him trying to beat out the train. It didn't make it. Everyone in the car–including Dash's sister, his girlfriend, and his best friend, died. Torn by the question of just what they were all doing together, and where they were rushing off to, and why his best buddy was stupid enough to cross the tracks, Dash starts coming apart. A Golden Gloves boxer, Dash kills a guy in a bar fight and winds up in prison. Five years later, he's released, returns to his hometown with his cell mate, a former hitman, and begins a search for the truth, if there's even one to find.

So, BLUE AUTUMN is a mystery, except it isn't really. It's a crime novel, except it isn't. It's got action, except where there's the lovey-dovey stuff. It's a treatise on first love, except when it's one on hate. It's about friendship and family, and the warmth they bring us, and the pain. In other words, it's about all the shit that most books in the world are about, except for me it's something of a new recipe for the stew.

It was easier to make something up than try and put truth into perspective. To really look at it, head-on and from the side and from the back, and figure out how I'd been affected, and what it meant to me in the short and long runs.

I've said before that horror was a young man's game, (so far as my own career seemed to be concerned). Horror was about fear skulking up ahead, around the next corner. It lays wait in the shadows, unknown, sometimes unknowable, often fantastical. Because the only thing that might scare a young man is the unknown.

But crime–and by extension dark mainstream fiction, if there is such a thing--is about fear coming up from behind you. You recognize it. You've seen it before. It's about your mistakes, and regrets, and disappointments, and failures. It's places you've been and hated, women you've loved and disregarded, friends you've lost, family members who've left and died. It's the known. It's the well-known, the completely known. It's what you can't get out of your head.

So that's where I'm at, starting a new page, still trying to figure out in which direction I'm moving, with or against the current of my own history. Can you believe I actually just paged through my high school yearbook? Holy fuckall. I feel myself growing more maudlin. I just hope to hell I can keep it out of the novel, or turn it to my best advantage. The reach is on, the reach is in, I'm extended, now to see what it is I pull back in with me.

Kindle

THE FEVER KILL is now available on Kindle, along with SHORT RIDE TO NOWHERE and all of my Bantam titles.

We've all heard that e-books is the most rapidly growing aspect of publishing. My wife loves her Kindle, and apparently so does everyone else who owns one. Other folks seem to be willing to go to the stake and burn alongside their printed paperbacks before they'll ever go digital. I had to think of a world without physical books in it anymore,w hich seems more and more likely nowadays. Even if publishers are willing to print them and readers are willing to buy them, bookstores are drying up everywhere. B. Dalton's is gone, Waldenbooks is gone, Borders is hanging by a thread, B&N is up for sale. Indies are having a harder and harder time of it. Where would we even go to buy books anymore? What would the outlets be?

Where do you fall on the topic? Are you a Kindle/Nook lover who enjoys saving space on the shelves? Or are you a Luddite who's hating this new technology that's rocking the bibliophile's world?

THE FEVER KILL

THE FEVER KILL now available as a digital download for $3.99 from Crossroad Press.

Crease is going back to his quaint, quiet hometown of Hangtree. It’s where his father the sheriff met ruin in the face of a scandal involving the death of a kidnapped little girl and her missing ransom. It’s where crease was beaten, jailed, and kicked clear of the town line ten years earlier.

Now Crease is back. He’s been undercover for so long that most days he feels more like a mobster than a cop. He doesn’t mind much: the corrupt life is easier to stomach than a wife who can’t understand him, a son who hates him, and a half-dozen adopted kids he can’t even name anymore. He’s also just gotten his drug-dealing, knife-wielding psycho boss Tucco’s mistress pregnant. A fine time to decide to settle old scorers and resolve a decade-old mystery.

With Tucco hot on his tail, Crease has to find his answers fast. Who kidnapped little mary? Who really killed her? Was his own father guilty? And what happened to the paltry fifteen grand ransom that seems to spell salvation to half the population of Hangtree? The town still has a taste for his blood and secrets it wants to keep. Crease has a single hope; a raw and raging fever driving him toward the truth that might just burn him up along the way.

"A wondrous blazing talent... Intense and astonishing!" --From the introduction by Ken Bruen

"It's the rare crime novel that pulsates with the nightmare intensity of THE FEVER KILL. Piccirilli pulls it off masterfully." --Charles Ardai, editor of the Hard Case Crime series

"THE FEVER KILL is a rattlesnake-mean noir... powerful, hard-hitting, fearsome stuff." --Ed Gorman

This book is available in MOBI (Kindle) E-PUB (Sony / Nook) PRC (Mobipocket) and PDF (Adobe) Formats. Coming soon to Amazon Kindle.

The Last Kind Words

Preliminary cover art for my next novel. What do you think, gang?

Dead Mower Dreams

My new column "Dead Mower Dreams and the Weeds of Boo Radley" is now up at the Mulholland Books site: http://ow.ly/2rPIt

It's my take on life during the recession, battling a mid-life crisis (and losing), and trying to navigate through the ever-changing world of publishing and willful illiteracy.

4 Upcoming Anthos

Pleased to report the full table of contents of Ellen Datlow's upcoming anthology SUPERNATURAL NOIR. Very proud to have my tale appear besides the work of so many uber-talented folks.

SUPERNATURAL NOIR, edited by Ellen Datlow
Introduction Ellen Datlow
The Dingus by Gregory Frost
The Getaway by Paul G. Tremblay
Mortal Bait by Richard Bowes
Little Shit by Melanie Tem
Ditch Witch by Lucius Shepard
The Last Triangle by Jeffrey Ford
The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven by Laird Barron
The Romance by Elizabeth Bear
Dead Sister by Joe R. Lansdale
Comfortable in Her Skin by Lee Thomas
But For Scars by Tom Piccirilli
The Blisters on My Heart by Nate Southard
The Absent Eye by Brian Evenson
The Maltese Unicorn by Caitlín R. Kiernan
Dreamer of the Day by Nick Mamatas
In Paris, In the Mouth of Kronos by John Langan

Look for the antho at some point next year. I'll, of course, report when I have more info.

Also: Bev Vincent had a little more information about the upcoming anthology SPECTERS IN COAL DUST, edited by Michael Knost. I hadn't heard who else was slated for the book, but Bev reports that besides me and him, the lineup will include Gary A. Braunbeck, Christopher Golden, Steve Rasnic Tem, Elizabeth Massie, Lee Thomas, Ronald Kelly, William Meikle, Nate Southard, Joshua Reynolds, Barbara Jo Fleming, Brian J. Hatcher and Michael Bracken. To be published this fall.

And: just received the gorgeous chapbook of Joe Lansdale's DREAD ISLAND, which is being used to promote CLASSICS MUTILATED, a new antho line coming from IDW. My tale "Benediction," about a hitman forced to deal with witches and a succubus in the form of Jayne Mansfield, will appear beside such fellow contributors as Joe Lansdale, John Shirley, Nancy Collins, Mike Resnick, Kristine Rusch, Thomas Tessier, Marc Laidlaw, and Rio Youers.

From the product description: "Monster Lit meets Remix Culture in IDW's all-new, all-original story collection by top talents from horror, science fiction, and dark fantasy scenes. IDW's first foray into genre prose takes the formula of "literary classic/historic figure + supernatural element" and drives a stake through its heart with fourteen brand-new stories, all written specifically for this collection, that transform the so-called Monster Lit movement in ways the mainstream could never imagine. Notable characters include Huck Finn, Capt. Ahab, Billy the Kid, Emily Dickensen, Jim Morrison, Edgar Allan Poe, and Albert Einstein."

Speaking of Joe Lansdale, he'll be editing a reprint anthology of supernatural/horror/crime/noir fiction entitled CRUCIFIED DREAMS. All I know about it so far is that it'll be out from Tachyon in early '11 and feature fiction by the likes of Joe Hisownself, Harlan Ellison, and David Morrell. He's taken a reprint of my novella "Loss," a noir-ghost story fusion that spotlights a talking monkey and the real creator of aluminum foil.

Here's the product description I nabbed from Amazon: "Crossing noir with the supernatural, this luridly visceral anthology attacks polite society and plunges into the unthinkable horrors lurking in its underbelly. Searching for some beauty in a time of increasing poverty and neglect, the desperate are all the more menacing, and in a brief moment, ordinary people turn into something far less human. Offering stylish yet savage tales of private dicks, serial killers, lurking demons, and femme fatales, these surreal and often bloody tales provide glimpses into sinister worlds that mirror our own. Boasting an intriguing assortment of stories from celebrated authors such as Harlan Ellison, David Morrell, and the infamous editor himself, each gritty and sensational undertaking proves that being human is a far cry from being civilized."

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Also, I just returned the line edits for my next novel THE LAST KIND WORDS to my editor at Bantam. Man, these people have some eagle eyes and caught a ton of small (and not so small) errors on my part. Big-time kudos to the editors and copyeditors who go all out to make the authors look so damn good.

LKW looks like it's slated for an April '11 release in trade paperback.

Short Ride to Nowhere

Now available for the first time anywhere: A new digital noirella from Crossroads Press.

Product description:

Jenks and Hale aren't friends, partners, or even next door neighbors anymore. Not since they each lost their jobs and had their homes foreclosed. Not since they lost their wives and kids and whatever stability they'd fought for in the world.

Adrift on the streets of New York, Jenks' dark path seems to parallel Hale's step by step. After Hale is found nearly dead beside the corpse of a nine-year-old girl, and soon after commits suicide in a mental hospital, Jenks decides to find out just what the hell happened.

What happened to Hale and the girl, what happened to the wayward American Dream, and what happened to his youth and forfeited hopes.

Because whatever happens to Hale happens to Jenks just a few months later.

This book is available for $4.99 in MOBI (KINDLE) - EPUB (Sony/Nook) - PDF (Adobe) and PRC (Mobipocket) formats. Please choose your preference from the dropdown menu below before proceeding to checkout.

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Over the next few weeks I'll be making several of my out-of-print and rarer novels available via Crossroads Press in Kindle, PDF, and other various formats. Some will also be released as audio recordings. As a self-professed Luddite this is all new territory for me. Let me know what you kids think of it.