Emily's Ghost — A Classic Spectral Story

Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Shirley Jackson, H.P. Lovecraft, Oliver Onions, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde … Paranormal fans will recognize names of classic horror writers. One other should appear on this list, an author better known for her cosy Callie Parrish novels. That writer crafted one of the finest stories of ectoplasmic– or any other– genre. SleuthSayers is proud to bring you the first US publication of a modern gothic tale from our friend and colleague, Fran Rizer.

— Leigh

Emily’s Ghost
by Fran Rizer
(12 Dec 1944 – 24 Dec 2019)

I sit silently as Drew drives our red Porsche along the rutted dirt road. It’s been three days since he spoke to me this time. Seventy-two hours of quiet. An eternity of longing to hear him say my name – “Emily.” I hated that word until I met Drew. The people in South Carolina’s low country drop the “i” and it comes out Emm-lee.

The first time I ever saw Drew, I’d gone to put flowers on Grandma’s grave. He was in the Beaufort churchyard sketching moss-covered trees and magnolias. I stood behind him and watched as he created a whole world out of just a few pencil strokes. After several moments, he turned and looked at me with unwavering blue eyes. The man took my breath.

“Who are you?” he asked.

Sometimes I’m flippant, downright sarcastic. Got an attitude. It’s a wonder I didn’t answer, “What’s it to you?” Instead I replied, “I’m Emily.”

“Emily as in Emily Dickinson?” he asked, and I laughed with pure pleasure. He’d pronounced my name with three delicate syllables. It sounded positively delicious when Drew said it.

“Yes,” I answered, “but I don’t make up poetry. I try to write stories.”

“Why try? Why don’t you just write them?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’m not too good at it yet.”

“You can be if you want to be,” Drew said, and I believed him.

***

Andrew Wyeth, Sea Fog

That’s how it began. Before long, we were spending most of our time together. Lots of days sitting side by side in churchyards or marshes. Me writing my little tales on a yellow legal pad while Drew sketched or painted.

“What are you writing?” Drew asked.

“A story to send to a magazine. I need to see my words in print. I want people to read what I write.”

“Where did you get the idea?”

“I made it up. It’s about a boy and girl falling in love and seeing a ghost.”

“Oh,” Drew said and went back to drawing.

When it rained hard and we couldn’t sit outside, we escaped into Drew’s battered old van. He kept a collection of Andrew Wyeth prints there. During bad weather and at night, Drew showed them to me.

“I want to paint like Wyeth!” he exclaimed. His eyes lit up like he was on fire inside. “When Wyeth paints fog and wind, you can feel them! Just look at this print. It’s called ‘Sea Fog.’ You can see the mist beginning to drift, to wisp away. You can feel the breeze tease your shirt in ‘Wind from the Sea.’ That’s how I’m going to paint!”

I didn’t have any books of my own, just the ones I checked out from the library. I’d hold up my favorite collections of short stories – ‘Skeleton Crew’ by Stephen King or one of Edgar Allan Poe’s and say, “Someday I’m going to write like this – mysteries and about ghosts and spooky things.”

“But, Emily, you’ve never been through any of that. Write about the life you’ve lived, people like the ones you know.”

I tossed my head to swing my hair back. “Don’t tell me what to do!” I snapped at him.

Andrew Wyeth, Christina’s World

Drew turned away from me and looked at his Wyeth prints again. He loved them all, but his favorite painting was “Christina’s World.” Everyone’s seen the picture of a young woman in a field of grass looking up toward a clapboard house and barn on top of a knoll. The girl’s wearing a pink dress, and her position looks strange. It’s as though she’s crawling, but her body seems twisted.

“That’s Christina Olson,” Drew explained. “She was crippled from childhood. Wyeth painted her and that farm for almost thirty years.” The picture has a haunting quality. Drew said, “It merges a feeling of loss and a sense of fulfillment at the same time.” At first, I thought that was ridiculously impossible, but now it makes sense.

When Drew decided we should live together, I told him that wasn’t how my Mama raised me, so we got married. Drew started selling paintings, and I mailed some of my stories off to magazines. I cried a lot the first year. Every time the mailman delivered a rejection letter, I sobbed. Mama always scolded me, “Don’t carry on so!” and I’d wail even louder.

My husband comforted me. He held me in his arms and gently brushed the hair away from my eyes. He kept telling me, “Quit worrying about writing proper by some teacher’s rules and making up supernatural stories about vampires and witches. Your stories about ghosts and murders sound too manufactured, too made up. Keep your stories real. Write those funny things you’ve told me about your relatives and low-country people, and put them on paper the same way you tell them.” I sniffled when he added, “And you can stop studying the dictionary to learn bigger words. Convey those yarns in your own vocabulary.”

I argued with him. “No magazine or book is gonna publish those stories,” I whined. “I want to write about the paranormal.”

Usually I go on and do things my own way when people try to tell me what to do, but I got turned down every time I sent out a manuscript. I finally decided to try Drew’s suggestions. I wrote an old family anecdote of how my grandparents always killed a couple of chickens for Thanksgiving because they didn’t raise turkeys and couldn’t afford to buy one. Finally the year came when they bought a big bird from the store – a Tom, the biggest frozen turkey available. Grandma put it on the back porch to thaw. When she went back to check on the bird, she found their big ole cat named Tom chowin’ down on that Tom turkey. Grandma used to say, “If Grandpa’d had his way, we’d of had roasted Tom cat for Thanksgiving that year.” I mailed the story off to a regional magazine.

You could’ve heard me hollering in the next county when the mail man brought an envelope with a check inside. When I followed Drew’s advice and wrote the stories like I told them, checks and contracts kept coming instead of rejections. Drew told me what to write and sometimes tried to tell me how to write. He’d brush my bangs out of my eyes and say, “Don’t you think it’s time you started writing on a computer instead of with a pencil?” I didn’t switch to writing on the computer, but I did use the Dell he bought me to type up my stories after I wrote them on the yellow pads.

My work was even reviewed in newspapers and a couple of magazines. That was good. The bad thing was that they called me “folksy” and referred to me as a young literary Grandma Moses – like writing and painting are comparable!

Drew refused to see why that made me mad. He said, “You should be happy and proud,” but I tried to explain that all I’d done was follow his directions. I felt like it was his accomplishment, not mine. He was an artist! Where’d he get off telling me how to write?

Paintings kept selling, too. We were as excited as kids on the last day of school when he had his first show at an art gallery in Charleston. Drew said, “I can’t wear paint-splattered jeans, and bought himself a new outfit with a sports jacket.

He gave me money for a dress, but he didn’t like anything I picked out. Finally, Drew bought a dress and brought it home. I tried it on, and Drew said it was “perfect.” I couldn’t see wearing black anywhere except to a funeral, but he just laughed and said, “It’s a classic, your first little black dress.” He gave me a necklace to wear with it. Not dime store beads, jewelry store pearls!

We moved out of my Mama’s house and rented a place of our own. Most of that time was happy for me and I think for Drew, too. I still liked to go with him when he went out sketching, and even then, he listened when I talked about stories I wanted to write.

Sometimes I’d take along a book like Ghosts of South Carolina and read instead of writing. I learned about dozens of apparitions in our state, and when I told Drew about the phantom hitchhiker on the Sumter Highway or the Gray Ghost on the coast who warns of hurricanes, he listened. We even went together to Edisto Island and visited a crypt that was said to be haunted and a tree that is rumored to have a pirate specter guarding treasure buried beneath it. Drew was the most patient man I’d ever known and never complained about me babbling on or wanting to sit and wait to see if a spirit would appear.

Before long, we started making real money selling his pictures and my stories. I have to confess my ghost stories didn’t sell, but the simple low- country ones did. That’s when Drew decided he wanted to move back to Maine. “There’s nothing wrong with painting swamps and marshes!” I screamed, but he ignored me.

Drew told folks I won that skirmish because we moved upstate, which was a lot closer to my home place than Maine. So far as I was concerned, I’d lost anyway. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to move to Maine. I didn’t want to move anywhere away from the coast of South Carolina!

The Greenville Museum of Art is home of an impressive permanent collection of Andrew Wyeth’s work. When CNN told us Wyeth had died at age ninety-two, Drew insisted we make a road trip from Beaufort to see the exhibit. He stood in awe before each piece. “Why are you staring like that?” I asked. “I don’t see one bit of difference between this stuff and your prints.”

“These are the real thing. It’s like being in the presence of a lifelong hero.” Tears welled in his eyes. “I always planned to travel to meet the man someday, but I waited too long. All I can do is visit his work.”

I looked at my watch. “It’s past lunchtime,” I said. “Let’s go find a restaurant.”

Drew shook his head and looked at me with disbelief, but I kept complaining about how hungry I was, so we finally left. In my opinion, it was a long ride for nothing. I had no idea that useless day trip would be a major part of deciding where we’d live. A week later, Drew disappeared for several days. When he came back, he said “we’d” bought a three-story clapboard house on a hill a little north of Greenville. I screamed and hollered, but we moved there anyway.

The studio he contracted to have built looked like a farm shed. The new garage in the back was a fake barn, and Drew scolded me when I didn’t park in it. By the time I’d followed around the road that circled our hill to the one driveway that led up to the house, I wasn’t in the mood to continue around our home to park in the barn.

“Always park inside and close the doors,” he said. “New vans and sports cars around our home don’t fit the picture!”

Andrew Wyeth, Witching Hour

Drew cut down the beautiful old trees around the house and had wheat planted in the stark, bare fields. Our farmhouse was exactly like a picture postcard of “Christina’s World” without Christina. Sometimes I thought Drew would be happy if I were crippled like she was. Maybe then he’d paint me. In all our years together, he’d never drawn or painted my likeness. He claimed he didn’t do portraits, and I never saw people in his work, but it still made me mad. He always told me what to do – write this way, stand that way. I told him, “If I was good enough for you when you met me, I’m good enough for you now, because I’m not gonna change!”

His answer was usually a muttered, “Most folks grow up eventually.”

***

Then the quiet times came. I call them quiet times, but the silence is one-sided. Drew stops talking to me, but I continue speaking to him. When I wake up in the morning and hear the birds singing outside and see the sunshine kaleidoscoping patterns on the walls through the lace curtains, I always lean over to kiss Drew and tell him about whatever I plan to write that day. Most times, he listens and then kisses me, too, but when he’s having a quiet time, he turns his back to me.

Drew doesn’t answer when I call him for breakfast during a quiet time. He comes into the kitchen and sits down at the big, round oak table. He eats whatever I’ve cooked for him with no comments about whether he likes it or not. Doesn’t seem to matter if it’s chicken-fried steak, eggs with cheese and scratch biscuits or simply grits with bologna gravy. Never says a word to me during quiet times. Just eats, then gets up and goes to his studio or climbs in his shiny new van and drives away for the day.

I wonder if he’s out sketching and painting or if he’s gone to the museum to “visit” his beloved Andrew Wyeth paintings.

Water colors of dilapidated, falling down barns have been selling like McDonald’s quarter-pounders. Drew’s even painted some old crypts and graveyards around Greenville, and those pictures have been pulling in big money, too. I don’t think it’s fair that he tells me not to write about ghosts or graves and things like that, but he does those cemetery paintings. When I stomp my feet and tell him how I feel, he ignores me.

Lately, it seems we’re having quiet times more than ever. I’d think he’d be happy that he’s successful, but who can tell? He never complains about anything, so how do I know whether he’s angry, disappointed, or just sad? He looks at me different, too. He narrows his eyes, and the intensity of his art is in those blue slits. Those cold, blue eyes freeze me so bad I just shiver.

***

Now we’re riding in the Porsche with the top down. He hasn’t said a word all the way back from an art show at some high-falutin’ gallery in Atlanta. Actually, it’s been three days since Drew spoke to me. The longest quiet time was almost two weeks. I wonder how many days and nights this one will last. What caused it? Most times he doesn’t seem to notice me at all anymore, but the night of the opening reception, he kept glaring at me. During the first hour, he told me to stand up straight so many times that I got mad and left. I went out and sat in the car.

Thank heaven we’re almost home. I look ahead and see our lonely house sitting atop the bare hill surrounded by fields of wheat that look like dried grass. A delicate breeze whispers a warning through the wheat, but I ignore it.

“A lot of your work at that show was those cemetery pictures,” I say, “but you always tell me that my mystery and ghost stories aren’t as good as the stories about my family and folks living on the coast. I don’t think that’s fair.” He stays silent. “Why don’t you paint people?” I demand.

Drew doesn’t say anything, just keeps driving.

“It’s taking forever to get there,” I say. “You should have a drive cut from the house down to the road on this side instead of having to ride all around the hill before we get to the turn-off. I’m so tired of everything having to look like the Olson farm.”

Drew keeps driving, his white-knuckled fingers clenched tight against the steering wheel. His eyes stare straight ahead, and his jaw works – flex and release, flex and release.

“Hurry up!” I say, “I need to use the bathroom!”

Unexpectedly, Drew turns off the road before we reach our long driveway. We’re hurtling across the field, headed toward the house.

“Stop!” I yell at him. “You’re going too fast!”

Drew slams his foot on the accelerator. The low undercarriage of the Porsche drags against the plowed furrows of the field shearing off wheat and flinging it into the air. The car lurches to a stop. Drew stomps the accelerator even harder. Tires spin, and dust flies up all around us. Slowly, he turns in his seat and faces me. For the first time in my whole life, I know real fear. My heart thunders in my chest. A scream rises in my throat, but I choke it down, and no sound escapes me. Drew stares at my face with a fixed expression. His features are unfathomable. Insanity or evil? I can’t distinguish. His eyes squint, and I recognize the emotion.

Only one word describes his look: loathing. The man I love despises me. Suddenly, I know this. I don’t have to think about it. There’s no doubt. The man I love hates me! I fling my car door open, get out, and run toward the house.

Drew jumps from the Porsche and follows me. I stumble over a rock and gasp as the breath whooshes out of me. Just as I hit the ground in a sprawl, he grabs me.

***

Do you know what a space break is? It’s one of those double spaces to show that time has passed in a story. I have a space break in my life. One minute I’m tumbling to the ground with Drew clutching me. The next thing I know, I’m standing on the little front porch of our house. I have no idea how I got to the steps, no memory of climbing the hill.

Drew is right in front of me. He goes in and leaves the door wide open. I’m standing on the small stoop. I lean against the doorframe for a moment before following him into the front hall. He paces around inside the house, from room to room, up the stairs, down the stairs, pausing to gaze at each framed Andrew Wyeth print on the walls. He stops and pats his favorite chair just like Grandpa used to pet his favorite hound dog.

Drew walks toward me, and I shout, “Talk to me! Stop this foolish silence! I’m tired of being ignored.”

The look on Drew’s face chills me, and I shiver. His sad eyes seem to see right past me. There’s no expression at all. Suddenly I realize that I’m screaming. “Drew,” I lower my voice almost to a whisper, “We have to do something to save our marriage.” He ignores me. “I’m not putting up with any more of this!” The words leap from my mouth, growing louder and louder. Before I know it, I’m yelling again. “I said I can’t go on this way!” When Drew reaches the door, I move directly in front of him, blocking his way. Drew steps right through me!

Now I know. I finally comprehend. An epiphany. Lights flash on abruptly in my mind. Drew murdered me! Killed me right out there in the field of wheat on the slope of the Christina’s World we live in, though I don’t guess I really live here anymore. I’m experiencing a real murder and ghost, but what good will that do me since I’m the ghost myself?

For the rest of Drew’s life, I will haunt him. I loved him. I loved him more than any woman ought to care about a man. That’s how low-country females are. Why am I using past tense? I still love Drew. I love the way he used to hold me and whisper, “I died for Beauty—but was scarce adjusted in the Tomb when one who died for Truth was lain in an adjoining room.” That’s from Emily Dickinson. I know the words don’t sound romantic, but when Drew said it very softly with his lips barely brushing against my ear, it was incredibly sweet and sexy. He hasn’t done that in a long time.

Drew exits through the open front door. I shadow right on his heels, but he doesn’t see me; I’m dead. I follow him as he crosses the porch and starts down the hill to the field. Is he going for the car? I don’t think he’s planning to bury me – he didn’t get the shovel. Why did he go around gazing at everything in such a final, sorrowful way like he was saying goodbye? Will he drive away to Maine before my body is discovered?

Now we’re near where it happened. I can see the wheat flattened in a spot about thirty feet from the Porsche. Drew reaches the area before I do. He stands there, solemnly looking down. What’s he feeling? Is he overwhelmed with grief, or is he glad to be rid of me?

As I plod the final few feet to stand by Drew, horror greater than I’ve ever known floods over me. I’m scared to see my body. Terrified to stand beside the man I love as he stares at my corpse on the ground. I tremble. I’m afraid to see myself in death. Will I look like a bloody, twisted Christina? Even now, I want to be attractive for Drew, so pretty that he’ll regret what he did. I want him to cry for me, miss me, love me! I wish he would say something, but then, he doesn’t know my ghost is standing right by him. Besides, he’s not talking to me these days, anyway.

I look down. The body lies motionless. The head is bloodied, and a wet, crimson-stained rock, the weapon of destruction, lies close by. This simple stone has ended all chances of saving our marriage.

The corpse is not me.

My beloved Drew lies dead at my feet. I look at my hands and see his blood. Then I scream and scream as the phantasm standing beside me drifts away like fog in a fine Andrew Wyeth painting.

≡ 30 ≡

More about Fran…

Día de los Muertos Vivientes

Today's essay serves one purpose only, to lay the foundation for our 1^st of November's Día de los Muertos / Day of the Dead article and persuade you to catch the most brilliant ghost story of our time. And, unbelieveably, it’s free. You may remember one of our authors whose life was cut short.  Allow us to reintroduce…

Fran Rizer
(12 Dec 1944 – 24 Dec 2019)

Andrew Wyeth: Ghosts

On a Christmas eve nearly seven years ago, our colleague Fran Rizer left us a gift, which we share today. Harking back to the golden age of horror, it’s one of the finest classic paranormal stories ever written. So why haven’t you heard of it?

It was published not in the US, but in a short-lived Canadian publication, Ficta Fabula. Rather than try to shop an already published story, Fran placed it in our SleuthSayers queue. Following damage to its MS Word file and to capture most recent publication edits, she turned to me for help.

We copied text from the publication’s PDF, which turned out a mess, suffering breaks at the end of every line instead of every paragraph. Italics and bolds disappeared. Little could be automated, paragraph by paragraph, it had to be reassembled by hand. She never anticipated it would take so long, nor that she wouldn’t be present for publication. Shaking off the ghost of Fran’s hand, so to speak, took a while, but the result is one of the most artfully ingenious stories you’ll likely read.

Fran and I became friends at an MWA gathering where she was giddy her first novel had been accepted for publication. Some thought her excitement was unseemly, but why not? We began to chat, partly about wrting, partly about everything. She liked to say after retirement she could move to Florida and quietly fade away, or live out her dream to write.

She sometimes phoned in the middle of the night to chat about nothing in particular. Fran was warm, witty, and wildly inappropriate. She entered her teens in the latter 1950s and I imagine young Fran was a trip and a handful. Even in her 70s, she was an incorrigible flirt. She loved men and could read XY chromosomes as readily as a Vanity Fair article. She had an uncanny knack of peering into the mind, perhaps learned from years of classroom experience and knowing herself. It wasn’t a bad thing.

Fran admired Mickey Spillane, loved bluegrass banjo, enjoyed cooking, and she appreciated American fine art. She claimed she watched sports for one reason only, to gaze upon players’, erm, male Sitzfleisch, that is to say derrières, tochus, hindaments, bums, buns, butts, booty patooties– you get the idea. That was Fran, unapologetic.

She also suffered great tragedy. Linda, Fran’s cousin, best friend, neighbor, and organizer of Fran’s Callie Parrish fan club, was brutally murdered in a home invasion. Fran swore she’d never write again. In our wee hour chats, I quietly listened. Slowly she returned to the notion of her writing again. That took a year. Her fourth novel wasn’t the same, but she’d taken the step. Over time, Fran once again found her footing.

Fran died on a Christmas Eve, her wonderful story suspended in the æther of the otherworld. For a long time, it occupied a pending spot in SleuthSayers files. Earlier this year, I readied it for the Halloween season as a holiday gift.

I cannot emphasize how much I admire this many layered story. You’ll discover why I illustrated today’s article with the Wyeth painting above. Take a moment on El Día de Muertos, the 1^st of November, to read her brilliant tale, Emily’s Ghost.

— Leigh

The Horror! The Horror?

For the past few years, I've been maintaining a list of markets for short crime/mystery fiction for the members of the Short Mystery Fiction Society (obligatory plug: membership is free, and the group is open to writers, readers, editors, and anyone else interested in the form). Several times a month I go hunting for new market opportunities: magazines, websites and anthologies that might be of interest to the writers in our group. This means checking sites like Duotrope and the Submission Grinder, scrolling through social media, doing general Google searches, and so on. New magazines are relatively rare these days, but new anthologies pop up fairly often.

I'm Stephen King, and you're not.

And I've noticed something odd– or at least, something I don't quite understand.

Mystery readers can be a fairly rabid bunch, and there are a lot of them. Walk into any bookstore, and the mystery section is likely to be among the largest. So why is it that there seem to be a lot more markets for short fiction in other genres than there are in mystery?

This isn't new; it's something I was aware of even before I started keeping the markets list. I should also say that it's possible I'm just wrong about this. Maybe my perceptions are skewed somehow, or maybe I'm just not good at this kind of searching.

But, man, it certainly seems as though, for every new anthology seeking mystery stories, there are ten seeking fantasy or science fiction and fifteen or so seeking horror. It's the preponderance of horror that I always find especially confusing. Go back to that generic bookstore, and compare the size of the mystery section to the size of the horror section (you can find it by looking for Stephen King and Joe Hill). In pretty much every bookstore I've ever frequented, the mystery section is larger.

So what explains the seemingly much larger number of markets for horror? Logically, it would seems to suggest a similarly larger number of readers, but I don't see much other evidence that this is the case. Maybe it's just the case that there are a lot of horror readers who don't read anything else? Maybe horror readers are more open to short stories, while most mystery readers prefer novels?

One of the places I dabbled in horror

I should make it clear that I have nothing against horror fiction. I've dabbled in it myself, and I certainly recognize there's a lot of wonderful writing being produced in the field. My first love will always be crime, though, and I guess the bottom line is that I wish mystery writers had more opportunities to strut our stuff.

So: short column this month. It's February, after all. The main reason it's short is because I don't have an answer to this question, and I'm hoping someone will. What do you think? Are my perceptions of the current market just wrong? If they're not, what explains this?

Or maybe everyone just wants to be Stephen King?

The irony, of course, is that horror fiction has its roots in texts like Dracula and Frankenstein. Mystery fiction, by contrast, looks back to the short stories of writers like Poe and Doyle (yes, this is reductive, and yes, Doyle wrote novels about Holmes, but I think there's pretty general agreement that the stories are better).

Room of Ice

I have a new story, Room of Ice, and it appears in the new SleuthSayers' anthology Murder, Neat. The alcohol reference in the anthology's title is on purpose. All the stories in the book have a finger, or other, in a drinking establishment. A glass or two of my story is set in a London pub.

Story settings aside, drinking establishments are excellent places to tell a story. The social atmosphere, comfortable seats, warmth, and alcohol invites (nay, demands) story telling. When the wine comes in, the wit comes out. I mean, if you're sitting there with a group of friends, you've got to do something while you're drinking. And pretty soon, someone will be off and running with a tale, tall or otherwise.

Our desire to gather with friends somewhere warm and convivial, and tell a story, is innate. And it predates drinking. Many thousands of years ago, our caveman ancestors sat around the fire on dark winter evenings. The whole clan. The extended family. They'd spent the day hunting and gathering, they'd eaten. They sat there sated and sleepy, nothing else to do – drawing pictures on the cave wall was so last era. Someone said, "You know, a funny thing happened to me today. There was this woolly mammoth…" And off he or she went, running with a tale, tall or otherwise.

The invention of alcohol meant there was now something to do while the stories were being told. And that swiftly led to the creation of places to do all of this in: pubs, inns, bars, taverns, and so on. The public living room.

I digress.

So, what's my story (Room of Ice) about? Well, no spoilers, it's about two things: Hammer Films and perception.

Hammer Film Productions is a British film production company that had its heyday from the mid-1950s to the 1970s. They specialised in horror films with a Gothic flavour (e.g., vampires, mummies, Frankenstein). Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing were probably the studio's two biggest stars. According to Wikipedia, the studio made 295 films (between 1934-2019). In addition to horror, Hammer also produced science fiction, thrillers, noir, and comedies. I grew up watching Hammer Horrors (along with their American counterparts, the Vincent Price Edgar Allen Poe movies).

In my story, I imagine Hammer made a horror film in 1959 called Room of Ice.

My story is from the point of view of a middle-aged man – "Tim" – who, as a child, was an extra in that movie. Tim tracks down the movie's now elderly star, because he has, in later life, remembered something about the filming – something he saw. It isn't a spoiler to say that Tim is a blackmailer.

This is a story about perception. Something witnessed as a five-year-old, and then remembered at 45, with a now adult's perspective of the world (my story is set in 1999).

Room of Ice is about movies (I'm film mad, don't you know?). Making them, remembering them, worshipping them. And, as such, I made a trailer for the story to help promote it. And rather than do my usual, I made a "movie trailer" for an imagined re-release of the movie Room of Ice. You can watch the trailer here:

Well, I'm off to read all the other stories in the anthology. Should be a treat!

www.StephenRoss.net

The Week in Pictures

For friends who claim I don’t reveal much truly personal, pfffft. End of month, I’m getting a colonoscopy. So there. That’s personal.

It’s not my first and afterwards, like Poe, I bought a pallet of bricks and walled up the bathroom remains in an attempt to protect future archeologists from planetary collapse.

Those so-called flavor-packs… what are they thinking? Brake fluid would taste better. At least this doctor, a gastroenterologist, allows Gatorade in the prep. And he has a sense of humor. Note this sign in their parking lot:

But what really prompted this article was a license plate on a nearby car. As I snapped the photo, a lady came strolling up, nicely, not aggressively. I explained why I was taking pictures of her car.

Nancy didn’t mind and explained it was her husband’s. He’s a writer, a real one, not merely professionally published, but award winning. Peer closely at the license tag and notice the frame around the plate. He’s a winner of the Bram Stoker award for Best First Novel and a Stoker award for Lifetime Achievement. Pretty damn cool.

Obviously he writes in the horror genre. He goes by Owl Goingback and happens to be the only other non-romance fiction writer I’ve come across in Central Florida.

Computer programs that generate tag numbers are designed to weed out certain combinations. Obscenity is an obvious category, whether automatically generated or requested by a car owner. Florida rejects about 500 request a year, not counting those manufactured by the state in the format of XYZ•123.

But vulgarity isn’t the only filtered category. You won’t see plates with certain combinations:

• FBI-123     CIA-123     IRS-123
• DEA-123     ATF-123     IBM-123
• and so on…

IBM? True. It’s among the many forbidden combinations. Thus I was surprised to pull up behind a vehicle bearing a tag certain to outrage Florida’s book-banning obscenity police.

As I returned home, a traffic light caught me at Lee Road (they misspelled my name) and I-4, I noticed a license tag.

I can’t wait til the governor discovers this affront to book burners across the state. It must be a conspiracy. Its left part is as pornographic, lascivious, lecherous, licentious, libidinous, and scabrous as the right. Our governor will clutch his wee pearls. Surely, that cannot be an accident.

Will the governor’s appointees plan a plate burning? Or bonfire the entire car? Or torch the hapless party who allowed this… this… this lewd, rude, dirty, filthy, vulgar, foul, coarse, crude, gross, vile, nasty, disgusting, offensive, shameless, immoral smut to sully America’s roads?

That’s personal.

Haunted Hearts and Trapped Souls: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

October has crept around, and again for the season I'll risk a toe in gothic waters. Last year, I analyzed Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. To stay with the author, I'll delve into my favorite of Jackson's novels: We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). 

First edition (Wikipedia)

Hill House was written in third person, often in a sweeping omniscient perspective that amplifies the narrative distance. Jackson never wanted us to understand Hill House's ghost. Instead, the novel explores how worse things than the supernatural walk our world. Persecution, isolation, fear-mongering, self-destruction. Jackson wrote about ordinary cruelty.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is no ghost story. There's not a scrap of actual magic, however much protagonist Merricat wishes otherwise. Castle is a crime novel. Humans are humans, and the dead are dead but never out of mind. The holds of the dead and our past are what gives Castle its unsettling punch. This time, Jackson wants us to meet cruelty up close and personal.

Consider this your spoiler alert.

The opening paragraph:

"My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead."

Masterful construction. Straight out, the voice invites a bond with this Wednesday Addams-ish Merricat. Her interests promise quirks and raise questions, lots of questions. Death stalks the paragraph. Unlayering the moving parts takes reading Castle closely more than once. If you haven't read it, hold two thoughts. First, Merricat believes magic exists--with a preference for a violent sort--though good luck might not. Second, every single word is about herself.

Merricat and Constance are the last Blackwoods alive after arsenic-laced sugar poisoned the family. The only other survivor, Uncle Julian, had gone unusually light on the sugar and was left an invalid. Merricat had been sent to bed without dinner--again. Suspicion lands on the otherwise-saintly Constance, the family cook and famously averse to sugar. But why use obvious means when she had a garden's worth of poisons? Why kill without a motive? A jury acquits Constance from lack of evidence, and the Blackwoods retreat to their hilltop confines.

Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, 2006

The novel opens six years later. Constance is captive to agoraphobia and a mother role to Merricat and the slowly-dying Julian. Julian obsesses with the unsolved crime and dedicates his addled brain to document it. Merricat runs errands and helps keep the house just as their parent left it. Between chores, she dashes around semi-feral with her cat, marking daily rituals and burying talismans against outsiders.

Her sympathetic magic protections aren't without cause. The village, sure Constance got away with murder, amps longstanding class friction into a cold war and Blackwood monster myth. Merricat endures vicious taunts on her twice-weekly supply runs. The grocer only serves her because she pays in Father's gold coins.

Constance is still young and attractive– and rich. Scandal cloud or not, a loyal upper crust connection wants Constance eased back into society. Constance is tempted. Merricat can't process Constance's restless thoughts or why any Blackwood might want to leave home.

Into the mix comes gold-digging cousin Charles after Constance's hand. Charles isn't the sharpest blade around. His charms and bluster work on Constance alone. Worse, his tactics make the wrong enemy in Merricat.

Underneath her endearing fails at magic, underneath her Blackwood grit, Merricat is stone cold cruel. She takes great lengths to follow strict house rules, such as parental belonging she can't touch. She can't enter Uncle Julian's room. She isn't allowed to light matches. She isn't allowed to prepare food. She states the rules simply, as if handed down from Constance or parents six years dead. But those rules aren't placed on Merricat. They're self-imposed. As Charles malingers, Merricat's changing attitudes show how her rules make shapes around darker things--not least a control mechanism over Constance. 

Jackson planted that seed in the opening paragraph. Merricat uses "I" eight times in six brief sentences. Constance is mentioned almost as a possession. At eighteen, Merricat is an indulged girl-child full of daddy issues and Blackwood privilege. Discipline is for less perfect children. Woe to anyone who disturbs the fantasy.

Merricat's cruelty isn't evil. Her obsessive routines and lack of expression and antisocial struggles hint at someone on the autism spectrum. She was born into Blackwood expectations and taught by formidable and vain parents. Her mother, a villager, had the Blackwood grounds sealed tight over Father's hesitation. It's not the last time her parents disagreed. One such argument rattled the manor that night of the tragic meal.

In the Jackson way, cruelty begets cruelty. A family friend from town makes her periodic visits. Merricat, no proper hostess, complains how terrible everyone in the village treats her. The guest correctly suggests that the townsfolk would be nicer to Merricat if Merricat was nicer in town. Constance asks for the same truce with Charles– and a bath and clean dress wouldn't hurt, either. 

Merricat never developed such emotional intelligence. Instead, she escalates her empty magic. When that doesn't scare off Charles, she uses his smoldering pipe to start a house fire. The town gathers to gawk and celebrate the fast-spreading blaze.

When the night is done, Charles is gone but so is most of the Blackwood finery, looted by the villagers. The upper floors are a burned hulk. Julian is dead of a smoke-induced heart attack.

In the aftermath, and in case anyone missed what's been in plain sight, Jackson clears up the murder mystery. Merricat did it– out of childish revenge for simple discipline. Merricat is fine with murder and fine letting Constance take the blame. Merricat is fine with burning the manor down, come what may.

Merricat wins, such as it is. Constance isn't going anywhere. The Blackwoods remain. The sister bond is sealed, if doomed. In a literary turn, vines grow over the wrecked manor. The sisters live in darkness and on meals left hurriedly by remorseful townsfolk. Merricat has achieved her self-image, a light of lights to be brought offerings. Sacrifices, more like. She's become the village bogeywoman from those rhymes. 

Technically, Merricat is an unreliable narrator. I don't read her that way. Mary Katherine Blackwood is honest from that opening paragraph. Stunted and dangerously arrogant--but honest in what she says and what she withholds. She feels no more need to share uncomfortable truths with a reader than she does in the village. We can't be sure how much guilt she feels, but Jackson doesn't spare the torture. Guilt is everywhere in the house. Guilt is Julian's main character function, a withering reminder Merricat can neither avoid nor internalize. Those rules become a coping mechanism.

The novel's secret sauce, though, is Jackson herself. The main characters are the sister figures caught in complex circumstances– sister figures often based on her daughters. The setting is again her New England stomping grounds, where years as a Bennington wife left her agoraphobic and feeling undervalued despite her track record. She tinkered with witchcraft. When Jackson wrote We Have Always Lived in The Castle, she wrote from her soul.

Ginger Snaps and Wolfbane

The Premise

Teen girl angst, goth and drama… Sisters’ suicide pact, everything is soooo dramatic… Death scenes staged for a school play project… That day when first period doesn’t refer to school…

For Halloween, a teen girl horror flick, a bildungsromans, a coming-of-age tale.

The cleverly titled Ginger Snaps is a 2001 horror movie for those who don’t like horror movies. It released much too soon after Columbine, which caused distribution problems at home and abroad amid fears of teen violence. A number of theatres banned it outright. The scheduled five and ten year anniversary re-releases failed to materialize, but nevertheless it developed a fan base and ‘cult’ status. I’m convinced anything labeled ‘cult’ refers to creative works with more depth that hurts critics’ limited brain cells.

The Promise

Ginger and Brigitte Fitzgerald are sisters, 16 and 15, in the same grade at school. Unpopular and bullied, they develop a fascination with death, morbidly filming gruesome death scenes for their school project. If they can’t manage to flee their small town when Brigitte reaches 16, they promise to die together.

Their father, Henry Fitzgerald, dotes upon his daughters, but he’s utterly clueless in the estrogen cauldron of his household. Mother Pamela is marginally better, wavering between complicit and the sole disciplinarian. At one point, she tells her husband, “Go back into your own world; this one only confuses you.”

The Plot

Halloween and the night of a full moon approaches.

Local dogs are found torn to pieces, presumably victims of the fanged Beast of Bailey Downs. The girls factor the legend into a plot against the school bully, but before they can act, Ginger is attacked by a creature and dragged into the woods…

Thus opens the story. A prim editor left the best potential tag line on the cutting room floor, but it made it into the movie’s mythos. In an unused clip, Brigitte tells her sister, “PMS is the least of your problems.”

Brigitte and Ginger Fitzgerald

The Practice

Conventional horror movies confuse time in the makeup chair with characterization. What makes Ginger Snaps special is the bond between the sisters. After months of fruitless auditions, the prospective leads happened to try out on the same day. When screenwriter Karen Walton saw the results, she said the young actresses were exactly who she was looking for. Coincidentally, the girls were born in the same hospital, attended the same schools, worked out of the same talent agency, and had appeared in separate episodes of Supernatural and The X-Files. Their chemistry was perfect.

Their parents are well-drawn and probably frighteningly close to how real teens view their folks. The school jock, Jason, makes another interesting character. He shows more moral fibre than we might expect. Rather than slut-shame the girl he just slept with, he merely tells his friends, “She rocked my world.”

When’s the last time you encountered an edgy teen drama that classy?

A mediocre sequel and a slightly more interesting direct-to-DVD prequel followed in 2004.

Thanks to Haboob for a list of where-to-view sources in time for Halloween. Enjoy the show.

Ginger Snaps (2001) Crackle Favesome Filmrise Plex Roku Tubi Vudu Wow Now paywall… Amazon iTunes Microsoft Roku YouTube

Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed Movie Sphere Plex Roku Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning Movie Sphere Plex Roku Tubi

The Tingler

Bringing in the wet dog, my pal Carole made a joke about Odorama – the provenance here being that she's a Baltimore girl, and Baltimore native son John Waters used a gimmick in his more-or-less mainstream debut, Polyester, that was a scratch'n'sniff card, smells keyed to scenes in the movie.

Lest you think this utterly without precedent, think again. John Waters, like Tarantino and Martin Scorsese, is very much a movie nut, and knows his history. Tarantino might champion Sergio Corbucci and a picture like The Great Silence, Scorsese is of course hugely influential in the preservation of significant landmark pictures, many of them marginalized or forgotten. It's no less serious of John Waters to find inspiration in the movies of a Russ Meyer or William Castle.

Russ Meyer was, famously, a schlockmeister. You could argue that Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is at least on some level a masterwork, but it's still trash. Terrific trash, maybe. On the other hand, Shock Corridor or The Naked Kiss it ain't. Meyer doesn't even come close. Sam Fuller made his share of exploitive B's, but he always had thorough discipline. Russ Meyer, let's be honest, was only in thrall to the great state of mammary.

William Castle is a different story. His career begins in the late 1930's, and lasts into the 1970's. A lot of it is pretty lame; some of it is eye-popping. He was on Welles' Lady from Shanghai. Twenty years later, he bought the rights to Rosemary's Baby, but Paramount wouldn't let him direct - they thought his track record with quick-and-dirty horror would hurt the word of mouth on an A-picture.

So, those horror movies. This is where Castle hit his stride. (He's actually contemporaneous with the glory days of Hammer gothic, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.) The first was Macabre, in 1958, and it was the first where Castle used medicine-show marketing. Along with your ticket, you got an insurance policy from Lloyd's of London: IF IT FRIGHTENS YOU TO DEATH - YOU'LL BE BURIED FREE OF CHARGE. The House on Haunted Hill, Vincent Price, where the theater went completely dark and the spooky soundtrack started before the picture did. And a plastic skeleton dangled over the audience (Castle pitched this as Emerge-O).  Then his second picture with Price, The Tingler. The Tingler had an even better device: a few of the seats in the theater were wired for a slight tingling effect, which signaled that the parasitic creature was creeping up your spine - and at which point the ushers were supposed to scream. You see the pattern, here. Even as late as Strait-Jacket, his Joan Crawford ax-murderer picture, he passed out party favor tie-ins, cardboard axes smeared with stage blood.

My personal favorite of Castle's movies is Let's Kill Uncle, which came out in 1966, and is apparently not really considered part of the canon. Maybe because Castle often used name Hollywood actors whose fires were no longer burning bright, like Crawford and Vincent Price, those pictures have a certain camp acidity, and they're not to be taken entirely seriously. Let's Kill Uncle, however, has the great Nigel Green, deliriously over-the-top, as the retired SAS commando major out to  murder his nephew for the kid's inheritance. And the shark in the swimming pool.

Castle himself never tried Smell-O-Vision (used but once, Scent of Mystery, 1959) or AromaRama (Behind the Great Wall, same year), so the mischievous sniff test of Odorama John Waters releases in Polyester is more of an homage, Castle-esque rather than a direct application of the Castle merchandising touch. It's satisfyingly retrograde.

Clearly, there are advances which work. Sound, and color. Widescreen, or Dolby digital. 3D is back, not a novelty this time, but here to stay. Smell is of course evocative. They say the most of all our senses. It's probably genetically hard-wired. Who argues? Maybe there's a way to do this. Easy enough to make a theater seat vibrate, after all, to rumble underneath you, or even tip left and right with the G-forces, so you're in the cockpit with Maverick. On the other hand, we'd probably need warning labels, like a product containing peanuts. You get to choose, 3D or flat, subtitles or dubbed, earthbound or zero gravity, scented or fragrance-free.

[In a cute piece of stunt casting John Waters actually got to play Castle in the miniseries Feud, about the rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford surrounding Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? In an Oklahoma publicity appearance for Strait-Jacket, Crawford "decapitates" Castle.]

Messages in a Bottle, or Notes from the Pen

For the next several days, our band of authors will be writing about writing— for magazines, especially non-mystery magazines. We’ll have a couple of surprises and a lot of expertize. Thanks to Eve for kicking off the program with non-traditional penmanship. You'll see.

—Velma

by Eve Fisher

I just got back from a weekend workshop at the local penitentiary, which (as always) was full of interesting moments, hard work, and definite characters.  If nothing else, the weekend confirmed (even if I do say so myself) that I really nailed the young meth-head who's the centerpiece of my latest story, "Iron Chef", in the November, 2016 issue of AHMM.  ("He thinks he's a lady's man because he wants to get laid," and more here...)

I did not tell the guys that.  Actually, I don't tell them much about my writing, because (1) That's not why I'm there (I'm there to facilitate an Alternatives to Violence Project Workshop, not talk about myself all the time) and (2) most of them don't really want to hear it.  Including the writers.

(Sometimes especially the writers.  Recent dialog between myself and an inmate:
Me: "There's a place on-line that lists publishers and -"
Inmate (interrupting): "I HAVE an agent. Or I will soon."
Me: "Okay."
Inmate: "Yeah.")

And there are a lot of writers (and artists) at the pen.  Interestingly, I haven't met one yet that writes mystery or crime stories.  I'm not sure if that's because it doesn't interest them, or they don't know how to do it, or if they're afraid if they put anything in writing, it might be held against them in a court of law.  Like a confession or a plan for future criminal activity...  Anyway, most are poets and/or songwriters.  Some write sci-fi and/or supernatural/horror. And a few write autobiographies.

Getting prison writing published is easier than you might think, thanks to the internet.  Here are just a few of the on-line resources for magazines, newsletters, anthologies and e-zines dedicated to prisoners' writing:

From South Dakota, The Prisoners for Prevention blog.
The Prisoner Poetry Page.
The on-line Prison Poetry Workshop podcasts.
The Prisoner Express which publishes poetry, journals, essays, etc.

One of the main problems, of course, for prisoners is that these days so many places only accept on-line submissions, and access to the internet is hard to get in the pen.  And sending out ms. in hard-copy is expensive when you only make 25 cents an hour.  (Not to mention that getting access to a typewriter is hard to come by, too.)  And almost all of the markets specifically set up to publish prisoners' work are non-paying.

In the search for paying markets, Writers' Digest is invaluable to prisoners:  I'd bet there's a (more or less) old, battered copy in every prison library.  I know inmates who've sent stories to Glimmer Train, Analog, Asimov's Science Fiction, and Playboy.  (No, I don't know any who've been accepted yet, but at least they're trying!)  I've read a couple of the stories, and even given a critique here and there. When I am specifically asked.  Again, not every inmate wants to hear any opinion other than that it's a great poem/story/song.  For that matter, not every writer OUT of the pen wants to hear anything else...

Another place where inmates writers can get published is with the PEN Prison Writing Contest. Prizes and publication in an anthology make this very prestigious.
And, for all of us, let's not forget sites like Angie's Desk and My Little Corner, both of which list anthologies and markets of all genres (although primarily mystery and science-fiction/fantasy).  Thank you, ladies!  Your hard work has opened up markets for us all!

Most of the work the inmates finally do get published is and has been edited by someone outside for content.  What gets passed around in the tier, chow hall, and our sharing circle is unedited, raw, and cannot be reprinted on this family blog.  Besides the poems of suicidal despair (since this is NOT the Gingerbread House of Corrections)

http://rhymeswithorange.com/comics/november-20-2016/

gangsta rap is HUUUUUGE.  Personally, I get bored with gangsta rap, because they all say pretty much the same thing:  ultra-explicit rap symphonies in F Major on drugs, bling, fights, arrests, killings, and sex.

(It's like the prison tattoos:  the first few times you go in the pen, you see these guys who are absolutely COVERED in tattoos, and it's hard to look away.  But after a while, you realize that they're mostly skulls, naked women, snakes, names, etc., in endless repetition, and the only reason you study them is to figure out what gang they're in.)

But there are those stories that show real creativity and thinking, and poems that take your breath away, like the following from PrisonerExpress.org/?mode=poetry

The thirteenth amendment, Amended

by Name Withheld by Request

A coffle of state slaves shuffles
Slowly into the radiant rays
Of dawn's early light.
Spartacus nowhere in sight.
Flight scarred all, and bone
Weary from strife and stress,
Destined to toil under the sun til
Twilight's last gleaming brings rest.

The tools are issued:
One hoe per man, each
Dull the blade, each
Seven pounds of sweat-stained misery,
Each, in proper hands,
Seven pounds of peril.

Let there be no peril today, we pray:
No quick and vicious fights, where, sweat stinging,
Fists flying, we cull living from dying:
No riots fought for fast forgot reasons__
Swinging steel scintillating in sunlight,
Blood gouting from the too slow heads__
Brown, black, white___
Our blood ruby red and thick with life,
No respecter of color or creed.

Let there be no peril today, we pray;
No dry crackling reports of leaden soldiers,
Chasing wisps of smoke from forge fashioned barrels,
Speaking the ancient tongue of Authority;
Guns guardgripped fast by bossfists,
In confederate gray cloths,
Their fire felling friends, freeing foes.

Let there be no peril today, we pray:
Today only__hard work, for no pay.

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except
as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall
have been duly convicted, shall exist within the
United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

So let it be rewritten.
So let it, at last, be done.

At Last

Today is October 31, 2016--Halloween.  Also known as Allhalloween, All Hallows Eve, and All Saints Eve, Halloween begins the three-day observance of Allhallowtide, the time in the liturgical year dedicated to remembrance of the dead.
To most of us, Halloween is a holiday characterized by the dispensing of candy to costumed young people who threaten, "Trick or treat."  Other traditions include costume contests and parades.  When I taught elementary school, teachers and parents worked together to hold Halloween carnivals for students.  Before my retirement, these changed to Fall Festivals, and scary costumes (such as vampires, werewolves, skeletons, zombies, and this year--clowns) were forbidden because some people felt that Halloween was a celebration of witchcraft.

The traditions of Halloween include decorations such as black cats and pumpkins carved into jack-o-lanterns as well as activities like apple bobbing, pranks,  bonfires, and divination games.  In some parts of the world, Christian observances include church services and lighting candles on graves.

What accounts for the popularity of the non-religious aspects of Halloween? I believe it's because humans like to be scared--so long as what frightens us isn't real.  We might think that fall and Halloween would amplify the appeal of spookiness, but horror is a genre that transcends season.

How does the title "At Last" relate to Halloween and the horror genre?  Recently I've been doing a lot of writers' workshops in South Carolina libraries.  One of my most popular is entitled "A Late Start." The topic is writing as a second career after my retirement including disadvantages of waiting so long to begin writing fiction as well as the obvious advantages of greater maturity and vaster experiences. The workshops include tips on speeding up the process of successful writing and publishing.  The story of my first horror book proves that I don't always follow my own advice when it comes to fast writing and quick publication.

"At Last" would work as well if this blog referred to my first novel in 2007 as it does now to my tenth book released this month, but Leigh Lundin didn't invite me to return to SleuthSayers to summarize the workshop.  I'm here to tell you about my newest book and why "At Last" is a perfect title for this column.

The HORROR of JULIE BATES began several years ago as A Midnight Dreary and morphed into Something to Fear.  Both David Dean and Dixon Hill critiqued the manuscript during one of those phases, and I incorporated several of their suggestions. After numerous rewrites, my agent accepted it, but held back a year before pitching it.  Berkley was interested and made two suggestions.  Pardon my unladylike expression, but I busted my butt to work out the changes and dashed it off back to my agent in two weeks.  I didn't hear anything.

Sure, I wanted to push for a response, but we all know that it's not a good idea to put pressure on agents or editors.  After months and months, I asked the agent to touch base with the interested editor at Berkley.  I almost had another heart attack when I received an apology from my agent because he had forgotten to send her the manuscript revised to her requests.

Meanwhile, there had been major changes in the publishing world. To make a long story short (literally in this case), it was too late.

I began querying new agents and received some requests for the complete manuscript, but when Darren Foster at Odyssey South Publishing said, "Let us have it," I jumped at the chance.  And so, ladies and gentlemen, at last, my first horror novel is now available.  Here's the back copy:

                                 Who knew Columbia, South Carolina, could be so scary?

Julie Bates discovers a corpse in front of the Assembly Street post office.  Arson destroys her home the same day, but Julie's story is not a mystery.  It's horror--southern style.  Police officer Nate Adams thinks the killer who raped and murdered Julie's mother the year before is stalking Julie, but Julie's tormentor is not human.  The well-known ghosts of South Carolina barely skim the surface of the evil that awaits Julie Bates.  Move over, Amityville.  Columbia, South Carolina, is right there with you on the scale of terror.

How does a writer transition from cozyesque to horror? The preface explains:

When a red-haired woman approached me at a book-signing, I expected her to ask me to autograph one of my own cozy mysteries.  Instead, she asked me to write a book for her.  I went into my usual spiel that she could do a better job of putting her story on paper than I, but we agreed to meet in the coffee shop after the signing.  Writers are frequently approached to write or co-write someone else's story. Most of the time, we decline politely, but there was something about this mysterious stranger that made me hesitate to dismiss her so quickly,

The HORROR of JULIE BATES is that woman's story.  I spent many, many hours recording Julie Bates' tale and many more days and nights scaring myself as I wrote her story from her point of view, changing only names. The occasional third-person chapters were added after I was fortunate enough to obtain Richard Arthur's journal.

I have already received several emails questioning, "Did you make up this story or did a red-haired woman really tell it to you?"  I can honestly say the story came from a red-haired woman.

Long-time SleuthSayer readers know that I've jumped genre from cozies in the past when I wrote the thriller KUDZU RIVER.  I have no idea where I'll land next, but in the meantime,

Until we meet again, take care of … you!