Pumpkin Carving

The other evening we had a family night and spent some time carving pumpkins. After carving her pumpkin, my daughter Mikayla, spent a few moments examining the results and apparently noted that her jack 0'lantern bore an uncanny resemblance to someone that she had seen before.

"I'm going to name my pumpkin Hilary Duff!" she proclaimed.

I'm not so sure if Hilary Duff, former star of Disney's Lizzie McGuire and current pop star, would find the comparison flattering...
























Uncanny resemblance or not? Decide your yourself.

Lords of the Bitter Dark

I'm pleased to announce that, Lords of the Bitter Dark, a story extracted from my upcoming novel, Through the Groaning Earth, is now the cover story for Dark Worlds Magazine #2 and is now available for purchase at Lulu.com.

Lords of the Bitter Darkness revisits Bathos, the city of corruption, which is the setting for my previously published novel, Escape from Devil's Head.

When his ship is blown across the great oceans by a sudden storm and founders upon the reefs of an unknown land, Azark plunges into the depths of the fiend-haunted silver mines of the Monks of Racaovanj, in order to free some enslaved fellow sailors who have been captured and put to work mining the silver ore. Soon, he finds himself caught between the deadly monks that zealously guard the mines and the living dead that lurk within the deep caverns.

Besides Lords of the Bitter Darkness, Dark Worlds #2 is 120 pages chock full of pulpy goodness and features other stories such as "Voices" (Mystery) by Nick Andreychuk, "Cauldron of Life, Blades of Death" (Historical Fantasy)by David A. Hardy, "River Baby Weeps" (Horror) by Joshua Reynolds, "Trick Candles" (Horror)by Stephen D. Rogers, "The Clatter of Dry Bones" (Mythos)by Jack Mackenzie, "One Man's Trash" (Space Opera)by C. J. Burch.

Dillon & the Pirates of Xonira

Chapter eight of Dillon's and the Pirates of Xonira has hit the Pulpwork Press website. Dillon deals with the repercussions of a saboteur aboard his submarine, the Morgan Adams, and interrogates him as the ship slowly runs out of air, unable to emerge from the depths.

Check it out here. And if you've been enjoying Derrick Ferguson's Dillon tale, be sure to order up a copy of the full length Dillon novel, Dillon and the Voice of Odin which is for sale at Amazon.com.

Evolution of a Tale or How the Blood Vault Came to Be

Sometimes people will ask me where I get all my ideas, and the truth is that I have been blessed (or cursed) with an overactive imagination and I get way more ideas for stories than I'll ever have the time to write.

So at the risk of pulling back the curtain on the Great and Terrible Oz and ruining the magic by showing the gears and levers behind, I'll mention how the idea for The Blood Vault--a precursor story to my novel, Devil Take the Hindmost, came about.

In 2001, Chandra Levy, an intern for the Federal Bureau of Prisons in Washington DC, disappeared. It came out soon that she had recently confessed to relatives that she was having an affair with Democratic Congressman Gary Condit.















So of course, I immediately asked myself--"Self, what if Gary Condit is a vampire and he is keeping Chandra locked up in his lair?"

Now for me, this is only a natural conclusion based on a long study and exhaustive research into the facts of this particular case.

The next logical step for me was to introduce a vampire hunter, Damon St. Cloud, that was going to uncover this horrible crime and do his best to rescue the kidnapped intern--and then I wrote a story about it.

And voila (a fancy French word which means there it is) -- the genesis of the short story The Blood Vault.

In honor of Halloween and all things vampiric I'm going to run that short story here on my blog, in several parts beginning next week. In the meantime, do order up a copy of Devil Take the Hindmost. It's available at the Pulpwork Press website, Amazon.com, and in various electronic formats at Fictionwise.

Halloween Horror Sale

With ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the stock market plummeting, rising, and plummeting again some people might say that they've already had enough horror this Halloween season. What? Not enough horror, you say?

Well, then click your way on over to the Pulpwork Press website and pick up some of Joshua Reynolds' horror tales, which are, in honor of Halloween, and for this month only, marked down 5 bucks off the cover price. If you're not familiar with Reynold's horror work, let me just describe him as follows: He's the Stephen King of South Carolina.

Now Stephen King, like any author from Shakespeare to Spillane, is not to everyone's taste, but if you like Stephen King's stories (and millions of people do) I think you're going to like Joshua Reynolds stories. The stories of both authors have the same twisted esthetics and while King often draws upon the state of Maine to provide color and background, just as H.P. Lovecraft drew upon Essex Massachusetts, Reynolds draws upon the kudzu-grown territory of South Carolina to provide color for the terror.

Because of its pulpy flavor and horror-soaked action esthetic my personal favorite of Reynolds' books is the Baxter Sarlowe tale, Wake the Dead. And I quote the back cover, because it's one of the greatest cover blurbs I've ever encountered--

Two men are eaten alive by insects.

A plane carrying Egyptian antiquities goes down in flames.

Yellow dogs and dead men prowl the streets.

Shadowy figures prepare to pay off a centuries old debt while the dead crawl out of their graves to greet an evil as old as time.

An evil that spreads from the burning sands of Egypt to the kudzu soaked streets of Columbia, South Carolina in an attempt to claw its way back into the light.

Evil never dies. It just sleeps...and dreams...and waits...

Note to readers, be forewarned that because of subject content, gore, and language many of the Reynolds tales earn themselves a solid R rating.