Posted on

Tis the Season for Horror (and Humor) at Dead Park

Dead Park: The Series available on Kindle

I love the Dead Park series. I love these stories so much. Over the past few years, the books, first inspired by my late father, have become a bit of a sandbox. Ideas, fragments of stories, and unfinished projects from the last twenty years have all found released within this series. At least two more books are coming.

In Dead Park, anything creepy, strange, or gory can happen. This eerie community counts everything from vampires to killer puppets to Mothman to a doll with teeth to Bigfoot himself as residents. Heck, even Mad Man Pondo, the real life deathmatch legend, makes a cameo.

Right now, you can get all four books on Kindle with one click for $11.96. Three of the four books – one about an office building, one about a mall, and one about a suburb – are story compilations, all based in one location. Book three, aka Dead Park Records, is a stand-alone novella with connections to the notorious office building that started it all, Dead Park Plaza.

If you like short stories; if you like humor with your horror; if you like relentless chaos, unexpected twists, and a splatter of insanity – and blood – give the series a try.

Order now on Kindle.

Posted on

How to Get Rid of Pesky Telemarketers of the Future

Cindy Maples in The Telemarketer.

One of my favorite short stories is called The Telemarketer. Inspired by those hard-working men and women in call centers throughout the world, the story envisions what telemarketing will be like in the future. Instead of using a telephone, why not use a teleporter? Why not beam directly into someone’s house and show, rather than tell, what you’re selling?

Think of the potential for sales!

Think of the potential for trouble!

The wonderful, beautiful, and incredibly talented Cindy Maples fell in love with this story. She championed the production of a short film that made the rounds in a few independent film tests. Thus, one of my favorite short stories became one of my favorite short films.

Ladies and gentlemen, The Telemarketer, starring Cindy Maples.

Posted on

And Now There Are Four!

Great news for Dead Park fans: Dead Park Estates is now in print!

Greater news for Kindle fans: Amazon lets you buy all four books on Kindle for just under twelve bucks.

The link below will take you to a page where you can buy the bundle. For those who prefer paperback, there are links for those editions as well – and a few are even on sale!

Posted on

For My Dad

 

Several summers ago, I attended Fright Night Film Festival in Louisville. The inside of the hotel was almost as sweltering hot as the exterior, but that didn’t stop a few hundred of us from jamming into a ballroom to listen to horror master John Carpenter answer questions about his career.

One exchange really stuck with me. A very goth-looking young woman asked Mr. Carpenter what advice he would give to someone who wanted to follow in his footsteps and become a horror director in Hollywood.

“Well, I went to Hollywood to make Westerns,” said Carpenter. “So I wouldn’t know what to tell you.”

I can relate to that statement more today than ever. I never set out to write books about pro wrestling, but I’ve written more than twenty. And if you told 8 year old me I would one day write HORROR? I never would have believed you. I loved science fiction. Specifically, I loved STAR WARS. So how did I, an aspiring screenwriter and author of science fiction flights of fancy, turn to horror?

It’s my Dad’s fault.

Dead Park Plaza and its growing list of sequels would not have happened without my dad. My dad loved horror. Not all horror, mind you, but a good chunk. He liked a good scare, but he also liked horror-comedy. He’s the one who introduced me to William Castle, Ed Wood, Army of Darkness, and many of my favorites.

My dad had a direct influence on one of the stories in Dead Park Plaza. One morning in mid-February of 2021, I heard my phone buzz. I was still in bed, but my Dad was already up and texting me. He had dreamed something he thought would make a great horror story, a story that took place in an office setting, and he wanted to share it with me. It was a clever idea, and I think (I hope) I replied back and said so. I wasn’t working on any fiction at that time, so I kind of put it out of my mind.

It was one of the last texts my Dad ever sent me. It might have been the very last. A few days later my mother rushed him to the hospital. Nine days later, after transferring to rehab and then back to the hospital, he was diagnosed with cancer on his birthday February 28.

A week after that diagnosis, he was gone.

Four months later, Dad’s story idea drifted back into my mind. I didn’t see potential for a full novel, but it felt like a great short story. That’s when I started connecting the dots, from Dad’s story to a few others I’d been mulling over – stories that took place in an office.

Today, I have a job for a virtual company that allows me to work from home, the coffee shop, the library, or wherever I feel like. I work with incredible people and two amazing bosses who actually believe in me. For the first time in my life, I look forward to starting work each day.

But in 2021?

In 2021 I was still getting up every morning and driving to an office that, at the time, was refusing to acknowledge that I’d been given a promotion, dragging their feet backfilling my old role.

I spent most of my adult life, more than 20 years, driving to an office, working in cubicle,  being forced to make new “friends” on a recurring basis as people left or were let go (including me, a few times), working with good and not-so-good people, working for great and TERRIBLE bosses left a mark.

All that “work experience” fostered story ideas. Little fragments taking up real estate in my imagination, just waiting for their moment. “What if,” I thought, “These stories all took place in the same office building? You know, like Sideways Stories from Wayside School?”

One story became a group of three, then five, then seven.

The first book literally came together in a month. A scattered group of half-cooked stories all came together in the most remarkable way. I recently published book four in the series, and books five, six, and seven are in the works.

And all because my my Dad’s crazy idea about a man starting a new job and discovering a message warning him he’s in grave danger.

Without that text, there would be no Dead Park Plaza and no Dead Park Books. The whole identity of my fiction publishing would not exist without that germ of an idea he sent me.

I was still in denial about my Dad’s passing when the first book was published, and as I write this (revised) blog post, I’m still pretty much in the denial stage about my Dad’s passing, by the way. Wondering if I’ll ever move on from that, but grateful that he gave me the gift of a story, a book, and much more.

Click here to order your signed copy of Dead Park Plaza.

Kindle Reader? Click here to get the full Dead Park series at a special price!

Posted on

The World’s Shortest Noir Films

I’ve got a new video series up on YouTube. Following up on the Covid-inspired World’s Shortest Horror Films, it’s The World’s Shortest Noir Films.

The series features the talents of George Robert Bailey, Cory Burdette, Sonny Burnette, Christina Cannon, Scene Nick, and Roni Jonah as well as the music of Jon Driver.

The playlist is linked below. Five videos have been released so far with four more on the way. Enjoy!

Posted on

Scary Movies I Made With My Kid

During the 2020 Summer of Covid, my son Sam and I started a weekly tradition. We’d go out every Saturday morning to have breakfast and play tennis. We still have breakfast every Saturday, but in deference to our being artsy types and not athletes, we no longer play tennis. The rackets are still in my car should we ever get the urge, but it’s been a good while. And it’s winter now, so…

Sorry, I digress.

One morning over a round of badly played tennis, we started spitballing ideas for short horror films. Not the kind you normally see at film fest, mind you, but the kind you’d see if people on horror films had something called Common Sense. You know. Common Sense  tells you not to open doors that say, “Keep out.” Common Sense says, “Don’t hunt vampires during the day.” Common Sense says, “Run out the front door, not upstairs where there’s no escape.”

We had six or seven ideas by the time we left the courts that day. In the coming weeks, we ended up with fifteen. I started reaching out to actors on Facebook, asking folks to film themselves and send us footage. (Covid, remember?) We cut them together on my trusty ol’ MacBook, the one with iMovie HD because I still to this day refuse to learn the newer versions. (It’s just easier, okay?) And we released them one at a time on YouTube.

The World’s Shortest Horror Films is a fifteen part series featuring the talents of many old friends and new. I made a lot of short films in my day, but few make me prouder. I mean, I made them with my kid. We wrote them. We cut them together. We even appear in one. Well, I appear in it; you can hear his voice. (Spoiler alert, I am not opening that door!)

Sam and I went our separate ways creatively after Covid. I’m back to writing, and he’s in a killer school of rock band called Abstract Agenda. He plays keyboard, bass, guitar, and saxophone. As a matter of fact, I was in quarantine with Covid the day he brought home a saxophone for the first time in July. He went from the usual beginner squeaks and squawks to accurately playing the opening solo from “Careless Whisper” in less than two hours. Kinda makes you sick!

Maybe one day we’ll collaborate on another short. Until then, I’m proud of the one series we assembled together.

You can watch the whole series, all 15 short films, in the video below. It’s only an eight minute commitment, so give it a whirl, will you?

Posted on

From Facebook Post to Screenplay to Novella

I had no intention of writing Zombies of Oz. For one thing, I’m not exactly an Oz fan. That mean old wicked witch scared me as a child. Sure, I’ve grown to love Margaret Hamilton for her little wink and nod to the camera in William Castle’s 13 Ghosts, but that hasn’t endeared me to the 1939 classic any more.

I haven’t read the Oz books, and the only other Oz story I know is The Patchwork Girl of Oz, thanks to a junior high musical I directed about, oh, 20 years ago. We had a lot of laughs. We didn’t exactly stick to the script. Correction: the delightful young show off I cast as the Glass Cat did not stick to the script. But other than her shenanigans, which unexpectedly went to 11 in front of an actual audience, I remember nothing about it.

A number of years ago, this idea came to me. What if Dorothy didn’t go to Oz? What if there was a storm and a bump on the head, and then a zombie apocalypse? And what if Dorothy was a juvenile delinquent? A rough, inner city kid sent to the farm to chill out? In other words, what if she was fully prepared to kick some zombie butt?

I liked the idea. I didn’t want to write it. So I made it a Facebook post. I posited the questions above and added a few notes about a gun-toting redneck, a cyborg, a shell-shocked soldier, and a pit bull. (You do the math; or better yet, read the story!) I sent it out into the world and told my filmmaker friends, of whom I have many, “Have at it.”

One of those friends, Irv Severs, responded. He loved it, and he said if I wrote it, he’d make it.

I started writing. Irv and I started talking. Then we roped Roni Jonah into the mix, which is how Dorothy became a redhead. You may have seen Roni in some of my films or, more famously, in Shark Exorcist. She’s a delight, and a heck of a muse for a rampaging, redheaded Dorothy Gale.

Long story short, the film never got made. Irv, Roni, and I moved on to other projects, and the script sat in mothballs until about a year ago. That’s when I first converted this story (along with the script that became Girl Most Likely to Kill You and the script that is now the upcoming third Dead Park book) from script to prose.

Zombies of Oz is now available on Amazon, and it will soon be available here. You can pre-order you signed copy from me by clicking here, or you can click here and get it direct from Amazon.

I’d apologize to Frank Baum, but that mean old witch scared me. I think he owes me for that.