THIS ROUGH OLD WORLD, my new novel from Electric Pentacle Press, is now available on Kindle!

(Click above to be whisked away to the Amazon page!)

THIS ROUGH OLD WORLD is now available for your Kindle e-reader as well as in print.

Check it out if you haven't already, spread the word and please remember to leave a review after you've read the book!

I was the guest on this week's Spooklights podcast, with hosts Jonathan Raab and Tom Breen. We talked about books, comics and movies and had a blast.

Check it out and get a little more background on the process behind the inspiration, writing and production of my books THE ALTAR IN THE HILLS, THE CASTLE-TOWN TRAGEDY and my newest, THIS ROUGH OLD WORLD!​

Click here, or below, to listen on either YouTube or Soundcloud!

Though I am a collector of Gold Medal crime and western paperbacks, I admit I initially bought this book due to the novelty of the author's name. I was delighted to find that it's actually very good.

​Read on, MacDuff, for more of my thoughts.

I'd never heard of this Frank Castle before I stumbled on this book and after I did, I googled to see what else he had done (there's not much; I only found two other Gold Medal paperbacks that preceded this one), and mostly found references to this novel - and most of that was negative. Fans of westerns simply didn't like it, it seemed.. Personally, I loved it, but I can see why hardcore western fans might not because, like H.A. de Rosso's .44, which I wrote about a couple of months ago, this book is a western firmly rooted in noir.

There are certainly the outer trappings of westerns--train robberies, shoot-outs, bandits, and so forth--but the story itself is essentially a vengeance-driven mystery. Gil Denning, for five years, has made a living as a bounty hunter, though he cares nothing for the money it brings in. The only thing he wants is information on the train robbers who, through collateral damage, killed his wife five years earlier, less than a month into their marriage. The mystery arises in that he has no idea who they are--nor does anyone else, until similarities to the crime arise during the course of events in this novel--and he has spent all this time desperately seeking any scrap of information he can find.

The novel reads more like a P.I. story than a western as Denning collects information through informants, bribery and occasional violence, is repeatedly the target of violence himself by people worried he's getting too close to his goal (which would endanger the criminals' current plans, of course) and has not one, but two women (a squeaky-clean angel and a beautiful, but fallen, angel, naturally) fall head over heels for him. But Gil Denning has no time or interest in romance. Vengeance is his only concern.

As I said, I loved the novel. The western elements are mostly cosmetic, but it's a good solid mystery with enough clues that you can figure out the ending by yourself if you're paying attention, although there was one red herring towards the end that made me doubt my (ultimately correct) conclusion for a little while. There's also plenty of action--both the two-fisted and shooting kind--to keep your interested if mysteries aren't your thing.

If you are a hardcore western fan, it might not be your cup of tea, as it doesn't feel like most of the westerns I've read, but if you're a fan of two-fisted, hard-shooting crime stories, I definitely recommend it.

It's been a while since I've posted a new comic here, so let's start the year off right with "A Person Again", I story the great Ted Pogo and I did for an anthology a number of years ago now that was unfortunately never published. This is a story I don't want to languish on my hard-drive, so I'll put it here and hope you all enjoy.

Click below to read "A Person Again."

It's the first post of 2018, so I'm going to talk about 2017 for the last time.

2017 was a weird year. A very difficult, frustrating year in many ways, for many people.

But it was also an important year.

I only had one short prose story published, in a magazine, and a reprint of a short comic story in a comic anthology, as well as a second edition--paperback--of a prose book I had come out last year, which was my first in hard-cover, and a single comic issue.

That's a pretty light year, and mostly because several things fell through that I thought were basically locked-in. That's tough and it hurts.

But for the things that were published, I want to thank Occult Detective Magazine's editor John Linwood Grant for accepting my fourth Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, Jordan Krall for publishing my collected Carnacki stories in THE CASTLE-TOWN TRAGEDY and Kurt Belcher for putting my story "Lucid Moments" in his comic anthology series and last, but certainly not least, my friend James W. Powell for publishing my comic THE GRUMPLEDOWNS GANG AND THE CASE OF THE MAIL-ORDER SHOGGOTHS under his Ten31 Publishing line. 

I also had my first true novel, THIS ROUGH OLD WORLD, published this year.

Writing TROW was very difficult for me; despite having read thousands of novels (without any exaggeration) I went in without any idea of how to actually write one. I had written a few dozen short prose stories, and I've written many comic books, but neither is the same as writing a novel, and the process was a long, painful one of starts and stops for me over a period of nearly two years. 

Eventually, I sat down and pounded out a first real draft of the novel in about six weeks, but it was missing a lot of the connective tissue that makes a real novel work. Again, my friend James Powell was absolutely invaluable in helping me beat it into shape, and the book is rightfully dedicated to him. 

It was another year after finishing it that I found a publisher for the book, and I want to thank Travis Neisler and Sam Gafford at Ravenwood Publishing/Electric Pentacle Press for all their hard work in putting the book together as well as M Wayne Miller for the incredible cover art he did.

It's been a rough year, but some good came out of it. I hope 2018 will be better for everyone.