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.

My novel THIS ROUGH OLD WORLD is out now from Electric Pentacle Press!

From the back-cover:

Los Angeles, 1968, a time of radical change - for everyone but part-time private-eye Tom Ahearn, who's stuckin a rut of routine and self-pity. When Charlie, a hippy of the lowest order, offers a quick buck for what seems like an easy job, Tom dives head-first into a world of casual sex, drugs, music and the occult. He'll find himself rubbing shoulders with drugged-up hippies, young Republicans itching for war and slumming socialites bent on nothing less than completely reshaping the cosmos - all while unknowingly witnessing the nascence of one of the twentieth century's most notorious evils.

"Hard-edged and pulsing with life... pulls you in and nails you. An excellent read." - Rusty Barnes, author of RIDGERUNNER & KNUCKLEDRAGGER


Published 12/24/17, exactly two years to the day after I finished my final draft, THIS ROUGH OLD WORLD is now available from Amazon (link both above and below).

This is an incredibly important work for me. It began as a short story that took on a life of its own and I spent close to two years writing and editing it, ending up with my first true novel. It represents many interests of mine: detective fiction, specifically noir; cosmic horror; history. It's definitely fiction, but there are shadows and echoes of real people and events in the novel, and readers watching for clues may recognize some of them.

This has been a long time coming, and was truly a labor of love. I want to thank, very sincerely, Electric Pentacle Press's publisher, Travis Neisler, and their designer, Sam Gafford, and cover artist, M. Wayne Miller, for all their hard work in putting the final book together. I also want to thank my friend James W. Powell for his incredible insight and feedback he gave me while I was writing it. Without any of you four gentlemen, this book would not exist.

The book is available now on Amazon, and you can click here to be whisked away to it.

A small number of advance review copies were made available over the summer and if you received one, I'd ask that you please take a few moments to leave a review on Amazon. Amazon heavily weighs reviews when it comes to advertising and suggesting books to potential readers and the sooner THIS ROUGH OLD WORLD starts racking them up, the better.

Thank you again and I hope you'll enjoy!

Merry Christmas! Well, almost. How about happy Christmas Eve Eve Eve?

In the spirit of the season, I thought I'd put up a couple of little presents.

Back around Christmas of 2012, a website I used to follow had a Christmas drabble (a story of exactly 100 words) contest. It allowed up to six entries per submission, but I only got around to writing two and I never actually submitted either one. Rather than letting them continue to languish on my hard-drive, I thought I'd put them up here.

They aren't much, but maybe you'll like them. Click on the title below to be whisked either to either story:

Have Yourself a Merry Little Relapse

A Roman's Holiday

I hope you enjoy and have a happy and safe holiday season!

Last week, I read BLACK FRIDAY, by David Goodis, a nearly-forgotten novelist whose only work I'd previously read was also his first and most famous, DARK PASSAGE, which is probably better remembered as the film adaptation, a Humphrey Bogart/Lauren Bacall vehicle, though the novel itself is great.

​Anyway, I saw BLACK FRIDAY and gave it a try. So what did I think?

Today, a brand-new-to-English manga by a brand-new-to-me mangaka whose work I'm very much enjoying: Abi Umeda's CHILDREN OF THE WHALES.

Originally titled Whale Calves Sing on the Sands, CotW is a manga that caught my eye immediately for one thing: the art strongly resembles Hayao Miyazaki's line-art from his mangaka days, specifically the style he used for Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. It's a very distinctive style and it couldn't be coincidental; googling Umeda's older works, I saw that she used a more modern, cleaner-lined style for them, so I was intrigued.

More than the art, however, the story and its tone also feels very much like Nausicaa - in a good way.

The basic premise is like something from Nausicaa's world: the world is, seemingly, an ocean of sand and on this ocean swims, literally, the Mud Whale, an apparently-semi-organic living island, populated by 513 human beings, none of whom have any knowledge of any world other than their tiny island. Moreover, the majority of these people are so-called "Marked", and possess psychic abilities called thymia, which are fueled by their emotions. Because of this, emotional displays are forbidden in their society, presumably for fear of someone losing control.

The Mud Whale has been swimming the sands for just over 93 years when the story opens and while life is monotonous and sometimes uncertain, depending on factors such as rainfall and food production, it's good overall, and people know what to expect: until another floating island is encountered and on it... another human being. The first anyone from the Mud Whale has ever seen, signaling to them that there is a world outside of their little home.

What follows is classically Miyazaki in style: the newcomer, though she doesn't even know her own name, knows more about the Mud Whale and its people than they themselves do and before she can share any of this information, the outside world (in the form of storm-troopers reminiscent of Jester-like versions of the troopers who invade the Valley of the Wind) attack the Mud Whale, setting off a chain of events that is halted by the end of the first volume.

Umeda, as so many other mangaka do, wears her influences on her sleeve in this work, but as I said, it's not a bad thing. CotW is a beautifully-drawn, lovingly-told story of exploration and frustration that is clearly leading towards bigger things. I'm personally very curious to see how far she takes the Miyazaki influence or if she'll just use it as a starting point, either way, I'm sure I'll enjoy what comes next.

This past spring, you may remember, my fourth Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder story The Arcana of the Alleys was published in Occult Detective Quarterly magazine issue #2.

It featured a young Thomas Carnacki just embarking on his career of occultism and detection and running into unusual circumstances, encountering some very exotic magic, in Boston, a place I don't think anyone else has ever taken the good detective. It also featured this gorgeous illustration by Sebastian Cabrol.

Because the magazine is a 96-page quarterly, stories are kept to under 6k words, typically, but my understanding is that despite that, they receive many longer submissions and that a few of them were so good they wanted to find a way to use them.

To that end, they are presenting a book-length anthology called Occult Detective Quarterly Presents, featuring stories anywhere from 8 to 25k (novella) length. They are currently running a kickstarter to gather funds for this anthology, and, if all goes well, may do another volume.

Below is a list of the authors for the first volume:

BEV ALLEN is an English writer who combines the wry with the fantastical, as in her collection ‘A Solemn Curfew’, which draws on the appetites and folklore of England, but who then defies expectations by writing SF/fantasy adventures liberally laced with soldiers. She describes herself as “a crazy old woman who writes weird short stories about things like a bloke having sex with his garden pond”.
ADRIAN COLE is an inhabitant of Southwest England. He has had over twenty novels published, and is known to science fiction/fantasy readers for his “Dreamlords” trilogy and other books. His latest gritty collection “Tough Guys” was released last year. A prolific short story writer, his Nick Nightmare series already has many occult detective fans in its grip, and he is also writing classic weird fantasy for publications such as Skelos Magazine.
AMANDA DEWEES is an American author who received her PhD in English literature from the University of Georgia and likes to startle people by announcing that her dissertation topic was vampire literature. She is already known for her stylish dark romances and thrillers, such as “With This Curse” which won the 2015 Daphne du Maurier Award in historical mystery/suspense. Her most recent novel “The Last Serenade” features the same Sybil Ingram as her story in this issue.
SAM L EDWARDS is a writer who likes dark poetry, dark fiction and darker beer. Though a Texan by nature, he is currently residing in California, from where he explores horror and weird themes in both prose and poetry, including his ‘Joe Bartred’ series of contemporary occult detective tales.
WILLIAM MEIKLE is a Scottish writer, now living in Canada, with over twenty novels published in the genre press and more than 300 short story credits in thirteen countries. His work includes all manner of speculative, supernatural and adventure fiction, with a sideline in continuing the Carnacki stories of William Hope Hodgson. When he's not writing he drinks beer, plays guitar, and dreams of fortune and glory.
ROBERT POHLE is originally from the Delaware Valley, and is a veteran writer of Westerns, historical and speculative fiction, as well as Holmesian fiction and his work on the films of Christopher Lee.
CHARLES R RUTLEDGE is the co-author of three books in the Griffin and Price Crime/Horror series, Blind Shadows, Congregations of the Dead, and A Hell Within, all written with James A. Moore, and his short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies. Charles lives in the Atlanta area with a cat named Bruce and far too many books.