Tag Archives: horror

Small Town Writer Tribes

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The bookstore, like every small town shop, rejoices in several networks and tribal affiliations. The tribe of writers is just one of these. Today I present three members who have recently published their own work–resulting in some very diverse stories, now available on-line.

Joann Lee

Joann’s mom is the lady my friend Elizabeth and I bought our goats from. (Welcome to the networking hotbed of rural living!) Joann lives where people tend to believe her lifestyle is not okay and theirs to comment on; she balances daily between being herself and flying below the radar. It comes out in her work, a romance about two women from very different backgrounds spending the summer at the beach.

Broken Star is available from jms-books.com.

Sheila Mayes

Sheila is from Pennington Gap and has written a novel based on real events, the story of a young girl from Afghanistan who struggles to get an education in America. In her words, the book “was important, but not a priority. As I was writing, Malala, a 15-year-old Pakistani girl, was shot in the head on the way home from school by the Taliban. My writing hit fast forward, the book became a priority and I completed it in March 2013. I am only one person, but I knew I had to do something to help end the violence against women all over the world.”

Sheila is donating a  portion of her e-book’s sales to the Malala Fund to help educate and end violence toward women. Sheila is on Facebook.

Michael Samerdyke

Michael is the writing group coordinator at our bookstore; if you’ve read Little Bookstore, he’s the one who started the group and has nurtured it these past five years. He writes lovely, strange short stories that range from hearts-ripped-out-of-bodies horror, to ripping through your heart with empathy at his nuanced portrayals of how people interact. His snowmen dance, his cat people long for more than blood. http://www.lulu or Barnes & Noble on-line carry Mike’s e-books, both collections of short stories linked by a framing story.

In Featured Creatures: a Phantasmagoria, space invaders, experiments run amok, rampaging dinosaurs and other horrors parade across the Star-Lite Drive-In’s screen for the greatest summer film fest ever. In The Dream Cabinet of Dr. Kino, the mysterious doc travels from town to town showing visions of mad scientists and monsters, vampires and werewolves, and other horrors in his cabinet.

Enjoy!

Season of Horror has Begun

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Lock your doors. Turn up the lights. Don’t answer that knock. The season of terror has come.

The garden produce is ready.

As Halloween approaches and the publishing industry flings its fall line of vampires into the reading metropolises of the world, we small towners know the difference between urban fantasy fear and the truly terrifying realities of rural life.

The gardeners–those quiet neighbors with the unnatural interest in what’s in the ground behind their house–are walking the Earth at night. Nobody knows them very well, but they’re easy to spot in straw hats that hide their glowing red eyes. Like zombies of the apocalypse, they stagger along sidewalks, dripping red tomato blood from shopping bags hung on door handles, leaving butternut squash the size of baseball bats in unlocked cars, pushing piles of pickling cucumbers through a broken shed window.

Unlike zombies, the gardeners can run fast. Sea water won’t melt them, silver bullets can’t bring them down. Stake a tomato and it grows faster. This is the Unstoppable Invasion that horror fans have secretly feared for so long.

True terror is this: Soylent Green is zucchini.

So lock your doors. Don’t go out at night. The bad harvest moon is rising, tugging at the blood of every home-grown vegetable to rise and incite the sinking of fangs–or dentures, or whatever–into its flesh. Resistance is futile.

(Caption Contest V closes tomorrow! Visit August 14 to leave entry and view others.)