Welcome to the website of author Edward Trimnell!
A down-on-their-luck young couple take advantage of an opportunity to strike it rich at a Southern Indiana casino. Instead they find themselves in the middle of a struggle between two ruthless criminal factions.
Welcome to state-of-the-art kitchen technology, 80s style!
My parents had the model in the middle (or something very close to it). This was a kitchen appliance that I positively monopolized.
Around 1982, I discovered fitness, and with that came an obsession with protein powder. Throughout my high school years, I experimented with various iterations of the whey-based protein shake. I often included such exotic ingredients as raw eggs and frozen bananas.
The great thing about a whey protein shake? It can be made to taste sort of like a milkshake, while still being good for you!
Much to my chagrin, I did not turn into Arnold Schwarzenegger, even with all those whey shakes, and countless hours spent in the gym. (Many of us really are limited by our genetics, in the quest to become Mr. Universe.)
I still like protein shakes, but I don’t even own a blender anymore. Nowadays, I opt for a modern, streamlined solution: the kinetic blender/shaker bottle. There are some good ones here on this Amazon page.
-ET
A blast of unseasonable cold has struck Cincinnati for Thanksgiving 2024, but I plan to have a good holiday nonetheless. I may even make it into the gym later today.
I hope that you, Dear Reader, will spend the day with people you love. If half of your friends/relatives voted for Trump, and half for Harris (a statistical likelihood throughout most of the country) dinnertime discussion may be interesting, to say the least.
Keep your cool and try to make the best of it. Remember that politics always change, but Thanksgiving remains the same, coming back year after year.
Just look at the above artwork from Norman Rockwell, 1919. The image is as inviting today as it was 105 years ago.
I love many people who, for whatever reason, don’t see the world through the same lenses I do. You likely do, too; and should.
I shall return on Friday. In the meantime, I hope you have a happy and safe Thanksgiving 2024.
-ET
Television in the 1980s wasn’t afraid to be shamelessly fun and escapist. Case-in-point: The A-Team, which aired from 1983 to 1987.
The premise of The A-Team was actually semi-plausible: during the Vietnam War, an elite American commando unit is charged with a crime they did not commit. Having escaped from a military prison, they survive in present-day (the 1980s) as “fixers” and soldiers of fortune (only for the good guys and noble causes, though!).
That was where the realism of the A-Team ended, however.
One thing about any A-Team episode: no matter how many rounds were fired, no one ever got hurt. Another thing about every A-Team episode: it was sure to end with a needlessly elaborate, Rube Goldberg-style plan. Often this involved modifying a commandeered vehicle into a makeshift tank.
The series made an international star of Mr. T, who had already distinguished himself in Rocky III (1982). The A-Team also starred Dirk Benedict, whom all Gen X teens and adolescents remembered from the much loved, but short-lived Battlestar Galactica (1978-9).
Yes, The A-Team was cheesy, throwaway television. But it was a great means to unwind for an hour on a Tuesday night in 1984.
-ET
The A-Team: The Complete Collection [DVD] (Amazon link)
Regular readers will know that I am a language aficionado. Years ago, I was a Japanese language translator/interpreter.
The languages that I’m currently learning and/or maintaining include Japanese, Spanish, Mandarin, German, and Russian.
I’ve dabbled some with Italian and Portuguese, too. But I’ll likely wait to get serious about those. (They both overlap too much with Spanish.)
I have been tempted by Polish at times. Poland is a country that I would very much like to visit someday.
But I have to confess—Polish is simply too much of a mess for me to take on at this point.
What do I mean by “a mess”? Watch the video above for starters. But all Slavic languages contain multiple case endings. Russian case endings are no piece of cake.
The biggest problem with Polish, though, is its whacky phonetic system.
Let’s begin with all the consonant clusters. Below are some of the Polish surnames in my immediate social circle:
Here is a simple Polish sentence:
Która jest godzina teraz w Warszawie?
(“What time is it in Warsaw now?”)
If you listen to the above sentence in Polish, you’ll find little relation between what you expect Latin letters to do, and what the Polish language requires them to do. When you learn Polish, you have to relearn the Latin alphabet again from scratch.
Polish is a language that really should be using the Cyrillic alphabet, instead of a [highly] modified version of the Latin alphabet. But given Poland’s current focus on the West, and its troubled history with Russia, I doubt that’s ever going to happen.
-ET
It’s 1978 and Christmas is approaching. That means lots of television ads for McDonald’s gift certificates!
As I recall, these came in denominations of 50 cents and 1 dollar. That was not a fortune even in 1978. (Stagflation, remember!) But in 1978, a single McDonald’s gift certificate of 50 cents or a dollar could at at least buy one menu item. Not like nowadays.
These were advertised as stocking stuffers and X-mas card inserts, not proper gifts. Even in the 1970s, we weren’t quite that parsimonious.
I don’t remember ever buying any of these, let alone receiving any. But McDonald’s really pushed them in television ads in November and December.
-ET
I never served in the US military. I am grateful to those who have served, and who do serve.
The above is a short video on the history of the holiday.
-ET
Jason Kelley is a college filmmaker who has accepted a challenge: walk eleven miles down the most haunted road in rural Ohio, the so-called Shaman’s Highway.
If Jason completes his task, he’ll win a $2,000 prize.
But before he reaches his destination, he’ll have to cope with evil spirits, trees that come to life, an undead witch, and packs of roving hellhounds!
A creepy supernatural thriller! Not for the faint of heart!
I’ve barely sampled Isaac Asimov’s fiction. (I own a book of his short stories.) But I caught a few interviews of the late science fiction author on YouTube, and found him to be an interesting character.
I was therefore open to reading his second autobiography, I, Asimov: a Memoir. (The title is a pun on his novel, I, Robot).
I’m finishing the book up now. Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) seems to have been a powerful combination of strong intellect with an engaging personality. Reading his biography, I almost felt as if I knew him. I regretted that I never met him, in fact.
Born in the Soviet Union, Asimov and his parents emigrated to New York when the future author was only three years old. (He notes several times, with regret, that he never learned Russian.)
I, Asimov will be of most interest to fans of his fiction, and to readers who want to learn something of his prolific writing habits. I fell into the latter category.
Asimov wrote or edited more than 500 books in his lifetime. He was certainly prolific. Asimov describes writing in addictive terms. Nothing, Asimov claimed, made him as happy as the time he spent at his typewriter.
Why the emphasis on “typewriter”? Asimov lived well into the personal computer/word processor age, but he preferred working on physical sheets of paper. He eventually acquired a word processor, but he used it mostly for typesetting his manuscripts before final submission.
Asimov did not survive into the age of truly modern word processing software (beginning around 1995). He did not live long enough to experience the Internet or social media, either. One suspects that he would have been an active blogger. (Asimov also wrote thousands of essays, letters, and postcards.)
He did not like to travel, and often turned down speaking engagements that would have required him to leave New York City. On this point I can sympathize with him; I have never enjoyed the logistics of travel, whether by car or by plane.
Asimov was an atheist, but he was not annoying in his atheism. He simply didn’t believe in God, or in a reality beyond the purely material. He was an avowed humanist, and had a strong (if irreligious) sense of right and wrong.
I, Asimov consists of 166 easy-to-read essays, arranged in more or less chronological order. I enjoyed Asimov’s memoir, and this book has made me want to take a deeper dive into his fiction.
-ET
Kindle Unlimited is Amazon’s main subscription ebook reading program. Kindle Unlimited gives you virtually unlimited (hence the name) reading privileges to a wide variety of titles, for a low monthly fee.
Not every title listed on Amazon is enrolled in Kindle Unlimited. Literary fiction from the big New York publishing houses generally is not included. You likely won’t find the latest Jonathan Franzen novel in Kindle Unlimited anytime in the near future.
Kindle Unlimited is heavy on genre fiction. This means: romance, space opera, LitRPG, fantasy, and horror.
I have a fair number of horror titles in Kindle Unlimited. I write supernatural horror, in the tradition of Peter Straub, H.P. Lovecraft, Bentley Little and E.F. Benson.
And yes (I know this sounds a bit pretentious) Stephen King. I have achieved barely a gazillionth fraction of King’s commercial success. But his formula of character-based, fast-moving horror is always on my mind when I sit down to write a horror tale.
What kind of horror don’t I write? If you want splatterpunk, or “extreme” horror (aka “torture porn”), then you should skip my books and stories. I have no interest in writing horror fiction that is endlessly grim and/or sadistic. My horror fiction is more akin to the campfire ghost story.
Below are the horror titles that I presently have enrolled in Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program. This means that you can read them for free if you’re a Kindle Unlimited subscriber.
To view one of these titles on Amazon, simply click on the image of any book, or any hyperlink below.
A college student takes a walk down the most haunted road in rural Ohio for a cash prize. This is a “haunted road” story, basically a tale of being stuck on a cursed country road at night. Ghosts, evil spirits, and hellhounds abound. Also, an evil witch that inhabits a covered bridge.
View Eleven Miles of Night on Amazon!
A coming-of-age story set on Halloween night, 1980. This is a tale of supernatural events in the American suburb. A classic horror tale for Generation X.
View 12 Hours of Halloween on Amazon!
The year is 1976, and the Headless Horseman rides again. This coming-of-age horror thriller is sure to please readers who appreciate character-based supernatural fiction with lots of twists and turns.
The basic idea is: the ghosts of American history coming back to haunt Middle America in 1976, the year of the American Bicentennial. (And yes, I’m old enough to remember the Bicentennial, although I was rather young at the time.)
View Revolutionary Ghosts on Amazon!
In early 2016, I read an article in The Economist about the luk thep “spirit dolls” of Thailand.
Manufactured and sold in Thailand, these are factory-made dolls with a unique sales point: each doll is supposedly infused with the spirit of a young child that passed prematurely.
The luk thep are intended to bring comfort to their owners. (They are marketed to childless women.) To me, though, the whole idea sounded rather macabre.
And I couldn’t help thinking: what if one of the dolls was infused with a child spirit that wasn’t very nice? What if that same doll ended up in the possession of an American woman who happened to visit Thailand on a business trip? Luk Thep is a fast-paced ghost tale that spans two continents.
Spanning a nearly 140-year period from 1882 to 2020, The Rockland Horror is a series about dark events at a cursed house in rural Indiana.
View The Rockland Horror series on Amazon!
While I recommend Kindle Unlimited for fans of horror fiction and ebooks, I should also point out that I have a number of horror stories you can read online here for FREE.
From classic ghost tales to creature features, you’ll find a considerable range. Check them out!
I recently received an email from a reader of 12 Hours of Halloween, asking me about “Devil’s Night” and the 1980s. The reader wanted to know if I participated in any Devil’s Night mayhem as a youth.
For those of you who don’t know the term: Devil’s Night, aka Damage Night, or Mischief Night, is traditionally the night before Halloween, October 30.
The observance apparently dates back to the 1790s. In the 1800s, this was a night when children engaged in innocent pranks, like soaping neighbors’ windows.
But nothing remains innocent for long, does it? By the time I was a kid, in the late 1970s, Devil’s Night had acquired a bad reputation. This was largely owing to the destructive arson sprees that took place in cities like Detroit on October 30, starting in the 1960s.
Strait-laced suburban youth that I was, I wanted no part of any of that. Nor did I hear much about such pranks during my trick-or-treating years. I think a few kids may have toilet-papered trees. But that’s about the extent of it.
In my personal circle, I have been acquainted with exactly one person who admitted to serious Devil’s Night misconduct: my maternal grandfather.
My maternal grandfather (who loved Halloween) was one of my favorite people. He was also a World War II veteran.
But before all of that, he was a youth in rural Southern Ohio, on the westernmost fringes of Appalachia. He grew up in the 1930s. And if you think those were innocent times, then you’ve been watching too many episodes of The Waltons.
On Devil’s Night, my grandfather and his friends used to engage in some marginally malicious hijinks. Much of this consisted of tipping over outhouses
My grandfather told me about one Devil’s Night on which a crotchety old man (who was the bane of local children) fired a shotgun at him and his friends in the dark.
No one was harmed. According to my grandfather, though, the man had fired his shotgun with the intent of doing serious bodily injury to the trespassers. (And they had just tipped over his outhouse.)
Do I approve of what my grandfather and his friends did that night? No, of course not. But I’m quite grateful that that old man’s aim was off. Otherwise, I might not be here to write this post.
-ET
On Halloween night 1980, three young friends face the perils of a supernatural curse.
Their familiar suburban environment is transformed into a nightmare hellscape of witches, evil spirits, and unimaginable creatures.
A terrifying coming-of-age tale for Generation X, or anyone nostalgic for the 1980s!
E.F. Benson (1867 – 1940) was an exceptionally prolific British author. Benson penned numerous novels, essay collections, and histories.
Benson was also an avid writer of ghost stories.
I am presently making my way through Night Terrors: The Ghost Stories of E.F. Benson (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural), which seems to be a complete collection of all the ghost stories Benson ever wrote. (The book is more than 700 pages in length.)
These are very good stories, on the whole. I enjoy Benson’s work somewhat more than I like that of his contemporary, M.R. James. Benson’s tales are more lurid, prefiguring the pulp writers of the 1930s and 1940s.
E.F. Benson’s ghost stories influenced H.P. Lovecraft, who influenced Stephen King.
Benson’s stories do follow a pattern, however. A single male protagonist travels to a location where supernatural events are known to take place. Often this is a resort, an old manor, or a guest house.
Strange things happen, and the action builds to a not unpredictable climax. The haunted location is usually the scene of a gruesome murder in the distant past.
So yes, there is a formula, but an entertaining one. If you like ghost stories with an old-fashioned feel to them, you might want to give this collection a try.
-ET
In 1989 I was 21 years old and a student at the University of Cincinnati.
I was also deep in the initial phase of my fascination with Japan, its language, and its culture.
Japan would become a lifelong fascination of mine…with some inevitable diminutions. Thirty-five years later, I am no longer quite as enraptured with every aspect of Japan as I once was. But I still spend time each day listening to Japanese-language YouTubers, podcasters, and media broadcasts. If a story about Japan appears in the Western media, I’m usually on top of it.
But back to 1989. Around the same time that I discovered Japan, I also discovered the novels of James Clavell. The two were interconnected, you see. It is impossible to read Clavell and not become interested in the cultures of East Asia. James Clavell’s books fueled my early interest in learning Japanese.
Clavell (1921 – 1994) was a British-Australian man of the World War II generation. He published most of his Asian Saga novels between the early 1960s and the mid-1980s. This was a time when Asian languages and cultures were not widely known in the West, and a certain amount of exoticism, or what is sometimes called orientalism, was par for the course.
Clavell’s work has thusly been critiqued by the nattering nabobs of political correctness. Not all of their criticisms are completely unfair…from the perspective of the third decade of the twenty-first century, that is. But Shōgun, Clavell’s novel about Edo Period Japan, was published in 1975. Almost 50 years ago. In those days, almost no one in the United States bothered to learn anything about Japan, except for the fact that Japan had been our World War II enemy.
Clavell often got the history wrong, too. Shōgun is loosely based on the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate in the early 1600s. Clavell captures the big sweep of that historical period, but the names and personalities are largely fictional.
The main character of Shōgun, John Blackthorne, is loosely based on William Adams (1564 -1620), known in Japan as Miura Anjin. Suffice it to say that the real William Adams was not nearly as exciting as Clavell’s creation.
What Clavell brought to the table was the genuine enthusiasm of a Westerner who was trying his level best to understand East Asian culture. He did this imperfectly, to be sure. But his passion for the subject matter was infectious.
Ditto for Clavell’s skills as a storyteller. When he was at his best, Clavell could tell a story that would hold your interest even if you didn’t share his enthusiasm for Asia.
I distinctly remember reading Shōgun in 1989. The novel was already more than a decade old then. Although I was busy with schoolwork and a part-time job, I nevertheless made my way through this 1,110-page potboiler within about two weeks.
That was 35 years ago. I occasionally reread books, provided a.) the book is worth a second reading, and b.) at least 10 years have elapsed since my first reading. Shōgun made the cut on both counts. This time, however, I’m listening to the audiobook—all 52 hours worth.
As noted above, my fascination with Japan, while still extant, doesn’t burn quite as intensely as it did in 1989. Japan was an unknown land of adventure for me 35 years ago. Since 1989, I’ve spent a lot of time in Japan…mostly for business. For me, Japan has become not the land of samurais and geishas, but the land of interminable business meetings and automobile factories. But I still love the place.
James Clavell’s storytelling abilities in Shōgun are just as good the second time around. After 35 years, I still recall some of the book’s major plot points, but enough time has passed that I’m still surprised by much of what I read. I also have the benefit of historical knowledge about Japan. (I knew almost nothing about Japan’s history in 1989.) And yes, I’ve been there now, multiple times.
What about the television adaptations?
The first TV adaptation of Shōgun starred Richard Chamberlain. It ran on NBC for five days in September 1980. You didn’t need any streaming subscriptions or memberships. The show was supported by commercials.
I recall watching the first screen adaptation of Shōgun when it ran, but in 1980 I was 12 years old. I knew next to nothing about Japan, and most of it went over my head.
I’m aware of the streaming FX series which was released this year. A remake was long overdue after 45 years; and the teaser clips I have seen online look promising.
Typical of the streaming era, there is no way to watch the show without buying a subscription to Hulu or Disney+. How I long for the benighted “old days”, when television was mostly free, and far more convenient to watch. But I digress.
I’ll get around to watching the 2024 screen adaptation of Shōgun at some point, I’m sure. In the meantime, I will content myself with this second journey through the book, via audio. I’m a little more than halfway through, and nowhere close to being bored.
-ET
In 1938, the planners in Nazi Germany know that war is coming. They are eager to acquire the atom bomb.
They are working against Allied governments, operating both in Germany and abroad. (And not all of the Reich’s accomplices are German nationals.)
A group of ordinary Americans and Germans are forced to choose sides. Their choices will lead them into a web of betrayal, murder, and espionage.
Their paths meet in Cairo, Egypt, where the Reich is hunting a fugitive atomic physicist.
Betty Lehman is a 19-year-old girl from Dutch Falls, Pennsylvania. Her family is active in the German-American Bund. Betty has been recruited to betray her country in the service of the Reich.
Rudolf Schenk is an undercover agent of the German Gestapo. He wants to do his duty. But can he abandon his last shred of conscience?
Jack McCallum is an American treasure hunter in Cairo. He falls for two women: one who is working undercover for the Third Reich, one who is fleeing the Gestapo.
Heinrich Vogel is a physicist who fled Germany for Egypt. He and his young adult daughter, Ingrid, face a daily game of cat-and-mouse with the Gestapo. His goal: to reach Britain or America before the Gestapo reaches him and his daughter!
Note: The individual books will still be available on the series page!
I’ve added an extended preview here on the site for The Consultant.
The Consultant is the story of an American marketing consultant who takes a business trip to Osaka, Japan, and talks to the wrong woman in a bar.
One thing leads to another, and he ends up in North Korea.
The story is loosely (I emphasize loosely) based on real events.
The North Korean government has carried out targeted kidnapping campaigns of civilians over the years. Most of the known targets have been South Koreans and Japanese. But there is no reason why an American couldn’t be the target of such a kidnapping. This novel explores that scenario.
The Consultant is a good read for Tom Clancy fans who also like James Clavell…or James Clavell fans who also like a bit of action.
