Category: book recommendation

Social interactions in the 1980s were a different game completely

In the 1980s, there was no social media and no dating apps. We didn’t even have email.

If you wanted to meet someone new, there was usually only one way to go about it.

You had to approach them in person, and strike up a conversation.

Below is a scene from NO SURE THING: A GEN X COMING-OF-AGE NOVEL SET IN 1988. In the scene below, the main character must jump through numerous hoops to meet an attractive young woman:

NO SURE THING: A GEN X COMING-OF-AGE NOVEL SET IN 1988

CHAPTER 43

Since my hand had previously been stamped, I had little trouble gaining reentry to the Casablanca Club. I walked by the doorman as if I owned the place, flashing him a glimpse of my left hand. He gave me no trouble this time.

Once inside, I got another break: there was no sign of Lance Corporal Evans or his fellow marines.

But where was Sergeant George Tuttle, fearless defender of the law in Cincinnati “for more than thirty  years?”

Maybe I would get lucky there. Maybe the cop had called it a night, or (more likely) been drawn away from the Casablanca Club by other police business.

I only had to walk around for a few minutes before I spotted her: the young woman from the Tangeman University Center. The pretty blonde who had caught my attention that day.

She was standing by herself at the edge of the nearest dance floor. Where were the other young women she had entered with, the ones I had assumed to be her friends? Was she meeting a guy here?

I didn’t know. And in that moment, I didn’t care. It was full speed ahead.

“Hi,” I said, when I got within speaking distance.

She turned toward me. I thought I detected a flash of recognition.

“You go to the University of Cincinnati, don’t you?” I asked.

Strictly speaking, this was a lame question with an obvious answer. The Casablanca Club was located a few blocks from the university, and we were both of university age. Probably half of the patrons here tonight were university students.

But few lines uttered by young men to young women in bars and nightclubs are brilliant. This wasn’t Toastmasters. Nor was I making an argument before Dr. Blevins. I was willing to improvise.

She smiled, but seemed at a loss for words.

“I think we may have spoken briefly in the Tangeman Center. That day you were looking at all the Armed Forces displays.

“More like I spoke briefly,” she said. “The proverbial cat seemed to have gotten your tongue.”

“There are no cats on my tongue now.”

This had to have been the most awkward line a man ever uttered to a woman in a bar. But it did the trick. She laughed.

“I’m Kim,” she said.

“I’m Paul.”

We talked for a few minutes more. I learned that she was a marketing major…common enough at the University of Cincinnati.

This was actually working, I suddenly realized. There was none of the awkwardness and fumbling that I’d felt when trying to talk to Tara and Courtney.

The difference, of course, was that the attraction with Kim was mutual, rather than one-sided. I therefore didn’t have to talk her into anything. All I had to do was go with the flow, be moderately assertive, and not say anything stupid.

But I was also conscious of Scott, who would right now be waiting for me in my car. I was also aware that in my very presence here, I was defying police orders, and breaking a promise I had made to a sergeant in the Cincinnati Police Department.

“I’ve enjoyed talking to you, Kim, but—”

“But now you have to go.”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“Call it intuition. Or maybe that you seem an awful lot like someone in a hurry.”

“I am in a hurry,” I confessed. “My friend is waiting for me at my car. Before I go, though: would you give me your phone number? I’d like to call you sometime.”

She smiled. “That’s usually what people have in mind when they ask for someone’s phone number. They want to call them sometime.”

A few minutes later, I was walking toward the main entrance/exit of The Casablanca Club with Kim’s phone number in my pocket.

She had written it on one of the club’s cocktail napkins, along with her last name. She was Kim Jones.

I was feeling on top of the world, more or less. Wait until Scott heard about this, I thought triumphantly.

I was outside in the parking lot of the Casablanca Club, almost home free, when everything unraveled.

“I thought you’d learned your lesson,” an older male voice declared. “But I guess I was wrong about that, wasn’t I?”

NO SURE THING: A GEN X COMING-OF-AGE NOVEL SET IN 1988 is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play and Apple Books.

1932: supernatural zombie horror in rural Ohio

My maternal grandfather, born in 1921, grew up in rural Adams County, Ohio. He told me so much about that time and place, that I sometimes feel as if I lived it all myself.

“Hay Moon” is a short story set in rural Ohio in the summer of 1932. My grandfather never told me a story like this, filled with supernatural forces and the undead. But his real-life accounts of his childhood years helped me add a realistic flavor to the tale, if I say so myself.

You can listen to the story here, or on my YouTube channel (where you’ll find lots of additional audio content).

You can purchase this story as part of my Hay Moon and Other Stories collection. If you like my approach to historical horror, consider The Rockland Horror historical horror series, which is also available in a five-volume boxset on Kindle.

-ET

1980s college fiction: new cover reveal

NO SURE THING has a new cover. The setting is a modified image of the University of Cincinnati campus, which I attended in the late 1980s.

Who should read NO SURE THING? You’ll enjoy this book if you fondly remember teen and young adult movies of the 80s. The book is based on a number of ideas I’ve been kicking around for years, but it really crystalized when I rewatched Risky Business, the 1983 film that made Tom Cruise a household name.

NO SURE THING is available at Amazon, Google Play, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and Apple Books.

-ET

I met a famous poet, I asked a stupid question

People occasionally ask me what I like in the way of poetry. When this happens, I hem and haw around, and try to change the subject. I might suggest the lyrics of Neil Peart, the drummer and chief songwriter for the Canadian rock band Rush.

But that’s a non-answer. Neil Peart mostly wrote song lyrics, which are distinct from—though closely related to—poetry that is meant to be read from a page, rather than performed as music.

The sad fact is: a lot of contemporary American poetry is not very good. Regular readers will know that I’m fond of trashing the twenty-first century. But the decline of English-language verse began far back in the last century. By the time I was born (1968), English-language poetry was already in decline.

Most of it seems to fall into one of two camps. At one extreme, there is sappy love poetry that imitates the late Rod McKuen. At the other extreme, there is slam poetry, which devolved from the rantings of Allen Ginsberg.

But not all is doom and gloom. Richard Wilbur (1921-1997) was a twentieth century poet who wrote verse as the English language gods intended it to be written. That is: with discipline and structure, and focused on concretes rather than abstractions.

Here’s a sample of Wilbur’s classic poem, “Advice to a Prophet”:

“When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,   

Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,

Not proclaiming our fall but begging us

In God’s name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,   

The long numbers that rocket the mind;

Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,   

Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.   

How should we dream of this place without us?—

The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,   

A stone look on the stone’s face?…”

That is great stuff. I loved these lines when I first read them, back in the mid-1980s. And I love them still.

I briefly met Richard Wilbur in 1987, when he was a guest speaker at Northern Kentucky University, where I was a student. I was already a moderately enthusiastic fan by this point. I asked him a question or two during the Q&A session— probably dumb questions. But hey, I was nineteen years old at the time.

If you are interested in poetry at all, then you should read Richard Wilbur’s poems. The best way to do this is by purchasing his omnibus collection, Collected Poems 1943-2004: Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Winner―Sixty Years of American Verse. I purchased this volume a few years ago. It is well worth whatever Amazon is charging for it nowadays.

-ET

Killer robots in the factory

“The Robots of Jericho” is one of my early short stories. I wrote this back in 2009.

I spent a lot of years in the automotive industry, and countless hours in automotive plants.

Many of these factories had industrial robots. If you’ve ever watched industrial robots move, you’ll agree that they often appear to be alive.

Of course, I know that industrial robots aren’t really alive and sentient. But what if they were? “The Robots of Jericho” is a story about such a scenario.

“The Robots of Jericho” is available in print and ebook as one of the stories in my Hay Moon short story collection. But you’re welcome to listen to the story in the video below:

New release: ‘No Sure Thing’ for Gen X fans of the 1980s

The year is 1988. Anything can happen, but nothing is guaranteed!

Get ready for a coming-of-age story that will remind you of your favorite teen/young adult movies from the 1980s.

As the year 1988 begins, Paul Nelson is nineteen going on twenty. Paul is an economics major at the University of Cincinnati. He has big plans to go to work at a major bank after graduation.

But Paul’s life is not without problems. His first serious girlfriend has dumped him, and his best friend Scott gets all the female attention, seemingly without trying.

Paul meets a witty young woman who seems to be his perfect match. But then he unexpectedly falls for an older woman who has secrets and an unknown agenda.

Paul’s life spins out of control. He’s also incurred the unwanted attention of the Cincinnati Police Department, criminal elements, and a military man who detests him on sight.

Filled with a wide range of memorable characters and a generous dollop of 80s nostalgia, ‘No Sure Thing’ is a fun and fast-paced tale from a bygone but fondly remembered era.

**View NO SURE THING on Amazon!**

TERMINATION MAN: Corporate HR represents your employer, not you

TERMINATION MAN is the story of Craig Walker, a management consultant who specializes in “removing” problem employees through entrapment and techniques of “social engineering”.

TERMINATION MAN is fiction, but it is based on my experience in the automotive industry. The novel’s premise also has a basis in HR practices.

“Managing out” is a common corporate HR practice. When an employee is “managed out”, her situation is made so unpleasant or unsustainable that she will effectively fire herself, and voluntarily resign. This saves the company hassle and expense on multiple levels.

TERMINATION MAN is an embellishment of the managing out practice, of course. But the principle exists, and all HR professionals are familiar with it.

Another thing to remember: corporate HR is not your friend. Corporate HR does not represent you. Corporate HR represents your employer, the company.

This doesn’t mean that corporate HR reps are automatically sinister, venal, etc. (Most are not.) But you should never forget who pays their salaries. (Hint: not you.)

-ET

**View TERMINATION MAN ON AMAZON**

Reads I remember: ‘The Great Brain’

I was ten or eleven years old when I discovered John Dennis Fitzgerald’s (1906–1988) semi-autobiographical series of children’s books, The Great Brain. The books are set at the end of the 1800s in Utah. The eponymous “Great Brain” is a fictionalized version of the author’s older brother.

I’m not sure why I started reading these books back in…1979, it must have been. Probably my mom was familiar with them (?)

Anyway, I recall getting my hands on the first one, and reading the rest in quick succession. Seven books were then available. (The original series was published between 1967 and 1976. A final book, based on Fitzgerald’s notes, was published in 1995, seven years after the author’s death.)

I skimmed through the first few pages of The Great Brain using Amazon’s preview function. I found myself being drawn into the story once again—more than 45 years after my initial reading.

My TBR list is already too long, and children’s fiction has never been my thing as an adult. I must say, though, I would not mind reading The Great Brain books again, or at least one or two of them. This really was—and is—youth fiction at its best. Far better than the much overrated Harry Potter novels, I dare say.

-ET

**View THE GREAT BRAIN on Amazon**

How about a haunted road tale?

ELEVEN MILES OF NIGHT is a tale of horror on a haunted road.

Jason Kelley is a college student who agrees to take a walk down the most paranormally active road in Ohio. His mission: to document the phenomena he encounters on the cursed stretch of rural highway. 

Along the way he encounters hellhounds, malevolent spirits, and trees that come to life. 

If you like traditional supernatural horror tales, you’ll love ELEVEN MILES OF NIGHT. Available on Amazon now.

‘Save the Cat!’ and the fiction writer 

I recently listened to the audiobook version of Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat!

Save the Cat! was originally conceived as a screenwriting book, but there is now a series of Save the Cat books for fiction writers, too. I’ve read Jessica Brody’s Save the Cat! Writes a Novel: The Last Book On Novel Writing You’ll Ever Need.

V iew it on Amazon

Save the Cat! is a 15-point formula found in many screenplays and movies. Is this formula worthwhile for novelists and short story writers?

Yes, and no, and maybe.

Save the Cat forces you to think about stories as systems of moving parts. This may be a new and necessary insight for many writers.

Most fiction writers know that they need an inciting incident, and a climax/conclusion. Where fiction writers most often struggle is in the vast middle portions of novels (and even long short stories). Save the Cat has remedies for this. The midpoint and “bad guys close in” are concepts that can be profitably employed in any story form.

One can argue that novelists should write with movies and television in mind, anyway. Visual media has affected the expectations that readers bring to fiction, and you ignore this at your peril. Try to write like Melville (or even Saul Bellow) today, and you won’t get far.

View it on Amazon

That said, stories and novels are fundamentally different from screen-based media. A novel is not a screenplay, just as a screenplay is not a novel. This may be why screen adaptations of novels are seldom satisfactory for viewers who have already read the book.

In particular: the screenwriter’s obsession with scenes and “show don’t tell”. Scenes are the building blocks of any story, but they aren’t the sole building blocks of fiction. All fiction contains some backstory and exposition that simply couldn’t exist in a movie. This is true even of commercial fiction. The “show don’t tell” dictum, when carried to extremes, can become counterproductive. In this regard, it’s a lot like the oft-repeated “no adverbs” rule.

If your goal is to write screenplays, stick with the original Blake Snyder book. If you’re interested in writing fiction, go with the Jessica Brody spinoff, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel.

-ET

The year is 1938…

The year is 1938. Betty Lehmann is an undercover German spy. Can anyone stop her? Find out in THE CAIRO DECEPTION, a 5-book, World War II historical fiction series.

**Read it for FREE in Kindle Unlimited**

 

 

1980s flashback: Halloween horror in the Shipley House (a scene from 12 HOURS OF HALLOWEEN)

Halloween 1980

You’re twelve years old, and trick-or-treating with your two best friends.

You know what they say about the Shipley House. Something very bad happened there in 1959.

For more than twenty years, the Shipley house has stood vacant. No one can live there for long.

You’ve been warned not to enter.

But it’s Halloween, after all. How can you resist?

You try the front door. You’re surprised to find that the Shipley house is unlocked. Almost as if the house has been waiting for you.

You go inside, and walk down the hallway toward the bedroom at the end of the corridor.

Be careful: what you find in that room may drive you mad. And you may discover things about yourself that you don’t want to know.

***

The Shipley house is featured in one of the chapters of 12 HOURS OF HALLOWEEN, a Gen X coming-of-age supernatural horror tale set on Halloween night, 1980.

Three young friends decide to go out for “one last Halloween before they enter their teenage years. But this will be a Halloween like no other.

12 HOURS OF HALLOWEEN is available on Amazon, and you can read it for free in Kindle Unlimited.

**View it on Amazon**

“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, and the secret lives of the middle-aged

In the spring of 1981, my seventh-grade English teacher assigned our class “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, a short story by James Thurber.

The eponymous lead character is a middle-age man who has gone into a trance in his day-to-day life. Walter Mitty is married, but there is no spark between him and his wife. (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty was published in 1939, before the advent of no-fault divorce.) The story’s sparse 2,000-odd words don’t tell us much more about the details of Mitty’s circumstances, but we can easily imagine him as a low- or mid-level administrative employee in an office somewhere.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) theatrical release poster

To escape the dullness of his actual life, Walter Mitty retreats into various daydreams. He is alternately a US Navy hydroplane captain, a bomber pilot, and a brilliant surgeon. Mitty’s daydreams of a more glorious existence are inevitably interrupted when someone—often his wife—scolds him for zoning out.

I was twelve years old when I read this story for the first time. I remember enjoying some of the imagery of the story. But as a seventh-grader, I simply could not get my arms around the ennui and resignation that often accompanies middle age. I had not yet been on the planet for thirteen years. Everything was still new to me.

I recently reread Thurber’s story at the age of 57. What a difference 45 years can make, in the way one interprets a work of fiction.

I wouldn’t describe myself as a Walter Mitty. I don’t daydream about flying a navy hydroplane while I’m driving a car, as Mitty does. But at the age of 57, I do understand how a person can become disconnected from the larger world.

American society is forever fixated on the future, and that naturally tends toward a youth obsession. Once you reach a certain age, you tend to fall off society’s radar. People are much more interested in what younger folks are doing.

The flip side of that is that you, in turn, are much less interested in what most other people are talking about. This doesn’t necessarily lead to constant daydreaming. But it does lead to a sense that you are not as fully a part of this world as you once were.

This process might be unavoidable, and it might not be completely unhealthy, either, for aging individuals or for society at-large. Society would never change if the concerns of the same cohort of people forever dominated the zeitgeist. For the individual, gradually losing touch with the world—even in late middle age—might be viewed as an advance preparation for leaving the world entirely.

Anyway, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” has apparently struck a chord with a lot of people since it was first published. The story was made into a movie in 1947, and then again at 2013.

I found “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” in the recent anthology, A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker: 1925-2025. You can also find the story on The New Yorker’s website.

-ET

The Headless Horseman returns

How I wrote a horror novel called Revolutionary Ghosts

Or…

Can an ordinary teenager defeat the Headless Horseman, and a host of other vengeful spirits from America’s revolutionary past?

The big idea

I love history, and I love supernatural horror tales.  “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was therefore always one of my favorite short stories. This classic tale by Washington Irving describes how a Hessian artillery officer terrorized the young American republic several decades after his death.

The Hessian was decapitated by a Continental Army cannonball at the Battle of White Plains, New York, on October 28, 1776. According to some historical accounts, a Hessian artillery officer really did meet such an end at the Battle of White Plains. I’ve read several books about warfare in the 1700s and through the Age of Napoleon. Armies in those days obviously did not have access to machine guns, flamethrowers, and the like. But those 18th-century cannons could inflict some horrific forms of death, decapitation among them.

I was first exposed to the “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” via the 1949 Disney film of the same name. The Disney adaptation was already close to 30 years old, but still popular, when I saw it as a kid sometime during the 1970s.

Headless Horsemen from around the world

While doing a bit of research for Revolutionary Ghosts, I discovered that the Headless Horseman is a folklore motif that reappears in various cultures throughout the world.

In Irish folklore, the dullahan or dulachán (“dark man”) is a headless, demonic fairy that rides a horse through the countryside at night. The dullahan carries his head under his arm. When the dullahan stops riding, someone dies.

Scottish folklore includes a tale about a headless horseman named Ewen. Ewen was  beheaded when he lost a clan battle at Glen Cainnir on the Isle of Mull. His death prevented him from becoming a chieftain. He roams the hills at night, seeking to reclaim his right to rule.

Finally, in English folklore, there is the 14th century epic poem, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”. After Gawain kills the green knight in living form (by beheading him) the knight lifts his head, rides off, and challenges Gawain to a rematch the following year.

But Revolutionary Ghosts is focused on the Headless Horseman of American lore: the headless horseman who chased Ichabod Crane through the New York countryside in the mid-1790s. 

The Headless Horseman isn’t the only historical spirit to stir up trouble in the novel. John André, the executed British spy, makes an appearance, too. (John André was a real historical figure.)

I also created the character of Marie Trumbull, a Loyalist whom the Continental Army sentenced to death for betraying her country’s secrets to the British. But Marie managed to slit her own throat while still in her cell, thereby cheating the hangman. Marie Trumbull was a dark-haired beauty in life. In death, she appears as a desiccated, reanimated corpse. She carries the blade that she used to take her own life, all those years ago.

Oh, and Revolutionary Ghosts also has an army of spectral Hessian soldiers. I had a lot of fun with them!

The Spirit of ’76

Most of the novel is set in the summer of 1976. An Ohio teenager, Steve Wagner, begins to sense that something strange is going on near his home. There are slime-covered hoofprints in the grass. There are unusual sounds on the road at night. People are disappearing.

Steve gradually comes to an awareness of what is going on….But can he convince anyone else, and stop the Headless Horseman, before it’s too late?

I decided to set the novel in 1976 for a number of reasons. First of all, this was the year of the American Bicentennial. The “Spirit of ’76 was everywhere in 1976. That created an obvious tie-in with the American Revolution.

Nineteen seventy-six was also a year in which Vietnam, Watergate, and the turmoil of the 1960s were all recent memories. The mid-1970s were a time of national anxiety and pessimism (kind of like now). The economy was not good. This was the era of energy crises and stagflation.

Reading the reader reviews of Revolutionary Ghosts, I am flattered to get appreciative remarks from people who were themselves about the same age as the main character in 1976:

“…I am 62 years old now and 1976 being the year I graduated high school, I remember it pretty well. Everything the main character mentions (except the ghostly stuff), I lived through and remember. So that was an added bonus for me.”

“I’m 2 years younger than the main character so I could really relate to almost every thing about him.”

I’m actually a bit younger than the main character. In 1976 I was eight years old. But as regular readers of this blog will know, I’m nostalgic by nature. I haven’t forgotten the 1970s or the 1980s, because I still spend a lot of time in those decades.

If you like the 1970s, you’ll find plenty of nostalgic nuggets in Revolutionary Ghosts, like Bicentennial Quarters, and the McDonald’s Arctic Orange Shakes of 1976.

***

Also, there’s something spooky about the past, just because it is the past. As L.P. Hartley said, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

For me, 1976 is a year I can clearly remember. And yet—it is shrouded in a certain haziness. There wasn’t nearly as much technology. Many aspects of daily life were more “primitive” then.

It isn’t at all difficult to believe that during that long-ago summer, the Headless Horseman might have come back from the dead to terrorize the American heartland…

View REVOLUTIONARY GHOSTS on Amazon