It’s an ordinary spring afternoon in suburban Cincinnati, 1980.
Eighteen-year-old Michelle Blevins is home with her younger brother when a stranger rings the doorbell.
The stranger is wearing a blazer, tie, and aviator sunglasses. He says he represents a local law firm. He says Michelle’s parents are in trouble.
And he really wants to come inside.
That’s the setup for “The Door-to-Door Man,” my latest original short story for YouTube.
Those of us who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s will remember that this was the era of “stranger danger.”
In some ways, the world was considerably less connected than it is today. There were no cell phones, doorbell cameras, GPS trackers, or Internet searches. If a stranger appeared at your front door, you couldn’t pull out your phone and immediately find out who he was.
At the same time, people were becoming increasingly aware that the world wasn’t necessarily as safe as they had once imagined.
Serial killers, violent crime, and mysterious disappearances regularly made the news. Parents warned their children about strangers. And yet it was still perfectly normal for unfamiliar people—salesmen, repairmen, deliverymen, religious solicitors, and others—to simply walk up to your house and ring the doorbell.
That combination provides the backdrop for “The Door-to-Door Man.”
I’ve been experimenting with writing very short fiction specifically for YouTube: complete stories that can be read or listened to in a single sitting, accompanied by atmospheric visuals.
“The Door-to-Door Man” is one of these stories. It’s a tale of suspense rather than supernatural horror. There are no ghosts, monsters, or paranormal forces here. Just an ordinary young woman, an ordinary suburban house—and a stranger at the door who may not be what he claims to be.
You can watch and listen to the complete story in the video accompanying this post.
If you enjoy “The Door-to-Door Man”…
You might also want to check out my DEADLY BYWAYS series.
Deadly Byways consists of six novels set in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Like “The Door-to-Door Man,” these stories explore the darker side of an era that many of us remember with nostalgia—but which had plenty of dangers and shadows of its own.
If you enjoy suspense stories about ordinary people confronting extraordinary dangers—especially stories set against the backdrop of America several decades ago—DEADLY BYWAYS may be for you.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy “The Door-to-Door Man.”
And remember: be careful who you open your front door to.
Seth Godin has written an uncharacteristically scathing piece on the Hobbesian state of Amazon advertising. His basic thesis is that Amazon’s reliance on PPC ad revenue has created some perverse incentives.
The company used to focus on delivering the optimal product listings to consumers at the lowest prices. All of this was powered by Amazon’s internal search engine.
This process is known as organic discovery, and it benefited both buyers and sellers.
Organic discovery still exists to a certain extent on Amazon. But now there is something more nefarious and complicated in the mix. Amazon now makes about a billion dollars per week from search ads. PPC (pay-per-click) ads litter every available space on Amazon, including the top of your search results. Because these ads are now so plentiful and prominent on Amazon, anyone who sells there must engage in PPC advertising.
This of course includes new entrants to a particular market, but not only new entrants. Established players must also now invest substantially in defensive advertising on the platform.
Consumers don’t benefit from this excessive ad competition. On the contrary, they end up paying higher prices (because sellers must now recoup high ad costs in product pricing), as well as more limited and shoddier product lines. This is what Seth Godin calls “the Amazon tax”. “Amazon,” declares Godin, “is stealing from the customers they said they were here to serve.” Make of that what you will.
About a decade ago, I read a review of Mary Miller’s 2014 novel, The Last Days of California, in a print magazine. The reviewer, a book critic whom I knew by name and trusted, highly recommended Miller’s novel.
I was skeptical. The Last Days of California is a teenage girl’s coming-of-age story. I was a middle-aged man. Not long before that, a young woman in my social circle had recommended John Green’s emotional teen novel The Fault in Our Stars. Against my better judgment, I had purchased The Fault in Our Stars and tried to read it. I was unable to finish—not because The Fault in Our Stars was a bad book, but simply because I was the wrong reader for it.
Nevertheless, I ordered The Last Days of California from Amazon. The book promised to be not only a coming-of-age story, but also a story about the dynamics of 21st-century family life with a little bit of the culture wars mixed in. I was intrigued.
I’m glad I took a chance on The Last Days of California. It turned out to be a wonderful story, even though this is the kind of book I rarely read. (My personal reading tastes veer more toward Michael Connelly and Lee Child.)
But the collective readership of Amazon and Goodreads does not agree with me—at least not the ones who are leaving ratings and reviews. At the time of this writing, The Last Days of California has a 3.5 cumulative average on Amazon and a 3.4 cumulative average on Goodreads.
If I had consulted the online peanut gallery, I would have skipped Mary Miller’s book entirely. Fortunately, by 2014 I already knew the truth about mass online review venues like Amazon and Goodreads.
The Last Days of California, by Mary Miller (Amazon product page, 8/25/2026)
In 2012, it was discovered that John Locke, a bestselling indie author famous for his Donovan Creed series, purchased reviews from review farms. He personally compensated some other reviewers.
Black hat practices like that are harder to carry out in 2026. (There was a widespread backlash over the John Locke scandal, and Amazon took some steps to penalize outright review scammers.)
But gray hat practices persist in the publishing industry. Major publishers and imprints retain lists of friendly reader-reviewers, who can always be counted on to give a particular author a 5-star review. Indie authors are not far behind. Most know better than to specifically compensate for reviews, but there are still indie authors who will raffle iPads for their reader-reviewers. That sends a message—and broadcasts certain incentives. Continue reading “Online book reviews and ratings: take them with a large grain of salt”
I attended the University of Cincinnati between the summer of 1987 and the early summer of 1991, and it is there that I earned my degree in economics. I arrived at UC in a circuitous fashion, and against my better judgment.
I started at Northern Kentucky University in the fall of 1986. NKU was just across the river from where my parents lived. (I was a commuter student throughout my college years.)
NKU provided an extremely pleasant educational experience—at least in those days. NKU had small classes, attentive professors, and a comfortable suburban/semi-rural environment. Oh, and parking was a breeze, too—no small matter when you’re a commuter student.
And of course, I was too foolish to know a good situation when I had it.
I can partly blame the 1980s. Those were placid, commonsense times, especially when compared to the chaotic cesspool that is the American culture of today.
A common trope in teen movies of the 1980s is the bored suburban/small-town teen whose life is so calm and satisfactory that he spends the first part of the movie waiting around for something exciting to happen. You can observe this trope in Risky Business, The Last American Virgin, Footloose, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
As a student at Northern Kentucky University in the 1986-87 academic year, I knew that the University of Cincinnati was an edgier, more tumultuous environment.
To begin with, UC was more than three times as large as NKU. UC was located in the inner city. UC was more “diverse.” (This was not a term that we used in the 1980s, but we understood the concept.)
UC—in the words of one of my friends—was also “a pain in the ass.” The daily commute was twice as long. Parking was a nightmare. Classes were frequently large, and so overenrolled that you might not get in.
I found the inner-city environment to be wretched rather than stimulating. On my drive home in the afternoons, I occasionally passed streetwalkers and drug deals in progress. The area around UC—both then and now—is a high-crime area. The campus itself was safe enough, but students were sometimes assaulted and robbed in the off-campus perimeter.
I briefly contemplated a return to NKU. But by the time I realized that I had made a mistake in coming to UC, I was already stuck there.
This was because of the way that NKU and UC allotted credits. At that time, NKU was on a semester system and UC was on a quarter system. As a result, NKU credits had a high exchange rate when transferred to UC’s system; but when transferring in the opposite direction, you would invariably lose credits.
So I finished my degree at the University of Cincinnati. The experience was far from a total loss, and not only because I earned a four-year degree. At the age of nineteen, I really had spent all of my life in sheltered, suburban, and (let’s be blunt about this) all-white environments. My years at the University of Cincinnati taught me to thrive beyond those confines—a skill that would serve me well in future years, when I entered some much rougher environments.
My time at UC also gave me a sense of gratitude—for the many unearned blessings that had been given to me by a mere accident of birth. These realizations brought both maturity and humility.
Looking back on it all almost 40 years later, I regard my years at UC as beneficial ones. I was there between the ages of 19 and 22. These are the young-adult formative years. It should not be surprising, then, that the University of Cincinnati shows up in my fiction. Below are the major and cameo appearances of the University of Cincinnati in my novels and short stories:
Set in 1988, this young adult novel includes many scenes on or around the UC campus of the late 1980s. While I have taken some liberties regarding professors’ names, etc., No Sure Thing provides an authentic look at the UC of the late Reagan era.
This dark fantasy/light horror parallel worlds novella is set on the University of Cincinnati campus in the summer of 1987. In this story, one of the university’s actual buildings is the heart of the supernatural setting.
This horror novel is set in 2013 and is not primarily about the University of Cincinnati. Two UC students, however, are major characters. There are multiple scenes set on campus.
At least one story in my first short story collection, “Gaia Cried Out,” takes place partly on the UC campus.
***
I am not nostalgic about the University of Cincinnati in the conventional sense. I do not attend alumni events. Nor do I attend UC’s football or basketball games.
The university is, however, often my go-to location when I need a campus setting, especially one set in the 1980s. Thirty-five years have passed since I was last a student at the University of Cincinnati, and I’m still writing about it. UC will probably appear again in future stories.
This morning I received an email from a co-chair of Warner Bros. Entertainment. In the subject line of the email, she informed me that she wanted to option the movie rights to one of my books.
The immediate problem? The book won’t be released for another month. It is currently listed on Amazon as a preorder. I haven’t sent out review or ARC copies. Nor do I use so-called “beta readers.” So unless the co-chair of Warner Bros. Entertainment somehow gained access to my personal files, there is no way she could have read the book in question.
The email also came from a Gmail account. Gmail accounts have unfortunately become synonymous with this kind of scam email in recent years. I say “unfortunately” because in the past, Gmail was regarded as one of the more reputable email services.
Scam emails are nothing new on the internet, of course. As far back as the late 1990s, many of us would receive scam emails claiming to represent the Nigerian lottery. All we had to do was forward our banking information so that the lottery officials in Lagos could deposit the amount that we’d won. So easy!
But AI enables internet scammers to personalize their messages. Authors—most of whom have their contact information online—have become salient targets. A scammer can set up an AI agent that scrapes book descriptions from the internet. Then the same AI can craft and send emails that seem semi-legitimate.
I was (very) briefly fooled by one such scam earlier this year. I received a Gmail message from an author in one of the genres in which I write. He claimed to have read one of my books and greatly admired it. In this case the book had been out for a while and found some readership. That was the first element of believability.
The scammer also did not purport to be Stephen King, John Grisham, or another celebrity author well known to the general public. The impersonated author had received some media attention in the United Kingdom, but would generally be unknown to American audiences or people who are not avid readers.
The email, moreover, seemed genuine. The content of the message suggested that its originator had indeed read one of my books and was at least familiar with the basics of the theme and plot.
What did I do? I replied. I thanked the author for having read my book and taking the time to send me an email. I made a vague promise to check out one of his books. I assumed that would be the end of the matter.
But then I received a reply only hours later. The slightly famous author wanted to know details about my writing process. How did I come up with my brilliant ideas, and develop them so beautifully?
At this point, my built-in BS detector went off. On a hunch, I checked the author’s website. The author maintained a blog and his most recent post indicated that someone had been impersonating him and sending out fake emails in his name. So that was that.
When authors are targeted, such frauds are usually long plays. The aim is to gain trust, and then convince the dupe to spend a large sum of money on a specious PR agency or promotional scam—which will inevitably be based in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, or South Asia.
How many authors are fooled by such scams? Well, I replied to one such email once. Spend a week in any writing forum on Facebook, and you’ll spot a post by at least one individual who declares—breathlessly and not nearly dubiously enough—that John Grisham or Stephen King has emailed them to ask them what they’re working on. I suspect that most would-be victims smell a rat before sending money. But phishing scams in general still have a success rate of 2.7 to 5 percent, according to recent statistics.
Once again, it is important to keep in mind how AI has changed the nature of scamming. It is no longer necessary for tricksters to rely on lowest-common-denominator contrivances like overseas lottery claims. A clever scammer can now personalize a phishing scam for each one of us. And with AI, he can do that at scale.
This new landscape of online fraud has affected my behavior. I don’t give my personal email address out to anyone new anymore under any circumstances. When I absolutely must give out an email address as a consumer, I use one of several throwaway accounts that I have developed and set up solely for such purposes.
The email address on my author website likewise is a throwaway account that I use as a buffer. If I determine that an email sent to this account is legitimate, I will then reply via my regular author email address. (Note: I did not reach this stage of trust with the aforementioned scammer who claimed to be the British author.)
And I haven’t even mentioned the most pernicious email scam of all. There are millions of AI agents on the internet that are trying to break into our personal email accounts every minute of every day. Their aim is to use our email accounts to gain access to our banking information. Or—in lieu of that—to use our email accounts to send out more scam emails to more unwary souls.
Which brings us to email marketing. During the initial internet boom of twenty-five years ago, an entire cottage industry developed around email marketing. The B2B and B2C online marketing spaces are filled with claims that email marketing is still just as profitable as it was in 2001 or 2005.
The writing and publishing world is filled with vendors and consultants whose business models are based on email marketing. “Build your mailing list!” they declare, as they attempt to sell you a system for luring potential readers through a labyrinthine email funnel.
If you’re selling or marketing anything legitimately, an email list is probably still worth having and maintaining. But it’s also important to realize that the online environment has changed since 2001 or 2005. I know many adults who have eliminated email entirely, relying instead on their smartphones and text messages (game-changing innovations that did not exist in 2001 or 2005) for all online communications.
When every other email message is a scam, we’re all just a lot more wary of email.
Over time, however, I realized that the setting itself had far more stories to tell.
Halloween in suburban Cincinnati during the Gen X era provides a unique backdrop for supernatural fiction. Kids still roamed neighborhoods after dark without cell phones. Parents gave them a little more freedom. Familiar streets, parks, and neighborhoods became places of mystery once the sun went down.
That world is simply too rich to leave behind after a single novel.
My newest story, The Gold Coin and the Crow, expands that universe.
Like 12 Hours of Halloween, it takes place on Halloween night in 1980. It features a different cast of characters and tells a completely standalone story, so you can read it whether you’ve already read the novel or not.
The story begins with what seems like a simple trick-or-treat stop. A strange homeowner has no candy to offer, but he does have something far more tempting: nineteenth-century gold coins scattered throughout his backyard.
There is only one catch.
You have to get past the crow.
From there, the story becomes an increasingly strange journey into the supernatural, filled with the nostalgic atmosphere of suburban Halloween nights, childhood curiosity, and the unsettling feeling that the ordinary world may not be quite as ordinary as it appears.
If you enjoyed the mood, setting, and Gen X nostalgia of 12 Hours of Halloween, I think you’ll feel right at home in The Gold Coin and the Crow.
This is also just the beginning.
My goal is to continue expanding the 12 Hours of Halloween story world with additional tales set during different Halloween seasons, following different characters, and exploring new supernatural mysteries—all while returning to the same familiar world of autumn nights, suburban neighborhoods, and the strange things that sometimes happen when the barriers between worlds grow thin.
There is a cashier at a nearby grocery store where I regularly shop. She is an avid reader of my books.
This woman (I’ll call her Beverly) is probably in her mid-forties. Like me, she has spent most of her life in Ohio.
Beverly subscribes to Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program, and she reads most of my books through KU.
The other day, I asked Beverly if she did much reading on non-Amazon platforms such as Apple Books, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, or Kobo.
Beverly gave me a perplexed look.
“Why?” she asked, honestly surprised by the question. (She had never even heard of Kobo—or, at best, was only vaguely aware that it existed.)
I grew up in an era when the retail book market was wonderfully distributed and diverse. We had Waldenbooks and B. Dalton in the local mall. There were independent bookstores throughout the eastern Cincinnati suburbs where I lived. There were also at least two bookstores serving the University of Cincinnati, which I attended in the late 1980s.
When the brick-and-mortar superstores Borders and Barnes & Noble came to Cincinnati in the 1990s, the retail book market consolidated somewhat—but not all that much. There were still no online book sales, and the market was large enough to support multiple retailers.
That’s the way I prefer things to be. But as is so often the case in the twenty-first century, I find myself out of step with the times.
A few months ago, I took a handful of my ebook titles wide, meaning that I removed them from Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program (which requires exclusivity) and made them available through Google Play, Apple Books, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble.
This past week, I decided to remove those books from wide distribution and place them back into Kindle Unlimited. That decision was based on sales data, as well as further analysis of broader market trends. One factor was the overwhelming cost competitiveness of Amazon’s Kindle devices.
As a result, seven of my titles will be returning to Kindle Unlimited. This process should be complete by the end of the month. It is taking longer than I expected because several of Kobo’s international bookseller partners have been slow to delist the titles, and I cannot enroll them in Kindle Unlimited until they have been fully removed from those sites.
These are the titles that will be returning to KU over the coming weeks. You can find all of them on my Amazon author page:
The Woman in Crosley Tower is a new title for preorder in my Uncanny Ohio series. It’s a novella of about 24,000 words. The novella will be released on June 26, 2026.
This horror/dark fantasy story is based on a single question: What would happen if a woman disappeared inside a building in the University of Cincinnati during the summer of 1987, and emerged 39 years later?
There is a lot more to it than that, of course. This is a story for fans of parallel world stories, and tales of liminal zones (like the “backrooms” urban legend). And since much of the story is set in 1987, there is also a generous portion of Gen X nostalgia, an element which is rapidly becoming part of my “brand”.
The Woman in Crosley Tower will be initially released in digital-only format (Kindle). For those of you who like to read on paper (and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, of course!) the title will be released in a combined volume with several other Uncanny Ohio titles later in the summer/fall.
Also, The Woman in Crosley Tower will be in Kindle Unlimited, at least for the foreseeable future. So you can read it there if you’re a Kindle Unlimited subscriber.
In the mid-1980s, I became a rabid fan of Stephen King. My fandom started with a random confluence of events, as so many things do.
My sophomore year of high school, I had a job manning the checkout desk at my school’s library during my study hall period. So I had plenty of exposure to books. One day, I happened across a paperback copy of Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot.
The novel had been made into a two-part television miniseries five years earlier (1979). I had seen the miniseries, and it had creeped me out. I remembered enough about the miniseries to know what the novel would be about, but not enough to ruin the book for me.
I was instantly hooked. I blazed through ‘Salem’s Lot in only a few days. After that, I checked out every book in the school library that was written by Stephen King.
When I exhausted the school library shelves, I turned to the Waldenbooks and B. Dalton stores at the local mall. This was in the mid-1980s. By this time, Carrie, The Shining, Cujo, and Christine were already published.Rose Madder, The Green Mile, and 11/22/63 were still years in the future.
Teenagers are natural-born fanatics. During those years, I was a fanatic of Stephen King’s work in the same way that I was a fanatic of the music of Rush and Led Zeppelin. During the remainder of my high school years, I read Stephen King’s novels and short story collections with a dogged, joyful determination. I wanted to read everything he had written to that time. (And given Stephen King’s prolificness as a writer, there was a lot to read even then, in the mid-1980s).
By the time I graduated from high school in the spring of 1986, my dedicated reading had more or less caught up with Stephen King’s prolific writing. But a few months later, Stephen King had a new novel out, and it was widely billed as the writer’s magnum opus.
I looked forward to the book weeks before it came out.
The “it” I’m talking about is It, Stephen King’s mammoth horror epic. The book was released on September 15, 1986. I purchased my copy that very same day. I know this, because I preordered the book from the B. Dalton’s at my local shopping mall.
I remember starting the book while on a break at my university library. (I attended Northern Kentucky University in the fall of 1986.) To say that I was in an anticipatory mood would be a gross understatement. Here was 1,138 pages of new fiction from myfavorite author.
Original hardcover dust jacket for It, 1986
What followed was one of my first experiences in youthful disillusionment (Many more were to follow, of course; but those are other episodes for other essays). It dragged. The novel contained too many subplots, too much padding, and a long, saggy middle.
What I loved about Cujo, Carrie, and the short stories in Night Shift were King’s fast pacing, narrative discipline, and literary economy. Most of these early works were written when Stephen King was still establishing himself as a writer, and was therefore subject to marketplace competition.
By 1986, though, Stephen King was already a celebrity writer. His short story “Trucks” had been made into a movie that summer, Maximum Overdrive. King was frequently interviewed, and widely known as “the Master of the Macabre”. He had even done a television commercial for American Express. In 1986, American pop culture was still characterized by scarcity and monolithic names. In popular fiction, King was one of those monoliths, alongside big names like Danielle Steel and Tom Clancy.
Stephen King on the cover of Time magazine, 1986
No discussion of It would be complete without mentioning the book’s controversial sex scene—what amounts to an orgy among its adolescent characters.
As a mature adult in 2026, I am supposed to get in a high dudgeon about the potential exploitation issues involved here. Back in 1986, very few adults did. There were some raised eyebrows, sure; but no public outcry greeted It, not even among members of the religious right. They were too busy lobbying to get Playboy and Penthouse banned from 7-Eleven.
But there was another factor in play for me, at the time. Keep in mind that in the fall of 1986, I was barely 18 years old myself, and only a few months out of high school. I was much closer in age to the members of the Losers Club than to the novel’s middle-aged author. Did my youthful age place me adjacent to something exploitive? Was I somehow a victim in all of this, too? Teenagers of the 1980s were not programmed to ask such questions.
Even at that age, though, I sensed that something was odd about this scene in It. I remember wondering if, perhaps, Stephen King had been drunk or high while writing this scene. (In light of King’s subsequent revelations about his substance abuse struggles during this period, my speculations may not have been too far from the mark.)
The sex scene involving the adolescent members of The Losers Club may or may not have been exploitative. It was, however, inappropriate and unnecessary, and definitely jarred me out of the story.
Forty years after the publication of It, Stephen King is still writing novels and I am still a fan.
Nowadays, however, I tend to read his work more selectively. King’s novellas and short stories are as engaging for me as ever. I often skip his longer, doorstop-size novels. I struggled to get through The Outsider, 11/22/63, and Fairy Tale.
Likewise, my early, teenage attempts at writing fiction were thinly disguised attempts at imitating Stephen King. But after all these years, and so many books of my own, I don’t sense much of King’s influences in my own work anymore. (I will, however, forever admire the stories in his first collection, the aforementioned Night Shift (1978). Every one of those stories is a gem.)
Stephen King is now almost 80, and I’m, well…a lot older, too. I hope King has many more years of writing ahead of him. I can’t promise to read all of his novels, but I’ll always show up for his short story collections.
Kobo, the Canadian alternative to Amazon, has recently announced that its Kobo Plus subscription program will be made available in the Czech Republic, Greece, Luxembourg, the Philippines, Poland and Romania. (Kobo already has a significant presence in many other European countries.)
This move will doubtless benefit the many writers who are producing work in those local languages.
I should also note that there are presently many fiction writers in Europe who should be writing in their local languages, but who are nonetheless writing in maladroit and often incorrect English, because they have been programmed to believe that English is the only language that matters in the book market. I want Polish and Romanian language writers to have all the opportunities that can reasonably be made available to them.
But what about writers like me, who mostly produce work in English? Since I have my writer/publisher hat on now, I’m going to take the liberty of examining this from a self-interested perspective.
Some indie writer gurus wax enthusiastic about the prospect of selling to the “whole wide world”. This often comes up in the context of wide distribution, i.e. distribution beyond Amazon. These commentators make much of the fact that their books can be made available in Poland, France, Spain, South Korea, and Bulgaria.
This is mostly wishful thinking.
Yes, I realize that English is studied as a second language all over the world. But even in Germany, where English-language skills are higher than the European average, books really need to be translated into German in order to sell well in the local market.
There is a tendency in publishing circles to conflate two very different categories:
People who can function in English
People who can (and will) read novels in English for pleasure
I have adult-level reading skills in both Japanese and Spanish. I can read a newspaper in either one of those languages with only an occasional reference to a dictionary.
And yet—I rarely read fiction in Japanese or Spanish—unless I’m specifically working on leveling up my language skills. And when I do purchase fiction in Japanese or Spanish, it’s almost always a work by a well-known writer: Keigo Higashino or Gabriel García Márquez.
The bottom line is that a reader in Poland who has rudimentary skills in English isn’t going to read or purchase many indie-published novels from the United States. This is a fact that US-based publishing commentators and wishful thinkers (few of whom have much experience with foreign languages) frequently overlook.
I have a new release: Family Secrets. Here’s what it’s about (Amazon description):
“When a Cincinnati businessman connects with a distant cousin on Facebook, he agrees to stop by the man’s remote rural property on his way home from a business trip.
The visit should have lasted thirty minutes.
Instead, he finds himself trapped in a doublewide trailer deep in the woods, drawn into the disappearance of a local girl, and forced to search a dark pond for a body that may—or may not—be there.
But something else is moving through the woods that night.
Something ancient and hungry.
Family Secrets is a supernatural mystery/thriller inspired by regional folklore, nightmares, and the eerie landscapes of the Midwest.”
This is the second book in a new series I’ve created: Uncanny Ohio:
“Uncanny Ohio is a series of atmospheric supernatural tales set in southern Ohio, in and around the Cincinnati area. Traditional ghost stories and urban legends with a strong regional flavor.”
This was a natural move for me. Many of my supernatural stories are set in southern Ohio, and take inspiration from the ghost stories and urban legends that I absorbed as a kid in the 1970s and 1980s.
Family Secrets is currently enrolled in Kindle Unlimited.
I’ve been watching Banshee, a crime drama that originally aired from 2013 to 2016. I’ve always enjoyed Jonathan Tropper’s books, and I was originally interested in the show because of his involvement.
First, the negatives. This show has far too many plot holes, some rising to jump-the-shark levels of absurdity. Characters don’t always behave consistently, and often behave in ways that are not even plausible. For this reason, the viewer is never quite able to suspend his or her disbelief.
But I don’t believe that realism is Banshee’s goal. This is compulsive, potato chip entertainment that keeps you watching—from one scene to the next, and from one episode to the next. The tension and power oscillations that are achieved in some of Banshee’s scenes are worth studying—especially if you’re interested in writing fiction or film scripts. (They’re also worth your time if you’re simply looking for some not-too-challenging, pulp entertainment.)
Another positive: There is quite a bit of sex in Banshee. But the sex, while occasionally excessive, is used strategically.
In all too many shows, and in 99% of all the romance and erotica novels being published nowadays, sex is used as a cover for weak storytelling. Not so in Banshee. In Banshee, the sex heightens the tension and complicates the plot. A sex scene in this show is almost never only about sex.
A married woman in the suburbs develops a sudden and inexplicable interest in graveyard photography. Her husband wonders what’s going on with her.
But what secrets is her husband hiding?
Such is the setup of Involuntary Deeds, my new supernatural/psychological horror novella. The novella is set in Clermont County, Ohio, about twenty miles east of Cincinnati.
Involuntary Deeds is presently available on Amazon. It will be rolled out to the other major retailers (Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, and Apple Books) in the coming weeks.
Amazon description:
Some crimes don’t stay buried.
Pam Vance never cared about cemeteries—until the day she couldn’t stay away from them.
What begins as a strange new hobby quickly turns into something else. An obsession. A need to photograph graves she’s never seen before… places she feels drawn to.
Her husband, Robert, knows something is wrong.
Then the warnings begin.
The ghost of a Revolutionary War soldier appears to Robert with a message he can’t ignore: stay away.
But Pam won’t stop.
Because one grave is calling to her—that of a sixteen-year-old girl who died in 1991. A death long forgotten.
But not by Robert.
As the past closes in, a truth buried for decades begins to surface—pulling the living and the dead toward a confrontation that can no longer be avoided.
‘Involuntary Deeds’ is a novella for fans of classic ghost stories in the tradition of Peter Straub, Shirley Jackson, M.R. James, and E.F. Benson.
Read NO SURE THING in Kobo Plus. Also available for purchase at Amazon, Google Play, Apple Books, and Barnes & Noble
No Sure Thing: a Gen X coming-of-age novel set in 1988 is now available in Kobo Plus.
Kobo Plus is Kobo’s version of Kindle Unlimited. I’ve been moving some titles in there on an experimental basis.
Kobo Plus, like Kindle Unlimited, will inevitably be swamped with trashy, sexually explicit romance novels. (Unfortunately, that’s probably already the case). But at least Kobo Plus does not require exclusivity. So I’m willing to give it a try for now.
No Sure Thing, like the title suggests, is a coming-of-age novel in a distinctly Gen X setting. While the novel is not autobiographical in any significant way, many of the characters and conflicts presented therein are based on people and situations that I observed myself during the 1980s. So it is authentic, if nothing else.
While there are several “love plots” in the book, this is not a romance novel in any traditional sense. If that’s what you’re looking for, look elsewhere.
But not all of the teen movies of the 1980s followed the traditional romance script. Consider the endings of Risky Business and The Last American Virgin. These were much more disillusionment plots than by-the-numbers romance plots (even though the romance element was heavily used in marketing both films).
Fast Times at Ridgemont High, despite the sex and comedy, also had several unmistakable disillusionment plots: Stacy learned the consequences of reckless sexual experimentation; Brad learned the pitfalls of hubris.
As noted above, No Sure Thing is available at all the major online bookstores.
One of you asked me the other day which online writers’ group I recommend. Many of these groups exist on Facebook.
Ten years ago I would have been able to heartily recommend several of them.
Today, there are none that are very useful to me. Here’s the problem.
Over the last five years, the online writers’ groups have become inundated with writers of “spicy” (i.e., sexually explicit) romance and outright erotica (i.e., even more sexually explicit material).
Now let me be clear here. I am no prude. Oh…far, far from it. I am quite sure that some of my off-hours activities would shock and/or offend the prudish among you.
But there is a limit to how much I enjoy talking about sex, writing about sex, and creating stories around it. My tolerance for that sort of thing is fairly limited.
I don’t like sex stories for the same reason I don’t like pornographic videos: watching other people have sex is a bit like watching other people eat.
Similarly, talking about sex is like talking about eating. I eat lunch every day. But I don’t wish to spend more time discussing my lunch than I spend actually eating it. I have a similar approach to matters of the bedroom. Some of these writers and their readers need to spend less time with their noses in books, and more time with living, breathing people. (Nothing cures a chronic preoccupation with sex like a little of the real thing.)
From a business perspective, the marketing of romance/erotica has much more to do with the marketing of OnlyFans or other pornographic material than it does with traditional book marketing. A person who picks up a Michael Connelly novel is not responding to the same motivations as a person who watches pornographic videos, or who reads pornographic stories.
No ill will for all the “spicy” romance and erotica writers out there, mind you. But they’ve made the online writing space more or less useless for everyone else, with their sheer numbers.
