Those maniacs over at Fangoria Magazine are running a giveaway on their website for several copies of The End of Summer. If you have yet to nab yourself a copy (Do you really want to hurt me? Do you really want to make me cry?), now’s your chance to enter and see if you are victorious. The contest ends next Monday, October 13, so don’t miss your chance! Or you could just buy a damn copy. I will sing you more Culture Club.

The wonderful cinephiles over at CutPrintFilm have invited me to start writing film-related columns for them. Given the month, I felt it appropriate that my first contribution be a defense of 1982’s Halloween 3: Season of the Witch, directed by Tommy Lee Wallace and produced by demi-god John Carpenter. Head on over to CutPrintFilm to check it out, and bookmark the site while you’re there – there’s a lot of great film talk going on. I hope to be writing more October-themed columns, so keep an eye out. That and I’ll be plugging them here, anyway, because why not? What else am I doing?

Very excited to announce something quite different coming soon from yours truly and my co-author, Chris Evangelista: The House on Creep Street, an old-school spooky haunted house adventure for young readers that will be available by the end of the month! Click here to read all about it.

Thanks to I Remember Halloween for the very kind and fair review!

A pretty decent portion of The End of Summer: Thirteen Tales of Halloween is available for free sampling via Smashwords, the world’s largest distributor of indie ebooks. And here I thought I was being all cavalier by giving away the first ten pages of “Stingy Jack.” If you’ve been curious about the book but have yet to pull the trigger on it, take advantage of the excerpt that Smashwords has made available and give it a try. We’re rapidly approaching the fall season (said with a grin on my face), so it’s a perfect time to familiarize yourself with all the nightmares, nostalgia, and romance (gross!) that awaits you in The End of Summer.

Southwest Fright and I have partnered for a “Halloween in July” contest, where folks can enter to win a copy of The End of Summer: Thirteen Tales of Halloween. Go here for your chance to enter and win! There are literally thirteen different ways to enter and they’re all ridiculously easy. (And there’s nothing sayin’ you can’t enter thirteen times!) Contest ends 7/31, so get crackin’.

Found this in an old folder of much older writing. Wrote this when I was 12 or so; I’d been reading a lot of EC Comics at that time, so, don’t judge me. Copied/pasted here verbatim, warts and all. Spoiler: It’s terrible. Hope I’ve improved!

---

THE PROMISE

“Please put down the gun, please! I’ll give you a divorce, you can have my money, but please, let me-.” A shot fired. Another. Muriel slumped forward and died. I put my gun in my pocket and went to work. I picked up her body and put her in the drivers seat in her car. I had driven her out to the woods to “talk.” I really came out here to get rid of Muriel’s body.

I released the brake and went to the back of the car. I pushed it and I watched it tumble down into the ravine. It was falling for a couple seconds, then it exploded when it hit the ground.

I climbed back in my car and drove back into town. To Beth. To my happy life.

(Read the rest…if you dare.)

The South Jersey Times recently reached out to interview me about The End of Summer. Naturally I was happy to, as it’s always fun to discuss the day of Halloween right smack in the middle of the summer, and it helps that the reporter was a Halloween enthusiast herself. (We’re out there in droves, people – you never know when/where/why one of us might pop up.) You can check out a teaser of the article in the Press Room, or you can read the entire South Jersey Times article here.

If you’re one of the nine people who purchased The End of Summer (self-deprecating laugh) and read the acknowledgments at the back, perhaps you noticed my shout-out to Alex Brown Church of the band Seawolf, who let me paraphrase lyrics from one of his songs. (Each story opens with a quote that seemed appropriate for the story’s content, but for one particular story, “Dumb Supper,” I felt strongly about using lyrics from the Seawolf song “Leaves in the River.”) Before the book entered the press stage, I reached out to Dangerbird Records in hopes of obtaining permission to paraphrase a couple lines of lyric from this song. While I did receive a polite and enthusiastic response from the record label, the cost involved with using the lyrics would have been round-about $1,000. While disappointed, I instead responded and explained (politely) that I’d be lucky to see that kind of money back in book sales between now and my death; I thanked them for responding and explained I would likely instead just remove the lyrics and find something else to use. At that point, the person with whom I’d been corresponding reached out personally to Alex to see what he thought, who responded with his blessing that I could use the lyric free of charge.

I was completely blown away.

“Leaves in the River” wasn’t just a song with appropriate lyrics, but also a song I knew by heart, because it’s one of my favorite all-timers. It made me a fan of Seawolf and I’d been following the band ever since. Not long after this exchange, Alex announced a Kickstarter campaign to fund a fully independent project to create a “completely stripped down” Seawolf album. The least I could do was pledge what I could to help him achieve his goal. (Not that he needed my help, because he met his goal in no time, since many other people besides myself know how awesome he is).

If I’m being brutally but realistically honest, the art he creates is going to have much more impact on many more people than my own ever will, but it still felt good to help him reach his goal, since he was so incredibly decent enough to help me reach mine. (And if I wanted to be super lame about this whole thing, I’d share this brief statement on the Kickstarter campaign page: This project was successfully funded on October 1, 2013. Which was also The End of Summer‘s release date. Talk about kismet.)

And so, all these months later, Seawolf has officially released, to its Kickstarter backers, the album “Song Spells, No. 1: Cedarsmoke.” I’m currently on my third listen and it’s gorgeous. It feels so good knowing that I had even just a 0.0001% impact on helping this thing come to life. From what I can tell, this album has only been made available to backers, but keep an eye on the band’s Facebook and website for its eventual release. And if you don’t know Seawolf yet, get started. You have no idea what you’ve been missing.