Coffin Hop 2012: Scream Time

Happy Halloween Coffin Hoppers!  This is the final day for the Hop and the last day to get your comments in to be registered for the signed copy of my novella In Memoriam and the Coffin Hop: Death by Drive-In EP sampler.  Go to any Coffin Hop post on the blog to be registered!  To check out the other Coffin Hop locations go to http://coffinhop.wordpress.com and take a trip around the graveyard for more prizes and authors who want to scare the crap out of you.

Earlier, I listed my favorite horror-themed songs and tonight I’m going to do a quick run down of my top 5 scary movies and books that make my skin crawl.

Silver Screen Scares List-

1.  A Nightmare on Elm Street- The original, the non-remake, and the one that made me sleep with the lights on when I was a kid.  Freddy and his burnt visage, slashing through the nightmares of teens.  Of course, he was justified, their parents did light him up like a torch and left him to die.  I love this one more because, while Freddy’s humor is fun in later installments, he is more serious and wicked in this first time out.  Always in my top lists.

2.  Event Horizon-  An experimental space ship disappears while on a test to travel to another galaxy by bending reality.  The ship vanishes and reappears years later.  A group is sent to investigate where the Event Horizon went and what happened to the crew.  The movie is darkly disturbing and has the ability to get under your skin.  An often overlooked gem that everyone needs to see.

3.  In the Mouth of Madness-  John Carpenter’s ode to H.P. Lovecraft is the story of an investigator sent to find missing author Sutter Cane who has gone missing before a big book release.  He finds himself on a downward spiral in a very Lovecraftian way.  This is one film that sticks in your head and makes you wonder what would happen if someone asked you, “Do you read Sutter Cane?”

4. Halloween- Carpenter again lands on the list with the best slasher flick ever made.  Michael Meyers is a killing machine with no remorse who returns home to wreak havoc on Halloween night and to finish some family business.  I do also like the Rob Zombie versions of Halloween.

5.  Night of the Living Dead- While I enjoy the original, the remake from the early ’90′s is my film of choice here.  When the dead rise and all looks lost just remember, “They’re coming to get you Barbara.”

The Bloody Book Shelf-

1.  IT (Stephen King)-  I read this book in 6th grade and it forever forged my destiny… and it freaked my reading teacher out.  Really, what kind of 11-year-old throws a 1k page book down on his desk for ‘free reading’?  This guy…

2.  Ghoul (Brian Keene)- Following the themes of childhood, this is by far the book from Keene that sticks in my heart the most.  I know people who mirror characters in the book and it makes it more personal.  If you haven’t read Keene or think he is just a zombie guy, give this book a read and be drawn into a world of monsters outside and those within.

3.  Vampyrrhic (Simon Clark)- A tightly woven vampire tale that returns the vamps to their natural state…ugly and blood thirsty.  The opening sequences of the book are Clark’s creepy descriptions and will leave you wanting to leave the light on.

4.  Salem’s Lot (Stephen King)- Another King book I read as a kid and about 3 times since.  I can’t say enough about how good the depictions of small town life and gossip get turned on its ear when the old ‘haunted’ house is bought.  Author Ben Mears returns home to the ‘Lot and is drawn in to the battle against the undead and his own ghosts.

5.  Night Chills (Dean Koontz)- Some have hounded me for liking Koontz, but the man can tell one hell of a story.  This novel isn’t straight-up horror, but when subliminal messaging is used to control a town, things turn ugly.  The scary part of the book has to do with losing control of yourself and being forced to do something against your will, even if you don’t know you’re doing it.

Well, this was short I admit.  However, I am bust preparing some other things and I hope everyone had a terrifying Coffin Hop 2012!  See you next year (although I’d rather you stay around and follow my adventures and misadventures in my quest to continue my writing career).

Goodnight…

On “Lights Out” and Interview with Nate Southard!

Nate Southard is brutal.  His writing is tight and visceral.  In the short time I’ve been exposed to his work, I’ve devoured almost everything he’s published.  He’s brought us the cruelty of Just Like Hell, a view from the end of the world in This Little Light of Mine, and the will to survive the monstrous in Red Sky.  It’s been one of recent works that really caught me when I read it.  Lights Out is a lean and mean descent into the Hell of Burnham State Maximum Security Prison. 

Beneath the walls of the prison, two convicts attempt to dig their way to freedom only to disturb a force that’s slept for years.  Now awake, it’s thirsty and it wants blood.  So begins the tale of vampires and other monsters.  Unlike the ‘new’ vampires in todays culture, Nate gives them their horrific edge back.  No beautiful people falling in love, just pure blood lust and evil, the way it should be.

The vampires aren’t the only monsters however.  Within the walls of the prison lives the evil that manifests its self in humanity.  Diggs, Sweeny, Marquez,  and Ribisi are the men with the power within the walls.  They are the men in charge of the four gangs vying for supremacy among the prisoners.  When the bodies first start to mount up, the gangs blame each other and look to take the fight to their adversaries.  Father Albright and Warden Timms want to control the situation and keep the gangs from retaliating.  It is these characters where Nate really shines in the book.  The prisoners and the staff are so well-rounded and their stories so interesting that I found myself wanting to read more about them and less about what happened when the sun went down.

Once the body count starts rising and the bodies themselves are vanishing, Father Albright works to form an alliance between the gangs to find the reason for the brutal attacks and killings happening at night within the prison.  Albright must do all this behind the warden’s back while he is trying to save his job from a governor who is quite upset about the murders in the prison.  The book follows the men on their quest to save the prison and the extent they can trust those who are their sworn enemies.  It all leads to a riotous conclusion that was both tightly written and satisfying.  Oh…and bloody.

Lights Out reminded me a lot of Salem’s Lot, which I consider ‘the” vampire novel after Dracula.  Like in Salem’s Lot, it is the build up of the characters and the slow burn that makes the book great.  The denizens of Burnham feel real and true.  Their distrust of one another and their forced alliance tightens the screws and doesn’t let up until the last page.  Overall, I highly recommend grabbing a copy and reading it, you won’t be sorry.  Thunderstorm Books still has a few copies, so click over and pick it up before it sells out.

Now as a special treat, Nate has agreed to enter The Arena to answer the 10 Questions!  So without further ado, here is Nate Southard:

1. After completing Lights Out, I was blown away by the way you put the monster back into the vampire. How did you prepare to write the novel?

-Honestly, I’ve never read many ‘romantic’vampire stories. The ones I always loved were things like Kin’s ‘Salem’s Lotand McKammon’s They Thirst, so I’ve always pictured vampires as brutal monstrosities. All of my preparation went into researching how things generally work in prison. Once I had a very basic outline in place, I put in Faith No More’s Angel Dust (which I listened to exclusively as I wrote the first draft), hit play, and got to work.

2. The characterization of the inmates, especially the gang leaders, is brutal and Burnham is such a rich backdrop. What planning and research went into the people who inhabit the prison?

 -Well, I tried really hard to schedule a tour of a prison, but it appears the State of Texas doesn’t do such things. I interviewed a few people who’d worked as correctional officers to find out what a day in the life is like. I wanted to know things like how much freedom inmates have during the day, what happens during a lockdown, and a whole host of other things. The rest of it was deciding what these people had done, what they believed in, and what sort of moral code they upheld. To this day, Marquez is my favorite creation. I love his strange mix of anger, wisdom, and honor, all while capable of doing some truly horrific things.

3. While reading the novel, the character of Maggot reminded me of somebody. Is he your novel’s answer to Renfield in Dracula?

 -I can see where he kind of fits that mold, but I really wanted Maggot to be the guy who probably should have wound up in a psychiatric hospital instead of a prison. He’s felt like a victim most of his life, and then he ends up in a place where he’s the ultimate victim. I’m sure there has to be people in prisons who are just terrified day in and day out. That’s Maggot.

4. I found This Little Light of Mine intriguing and at the end I wanted to go on further. The world you created within the parking garage seemed like a piece of a much bigger puzzle. Is it something you plan on returning to in the future?

 -Good catch! This Little Light of Mine started as one-quarter of a novel called The Collapse, which would show a global apocalypse from four different places. My plan has always been to write four novellas and then splice them together like a movie. One of these days, I need to get around to writing the other three. They’re all in my head, just not on the page.

5. How do you go about writing a new Nate Southard novel. Do you plot out everything with an outline or do you just dive-in and let the story take you where it takes you?

 -It depends on the piece. Some of my stuff, like Lights Out and Just Like Hell, got pretty sparse outlines. With Red Sky, all I knew was that I wanted to write one scene near the end of the novel. I saw something that just struck me as really horrible and beautiful at the same time, and I wanted to put it in a novel. I had to write about fifty thousand words to get there, but it turned out all right. Other times, I just start writing scenes that stick in my head until somehow they fit together and make sense. The title novella of my new collection, Something Went Wrong, was partially written that way.

6. I am a big fan of beer. How did your homebrew turn out?

 -My first batch, a brown ale, turned out both delicious and potent, but it never did carbonate right, probably because of a mistake I made while bottling. Right now, I’ve got an IPA on storage that I’m hoping will get nice and fizzy in the next two weeks.

7. Don’t hurt me, but I haven’t got to Scavengers or Down yet. They are high the reading list though… What is on your reading list right now?

 -I just finished reading Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, which is amazing from start to finish, and I’m getting ready to start John Horner Jacobs’ Southern Gods. After that, it’ll probably be some Laird Barron and Paul Tremblay, unless Sarah Langan has a novel coming out that I don’t know about. She always goes on top of the pile.

8. What upcoming projects do you have in the pipeline you haven’t been sworn to secrecy about?

                                      -My new short story collection, Something Went Wrong, should be out from Thunderstorm Books in another week or so. Go look for it. The title novella is the most deeply personal thing I’ve ever written. After that, I have another zombie novel coming from Creeping Hemlock sometime in the next year or so. Everything else is half-finished or looking for a home.

9. Where can readers go to find out about everything Nate?

 -I try to keep my website (www.natesouthard.com) updated nice and regularly, but people can also check me out of facebook (www.facebook.com/natesouthard) for semi-regular snark, song lyrics, and pictures of me going to food trailers. Also, I’m not one of those facebook folks who spreads a lot of memes, so you don’t have to worry about me clogging your news feed.

10. The last space…this is yours to say anything about anything.

                                    -Everybody should check out my latest novel, Down (from Sinister Grin Press). It’s about a rock band whose plane crashes in a forest that contains some nasty surprises. I think it’s a big step forward for my fiction, and I hope everybody reads it.

Bonus question: Who wins in a cage match? Nate Southard or Wrath James White?

 -Wrath. Roughly four seconds in.

I would like to thank Nate for stopping by and I’d also like to thank all of you for stopping by  too!

Goodnight…

Happy New Year and the Best Books of 2011

First off faithful readers, Happy New Year!  Things are already looking up for 2012 (except for my book buying ban for part of the year).  I hope everyone has a good year and we don’t die on December 21st like the crazies think we are.  I will prepare myself and consume mass quantities of rum the day before just in case, you can’t watch the world end sober can you?  My resolutions for the year are to make a writing regimen I can stick to.  There are some days I just don’t feel it, but the problem is the day becomes plural.  So to combat that, I have set some benchmarks for the novel and the novellas for the year.  If I can stick to those, this should be a very productive year. 

Enough about me…so how about the list of the 10 best books from 2011?  To qualify, the book had to be released in 2011.  I read about 90 books last year and this is only for 2011 release books.  The number means nothing.  The number 1 is not the best, but just where it got listed.  I know Jeff Strand was happy to be number 4 on a list of mine earlier in the year, but look at it a list of the 10 books you should have on your shelf or books you need to get and throw on the ‘To Be Read” pile.  Let us draw back the curtain and here we go…

1.  11/22/63 by Stephen King – This book did not excite me when the synopsis was revealed and I dreaded reading it.  I will be the first to admit, I was wrong.  This novel is up in my top 5 of King’s books.  He weaves the tale of a man out of time and on a mission to kill Lee Harvey Oswald into a sometimes heart wrenching story of love and loss.  The end is one of his best and shows that the man once considered a hack writer is indeed the king of modern literature.

2.  Sacrifice by Wrath James White – Wrath is known for being extreme with the subject matter in his books.  I found this story of two detectives investigating a series of bizarre murders to be rather tame by his standards… and I liked it better that way.  The violence is there, the sex is there, and the naughty language is there but it is toned down and I think it allowed the story to flow better.  I don’t know if I am just over the extreme stuff or not, but I liked Sacrifice better over his other new release Pure Hate (which is still a good read).  The characters from another book that appear blew my mind and left me wanting more (I just have to wait).

3.  Entombed by Brian Keene – Set in the Dead Sea world, survivors of the zombie apocalypse hole up in a bunker beneath a hotel.  Brian touches greatly on my favorite part of the zombie mythos and that is the breakdown of man as a social animal.  When the society we know is gone and the fabric of our world are ripped apart, how do we as animals react?  The book is less about the zombies and more about the breakdown of the social order within the bunker.  The book also features his story White Fire from the Hell Followed With Them anthology from a few years ago.  Both are outstanding reads.

4.  The Pumpkin Man by John Everson – A dark and brooding story about a legendary murderer who carved pumpkins and kids alike.  This book hands down featured the best use of a Jack ‘O Lantern ever.  It is fast paced and was a super book.  The hardcover is sold out, but during my interview with John during the Coffin Hop 2011 Tour, he informed me that the trade paperback from Leisure has added material (still need to read that).

5.  Fangboy by Jeff Strand – A heartwarming tale of a boy named Nathan who was born with really big and sharp teeth.  We are treated to his high points and his low points while he tries to find his place in the world.  There are nice places, bad orphanages, and an evil circus that makes us stand up to root and cheer for poor Nathan Pepper.  Jeff’s comedic style is on full display and needs to warm your heart this winter.

6.  Back From the Dead by J.F. Gonzalez – Nothing ever good comes from messing with spells to raise the dead and this books highlights the main reasons why.  A superb novel about the secrets towns can keep and how the evil that permeates the ground can act when provoked.  Every book J.F. comes out with gets better and better.  A box in the mail with a book from him is a good day indeed.

7.  Waiting Out Winter by Kelli Owen – A short novel about the problems arising from messing with the natural order of nature.  Flies released to combat a worm infestation has  unintended consequences in the bleak winter months.  The book is full of tension and it introduces us to a world I hope she returns too in the future.

8. Samson and Denial by Robert Ford- Bob wrote one of the most fun books I read all year.  He shows us how the world can go to hell when you buy a mummified skull, cross a cult of hot woman, and try to deal with the city of Philly.  The book is well written and is amazing to hear when he reads from it. 

9.  The Floating Staircase by Ronald Malfi – A thick book, but it is so well plotted and executed that it reads at a lightning fast speed.  The book is moody, suspenseful, and full of sorrow.  A writer who returns to his hometown becomes obsessed with the story of a boy and the up-ended dock in the lake dubbed the ‘floating staircase’.  I became really wrapped up in the story and surprised myself by how emotionally invested I became in the story as it unfolded.  Stop reading, go to a website with books, and buy it.  Now…I’m waiting!

10.  This Little Light of Mine by Nate Southard – A chapbook about people caught in a parking garage collapse.  They have no cell signal, no idea what is going on, and only limited sources of light.  When the darkness falls, something is with them, and their light is running out.  I loved the story and I hope Nate will one tell us the extent of what happened in the world outside the garage.

Well, there you have it.  Those are the 10 favorites of mine from 2011.  There are some books I didn’t get a chance to read yet from last year (notably Ray Garton’s Meds and Trailer Park Noir).  So, I might add-on at a later date.

Goodnight and keep reading…

Coffin Hop Day 3: Sad News and Author of the Day

Welcome to-day 3 of the Coffin Hop! 

I realized that my blogs about me are no longer on the front page, so I will recap what has gone on before.  My name is Brent Abell and I write horror fiction.  I have only been writing for a year and a half and have already had eight stories accepted (it was nine-more on that later).  In the past two years I read at Mo*Con IV and recently read at Horrorfind 13 in Gettysburg.  So far, only one story has seen print from Rymfire eBooks and the others should be coming out soon, starting in a couple of weeks with my story “Spot Shoot” in Post Mortem Press’s New Dawn Fades anthology.  More stories will be coming from Pill Hill Press and Wicked East Press.  For more information, please click on the Biblio link on the right.  I am working on two novel projects, finishing the last touches on a novella, and working on concepts for two short story collections.  Here is where you will find all the latest news and rants.  Feel free to also follow on Twitter or to send a friend request on Facebook, I also use those quite a bit as new arises (links to these are on the right also).

Ok, the news…In a sad turn, The Twisted Library has cancelled almost all of their planned anthologies.  This includes my story “Stonewall” which was to appear in their The South Will Rise Undead anthology.  It saddens me because this was the first story I ever had accepted, so it held a special place in my heart.  Now that the story has been returned, I’m brushing it up and finishing up my initial concept by making it a novella.  I have some places in mind, so we will see what the future holds.  I wish the good Doc and all the Twisted Library luck and their moves now save the press for later when the economy improves.

Author of the Day #3-  So far I have talked about Stephen King, Brian Keene, and Jeff Strand stopped by to answer some questions this week.  Today’s author is somebody who’s work is simply amazing and is a big influence on me along with the other three authors.  Ray Garton’s books have been some of the best I have read in the past three years since I found small press horror.  He is the author of works such as the highly regarded vampire novel Live Girls, he gave werewolves a neat twist in Ravenous and Bestial, and even his non-supernatural thrillers such as Shackled are great reads.  The good thing about Ray’s stuff is that he tries to keep things in print.  All of his hard to find novellas and short stories find ways to get back out for a bigger audience to enjoy.  The past year has seen many of his limited and hard to find books being released in trade paperback format from e-reads.com as well as a few new ones like Trailer Park Noir and Meds.  If you have not been reading Ray, you’ve been missing out a one hell of a writer and if you have…you know how talented the man is.

Day Three Author Question:  What thriller by Ray about people who live in the sunny hills is my favorite novel from him?

Coffin Hop: Contest Author #1

Ok gang, you have seven days and seven authors.  Your mission: be the first to correctly guess my favorite book by that day’s author.  Go down and enter your guess into the comment section.  The first person that correctly guesses each day will have their name in the hat for the grand prize at the end of the seven days.  Remember, the pack includes a signed copy of the “New Dawn Fades” anthology with my story “Spot Shot” from Post Mortem Press, a Cemetery Dance hardcover of Peter Straub’s “Pork Pie Hat”, and a Delirium hardcover of Jeff Strand’s “Fangboy” courtesy of Jeff (and if you want more Jeff, check out the last blog post where he graciously answered some questions).

Today I am going to start with the big guy, Stephen King.  This guy has been sending us to bed with nightmares since his first novel “Carrie” was released in 1974 and is getting ready to put us through the paces again in a few weeks when his latest novel, “11/22/63″ comes out.  He was the first horror author I read and I will always revere his work.  The only problem is that with all his hardcovers on my bookshelf, the shelves start to bow from the weight of all that goodness.

There are plenty of books to guess from, so Hop to it!  Hint:  Unlike most people, my favorite book is not “The Stand” and some small towns get what they deserve.