The Eleventh Delusion
Infected Voices 2, Terrifying Tomes of Terror Podcast, and an interview with Mike Lombardo
I was able to open up the windows in the house this week. It’s been cold in the mornings. I think summer is finally leaving us the hell alone and I couldn’t be happier about that. I’ve hated summer all my adult life. It stops being fun when it isn’t a break from school anymore.
Welcome to Fall, and welcome to the Eleventh Delusion. Good to have you here.
What’s new?
The second instalment of my Infected Voices series on Godless just dropped.
Watching those Red Asphalt movies in driver's ed was a rite of passage. The blood and broken glass. The twisted metal and mangled bodies. The Red Asphalt Driving School takes a whole new approach at teaching teens how to drive. Gruesome videos are just the beginning!
I was on the Terrifying Tomes of Terror Podcast last week talking about The Circus Oasis and all kinds of other horror related stuff. It was a great interview. It’s such a pleasure to talk to someone who has read the book and enjoyed it. I feel like those interviews have a certain depth that is both enjoyable for the author and the listener. If you would like to know more about The Circus Oasis and myself, please have a listen.
Spotlight On SALPSAN
Salpsan is an older novella of mine that never got much traction. It was supposed to be published years ago, but the publisher (who will remain unnamed mostly because I don’t remember their name) screwed a bunch of authors. They let my contract just about run out, not responding to my queries, and then offered another contract that was nothing less than insulting. Asking for more time to not publish my novella and offering me no further compensation. I got the rights back, contacted the cover artist and made sure the publisher didn’t have the rights to the art. I paid the artist a reduced rate for the artwork and published it myself. The book had already been edited, and they had actually used a very good editor (a few years later I reached out to hire her on another project, but she quit freelance editing).
That’s the publishing history of Salpsan. It never found its audience, sadly. It’s a gothic tale set in the Spanish countryside. The story a nurse who had been stripped of her license due to an ethical decision she made who was later hired by a man in Spain to care after someone, only when she gets there she realizes that she’s been hired to care after a monster. I love this story and it breaks my heart that it never found its footing. Is it the cover art? My shitty promotion? Who the hell knows. I will eventually rebrand it with new art. It’s a quick read and only available in ebook. I’ll either rerelease it in a collection of novellas or by itself. But who knows when I’ll get to that.
"Robert Essig has crafted one creepy-as-hell tale of modern gothic horror that sets an ominous tone from the first few words and never lets up. Told from the POV of an unconventional narrator with secrets of her own, Salpsan is a dark, dark story that will prove you wrong several times when you think you know where it's going. I enjoyed it immensely, and can't wait to read more from this writer!"
-- James Newman, author of Odd Man Out, Animosity, and Ugly as Sin
"With Salspan, Essig takes you on a twisted journey through the Spanish hillside;
one full of intrigue, memorable characters and hellish encounters. This is a story that will stick with you, long after turning the last page.
--K. Trap Jones, author of The Charm Hunter, The Sinner and The Harvester
Recent Reads from Hell
I read and thoroughly enjoyed Mike Lombardo’s Please Don’t Tap on the Glass, a collection of short stories. I liked it enough to reach out for an interview with Mike. More on that below.
Currently reading The Dweller by Jeff Strand, The 11th Plague by Tony Evans, and about to start an ARC for a blurb as well as The best of the Horror Zine: The Middle Years edited by Jeani Rector and Dean H. Wild.
Interview with Mike Lombardo
I liked Please Don’t Tap on the Glass enough to reach out for an interview with the author Mike Lombardo. Mike a good dude and funny as hell. The book was great. I suggest it to any fan of horror.
Robert Essig: The opening story "Dead Format" was my favorite. It brought me back to the days of being a VHS horror movie junkie (I still have a box of 'em!). What movies had some of your favorite VHS box art? Why was the art so cool?
Mike Lombardo: VHS art is such a wonderful thing! I miss the glory days of roaming the video store aisles staring at those boxes imagining what the movies were going to be like, which of course was never accurate, haha! The painted artwork was always so detailed and so lurid, how could any kid resist picking them up? My all time favorite box art is Headless Eyes, which when I finally got to see the movie was a complete letdown. A few of my other favorites were always Silent Night, Deadly Night, C.H.U.D. and Dead Alive. The 80's Blob cover always fascinated me as a kid too.
RE: There is a lot of emotion and depth in these stories. I related to many of them in very deep ways. I'm assuming a lot of your inspiration comes from life experiences. Do you find it more affective to write a good story when you have some kind of emotional connection?
ML: Absolutely. A few people have told me that Please Don't Tap on the Glass is like a short story collection mixed with a memoir and I think that's a pretty apt description. I poured myself into these stories and a lot of them were very difficult to write. I've always found the best way to deal with things is by writing them into stories and scripts, it’s extremely cathartic to explore my own head and use it to fuel my creativity.
RE: If you could make a feature or even a short film based on any of these stories, other than "I'm Dreaming of a White Doomsday", of course, which would it be and why?
ML: Funny you should ask, haha! I'm just about done with the screenplay for Dead Format, which I'm planning on being my next film project. At this stage it’s going to be a short film, but once upon a time I said that when we were shooting White Doomsday and that ended up being my first feature. I want to do Dead Format because it's exactly the type of story I want to tell right now. It's got the emotional depth and melancholy of White Doomsday and the b movie fun and gore of my old short films. It's about being haunted by nostalgia and the desire to go back to a time before you learned the world had teeth, and that's never been more relevant in my life than right now.
RE: They're both very different creative outlets, but which do you like better, writing or directing?
ML: I don't know that I could really say I like one more than the other because for me they are so entwined. I don't really have the desire to direct something unless I wrote it, and I am basically directing a little movie in my head whenever I write. At the end of the day, they are both ways of telling a story and I love them equally. I will say that writing is a lot easier because you don't have to worry about budget or locations or dealing with actors, haha.
RE: My favorite stories in the collection were "Dead Format, "Just Like the Real Thing" and "Weekend at Escobar's". What are your top three stories in this collection?
ML: “Dead Format” definitely seems to be the standout in the book from everyone who has read it and it its honestly probably my favorite story as well. It was a lot of fun to write about my old video store haunts and I wanted to write something nice in honor of my dad, who always used to ask me when I was going to make something that wasn't so horrific. I think he would have liked this one even though it still has disembowelment.
“Weekend at Escobar's” is probably the best thing I've ever written and I am so happy people finally are getting to read it.
And finally I'd say “The World in The Window”. I was dealing with a lot when I wrote this and it really helped me sort through some of the grief I was going through about my father passing away and it helped give me some emotional closure on a long term relationship that ended.
Thank you so much, Mike! And to everyone else reading this, please consider grabbing a copy of Mike Lombardo’s short story collection Please Don’t Tap on the Glass. You’ll like it!
Well, that’s all for now. Thanks for stopping by. We’ll do again in two weeks, yes?
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