Last Friday I headed from Knoxville, Tennessee to Huntsville, Alabama to see the Ghost/Mastodon show. Three hours each way. Great show. One of the best I’ve ever seen. Ghost was absolutely amazing. And Mastodon was great. I’d seen them once before in San Diego with Primus (who I regret to say was terrible, but that’s another story). I got home at 3:30 AM, slept for maybe four hours, and then headed a few hours north to Ronald Kelly’s Southern Fried and Horrified book launch. That was a great time. Considering I did CreepyCon the weekend prior, I’ve been one busy dude.
Welcome to my newsletter!
News
My Infected Voices series on Godless continues this month with “Red Asphalt Driving School” dropping September 23rd.
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!
Check out the first instalment of Infected Voices “The Extraction King”.
Southern Fried and Horrified
I’ve gotten to know Ronald Kelly through social media over the past number of years. He’s truly one of the good ones in this biz. A kind and generous dude who recently wrote a memoir called Southern Fried and Horrified. He held a book launch last Saturday along with special guests Jeff Strand, Bridget Nelson, and J. Rodney Turner. The event was great. The turnout was awesome. Books and art were sold, conversation was had, there was a live reading, an interview with Ronald, and just an all-around good time. Here are a few pictures from the event. An extra special treat was meeting Alicia and Chris Stamps. They’ve been fans of my work for years, and massive supporters of indie horror.
Currently Reading
I’m reading Please Don’t Touch the Glass by Mike Lombardo. A fantastic short story collection that I’m absolutely devouring. I have one story left. Maybe I can get Mike to do a little interview in the next newsletter. Working on Lot Lizards by Ray Garton. Finished Yours Cruelly, Elvira. What a great autobiography. Casandra Peterson has led a fascinating life that goes far beyond the Queen of Halloween we all know as Elvira. What and inspirational book. Highly recommended. Just started Dweller by Jeff Strand.
Free Fiction
This story was published in an anthology called 44 Lies by 22 Liars. At least I think that was the title. I didn’t get paid for my two stories and I didn’t get a contributor copy (yeah, fuck that publisher). At the time I was publishing a lot of short fiction. This book came out and kind of flew under my radar and by the time I realized that I hadn’t been compensated, it was too late. The publisher had gone silent. Good riddance.
When I was a kid I was fascinated with names in the sidewalk or etched on trees or benches (there was a bench at school that had a very detailed Evil Eddie from Iron Maiden etched in it). I sometimes go back to things that I was interested in when I was younger to look for ideas. Re-reading this story, there’s some very personal stuff in here. Things I had been dealing with at that time in my life. Let’s just say, I’m not the driver, but very much could have been. And yes, I did drive a Mercury Sable at one time (probably back when I wrote this story).
Names in the Sidewalk
When I was a kid I remember seeing names etched in squares of sidewalk, left there by passing teenagers who couldn’t resist the urge to defile fresh concrete. I always wondered how old they were and if they were still living in the neighborhood. What did they think when they walked by and saw that teenage script forever immortalized? Had any of them died and left a name no one would remember?
The sold placard had been placed beneath the Century 21 sign in my front yard. Deborah and I were finally going to move out of the house we thought we’d live the rest of our lives in.
Deborah hasn’t been the same after the tragedy, and who could blame her? Much of the past several months had been spent in a haze, signing papers, making final arrangements. Parents weren’t supposed to bury their son.
That fresh patch of sidewalk in front of my yard was where the incident occurred. It was the middle of summer just as the sun began to set. We lived in a cul-de-sac, a safe place to raise our son Steven. Safe enough not to have to worry about our seven-year-old playing on the sidewalk in front of our house, just a glance through the kitchen window away.
Some bars are starting happy hour at four and three in the afternoon. Apparently that’s where Lance Hatchell had come from when he pulled into the wrong cul-de-sac and passed out behind the wheel. Steven was playing on the sidewalk where my car should have been parked. I’d been late from work that day due to an addition to my work order that I had to take care of. If only I’d been home Steven would be alive today.
I try not to blame myself. I think that Deborah does. She’s become distant, spending too much time sleeping. I’ve heard that’s a sign of depression.
She was home when it happened. I can only imagine what she thought when she heard the impact, and I don’t want to know what she saw when she came outside that evening. I made it home fifteen minutes later. There was a sheet covering my son’s body, still pinned beneath the front of Lance’s Mercury Sable. Before I saw Deborah crying on the front porch I knew what had happened.
A few days ago I came home to find that the city had used jackhammers to remove two sections of sidewalk in front of my house. At first I thought they did it because of blood that may have stained the concrete, but Lance’s car had dragged my son’s body from the sidewalk clear up onto the grass. There hadn’t been any blood on the concrete and there weren’t any tree roots pushing the concrete up, so there really was no reason to repair the sidewalk, not that the city needed a reason.
The following night I came home and they had just finished smoothing out the concrete. Seemed strange to me that they waited until the end of the day to pour concrete, but I supposed it had something to do with how it dried.
During dinner that night (I ate alone, for Deborah had no appetite) I came to the conclusion that the new sidewalk would represent getting over the horror we had been living with. I decided that I would convince Deborah that it was a sign and that we needed to make a fresh start; that Steven would have wanted it that way.
I looked out the front window and, shaded by my work truck, I could see a figure knelt down before the fresh cement, scrawling something, probably their name or the name of their favorite band, into the fresh cement. It wasn’t my place to complain, but that was Steven’s cement. In some backwards mode of thought that cement was just about as good as a silent memorial for my son and some half-baked teenager was desecrating it!
I opened the kitchen window and yelled for him to “get away from that concrete or I’ll call the cops”. He looked up at me and then slipped into the shadows.
I found Deborah in Steven’s room. When she wasn’t in bed you could bet your last dollar she was in his room. She had his artwork lined up on his bed and all around her on the floor. Deb and Steven often colored and painted together. She’d kept just about every piece of art he’d done since he was but a finger-painting toddler.
I tried to tell her that we would get over it, that time heals all wounds great and small, but I wasn’t sure I believed that myself.
She didn’t even look at me.
The next morning I left for work and stopped just short of my car. My knees weakened; I dropped my coffee. In the now-dried concrete was half of a signature: Steven Dalt—
It could have been anyone with my son’s first name and a surname like ours: Dalton. But the jagged script was identical to what I had seen only the night before on so many drawings and paintings spread across my late son’s room.
I’d frightened him off.
I’d scared my son away from making his mark.
Deborah hasn’t changed, but I’m sure she wanted to move away from here–too many bad memories.
The new house across town is smaller. I just don’t see any more children in our future. The realtor probably thought I was crazy, but I told her that the most important thing about a house was that the sidewalk in front not have names etched in it.
Thank you for checking out the newsletter. I appreciate your time.
Read horror and take names!
Names in the Sidewalk, is both beautiful and tragic!!
Wow. Names in the Sidewalk gave me chills.