Great book to start halloween week!
Murder in Montague Falls Collection released October 1 in the thriller genre.
WHITE HOT THRILLS! PITCH BLACK DEEDS! 3 TALES OF TEENS TACKLING THEIR DARKEST RITES OF PASSAGE
In Colchamiro’s RED INK, a paperboy with an overactive imagination witnesses a brutal killing on his route—or has he taken his fantasy spy games a step too far?
In Hatton’s THE DEVIL’S DELINQUENTS, a trio of teenage misfits in pursuit of success, power, and revenge practice amateurish occult rituals… with deadly consequences.
In Thomas’s A MANY SPLENDID THING, a sultry high school teacher enrolls one of her students to get rid of her husband. But will the young man really graduate to murder?
Acclaimed storytellers Russ Colchamiro, Sawney Hatton, and Patrick Thomas each present an original novella brimming with enough danger, intrigue, and murder to get readers’ blood pounding and hearts racing.
About the Authors:
RUSS COLCHAMIRO is the author of the rollicking space adventure, Crossline, the zany sci-fi backpacking series Finders Keepers, Genius de Milo, and Astropalooza, editor of the sci-fi mystery anthology, Love, Murder & Mayhem, and contributing author for his newest project, Murder in Montague Falls, a noir novella collection, all with Crazy 8 Press.
Russ has contributed to several other anthologies including Tales of the Crimson Keep, Pangaea, They Keep Killing Glenn, Altered States of the Union, Thrilling Adventure Yarns, Brave New Girls vols. 3&4, Camelot 13, TV Gods 2, andFootprints in the Stars.
He is now finalizing the first in an ongoing SFF mystery series featuring his hard-boiled private eye Angela Hardwicke and has several other SFF, crime fiction, and children’s book projects in the works.
Russ lives in New Jersey with his wife, their twin ninjas, and their crazy dog, Simon.
For more on Russ’s works, visit www.russcolchamiro.com, and follow him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @AuthorDudeRuss.
On Halloween
Halloween was a special holiday for me as a kid… until it wasn’t. Every year I’d get dressed up with my friends, trick-or-treat until dinner time, then head back out in the pitch black until it was just too cold to keep going. It was great.
But then in the early 1980s, rumors circulated about poisoned apples, candy bars with razor blades in them, and other insidious gestures targeting children, and suddenly Halloween was dead for me.
I was about to age out anyway, but still… I felt like this magical event had been ruined for me.
Some thirty years later, and I’m the dad of nine-year-old twins—my ninjas—and Halloween is fresh and new and pure again.
It’s fun the way it’s supposed to be.
So with my renewed enthusiasm for the spookiest of holidays, ‘Red Ink,’ my contribution to Murder in Montague Falls, takes place in 1984 during the days and nights surrounding All Hollow’s Eve.
In fact, my novella features a 14-year-old paperboy who witnesses a murder on his route and, after being somewhat rebuffed by the police, decides to investigate it himself, with deadly and bloody consequences.
And yes, I recognize the irony of reclaiming a once-ruined holiday by using it to commit murder, but hey…. that’s just the way we mystery writers roll.
SAWNEY HATTON is an author, editor, and screenwriter who has long loved playing in the dark. His published works include the Dark Comedy novel Dead Size, the YA Noir novella Uglyville, and the Dark Fiction short story collection Everyone Is a Moon. He also edited the Sci-Fi Horror anthology What Has Two Heads, Ten Eyes, and Terrifying Table Manners?
Other incarnations of Sawney have produced marketing videos, attended chili cook-offs, and played the banjo and sousaphone (not at the same time). As of this writing, he is still very much alive.
For more semi-unseemly insights into Sawney, visit his website at www.SawneyHatton.com or find him on Twitter and Facebook.
On Halloween
Some of my fondest memories of Halloween as a pre-teen kid were when several of my friends and I enacted semi-improvised horror shows. Our best performance—or rather, the most ambitious—had been a barely coherent piece of pulp we called “Blood on the Tombstone,” held in the gloomy basement of my friend Bob’s house.
There was no audience. (There never was.) Still, we went all out for this one: body parts made from newspaper-stuffed clothing, lots of blood (i.e., ketchup) spattering the concrete walls, a makeshift graveyard of cardboard tombstones near the boiler. Many of us wielded a variety of garden implements and hand tools, pretending to fend off a zombie attack in the vein of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.
At the beginning, only a couple of us portrayed flesh-hungry zombies, but by the end we were all turned into living dead with shuffling feet and gnarled fingers and gore-smeared mouths. (We avoided dirtying our clothes, fearing our mothers’ wraths when they did the laundry.) After the staged carnage was over, we enjoyed snacks and sodas.
When writing the grisly final act of THE DEVIL’S DELINQUENTS in MURDER IN MONTAGUE FALLS, I vividly recalled this no-budget Grand Guignol. As fake as everything had been, our twisted childhood imaginations created something real enough to stick in my mind to this day, more than three decades later. For me, it was indeed a Halloween to remember, and now that very basement has been immortalized for the climactic setting in my new novella.
Pleasant dreams, dear reader.
PATRICK THOMAS is the award-winning author of the beloved Murphy’s Lore series and the darkly hilarious Dear Cthulhu advice empire.
His 40+ books include Fairy with a Gun, By Darkness Cursed, Lore & Dysorder, Dead to Rites, Startenders, As the Gears Turn, Cthulhu Explains It All, and Exile and Entrance. His is the co-author of the Mystic Investigators series, The Santa Heist, and the Jack Gardner mysteries.
Patrick is the co-editor of Camelot 13 (with John French), New Blood (with Diane Raetz), and Hear Them Roar (with CJ Henderson), co-created The Wildsidhe Chronicles YA series and is the creator of the Agents of the Abyss series.
He has had more than 150 short stories published in magazines and anthologies, with his work for YA and children including the Ughabooz books, the Undead Kid Diaries, the Joy Reaper books, and the Babe B. Bear Mysteries as Patrick T. Fibbs.
Visit him online at www.patthomas.net and www.patricktfibbs.com
On Halloween
When you’re a kid, Halloween is one of the greatest days of the year. You can dress up and pretend to be something you’re not. Just for doing a little exercise and ringing some and doorbells, people will give you candy.
Try that as an adult. It probably won’t work out so well. As adults, we can decorate our houses and dress up for costume parties or even take our own children trick-or-treating. We can revel watching the joy and fun they are having, it’s not the same as when we were them. Even so, All Hallows Eve is still wonderful for nostalgia for that time of wonder.
Of course, lest we forget, part of the fun of Halloween is about being scared, about horror that is safe and that you know you will survive. Or at least that is how it is supposed to work. In my novella, ‘A Many Splendid Thing’, we check off the nostalgia factor with it being set in the 1950s, a simpler time. At least in retrospect, if we leave out things like Korea, the Red Scare and McCarthyism. There is horror there too, although it doesn’t start out that way.
A young man in high school is offered the love of a beautiful older woman who happens to be his teacher. She turns his world inside out and upside down with feelings he’s never experienced before. Sadly, as he is dragged into his teacher’s web of lies and murder, the horror he experiences becomes far from safe for him and several others.
Being noir and a murder mystery, you know it’s not going to turn out well for somebody, but at least, dear reader, you can rest assured that it won’t be you. At least this time.
Happy Halloween.
Giveaway:
- Print Copy (US Only) Digital Copy (International)
Link: http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/0e7c6a8f114/
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MacKade ~ V.V. Strange 