FREE PROMO - 3 days only, get your copy of CREEP.

As a thank you to my readers and an invitation to new readers I have one of my more popular stories available for free for the next three days. As you're probably aware, a large part of being an 'indie' author is spent with marketing and self promotion. This is one of those times and the following details will hopefully provide you, my astute readers, with the tools you need to get your FREE copy of Creep.


Free Kindle Ebook (28/08-31/08):


CREEP, is the first story in an exciting and gritty new psychological thriller/horror series. Cassandra: Hunter of Darkness, is a hero to the victim and a merciless angel of death to the evil ones. A killer of killers, she strikes fear into the hearts of those who get their kicks off hurting others. Join Cassandra on her quest for justice and revenge as she begins her journey into the dark underbelly of serial murder and takes care of business as only she knows how.

FREE NOW - Please share. Any reviews welcomed

US Link: http://www.amazon.com/CREEP-Book-Cassandra-Darkness-ebook/dp/B00CSGOUAK/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1377674914&sr=1-1&keywords=william+cook

UK Link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/CREEP-Book-Cassandra-Darkness-ebook/dp/B00CSGOUAK/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1377690515&sr=8-3&keywords=william+cook


"5.0 out of 5 stars A CREEPY THRILLER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
By dean s
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

"Where do i begin?
What a fantastic exciting action packed thriller from the start of the book. This is the story of cassandra a girl who is off back to university after having a holiday with her parents. She calls a taxi and gets into it and what she gets into is a big mistake and a pathway to a terrible time with the creep.
This story gripped me from the start and kept me wanting to turn the pages with excitement and the unknowing. I also had to read this in one sitting as it captures you in with the characters on every page wondering what is going to happen next.
The only bad thing to say is that it wasnt long enough because i could have read more and want more,so hopefully the sequel wont be too far off. 5 stars and well deserved."

#freehorror #kindlehorror #thriller #FREE #FREEKINDLE

Favorite Books List

Here is a list of my favorite literary works. The list is not complete and is totally subjective in that the books listed are my personal favorites - the books that I go back to for whatever reason and read again and again. This is NOT a list of books I think have the most literary merit, this IS a list of books I have enjoyed reading the most for whatever reason. My friend and peer, Vincenzo Bilof has done a similar list you may find of interest here, in response to a challenge I made to him. This, of course, being my response to said challenge. 
My Favorite Books (to date) - Recommended Reading

Fiction (Novels)

Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
Big Sur – Jack Kerouac
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
Infinite jest – David Foster Wallace
The Killer – Colin Wilson
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
Winesburg, Ohio – Sherwood Anderson
The Stranger – Albert Camus
Redemption Falls – Joseph O’Connor
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Doystevsky
As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
Shantaram – Gregory David Roberts
Bliss – Peter Carey
Killer on the Road – James Ellroy
Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon – Thomas Harris
David Morrell – First Blood
Surfacing – Margaret Atwood
The Walking Drum – Louis L’amour
Tortilla Flat – John Steinbeck
Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
The Shipping News – Annie Proulx
In My Father’s Den – Maurice Gee
In the Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
The Novel – James Michener
The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag – Robert A Heinlein
The Girls He Adored – Jonathan Nasaw
Ham on Rye – Charles Bukowski
Zombie – Joyce Carol Oates
Dandelion Wine, The October Country – Ray Bradbury
The End of the Night – John D Macdonald
The Journal of Albion Moonlight – Kenneth Patchen


Fiction (Horror)

Abarat, The Hellbound Heart –Clive Barker
The Backwoods – Edward Lee
The Face That Must Die – Ramsey Campbell
Exquisite Corpse – Poppy Z Brite
This Symbiotic Fascination – Charlee Jacob
Mystery Walk, Baal – Robert McCammon
The Shining, IT, The Dead Zone, The Stand – Stephen King
Ghost Story – Peter Straub
Psycho, American Gothic – Robert Bloch
Rats, Lair, Domain, The Fog – James Herbert
Slob – Rex Miller
Spawn – Shaun Hutson
Telekiller – John Warwick
The Lost – Jack Ketchum
Children of the Night, Carrion Comfort – Dan Simmons
Flesh and Blood, Family Portrait – Graham Masterton
Futile Efforts – Thomas Piccirilli
The Amityville Horror – Jay Anson
The Exorcist – William Peter Blatty


Short Story Collections

By Bizarre Hands – Joe R. Lansdale
The Complete Stories – Flannery O’Connor
Blue World – Robert McCammon
Tales of Mystery and Imagination – Edgar Allan Poe
Night Shift – Stephen King
Books of Blood 1-3 – Clive Barker
A Peaceable Kingdom – Jack Ketchum
The Most Beautiful Woman in Town, Tales of Ordinary Madness – Charles Bukowski
Collected Stories, The Fat Man in History – Peter Carey
The Nightmare Chronicles – Douglas Clegg
Ray Bradbury Stories (Vol 1 and 2) – Ray Bradbury
Red Dreams – Dennis Etchison
Run With the Hunted: A Charles Bukowski Reader – Charles Bukowski
20th Century Ghosts – Joe Hill
The Collection – Bentley Little


Anthologies

Dark Forces – Ed. Kirby McCauley
Cutting Edge – Ed. Dennis Etchison
Prime Evil – Ed. Douglas E Winter
Psycho-paths – Ed. Robert Bloch
Psychos – Ed. John Skipp
999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense – Ed. Al Sarrantonio
Faces of Fear Ed. Douglas E Winter


Poetry

The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner – Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell – William Blake
Selected Poems – Carl Sandburg
Complete Works, Prufrock & Other Observations, Four Quartets – T.S. Eliot
The Cantos – Ezra Pound
Greed – Ai
The Monkey’s Mask – Dorothy Porter
Love is a Dog from Hell, Mockingbird Wish me Luck – Charles Bukowski
The Divine Comedy (Hell & Purgatory) – Dante Aligheri
Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman
Ring of Bone – Lew Welch
The Theatre and its Double – Antonin Artaud
A Season in Hell – Arthur Rimbaud
The Flowers of  Evil – Charles Baudelaire
Cap and Bells – Francis Webb
Complete Poems – Kenneth Patchen


Philosophy

Aristotle – Ars Poetica, *Metaphysica, The Nicomachean Ethics
Marcus Aurelius – Meditations (trans. Graves)
Jean Baudrillard – Simulacra and Simulation
Walter Benjamin – Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
William Blake – The Marriage of Heaven & Hell
Edmund Burke – A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
Albert Camus – *The Myth of Sisyphus, The Rebel
Thomas Carlyle – Sartor Resartus
Khalil Gibran – The Madman, *Thoughts & Meditations, The Prophet
Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason, *Critique of Judgment  
Jiddu Krishnamurti – Beyond Violence, The Awakening of Intelligence, *Freedom from the Known
Bruce Lee – Tao of Jeet Kune Do
Frederich Nietzsche – *Beyond Good and Evil, The Antichrist, The Gay Science, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Human, All Too Human
PD Ouspensky – The Fourth Dimension (from A New Model of the Universe), Tertium Organum, *The Fourth Way
Bertrand Russell – *The Problems of Philosophy, The Analysis of Mind
Arthur Schopenhauer – The World as Will & Representation, *On the Suffering of the World
Lao Tzu – Tao Te Ching
Alan Watts – *The Wisdom of Insecurity, The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Colin Wilson – *The Outsider, Beyond the Outsider
Ludwig Wittgenstein – *Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Philosophical Investigations

And there you have it - my list, not by any means complete or chronological, just what it is. This will evolve.


Very pleased to be in such esteemed company alongside writers  John Paul Allen, William Meikle, Sandy DeLuca and Mark Allan Gunnell. The wonderful Horror Novel Reviews.Com website has just posted reviewer Drake Morgan's top 5 picks for the best recent Horror Novellas and graciously decided to include my ebook 'Devil Inside' on the list. Without further ado, here is the post in its entirety.

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The Five Best (Recent) Horror Novellas

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Written by: Drake Morgan

This list is by no means complete. There are so many fantastic novellas out there that one loses track fast. I don’t hold hard and fast to any literary rules on “novella.” Some of these pieces are short, but they’re published as independent releases. They count in my book. Rather than do a “best of” and try to search through decades of great work,  I’m passing along the five most outstanding that I’ve read lately.

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1) Sandy DeLuca: Messages from the Dead
This is just a great read. Spooky, haunting, and disturbing, DeLuca’s tale travels through the corridors of time to bring past and present together. Ghosts haunt the shadows of both the mind and a former hospital and they come with dark secrets.

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2) William Meikle: The Auld Mither
Based on an old Scottish legend, Meikle weaves a complex tale questioning that fine line between reality and those ancient tales still told late at night when the storms batter the windows. Disbelief in the modern world comes face to face with dark things from the ancient past.

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3) Mark Allan Gunnells: October Roses
This is a great ghost story in the old-fashioned “around the campfire” vein. College students searching for the lost body of a long-dead serial killer get more than they bargained for when they find him. Spooky Halloween read.

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4) William Cook: Devil Inside
William Cook is a man who knows his madmen. Here he explores the delicate balance between sanity and insanity, and the disturbing consequences when the walls between the two collapse.

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5) John Paul Allen: House Guest
When does love become something dark and sinister? John Paul Allen explores this complex question through an incredibly bizarre narrative construct (no spoilers here). He examines that nebulous place between reality and the supernatural through the character of Chastity and her rather unique situation.

 Reposted from Horror Novel Reviews.Com

John Paul Allen, William Meikle, Sandy DeLuca, Matt Molgaard, Drake Morgan, Mark Allan Gunnells, William Cook, Horror Novella, Horror

Jack Ketchum Interview/s

As a self-confessed Jack Ketchum fan, I like reading interviews about what makes him tick as a writer and as a person. For those of you out there who like Jack Ketchum and his work, I figure you would probably enjoy them as well. Jack Bantry from the fabulous Splatterpunk zine, gave me permission to post this recent interview he did with Jack so without further ado here it is, plus all the available online links I could find to good text/audio/video interviews with the man himself. Enjoy.


Jack Ketchum interview by Jack Bantry from Splatterpunk Zine 


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The following is an interview I did with Jack Ketchum for the first issue of SPLATTERPUNK.

How did you come about collaborating with Lucky McKee on THE WOMAN? Who approached who with the initial idea? Was it always going to be a film as well as a novel? Did the novel come before the script?

Andrew Van den Houten, who produced and directed my script for OFFSPRING, made an executive decision – instead of killing The Woman off as my screenplay did, he let her live. With a sequel firmly in mind. When I saw Pollyanna McIntosh’s work, I realized why and was glad he did. She clearly deserved a movie all her own. Andrew had always wanted to work with Lucky and knew that I already had, so we showed him OFFSPRING too, and he heartily agreed. Polly was ferociously good!

The idea to do both a film script and a book together was there from the start. I don’t recall who first suggested it – maybe it was just in the air. But we quickly agreed as to how to go about it. We instant-mailed. We’d do maybe an hour, hour-and-a half until we went brain-dead, discussing the characters first, then the themes, plot, dialogue, all kinds of things. We had a fine time together, almost always on the same page, absolutely always willing to bend to a good idea. We’d talk about how the book would differ from the movie, scenes of internal monologue in the prose version, point of view changes, etcetera. And we kept everything on file, even the goofiest ideas we knew would never made it into either version. So that by the time we were done we had “bibles” for both movie and novel. We agreed that Lucky would do the heavy lifting on the script and I’d do if for the novel. So Lucky would write ten, fifteen pages or so and e-mail them to me, and I’d revise and send them back, and we’d do this until we felt we’d nailed them and then go on to the next section. When it came to the book, I’d write maybe thirty pages and send him to him, and we’d go back and forth on that.

How did you collaborate with Ed Lee on the SLEEP DISORDER stories?

I’d only previously collaborated with Lee on the five stories collected in SLEEP DISORDER and one story, THE NET, with P.D. Cacek – Trish to her friends. Lee had this story called I WOULD DO ANYTHING FOR YOU that he wasn’t happy with. He didn’t like the tone. So he asked me if I’d like to doctor it up for him. The first thing I did was change the title to I’D GIVE ANYTHING FOR YOU – more to the point of the story. Then, because Lee tends to write longer than I do, I did a lot of trimming, swatted down some of the sex scenes, zapped some adjectives and lines here and there, and sent it back to him. He fine-tuned and that was that. A couple of year later he sent me LOVE LETTERS FROM THE RAIN FOREST. Basically tonal problems again. Same thing – I edited, tinkered. Then I had a story called MASKS for which I couldn’t find an ending, and another called EYES LEFT. Lee found the right endings for both of them. We passed them back and forth maybe twice. I did have an ending for SLEEP DISORDER but it struck me as flat. Lee came up with one a whole lot much better.

The story with Trish was my idea. We talked it over at NECON, our annual writers-behaving-badly summer bash. The notion was, an e-correspondence between an older man and an underage girl, neither one of them being quite truthful, with disastrous results. It was based on a true story I’d read about. We decided to actually write the thing by e-mailing back and forth, playing our parts online – me the older guy, she the teenage girl – and with all the bare bones in mind, making up the dialogue as we went along. Then I did the final polish and the epilogue. It was great fun!


When working on the script how did you deal with some of the graphic details in the novel? I read the book first and wondered how you’d deal with some of the explicit details – pliers on nipples, the eyeballs, killing of Brian, the dog child, etc. – Did you think to leave some of the details out of the book because they couldn’t be shown on screen?

We discussed them at length, sure. Lucky’s a bold, even fearless film-maker, but he’s also a softie at heart. Believe it or not, we’re alike that way. We’re also very aware of the fine line between exposing hideous activity and exploiting it. It’s a balancing act perhaps harder to perform in a movie than in a book, because you can explain more in a novel, you can go deeper into the motives, the whys. But you’re going to be surprised at how closely linked book and movie are.

Will there be another book in the series?

Can’t say for sure at this point one way or another. But we’ve discussed some options. We’ve resolved that if we do a sequel, it’s got to be a story that’s as important to tell as the story in THE WOMAN, and it’s got to explore theme and character. Neither of us are even remotely interested in a Jason/Freddy franchise.

You have written other novels, like RIGHT TO LIFE and THE GIRL NEXT DOOR, where someone has been held in a basement or cellar, any reason for this? Have you had a traumatic experience in a basement or enclosed space?

When I was a kid growing up in the fifties, everybody had a cellar, and nobody had the bucks to light, heat, and convert there’s into a playroom. So that what you had was this room that stayed cold and usually damp, even in summer, and not a lot of light coming in through ground-level windows. They tended to be spooky places, dark, with bare bulbs handing from the ceiling. We had coal bins. Stone wash-basins with wooden washboards. There was a chute that collected our ashes from the fireplace. I’d open it and hide stuff there. On one occasion I found a dead bird inside, and on many occasions, bits of charred bone. Freaked me the hell out. When I was about ten or so, we neighborhood kids used to have meetings of our Horror Club down there, and pasted our favorite photos from FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND or CASTLE OF FRANKENSTEIN up on the cinderblock walls.

So, no traumatic experience, but I do associate basements with mystery and horrors. And in all those true-crime stories you read, where do they tend to keep their victims? Not usually on the front porch, in a rocking chair. It’s down in the cold dark depths.


Where did you and Lucky get the idea for having THE WOMAN become the captive when she’s always been the hunter?

That came right away, and it was a natural — a reversal that would immediately avoid the same-old-same-old. It was also a way to get at her character in a lot more depth, to show many more sides of her. Remember that we always had Polly in mind, and we wanted to showcase her skills as an actress, as well as tell a good yarn.

We’ve mentioned OFFSPRING and THE WOMAN, but the novel that started it all was OFF SEASON. Would you like to see it made into a film / Are there any plans / Have you considered writing a script?

I sold film rights to OFF SEASON quite a few years ago but thus far the buyer hasn’t been able to finance the movie. There’s new interest just this year, though, from a very reputable director whose name I can’t mention yet, but who I’d love to see at the helm. Should that happen, I suspect he’d want to write his own script and knowing his work, that’d be fine with me.

That sounds interesting!! Yes, indeed…

I got a kindle for Christmas, but I still prefer reading books: being able to hold the book; having the cover in my hand; with older books the smell of the paper, etc. But a lot of horror novels are very limited and expensive (mass-market paperback seem to be disappearing), and the Kindle versions are much cheaper so your work becomes more widely available. You’ve been a writer for over 30 years and will have noticed the changes much sooner. What are your thoughts on this?

I think very few people were prepared for e-books and I was not one of them. In fact it’s only within the last year that my stuff has been available in that format. I can’t feel too bad about that, though, since most of the publishing industry were and still are in the same boat. If I were to make a prediction about all this, it would be that things will settle down as the world’s economies settle down and perhaps even before then. That e-books will co-exist with paper formats and each will support the other. And though I’m not sure mass-market paperbacks will ever make a comeback, it’s not out of the realm of possibility either. Look at vinyl. What worries me right now is e-piracy. There’s a lot of it. And we writers work too damn hard to have a bunch of spoiled, entitled, low-level sociopath assholes steal away our living.

What would you write on your epitaph? Jack Ketchum…

It would have to be either: JACK KETCHUM, LOVED BOOKS, WOMEN AND CATS, NOT NECESSARILY IN THAT ORDER or just JACK KETCHUM, LUCKY GUY

All questions by Jack Bantry
Photo by Steve Thornton
(Originally published in SPLATTERPUNK, Issue 1, April 2012)

 

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Available Online Interviews with Jack Ketchum (Text/Audio/Video):




 

Video
 

Audio






Recommended LINKS for further reading:



Jack Bantry, Splatterpunk, Splatterpunk Zine, Jack Ketchum, Interviews

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