Bev Vincent

We were starting to think the clouds had forgotten how to throw water from the sky. My wife and I were having supper at one of the handful of local restaurants we frequent (we only go to places that have outdoor seating) when the skies opened up and pelted the earth for quite a while. It was a good soaking. We had to move from our table at the edge of the covered patio to keep from getting splashed, but otherwise we enjoyed the storm—especially the drop in temperature it brought.

Because it has been aitch-oh-tee HOT lately. Well over a hundred degrees every day for about three weeks, with “feels like” temps around 110°. Too hot to do much of anything but stay inside. It’s a momentary reprieve—after today we’re heading back to triple digits again. And August is usually our hot month. The Gulf of Mexico is probably as warm as a sauna, which means any storms that end up there will get stronger fast. Could be an interesting summer.

Less than two months until the release of my book Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of His Work, Life and Influences. On publication day, I will be appearing at the relatively new independent bookstore in our community, Village Books. While the event is free, seating is limited, so reservations are required. For people unable to attend, the bookstore is happy to ship signed/inscribed copies via this link. The link will remain active after the event—if someone orders a signed copy, I’ll drop by the store to spill some ink on the book.

A while back, Brian Freeman asked me if I thought there was an essay to be written about Stephen King books that had different original titles. I agreed that there might be enough there to write about. The result is a lovely chapbook called What’s In A Name? What makes this chapbook particularly special (in addition to the fact that is limited to members of his Lividian Publications patreon) is the fact that he got François Vaillancourt to create book covers for these discarded titles, making a gorgeous little booklet. Although it is out of print on publication, François has created a poster featuring his alternate covers. To learn more about that, see his Facebook post from July 14, 2022.

This is proving to be a productive year for short stories. Here are my recent and forthcoming publications:

• Double Play, Summer Bludgeon: An Unsettling Reads Anthology, June 21, 2022
• Kane’s Alibi, The Book of Extraordinary Femme Fatale Stories, Mango, July 12, 2022
• Date Night, Picnic in the Graveyard, Cemetery Gates Media, 2022
• The Unburied Past, The First Line, Vol 24, Issue 2, Summer 2022
• Cold Case, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, Vol. 3 No. 4, 2022
• Death Sentence, Black Cat Weekly #51, August 2022
• Something Strange, Land of 10000 Crimes, September 2022
• A Grave Issue, FOUND: An anthology of found footage horror stories, October 2022
• Good Neighbors, Gone, Red Dog Press, November 2022

When we were on vacation last month, I discovered a copy of Belle Ruin by Martha Grimes in the rental house. It’s the third book in a four-book series featuring 12-year-old sleuth Emma Graham. I decided to go back to the beginning and read Hotel Paradise to my wife in the evenings. Interestingly, we don’t learn Emma’s first name until the closing chapters of the book. Now we’re moving on to Cold Flat Junction. I also tore through Take Your Breath Away by Linwood Barclay and am currently reading Three-Edged Sword by Jeff (Dexter) Lindsay. It’s the third caper in his new series featuring the world’s best thief.

We watched a few foreign movies recently: Toscana, about a Danish chef who has to return to his estranged family home to settle the estate and The Rose Maker, a charmer about a woman who hires three people on a prison work-release program to help her save the family business. Peace By Chocolate would also qualify as a foreign movie, I guess—based on the true story of a family of Syrian refugees who end up in a small town in Nova Scotia and start a wildly successful chocolate business. I watched Buried in Barstow because I’ve always liked Angie Harmon. We watched No Time to Die, which I thought was entertaining and then, the other night, Everything Everywhere All at Once, which was fascinating, innovative, creative and thought-provoking. Although much has been about its themes of nihilism and meaningless, to me it was the story of a woman suffering a nervous breakdown because she was dealing with four or five major life crises all at once. I highly recommend it, although I have to warn you that it can be overwhelming!

Lots of TV to talk about. The final episode of Barry was dark and intense, making me wonder how they’re going to pick it up next season. I went back to Russian Doll and finished it, although I wasn’t quite as engaged as I was during the first season. I also went back to Hacks and finished it—the first couple of episodes were hard because Jean Smart’s character was so unlikeable, but things get turned around by the end in a good way. I enjoyed Borgen: Power & Glory, the Danish political series about the discovery of oil in Greenland that threatens to topple the power balance between Denmark and it’s colony. Of particular interest is how the main character allows herself to throw aside some of her fundamental beliefs to the extent that people don’t recognize her any more. Then she has an epiphany.

We are enjoying The Old Man on Hulu, a terrific espionage thriller. Amy Brenneman’s character is particularly interesting, as is the intriguing character played by Alia Shawkat. Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow are excellent in it. I blazed through The Lincoln Lawyer. Great to see Neve Campbell again, and Becki Newton pretty much stole the show. We thoroughly enjoyed the Yellowstone prequel 1883, which is gritty, dark and quasi-mystical, but we couldn’t get into Yellowstone itself.

Of course I polished off the final two episodes of season 4 of Stranger Things, which I’ll be writing more about for Dead Reckonings with Hank Wagner. We are also watching the original three seasons of Midnight Diner (not to be confused with Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories, which are the later seasons), a charming series about a Shinjuku diner that opens at midnight, thus attracting an unusual set of patrons. At its heart, it’s about how certain foods transport us back to seminal moments from our childhood.

Season 2 of Grace, starring John Simm, is good, although the plots are based on some well-worn mystery tropes. The motivator for Redemption, starring Paula Malcomson, is fascinating. A British cop gets a call that her estranged daughter has been found dead in Dublin, so she goes there and gets herself attached to the Garda so she can dig into the death, look after the two teenaged grandchildren she didn’t know she had, and also deal with the crime-of-the-week.

My most recent discovery is Manifest, which has strong Flight or Fright connections, as well as showing its Lost influences. It’s about a flight from Jamaica to NY that vanishes, only to land 5½ years later. For the people on board, no time has passed at all (which sets up an interesting situation with a pair of twins, one of whom was on the flight and the other wasn’t). In the aftermath, the passengers experience “callings” that give them missions they have to figure out and solve. Of course, the government wants to figure out what happened to the plane, and factions arise that think the passengers are either angels or demons. It’s a little frothy, but I’m enjoying it. NBC canceled it after the third season cliffhanger, but Netflix is resurrecting it for at least one more.

Glad to see Better Call Saul back for its final episodes. There will ever be a debate about whether it was better than Breaking Bad or not. As Odenkirk said in a recent interview, this show wouldn’t have been possible without Breaking Bad.

Hey—Alan Parsons has a new album out today. I know what I’ll be jamming to while I work!

For my birthday this year (“prime” refers to my age), my wife and I went to one of our favorite vacation/getaway spots—a rental house in Surfside Beach, TX called Land’s End. It sits behind a grass-covered dune on the Gulf of Mexico and is the setting and inspiration for my recent short story “The House of Sad Sounds,” which can be found in Road Kill: Texas Horror by Texas Writers, Vol. 6. We’ve been there several times over the year (after our previous favorite went off the rental market), but it’s been three years since our last visit. Far too long. Going there again has been one of my persistent fantasies and dreams during the pandemic lockdown, and it was so nice to be able to return. The house is far too big for just the two of us (it would comfortably sleep eight), but the location is perfect and we know where to find everything in it. Other than a trip to California to visit with our daughter and her family a while back, it was our only trip away from home since 2019.

We spent most of our time on the deck facing the gulf, listening to the constant roar of the surf and watching the antics of people visiting the beach. It’s one of those rare beaches where people are allowed to drive their cars along it and park. Parking is now restricted to the dune side of the beach, probably inspired by numerous people who parked on the water side, not realizing how quickly the tide can come in. On a previous visit, we had an entertaining afternoon watching a vehicle get hopelessly stuck in the wet sand only to have the “rescue” vehicle that tried to pull it out get mired in the sand as well. An enterprising local was able to pull them both free eventually.

The main deck is beneath an upper deck perched above the roof. We seldom go up there because there’s no protection from the sun, but it is a nice lookout and it provides shade most of the afternoon for the lower deck. As long as there was an onshore breeze, we weren’t bothered by mosquitos or other annoying flying creatures, too. It was hot and occasionally quite humid, but just being outside in all that fresh air was restorative. The house is also directly across the street from a nice restaurant that has tons of outdoor seating, one of our prerequisites for any dining establishment these days. As soon as we unloaded the car after we arrived last Wednesday afternoon, we went across the street and had a couple of frozen margaritas on their deck. Vacation had begun!

We didn’t do much but relax. Watched no TV; read no news. We went on a walk on Thursday afternoon and were caught in an unexpected rain squall, but it’s the beach—who cares if you get a little wet! The rest of the time we listened to music, played cards, prepared meals, drank wine, read and just chilled. Heavenly. There was an impressive rainstorm on Thursday evening that pelted the house with rain and wind, but we were already tucked up in bed by then so it didn’t bother us at all.

It was fun to watch the families playing on the beach, too. The most entertaining thing was saw was two men and a boy trying to set up a beach canopy. It was an unusual design, one I’ve never seen before. It consists of a hoop that supports one end of the canopy. The other end is supported by the wind—it apparently requires only a 2-4 mph breeze to hold it up, sort of like a windsock. I found the model’s website and it says it takes only a few minutes to set up. These two guys worked at it for well over an hour without any success. There was probably beer involved. The young boy played in the sand while they tried to figure it out. Eventually they gave up, packed it in and left.

Surfside Beach is adjacent to a shipping port (Freeport), so large ships containing LNG (there was an explosion at the LNG terminal a few days after we left), LPG, cars and other sundries are always coming and going. We found a website that gave information about every boat and ship that arrived at the port. We could tell where a ship came from, how long it had taken to get there, what it was carrying, etc. Tugboats and pilot boats were always going back and forth to escort the ships into the port. One of them was called the Poseidon but, so far as we saw, it remained right-side up.

We packed up our things on Sunday morning and headed home (a two-hour drive), giving us time to wipe off the sand, do the laundry, stock up on groceries and get ready for a new week. Can’t wait to go back!

We are still living in a pandemic world. As I mentioned, we only dine at establishments that have outdoor seating. Since we’re currently in a heatwave, with daily temperatures in the high nineties, we often have the patios to ourselves. I turned down a chance to be on a panel at San Diego Comic-Con and won’t be attending NECON this year, either. Still not ready to be indoors among a bunch of unmasked people for prolonged periods. I’m eyeing Bouchercon in September as a possibility, especially since I have a story in this year’s anthology, but I’ve made no definite plans yet.

I’ve got quite a few stories in the queue for the rest of 2022. I just signed a contract for my first appearance in The First Line with a story called “The Unburied Past.” It’s an intriguing concept—every story in a particular issue starts with the same first line. The opening line for the Summer 2022 edition is “Thomas hadn’t expected to be alive when the town’s time capsule was opened.” Funny thing—the story I submitted to them was originally written in 1999 and called “Time Capsule.” It had garnered something like 10 rejections over the years but it was a perfect fit for this market. I had to revise the first line, of course, and the original version was in first person so that necessitated some changes. The editors were really good, too, at picking up on some problematic plotting issues and suggesting improvements in a few places. It’s rare to get that kind of feedback in the short fiction market.

I found this blog post that does a deep dive into the playlists Brian Keene and I provided for each other for our collaboration Dissonant Harmonies. It’s always nice to see someone else’s thoughtful perspectives on a project.

Also debuting in a couple of weeks is Summer Bludgeon: An Unsettling Reads Anthology, which contains my story “Double Play.” It’s a crime story that was inspired in part by a rather unpleasant smell I encountered one hot summer day a few decades ago.

We thoroughly enjoyed 1883, although we found Yellowstone itself to be rather dreary and cut out in the middle of the first episode. I’m all caught up with Stranger Things (which Hank Wagner and I will be writing about for Dead Reckonings) and eagerly awaiting the final two episodes. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is keeping us entertained (the shore leave episode was a delight). We started the second season of Hacks last night, but my wife found Jean Smart’s character to be so unpleasant that we may not continue it. I watched the first episode of the second season of Russian Doll and I’m not sure I was engaged by it, either. I’ll probably try the new season of Borgen before giving it another go. I’m also looking forward to the final episode of Barry.

For movies, we found Lost City to be good, light entertainment. An episode of Strange New Worlds had me thinking about submarine movies, so we watched The Hunt for Red October, which really holds up after 30 years. I’d forgotten Tim Curry was in it. A couple of nights ago, Focus granted us a free screening of Downton Abbey: A New Era, which we thoroughly enjoyed. Definitely a feel-good movie. I’m really surprised that we’d managed to avoid spoilers about one of the more dramatic incidents, and I’m glad we did.

I’m just about finished reading The Talented Mr. Varg by Alexander McCall Smith to my wife. While we were on vacation, I found a copy of Belle Ruin by Martha Grimes on the shelf in our rental house and I read it cover to cover. It’s the third book of a four-book series, so I plan to go back to the first one as my next book to be read to my wife.

Alan Parsons Project fans will recognize that line from their Vulture Culture album. That one came out when I was a grad student and before I had a car, so I had a 20+ minute bus ride from my apartment on Cowie Hill in Halifax into the Dalhousie University Department of Chemistry. I had a Walkman and I remember vividly listening to that album on several of those trips. I don’t readily pick favorites of anything, but that record will always have a fond place in my memories.

In a different world, I might have been at StokerCon in Denver this weekend, but I’m still not ready to spend long stretches of time indoors with hundreds of people. COVID is still out there in full force and even if everyone was masked it would still be a greater risk than I’m willing to take, even with four doses of Moderna training my immune system. I’m probably not going to make NECON this year. I’m holding out hope for Bouchercon in September—that was the last convention I attended before the plague and I really enjoyed it. Plus, I have the added incentive in that I have a story in the annual anthology and it would be fun to meet up with the other contributors and promote the book.

Promotion is part of the writing biz. It comes easier to some people than others. As a Canadian, talking about myself and my work isn’t in my nature, but it’s necessary to overcome that reticence. Other people’s livelihoods can depend on the success of a particular project, especially when that project is an anthology. As contributors, we have to band together and get the word out—it’s for everyone’s benefit. So, deep breath, prepare yourself for some promotion!

My story “Kane’s Theory” appears in Low Down Dirty Vote, Volume III: The Color of My Vote, which drops on May 15. This charity anthology is raising $10,000 for Democracy Docket, an organization that is successfully fighting against voter suppression in the United States.

Today over on Writer Unboxed, several contributors offer behind-the-scenes looks at their stories and the anthology’s theme, in a blog entry called Writing Wrongs: The Color of My Low-Down Dirty Vote. Comments are welcome!

Then, on Sunday, editor Mysti Berry and a selection of authors will be launching LDDV3 on Crowdcast. We’ll each spend a few minutes talking about the anthology, our inspiration, and/or reading from our stories. Session one features Katharina Gerlach, me, Sarah M. Chen, Travis Richardson, Camille Minichino, Ann Parker, and David Corbett at Noon PDT | 3pm EST, while Session two features James McCrone, Tom Pluck, Jackie Ross Flaum, Miguel Ramos, and David Hagerty at 3pm PDT | 6pm EST. Click the links to register for this event. The book is available for pre-order now from all the usual places.

A week or so back, I spent an hour with David Agranoff and Marc Rothenberg discussing my publishing history and experiences for the Postcards from a Dying World podcast. That interview went live today. You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts or watch us on YouTube.

I finally finished my rewatch of The Shield. Man, that finale is still as powerful as it was nearly fourteen years ago. Moving on to We Own This City, the new HBO Max show from David Simon and George Pelecanos, felt like a natural transition. This show feels like a cross between The Shield and The Wire. Corrupt cops being chased down by not corrupt cops.

The last two episodes of this season of Call the Midwife were really exciting! I finished Killing Eve. A quirky show. Not quite sure what I think about the way it ended. Similarly, I have a lot of thoughts about the way Ozark wrapped up. Certain things seemed staged to appeal to the audience rather than to serve the story. I won’t say more here, but I’d love to discuss it with someone!

We enjoyed the last episodes of Picard and the first of Strange New Worlds. I’m also into Barry S3 and we’ll probably dip into Hacks S2 soon. Also on my radar: Russian Doll, The Lincoln Lawyer and Bosch: Legacy.

During my interview with David Agranoff, a Philip K. Dick expert, I confessed that I’d never seen Blade Runner. That situation has been rectified—we watched the Director’s Edition last weekend. It was pretty good but I’m not sure why it has been elevated to the status its achieved. Maybe I was watching it with its reputation in the back of my mind and it had a lot to live up to. Maybe I should have watched the version with the narration. I have no idea why people think there’s a chance Deckert was a replicant.

We also watched The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Claire Foy, Toby Jones and Olivia Colman (as the narrator). It’s the biopic of a Victorian guy who became briefly famous for his drawings of cats. Charming and quirky.

I have an unaccustomed Friday evening to myself and I was thinking about signing up to Peacock for a month to watch Firestarter, but after seeing the barrage of negative reviews, I think I’ll watch something else instead. The Lincoln Lawyer, maybe. If nothing else, the “fire” metaphors reviewers are using to pillory the film are entertaining.

For the first time since July 2019 (when I went to NECON), I boarded an airplane. I can’t say it’s the first time I was at an airport since then because I had to make a few trips to pick people up and drop others off last summer. On those occasions, though, I only made it inside the terminal once, and even then it was for less than a minute.

My wife and I flew to SFO to spend Easter with our daughter and her family, which includes our two grandchildren, none of whom we’d seen since last October. Since we’ve been staying out of the public for most of the pandemic, it felt a little unsettling to be among so many people, especially bottled up with a couple of hundred of them on an airplane. Flight or Fright, indeed. I was hoping we wouldn’t encounter one of those jerks who insist on causing a disruption, thereby delaying our flight, but that didn’t happen. People were pretty much compliant, except for the guy on the return flight who stared at Fox News on his inflight monitor as if he were a character from Clockwork Orange with his eyes held open the whole flight. His mask was under his chin for much of the flight, and no one gave him any grief for it. I’d like to blame him for the cold I caught, but that was probably courtesy of my grandson, who was sniffling and coughing the morning we left.

It was good to get away and visit family, though. Breathe some fresh northern California air. Our daughter lives a little inland from San Francisco and Berkeley, so we were able to do a little hiking in the fields and hills nearby. Mostly, though, we conjured up meals, played cards and other games, played with the grandkids and visited.

Recent short story acceptance: “Something Strange” will appear in the Bouchercon anthology, to be published in September.

Coming soon:

• “Kane’s Theory” will appear in Low Down Dirty Vote, Volume III: The Color of My Vote in May
• “Date Night” will be in Picnic in the Graveyard from Cemetery Gates Media
• “Kane’s Alibi” will be in The Book of Extraordinary Femme Fatale Stories in July
• “Double Play” will be in Summer Bludgeon: An Unsettling Reads Anthology, appropriately enough, this summer

My rewatch of The Shield continues. I just started season five. I’m also watching the final season of Better Call Saul, which is as good as ever. I enjoyed Hugh Laurie’s adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? I hope he does more like this. I have only two episodes left of the final season of Killing Eve.

The best thing I’ve seen lately, though, is Severance, which turned out to be quite different from what I expected. Best seen knowing very little about it, other than the fact that it has Christopher Walken in a supporting role, as well as John Turturro and Patricia Arquette. Britt Lower is a standout, and the final episode of the first season is a case study in creating suspense. I was shaking when it was over and I can’t wait for season two.

We watched the director’s edition of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and then the first two TNG movies. The only other film we’ve watched recently—one that I hesitate to even mention—is The Bubble, which was not very good at all. Only a copious amount of wine got us to the end.

I finished Corrections in Ink: A Memoir by Keri Blakinger on the return flight. Ms Blakinger was a reporter for the Houston Chronicle who first came to my attention when she covered a chemical factory fire in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. I’ve been following her reporting ever since, mostly having to do with prison issues. She knows whereof she writes, having spent some time in prison herself, which is mostly what this book is about—how she ended up there, what she experienced and how she turned things around afterward. I’m tempted to call it “Orange Is the New Blakinger,” but it stands on its own, even though she herself mentions the book OITNB a couple of times.

We also finished Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult, a full-on pandemic novel that has an interesting twist. We liked her writing enough that I grabbed another one, so we are now in the beginning pages of Vanishing Acts, where the twist is revealed early on.

I have a couple of podcast interviews lined up in the near future, so stay tuned for links to those when they’re done and posted. I expect there’ll be more of them as the publication date for Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of his Work, Life and Influences draws nigh.

In November, 2008, I was contacted out of the blue by an editor at becker&mayer! (the exclamation mark is part of their name) to see if I would be interested in writing the text for a book commissioned by Barnes & Noble. That email led to The Stephen King Illustrated Companion, which was published less than a year later. It was a different kind of deal than traditional publishing. B&N ordered a certain quantity of books, so the entire run was delivered on publication and I was paid up front on a per-copy basis for the entire order. No returns, no royalty statements.

The book proved popular, and that initial order sold out, putting it out of print. Every now and then I’d reach out to b&m to see if B&N might be interested in a second printing. In February 2010, the bookstore chain placed a second order only slightly smaller than the initial one. Eventually, all those copies were sold, too.

A couple of years later, I pinged b&m again and they agreed to a new edition with additional text; however, due to the increased cost of paper and manufacturing, this second edition lost the pouches with removable content. Still, that edition sold out, too, after a while. There was also an Italian translation of the original version.

The book was garnering high prices on the secondary market but was no longer available in stores. From time to time, I’d query b&m, but nothing happened. I recently discovered the publisher had been acquired by Quarto, an international publisher with offices in the UK and the US, selling books into 50 countries. Last May, I queried Quarto through a general submissions email address. That was forwarded to someone from becker&mayer! and I got a response less than a week later. They wanted to revise and expand the book and I met with the editor via Zoom to discuss a proposal.

That is all preamble, leading up to the forthcoming publication of Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of his Work, Life and Influences. While this book contains the material I wrote for the Companion (some of it modified and updated), it has been greatly expanded. It has twice as much text and covers all of King’s books. Much of his oeuvre had been mentioned only in passing and—in some cases, not at all—in the earlier book. So, this new book, which is divided roughly by decade, is a much more complete exploration of everything up to Fairy Tale.

Here is the cover copy:

Explore the evolution and influences of Stephen King’s body of work over his nearly fifty-year career, and discover how the themes of his writing reflect the changing times and events within his life. Featuring archival photos and documents from King’s personal collection, this chronological history delves into the stories behind how his novels, novellas, short stories, and adaptations came to be.

With critically acclaimed titles that have also been turned into blockbuster sensations like It and Carrie, King’s work has stood the test of time across decades. This history of the writer’s struggles, triumphs, bestsellers, lesser-known stories, collaborations, and more makes the perfect addition to any Stephen King fan’s collection.

Celebrate the beloved author and King of Horror with this informational and entertaining look inside King’s most iconic titles and the culture they have created.

Some of the new material I wrote includes deep dives into the history and geography of Castle Rock and Derry, which was a lot of fun. Of particular note, this book is not a Barnes & Noble exclusive. It will be available wherever books are sold, in all of the English-language countries Quarto covers. That means it will be more generally available than the previous Companion, which delights me.

The book will be out on September 20, 2022—a highly significant date in the world of Stephen King—and it is available for pre-order now. You can see the table of contents on this page (Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of his Work, Life and Influences) together with a list of links to places where you can order it at the bottom.

Time flies when you’re having fun. (Even when you’re not, the corollary says, but that doesn’t apply to me.) I had been hoping to make The Big Announcement about my next book by now, but I’m still waiting on the finalized cover to do so. Some of you may have already heard about it via other channels, but the full scoop is yet to come. Soon, I hope. Very soon.

[Of course, less than half an hour after this posted, I received the final cover image in my INBOX. Stay tuned for an update!]

My wife and I got our second booster shots last Saturday. Feeling somewhat emboldened (but still masking), I visited a new local bookstore, Village Books, for the first time. The shop owner recognized my name from Facebook and took a selfie with me, the first time I’ve done that in years! I was in the vicinity of the store because I’d sold a book on eBay and it turned out the buyer was someone who lives in the same community so I met up with him at a coffee shop to deliver it in person rather than send it five miles by media mail. We ended up chatting for well over an hour, the first time I’ve had a lengthy conversation with someone in person other than my wife since I can’t remember when.

I’ve had a good run on short story acceptances lately. The biggest one is my second acceptance to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine for a Benjamin Kane story called “His Father’s Son.” Ben also makes appearances in the forthcoming stories “Kane’s Theory” in Low Down Dirty Vote, Volume III: The Color of My Vote, which comes out in May and in “Kane’s Alibi” in The Book of Extraordinary Femme Fatale Stories, due out in July.

Yesterday, I was notified that my cop story “Something Strange” will be in the Land of 10,000 Crimes anthology for Bouchercon 2022, which is in September. I have a demented story called “Date Night” in the anthology Picnic in the Graveyard from Cemetery Gates Media due out in May and a noir story called “Double Play” in the forthcoming anthology Summer Bludgeon from Unsettling Reads. My sci-fi noir caper “The Lagrange Point” will be in Fans Are Buried Tales from Crazy 8 Press, which I think will be out in November. I have a few others in the pipeline — you can check out what’s coming at my Fiction page.

On the non-fiction side, my essay “New England Adjacent” appeared in Mystery Readers Journal Volume 38, No. 1, Spring 2022, the first of two issues on the theme of New England Mysteries. My interview with Stephen King & Richard Chizmar about Gwendy’s Final Task ended up at Fangoria in February.

Brian Keene and I were interviewed for the Writers on Wax podcast. The host, Joshua Marsella, lost power just as we were getting ready to finish and we thought the whole conversation had been lost. However, Zoom saved it all. We did return a few days later to do the wrap-up. It was fun talking about the influence of music on writing, with a focus on Dissonant Harmonies. Video can be found on YouTube and the audio-only version on Apple Podcasts.

Recent movies: I finally made it through The Power of the Dog, although I have to say it was a bit of a slog. We watched two Ryan Reynolds films, Free Guy and The Adam Project, both of which were delightful in different ways. As a longtime reader of Haruki Murakami, I was looking forward to Drive My Car since I first learned about it. It was quite good, as was Licorice Pizza, which also introduced me to the musical group Haim.

What’s not to love about a Michael Caine caper movie? For some reason I missed King of Thieves when it first came out, but it was entertaining. We saw Shanghai Noon when it first came out on video (probably on VHS) but we watched it again, following up with Shanghai Knights, which we hadn’t seen before. We got a big kick out of the interactions between Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson. There has been talk of a third film for ages, but it’s hard to imagine Chan having the energy for all that action twenty years later.

I read Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile many years ago, possibly more than once because I had a clear and vivid memory of whodunit and how. I probably saw the 1978 movie, although I have little memory of it. The new Kenneth Branagh adaptation brought those scenes to life. It also added a non-Christie backstory to Poirot that was interesting. Reportedly a third film is in the works, based on a lesser-known work and set in post-war Vienna, which doesn’t match up with any Christie novel I’m familiar with.

I watched the Norwegian series Borderliner (terrible title), which reminded me of A Simple Plan in that it deals with people who come upon something valuable and then proceed to make one bad decision after another. Archive 81 was a trippy, fascinating “found footage” series that ends with a cliffhanger but then the series was canceled so, hmm.

I really liked From on Epix. It owes a lot to Lost (so much so that I expected the characters to stumble upon a Dharma station at some point). Since it’s on a non-network channel, the level of gore and language adds to the show’s “reality.” They really went all-in, though, in expecting a second season. I’d definitely be there for that. I also watched Suspicion, about a group of strangers who are supposedly being framed for a kidnapping. Lots of intrigue, although it got a little muddled and preachy toward the end. I’m also working my way through a re-watch of The Shield–I’m up to the middle of season 3.

Most recent read: Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, about an artificial friend and her human companion. Some books are guilty of information dumps–this one is the opposite. The near-future situation isn’t explained at all and readers are expected to keep up. Young characters are either “lifted” or not, and we don’t discover what that means until late in the book. Quite fascinating.

Currently reading: Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult, about a woman who gets stranded on one of the Galápagos Islands at the beginning of the pandemic. The island is effectively shut down (even the hotel where she had a reservation), she doesn’t speak Spanish and isn’t an experienced traveler. She was supposed to go with her boyfriend, but he’s a medical resident who couldn’t leave NY in the face of a growing onslaught of coronavirus patients. I’m pretty sure this is the first Picoult novel I’ve read and I’m enjoying it.

So, it’s only been five weeks since my last post, so I consider that an improvement over the roughly half-year gap in 2021. Where to begin? Ok, business. I have a short story called “The Lagrange Point” in the anthology The Fans Are Buried Tales, edited by Peter and Kathleen David. The book was supposed to launch at a science fiction convention this year, but the target convention isn’t doing COVID restrictions and Peter is immune compromised, so instead he switched to the Kickstarter model to pay his contributors. The fundraiser goals are essentially people buying copies of the book, and we’re already about 1/4 of the way to the target. If you’re interested, here is the link. The anthology combines the concept of The Canterbury Tales with cosplayers stuck in a convention hotel by a blizzard. It’s great fun!

“Lucifer!” by E.C. Tubb, one of the stories Stephen King and I included in Flight or Fright, will be adapted into a feature film called 52 Seconds, starring Morgan Freeman. Filming is set to begin in April in Louisiana. Although we played no part in this (other than maybe someone saw the story in the anthology), it’s very exciting!

I’m still sitting on my big news about a book scheduled for September publication, waiting for the green light (and cover art) from the publisher. I have a couple of other short story acceptances that I’m reserving mention of until I get the contract or approval from the respective editors.

I signed up for a 30-day free trial of Showtime so I could binge through Yellowjackets and Dexter: New Blood. The former is like a cross between Lost and Lord of the Flies. A group of high school girls, members of a soccer team who’ve just won their state championship, are en route to nationals when their plane goes down in the Canadian Rockies and they aren’t found for over a year and a half. Only one adult survives the crash. Where Lost focused on the lives of stranded people before their plane crashed, Yellowjackets deals with the survivors 25 years afterward. The first season ends with many questions unanswered, and the most ominous possibilities for what will happen to the stranded girls have yet to be fully realized. It’s gripping, compelling and I want Season 2 now!

Dexter: New Blood is less compelling, alas. It takes place 10 years after the end of the series and Dexter is now living in upstate New York, working in a sports store in a small town, and dating the local sheriff (who bears a startling resemblance to his dead sister Deb). The son he sent off to South America has managed to track him down (everyone else believes he died in the hurricane), setting a series of events in motion. Of course there’s a serial killer in this small town, too. If we treat Dexter’s illness as an addiction, he has a major relapse. Now, instead of seeing visions of his dead foster father, he is haunted by Deb, which is probably the best part of the series. Deb and her creatively foul mouth. I also quite liked the sheriff, who turns out to be a perceptive cop, and could see her leading a series of her own.

I also watched the Danish series The Chestnut Man on Netflix, which is quite good, and caught up with the first half of Ozark, Season 4, which continues to be tense, brutal and compelling. Every now and then I watch an episode or three of Night Court, which is free on IMDb-TV. I loved that show when it first ran and it stands up pretty well considering its age. A season 2 episode features Ray Walston from My Favorite Martian as an eccentric judge hearing a complaint about Harry Stone’s performance in the courtroom. It is genuinely funny with an unexpected gut-punch of emotion toward the end, something the show always managed to do so well.

Last night we watched Carole King and James Taylor: Just Call Out My Name on HBO Max. King and Taylor went on tour in 2010 to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of their first concert together, at the Troubadour in Los Angeles. They’re both in their sixties but, boy, do they still have it. Such great, uplifting songs. They rounded up a few of their original band from the 1970 tour, including bassist Leland Sklar (you probably would recognize him from Phil Collins videos) and drummer Russ Kunkel. We enjoyed every second of it.

I watched Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, starring just about everyone. It wasn’t all what I expected, and certainly the last 30 minutes went in a very different direction from what I was anticipating/fearing. Pure noir, with some great performances. Not a feel-good movie, though. Noir never ends well. You just never know how bad it’s going to get.

Last weekend we watched The French Dispatch. Interesting but challenging. Mind-bending. We also watched Norwegian Wood, based on the Haruki Murakami novel. I’m getting near the end of Killing Commendatore, his most recent novel, which I’m reading to my wife. “There’s some strange shit going on,” was one of her most recent comments about the book. It’s long but it’s engrossing. An artist who is caretaking a house once owned by a famous Japanese painter finds a painting hidden in the attic. As soon as he unwraps it, strangeness of the sort that only Murakami can create is unleashed. I wouldn’t even know where to begin to describe a book that has an animate Idea (also a Metaphor)!

I’ve done a couple of interviews recently. What is the Stephen King Universe? went up on January 9 and I did another interview for the same channel in which we discuss Billy Summers, although that one hasn’t been posted yet. Then I was on Dark Tower Radio Episode 120: Dark Tower III The Wastelands Palaver. Brian Keene and I will record an episode of the Writers on Wax podcast at the end of the month to discuss the influence of music on our writing and, in particular, Dissonant Harmonies.

I did a length update for News from the Dead Zone at the end of January. Next Tuesday, my review of Gwendy’s Button Box will go up there. I interviewed King and Chizmar about the book a while back, but I’m not yet sure where that will appear. Stay tuned!

I became quite delinquent in updating my blog last year. I’m going to try to do better in 2022.

I wonder how we would have reacted in March 2020 if we’d known that, two years later, we would still be in the heart of the pandemic and in more-or-less total lockdown. I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have been very enthusiastic about the prospect. And yet, here we are. Working from home is the new normal for me and, I have to say, I don’t mind it at all. Quite like it in fact. I’ll probably never go back to the office full time again. My physical office has been given to someone else and, although I still have a phone extension there, it’s all virtual.

When the weather was milder we occasionally went to some local restaurants if we could eat out-of-doors, but a cold spell descended upon us last weekend. I haven’t been out of the house this year except to go to the mailbox, which is basically in our front yard. We mask up to go to the grocery store, although I might go back to ordering online for car delivery until we get past this…what is it, the sixth wave? For some strange reason last night, my dream-mind kept trying to recite the Greek alphabet.

We had a quiet holiday break. Back when it looked like the pandemic was easing up, we’d thought we might go to California to visit family, but once Omicron took hold we decided to stay put. We cooked meals, watched streaming, teleconferenced with family, and got some work done. I wrote and submitted a few short stories and did research for others. I also had to set up a new writing PC, which was a pain, but at least I don’t have to worry about the noises my 10-year old computer was making any more.

My to-do list for the first part of 2022 includes three more short stories to be written and two novellas, including one for Dissonant Harmonies II. I also hope to have some exciting news to announce next week.

A couple of nights ago, we watched Anxious People on Netflix. It’s based on the novel of the same name by Swedish author Fredrik Backman. At six 30-minute episodes, it makes for good binge-ing. It’s about a bank robber who flees the scene and takes a group of people attending a realtor’s open house hostage in a small Swedish town. The police force consists of a man and his son. When the hostage situation is resolved, the kidnapper has mysteriously vanished and the former hostages seem unusually reluctant to provide any details. It’s a heart-warming comedy about trying to do the right thing despite what the rules tell you to do. Quite charming.

Our major binge over the holidays was the 16-episode Korean melodrama Crash Landing on You. Sixteen 90-minute episodes, so it was quite a commitment. It’s about a Korean woman named Yoon Suri, head of her own fashion business and daughter of a wealthy businessman who has to assign a new head of his company after he’s released from prison for financial crimes. Shortly after he makes his decision (in addition to Suri, he has two older sons), while testing out a paraglider for her business, Suri is caught in an unusual storm and blown all the way into the DMZ between the Koreas, where she encounters a North Korean army captain. For various reasons, he decides to hide her from the government and try to get her back home. It’s a high-stakes dramedy (people can die) with lots of humor, too. The captain has four underlings who are terribly amusing, and the women in his village are hilarious. There are tons of complications to fill the 24 hours of the season, including a terrific villain we grew to loathe. It was interesting to see something set in that culture, about which we know so little. North Korean defectors served as consultants to help them get the details of their country as right as fiction will allow. The storytelling style was interesting, too. Flashbacks occurred without warning, which meant it took some time to orient ourselves to when something was happening, and they often revisited a scene we’d already seen, but either with more detail or from another character’s perspective. It was campy at times, and occasionally too repetitive, but we enjoyed it, often watching four or more episodes in a sitting. A number of scenes take place in Zurich, Switzerland, where I lived for a while in the late 1980s, so it was fun to see places I recognized in that city, as well as the familiar blue-and-white trams.

Publication news: My short story “The House of Sad Sounds” is now available in the anthology Road Kill: Texas Horror by Texas Writers, Vol. 6  and “Kane and Averill” came out this week in Black Cat Weekly #18. As the title indicates, the latter features my series detective Benjamin Kane.

I recently finished reading two books, one just after Christmas and one last night. They were The Man From Mittelwerk by M. Z. Urlocker, which comes out in April, and The Joy and Light Bus Company, the latest #1 Ladies’ Detective Agency novel by Alexander McCall Smith. I met Zack Urlocker (the Z. in M. Z. — M. is his brother Michael) at Bouchercon in Dallas in the beforetimes and we had a nice time chatting at dinner during one of the events. The novel is an interesting blend of war story, noir, cosmic horror and whodunit. I provided them with a blurb, something I’ve only done a few times in the past.

My sorriest list for 2021 is the one for the books I’ve read. I only managed to read 29 thus far (although I do hope to get one or two more in before the end of the year. A lot of my “free” time was taken up with writing projects and the rest was mostly watching TV and movies, as the previous two posts demonstrate. Over a third of the books I read this year were “bedtime books” that I read to my wife (the bold ones below). I read a lot more in 2020, when I was judging the YA Edgar Awards.

My list of reviews is, naturally, quite short as well. The reviews are linked in the list below. I did manage to read half a novel on Christmas Eve, so maybe 2022 will be better. In every respect!

• Never Far Away by Michael Koryta
• Later by Stephen King
• Sleeping Beauties, Vol. 1 (Graphic Novel) by Rio Youers and Alison Sampson
• Good Neighbors by Sarah Langan
• A Promised Land by Barack Obama
• Find You First by Linwood Barclay
• Lola On Fire by Rio Youers
• Dream Girl by Laura Lippman
• Billy Summers by Stephen King
• When a Stranger Comes to Town, edited by Michael Koryta
• How to Raise an Elephant by Alexander McCall Smith
• Where They Wait by Scott Carson
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
• Home Stretch by Graham Norton
• The Peculiarities by David Liss
• How to Write a Mystery: A Handbook by Mystery Writers of America, edited by Lee Child With Laurie R. King
• The Life and Loves of a He Devil: A Memoir by Graham Norton
• My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones
• The Wonder Boy of Whistle Stop by Fannie Flagg
• Survivor Song by Paul Tremblay
• Arizona Dreams by Marsha DeFilippo
• Daughter of the Morning Star by Craig Johnson
• Silverview by John Le Carré
• In a Time of Distance: And Other Poems by Alexander McCall Smith
• Renegades: Born in the USA by Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen
• Thunderstruck by Erik Larson
• The Dark Hours by Michael Connelly
• The Man From Mittelwerk by M. Z. Urlocker
• The Joy and Light Bus Company by: Alexander McCall Smith

The last movie I saw in a theater was 1917 in January 2020, and I don’t expect that to change soon. We are perfectly content to enjoy new movies as they become available on streaming platforms. I know a lot of people are missing out on the experience of seeing things on the big screen, but we aren’t prepared to take that risk yet. More than anything else, we’re missing out on movie popcorn!

We averaged about a movie a week throughout the year. This doesn’t include the seventeen times I watched Yellow Submarine with my granddaughter, who grew briefly obsessed with it. I’d never seen it before, but now I know it inside and out.

Ironically, the first film we watched was called Death to 2020, and if we’d known what 2021 had in store for us we might have given it a pass. A few of the films we watched were second viewings inspired by fondness for a particular movie experience. We really liked O Brother, Where Art Thou when it first came out, so we enjoyed it again. We took a trip down memory lane with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I re-watched The Dead Zone to get ready to contribute a 5-minute segment to the DVD commentary of a new edition. We’d never seen The Whales of August, but have since rectified that situation.

Do we consider Get Back a movie? Or three?

Some of the movies were documentaries or comedy specials. One was a filmed production of Come from Away, which I’ve always wanted to see. I introduced my wife to Attack the Block, which I’d seen for the first time in 2020 and to The Maltese Falcon, which one of my all-time favorite films. We got a kick of out The Hitman’s Bodyguard and Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, especially the way Sslma Hayek went thirteen-letter-curse-word to thirteen-letter-curse-word with Samuel L. Jackson.

If I had to narrow the list down to a top 10, it would look something like this, in chronological order:

• Promising Young Woman
• The Dig
• Nomadland
• Minari
• The Father
• Ammonite
• Nobody
• CODA
• Pig
• Belfast

but I’m really bad at making this sort of list, so I’m not sure I believe it myself! Here is the full list.