There are few sites I check multiple times a day for new content. BIRTH.MOVIES.DEATH. happens to be one that I do frequent. It’s a hilarious and entertaining space full of great reviews and editorial pieces. Seriously, if you’ve never visited it, please do. Explore the archives. The writing roster is unfuckingtouchable.
So imagine how excited I am to reveal that yesterday BMD interviewed me. Check it out when you get a chance. I think it turned out pretty okay.
Many of you undoubtedly witnessed the shitstorm from DarkFuse over the last couple months. If not, I recommend you listen to this episode of The Horror Show with Brian Keene for full details (starts around the 55 minute mark), but here’s what’s important: DarkFuse, publisher of my novel The Nightly Disease, filed for bankruptcy and closed shop. They did this, of course, without paying me a single dime of royalties for 2017 (the book was released in the final weeks of December 2016), which leaves me pretty much screwed.
So, with the rights back for the novel, I’ve decided to release it through my own small press, Perpetual Motion Machine.
Need refreshed about what the hell The Nightly Disease even is? Here:
Isaac, a night auditor of a hotel somewhere in the surreal void of Texas, is sick and tired of his guests. When he clocks in at night, he’s hoping for a nice, quiet eight hours of Netflix-bingeing and occasional masturbation. What he doesn’t want to do is fetch anybody extra towels or dive face-first into somebody’s clogged toilet. And he sure as hell doesn’t want to get involved in some trippy owl conspiracy or dispose of any dead bodies. But hey…that’s life in the hotel business.
Inspired by my now six years working the night shift at a hotel, it recycles the strangest encounters I’ve had with guests into something even David Lynch would scratch his head at. I’ve also added ten thousand words of bonus content, including a brand new introduction and bonus chapters and fake hotel reviews. I’m particularly proud of the introduction, which is rather long but I feel it accurately describes my surreal history with hotels.
Oh, yeah, check out the new front cover, courtesy of the immensely talented Matthew Revert:
Holy shit, right? Holy shit. This is the cover The Nightly Disease always deserved. I liked the DarkFuse cover, sure, but it’s garbage compared to Revert’s version.
Here is how you can buy the novel:
Right now, the book’s Amazon page is sitting at 42 reviews. Once I hit 100, I plan on celebrating by conducting an eight-hour livestream during the night shift at my hotel, which would consist of live readings, Q&As, me falling asleep at the front desk, you name it. If you want that to happen, then please buy it, read it, and leave a review.
At least this time we know I’ll actually fucking get paid for the sales.
I talked briefly about Johnny Cash over on S.W. Lauden’s blog to help promote Joe Clifford’s new anthology, Just to Watch Them Die, which includes my new short story “Understand Your Man.”
Clifford, Jen Conley, Danny Gardner, Lynne Barrett, Angel Colon, and Terri Lynn Coop also join in on the roundtable discussion.
You can check out the conversation here and purchase Just to Watch Them Die here.
Over on LitReactor I wrote up a pretty detailed essay about Stephen King’s pseudonymous history. I think it turned out really well. I cover every book he released under Bachman’s name and even speculate over a possible future work, something he mentioned back in Dance Macabre about the Patty Hearst kidnapping. Check it out.
Also, a few months back Lori and I did an episode about Bachman for Castle Rock Radio. You can listen to that here.
Also I really want to get a new dog and name him Bachman.
This has been in the works for almost a year now, but last week I finally opened my latest anthology project for public submissions. Lost Films is my follow-up to 2016’s Lost Signals. This time, instead of audio, we’re branching out into visual themes. Think Videodrome. Pay’s $0.02 per word and the deadline is this Halloween.
View the full details over on Dark Moon Digest.
I’m trying to respond to everything as fast as I can. The longer it takes to hear from me, the better you probably are as a writer. Please don’t send me any trunk stories with a video theme awkwardly forced in. I’ll be able to tell, trust me.
Good luck and I look forward to reading a bunch of groovy horror stories.
New from Gutter Books, edited by the very talented Joe Clifford: Just to Watch Them Die: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Johnny Cash.
This anthology includes my own short story “Understand Your Man” inspired by the song—you guessed it—”Understand Your Man.”
Other authors you’ll find in Just to Watch Them Die:
Rob Hart — “Like the 309”
Jen Conley — “God’s Gonna Cut You Down”
David James Keaton — “One Piece at a Time”
Lynne Barrett — “A Boy Named Zoe”
David Corbett — “Rusty Cage”
Tom Hazuka — “The Ballad of Forty Dollars”
Mike Creeden — “Sunday Morning, Coming Down”
Nik Korpon — “Rose of my Heart”
Sarah M. Chen — “Missouri Waltz”
Terrence McCauley — “Hurt”
S.W. Lauden — “25 Minutes to Go”
Gabino Iglesias — “Want to Go Home”
Danny Gardner — “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town”
James Grady — “Rings of Fire”
Renee Asher Pickup — “Thirteen”
Hector Duarte Jr. — “Ain’t Gonna Work Tomorrow”
Ryan Leone — “Folsom Prison Blues”
James R. Tuck — “Walk the Line”
Angel Luis Colon — “Jackson”
Jennifer Maritza McCauley — “I Don’t Know Where I’m Bound”
Steven Ostrowski — “I Still Miss Someone”
Terri Lynn Coop — “Man in Black”
Heath Lowrance — “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?”
My hotel novel, The Nightly Disease, is currently out of print. Here’s an article I wrote about it for LitReactor. It sounds like I’m more sad than I actually am. I’m okay. It’s cool.
Anyway, I’m currently in the process of adding bonus content for a reissue, which will include an essay-length introduction titled “A History of Hotels,” bonus chapters, and a series of fake hotel reviews at the end of the novel. The reviews are where I need your help.
Only continue reading if you’ve already read the novel, because I am about to spoil the ending.
Here is my idea: after the book ends, I want a couple pages consisting of a series of fake reviews. The reviews will be written by guests who were staying at The Goddamn Hotel during Isaac’s last night there. So, these guests have experienced not only a fire, but owls had also invaded the building, there was a shoot-out in the lobby, little league coaches and parents partied like rockstars, and an employee turned a giant dildo into a torch. It was…an eventful night.
I would like you to write up a brief review from the POV of a guest who stayed at The Goddamn Hotel that night. Get as weird with it as you want. Nothing too long, keep them below 300 words. Feel free to use your real name for the guest or come up with something else, and don’t forget to give the star a rating (5-star system).
Send them to maxboothiii@gmail.com by August 5th. If I like what you come up with and decide to use it in the book, I’ll send you a signed copy of the new edition whenever it comes out.
Hard Sentences, an anthology consisting of crime fiction inspired by Alcatraz, is now available from Broken River Books. Edited by David James Keaton and Joe Clifford, this anthology includes short stories by folks like Nick Mamatas, Jedidiah Ayres, Matthew McBride, Nik Korpon, Gabino Iglesias, and many others. It also includes my story “Roller Canary”, which is about the infamous Birdman of Alcatraz.
Read Keaton’s hilarious introduction to the anthology over at LitReactor, then go pick yourself up a copy on Amazon.
It is my birthday and also Lori’s birthday and also America’s birthday and my chest is on fire and I am a coughing machine and we are watching War on Everyone on Netflix and less than one minute in we are already laughing and today I am twenty-four years old, which is not much different than twenty-three or twenty-five.
Here are where some things stand:
I wrote a novella of around 18k words titled “Everywhere You’ve Bled and Everywhere You Will”. It’s about a bleeding penis, spiders, and witchcraft. You can read it in the newly released Garden of Fiends anthology published through Wicked Run Press. There’s a bunch of other addiction horror novellas and short stories collected in it that I’m sure are also dope. Maybe that was a bad word choice, given the anthology’s subject matter. Maybe it was a perfect word choice. I don’t know. You should go buy this thing. I’m pretty stoked about it.
Check out this cover:
