Category: literature promotion

Stripes

We need not see white stars against a blue background
to know the blood of the red against the white. As early
as the Mystic Massacre of the Pequot, we already have
the proof we need to see the bloodlust of the 13 British
colonies, whose men began the first phase of the killing, with stripes of red on
red skin, hardly thanksgiving for all the good the aboriginals did for us whites.
We were helped in the cold; we burned them alive in their villages and tepees.

The Gods Must Be Furious–Chapter One

Kurt Wells and his wife, Samantha, were being driven home from dinner in a French restaurant one night in Vermont. He was looking through the business section of a newspaper, checking his stocks.

“How are your investments doing, Kurt?” she asked.

“Wonderful!” he said. “Excellent! They’re the highest they’ve been in…oh…four years.”

“Really?” she asked. “And so many people complain about the economy.”

“The people who don’t matter complain,” he said. “And the people who do matter, don’t complain.”

Their chauffeur, worried about his unemployed brother, tried to keep his sigh inaudible.

A sudden, loud crack of thunder startled all three of them. Then the rain started to fall.

“Have our large umbrella ready for us, Phil,” she told their driver.

“Yes, ma’am,” Phil said.

A huge gust of wind whistled by the car, startling them all again.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “This is going to be a nasty one.”

A flash of lightning switched the black of night to white for a split second. The rain was coming down heavily now, drenching the car.

The Wellses could see their mansion, surrounded by its large, gated lawn. In the flashing lightning and black of night, it looked to Phil like Dracula’s castle.

The gates opened, and the car went in. A bolt of lightning hit the right side of the gate just after the car drove past.

“My God!” Kurt shouted. “That scared the life out of me!”

“Oh, the gate is destroyed,” Samantha said. “How much it will cost to replace it!”

You can afford it, you billionaire bitch, Phil thought.

“Drop us off by the front door, and have our umbrella ready,” Kurt said. “I don’t want to go through the annoyance of parking in the basement parking lot, and then having to go up the stairs to the ground floor, what with my gout.”

Phil parked as instructed, and had the umbrella in his hand. He got out of the car and went over to open the right back door of the limo. He had the umbrella over himself for the moment.

“The umbrella is not for you, Phil, it’s for us!” Kurt snapped at him; then he held it over Kurt and Samantha.

Yeah, I’ve gotta get totally soaked for you, don’t I, you selfish oligarch bastard, Phil thought.

The couple got out of the car. A gust of wind blew rain all over Kurt and Samantha. His black tuxedo and her dark red evening gown were soaked.

“Phil, be careful!” she shouted. “Make sure the umbrella protects us from the rain!”

Yeah, like I’m supposed to be able to predict when the wind’s gonna blow the rain which way, Phil thought.

A bolt of lightning hit the walkway just a few feet behind where the three of them were.

“Oh, my God!” she screamed.

“Hurry up and get us inside, you lazy fool!” Kurt shouted.

Since when am I dawdling, you grumpy piece of shit? Phil thought. I wanna get out of this storm as quickly as you do. I can’t help it if the wind and rain are slowing us all down.

They’d reached the front door of the mansion and the butler opened it to let the couple in. Just then, the loudest crack of thunder they’d hear that night jolted all four of them.

Immediately after that, without even a second to calm down, a jagged fork of lightning came right at Kurt and Samantha, not only electrifying them, but also impaling them with its points.

They both screamed as their bodies shook and their blood sprayed and mixed with the rain. After several more seconds of this screaming, shaking, and spraying of blood—their bodies lit up like Christmas trees and burning to crisps—the forked spear of a lightning bolt disappeared, and the two lifeless bodies fell face-forward on the walkway immediately in front of the door.

They were charred black from head to toe. Holes in their chests, the diameter of thick spears, went all the way through from their backs to their fronts. Phil and the butler—shaking as much as their dead bosses had just been, their eyes and mouths agape—could see through their bosses’ backs to the concrete underneath. The two servants would keep shaking for another two minutes, always staring at the corpses.

Finally, Phil looked up at the night sky, for the storm had stopped just after Kurt and Samantha died. It stopped as quickly as it had begun. He intuited, correctly, that it was as if the whole purpose of the storm had been to cause the deaths of his wealthy bosses.

As he looked up there, he sensed how correct he had been to assume that it had, indeed, been the purpose of the storm, for Phil could clearly make out, in the darker spots inside the clouds, a large man’s face: eyes, nostrils, a smiling mouth, and even a beard.

It wasn’t pareidolia, either: it was too perfectly proportioned for that. In fact, Phil was sure he saw the eyes and mouth move.

The Gods Must Be Furious–Prologue

This was the dream.

There was a meeting of all the gods in a place so dark—was it a cave? Was it the bottom of the ocean? Was it in a starless part of outer space?—only their divine eyesight allowed them to see each other.

The gods looked upon the weeping goddess of the Earth, and on those who were her stewards, with near despair.

“Something must be done,” the sky-father said in a deep voice. “We have been dormant for too long. We have allowed man to abuse our grandmother of the Earth several hundred years now. It cannot go on.”

“They stopped praying to us centuries ago,” the god of the sea said. “We tolerated that, but their sin has reached such lows. We cannot tolerate it anymore.”

“Since the praying stopped, we have been dormant, in a state of hibernation for so long,” the king of the underworld said.

“Not I,” the god of war said. “On the contrary, I have hardly been allowed to sleep since the filth has gone into the clouds, the sea, and on the land. My energy is nearly spent. I crave rest.”

“Man is killing me, and all of my children,” the earth mother goddess sobbed. “Man is killing himself, too, only he is too blind and foolish to see it. Save us, brothers and sisters—I beseech you.”

“Our grandmother in body, and sister in spirit, we know your pain,” the sky-god said.

“We will help you, dear sister, have no fear,” the goddess of the grains said. 

“All man cares about is money,” the god of commerce said. “He must either be freed of his slavish devotion to it, or he must be killed.”

“Not all of them,” the sky-father said. “There are a few good men, women, and all the innocent children who can be spared…or resurrected later, at least. First, we will seek out a select few of the evil ones to slay, as a message of warning to the others. Those who have ears, and will listen, we will provide them with protection when we destroy the rest. As for the evil ones, we will first provide fair warning.”

“They will not heed the warning, to be sure,” the sea-god said.

“No, they will not,” the sky-father said. “We will give them warning even still, for it is the just thing to do. Their unwillingness to heed our warnings will be upon them, not upon us.”

“How shall we do it?” the god of the underworld asked. “How shall we warn them?”

“Each of us will choose a group of victims and slay them,” the sky-father said. “You, my brother, find someone in the mining business, or in the hydraulic fracturing business, and destroy him. You, our grandmother of the Earth and our spiritual sister, find fitting victims. You, my brother of the sea, can find some wealthy sorts on their yachts and lead them to their doom. I, too, will find victims. After these attacks, we will await the world’s reaction, and act in a manner fitting.”

“So the people will know that these acts are not freak occurrences of nature, but deliberately carried out by us, we will have to leave signs,” the sea-god said.

“Yes,” said the sky-father. “When the attacks are finished, we will allow ourselves to be seen: me in the sky, you, Brother, on the waves of the water, on the grassy ground for you, our sister of the Earth, and in the underground rock for you, our brother. Someone will report on the sight of our images, and though most won’t believe, enough will—those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. These ones will have the faith to be saved.”

The dream ended there.

Who woke from it?

Many, many people saw and heard the exact same dream…all over the Earth.

These dreamers all wondered: was this dream mere wish-fulfillment, a wish that the wicked would be destroyed and the Earth saved…or was the dream prophetic?

“That dream felt so real,” Michelle said with a yawn. “Were the gods talking to me?”

“Why would I dream of something like that?” Gary asked himself as he sat up in bed. “Wish fulfillment? Do I want the gods to intervene in our shitty world that badly?”

Nina was rubbing her eyes and watching her husband sleeping peacefully beside her. I feel rather disappointed that that was only a dream, she thought. Since nobody else is doing anything about the Earth’s problems, a little divine intervention for the sake of our Mother Earth would be a good thing.

Shelly woke up with a start. Then she closed her eyes again, put her hands together, and prayed: “O gods, please do what I just dreamed…but show mercy, even to the wicked.”

Across the road from Michelle’s house, her mother woke up, too.

Why would I, a Bible-believing Christian, dream about pagan gods? she wondered. That was the kind of thing my daughter would have dreamt. Or were they angels? I’d rather believe that.

Cam woke up. “What a ridiculous dream, something Gary would have dreamed,” he whispered, then went right back to sleep.

The Tanah: Crests–Chapter Three

[The following is the forty-sixth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, here is the twenty-sixth, here is the twenty-seventh, here is the twenty-eighth, here is the twenty-ninth, here is the thirtieth, here is the thirty-first, here is the thirty-second, here is the thirty-third, here is the thirty-fourth, here is the thirty-fifth, here is the thirty-sixth, here is the thirty-seventh, here is the thirty-eighth, here is the thirty-ninth, here is the fortieth, here is the forty-first, here is the forty-second, here is the forty-third, here is the forty-fourth, and here is the forty-fifth–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

Translator’s Introduction

This chapter is the last of the Crests. It is also the last of the texts of the Tanah to be translated…for now, until more have been discovered, to be translated and commented on when the time comes.

As has been explained in the commentary on earlier chapters, this crest is an ambiguous one. What is to become of humanity after the third and most terrible trough? Is man to be reborn in a new, peaceful world, or is he to exist only in a spiritual, nirvana-like state in the oneness of Cao? The elders of the tribe who saw the vision of this final crest do not know. The reader will have to decide for him- or herself.

Chapter Three

The last vision that we elders had, the final crest, was difficult to interpret. What was the true nature of the peace that we saw? Was it the quiet of man no longer fighting his brother, or was it the quiet of man no longer in existence, since death is often the highest peace, the one true escape from pain? Our uncertainty was chilling.

We saw flatlands with no plants or animals. We saw only barren desert waste and rock. Total silence. Not a single man, woman, or child could be seen anywhere, near or far, to populate the land.

Still, we could feel humanity; the souls of all people were a vibration throughout the air. These souls were all one, united in peace, with no bodies to make them seen or heard. Still, that collective soul was there, all in harmony.

Finally, after a long wait, what seemed like years, maybe hundreds or thousands of years, we saw the beginning growth of green, a tiny plant. Our vision thus ended.

We asked each other many questions about what we saw. Will the Pluries fall again, animating the rain with divine spirit and life? Would this plant we saw be the first of many more to come? Would new animal life come after the plants? And then, at last, would man reappear, to live in peace and harmony with his brother?

We can only hope so.

If not, may the united souls of man, in that vibration in the air, remain in peace by always being at one with Cao.

‘Just Beneath Your Boat,’ the Horror Anthology with My Short Story, ‘Scylla,’ Has Been Published!

Just Beneath Your Boat: Tales of Aquatic Terror Edited by: Thomas Folske, has been published on Amazon today, May 17th. Presented by Dark Moon Rising Publications, the anthology has my short story, ‘Scylla,’ in it.

My story is about a family going out in a yacht, but the father works in a big company that is polluting the ocean to cut costs and maximize profits. Certain supernatural forces in the ocean, however, want to take their revenge not only on him but also on his whole family, using the plastic dumped in the ocean to construct a huge…abomination…to kill them.

Other great writers in the anthology include the following:

Stephen A. Roddewig
Jeff Parsons 
Lillian Csernica
Rob Tannahill
Claire Davon
LJ Jacobs
Milan Simić
Justin Carlos Alcala
Denise Landry 
Blake Hoss
David McDonald 
CJ Hooper
Pip Pinkerton 
Dino Parenti
Don Anelli
Matthew Chabin
Kasey Hill 
DJ Tyrer 
Miguel Fliguer
Thomas Folske
Michael Mortimer
Margaret Eve

Also, there is artwork from:

Alhiya Hoffman
Amelia Folske
Ben Merk
Blake Hoss
Kelsey Grimmell
Michelle Hanson 
Milan Simić
Olivia Davis
Sidney Shiv 
Todor Gotchkov
Warren Muzak

So, go get yourself a copy of this great book! Its’ also to be published on Kobo and OverDrive libraries, possibly also even on hoopla. I mention these alternatives for those who’d like to buy the book, but who don’t want to give Jeff Bezos their money. 

😉

My Short Story, ‘Cao,’ in the ‘Beast Under Your Bed, Vol. 1’ Anthology, is Published!

Beast Under Your Bed, Vol. 1: A YA Horror Anthology, from Dark Moon Rising Publications, has my short story, ‘Cao,’ in it. The book has been published on Amazon. Because the stories are written for teens, there are no naughty words or other adult content.

My story is about Timmy, a sensitive boy who feels a mystical connection with Cao, the unifying energy field of the entire universe. It keeps telling him it is going to take him away. He’s terrified of it…but will going away really be a bad thing, given his abusive parents and the bullying he suffers at school? Will being taken away be his damnation, or his salvation? Read and find out!

There are lots of other great writers in this anthology, one of whom is Megan Guilliams, the curator of the book. All of us writers are as you can see below:

You can also see other publishers of the anthology, if you don’t want to give Jeff Bezos your money. Go get yourself a copy of this great book as soon as you can! 🙂

The Tanah: Crests–Chapter Two

[The following is the forty-fifth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, here is the twenty-sixth, here is the twenty-seventh, here is the twenty-eighth, here is the twenty-ninth, here is the thirtieth, here is the thirty-first, here is the thirty-second, here is the thirty-third, here is the thirty-fourth, here is the thirty-fifth, here is the thirty-sixth, here is the thirty-seventh, here is the thirty-eighth, here is the thirty-ninth, here is the fortieth, here is the forty-first, here is the forty-second, here is the forty-third, and here is the forty-fourth–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

Translator’s Introduction

This chapter, too, seems eerily prophetic. It seems to predict not only the French Revolution and the rise and fall of Napoleon (or are our researchers letting their imaginations run wild here?), but also the end of the Commons due to enclosure, forcing English farmers to enter cities to work in factories. We’ll let you decide if our researchers’ speculations are correct.

Chapter Two

The next crest we saw in our visions would be a short one–so short as almost to seem non-existent. Indeed, this crest seemed almost to overlap with a trough, and to overlap almost fully.

Those who wore the bracelets came to hate them, suspecting rightly that it was the bracelets that were the creators of their woe. So when the time came that the bracelets would no longer stick to their skin, and the wearers were to feel compelled to pass them on to be worn by the next generation, the wearers, having finally become able to remove the bracelets from their wrists, resisted giving them to their sons and daughters. They felt a terrible headache from their resistance, but they prevailed all the same, not knowing the Crims or their divine power in the bracelets.

This unwitting disobedience to the Crims–the people’s not knowing that it was to be the Crims who decided when the wearing of the bracelets would end, and not the people to decide–would result in good and ill fortune at nearly the same time. True, the ill fortune of servitude to the lords of the land would end, the curse of wearing the bracelets, but a new ill fortune would creep up on the unsuspecting people, their punishment for rejecting and discarding the bracelets before the time the Crims deemed a fit one.

The people with naked wrists rejoiced at the cutting off of the heads of their oppressive kings and queens. They rejoiced no longer to have to work on land owned by lords who took most of the food they produced. They were delighted that a new state, with men to represent the needs of the common people, was born…almost still-born, they would soon learn.

Indeed, new evils were soon coming to replace the old ones–new evils that followed like toes of boots stepping on the heels of the feet of the old ones.

A great new leader, once thought to be a liberator of the people, would soon call himself “emperor,” and would conquer many nations–though he would be defeated soon enough.

More significantly, while those farmers who now lived off the land in relative peace, without lords to have to give most of their food to, were happy in this state for a time, new masters would come. These would buy off the land and force the farmers off of it, making them move to the cities to find work in filthy, smoky buildings, castles that blew fumes into the skies.

The people would work for a pittance, barely enough to live on, and thus would begin a new trough, the worst of them all.