Tedious, I Know, But I’m Not Lying – this one is Good

I’ve continually been obsessed with the traveling motif and my Gaunt Rainbow promotional videos. They were getting tedious, but I think I’ve finally polished the idea and the finished video. At that, I present my refined Gaunt Rainbow promo -

Pamela – the young(?) woman in the story – spends a lot of time riding her motorcycle over the Shur desert. She calls her bike Caballo and has nicknames for her friends back in the encampment. They call her Rainbow because she only wears black. The web of Ithadow looms over our protagonist the whole time she explores the waste looking for her messiah – the heathen’s Living God. I explain that whole mythology in Gaunt Rainbow – or you’ll already know what I’m talking about if you’ve read my Pazuzu Trilogy.

Gaunt Rainbow is a tale told 30 years after heathens pillage and raze the Chosen’s Promised Land. Pamela lived there as a little girl and she had died before the terrorists had attacked. But the messiah had brought her back to life – and bestowed a curse before he had absconded with a traitorous priest. Oh, there is so much more. Read about the world…

---

Books and ebooks available at LULU and Smashwords

Rejected

Because my Pazuzu Trilogy, and every other bleeding thing I’ve written, has been rejected by publishers and agents – by way of no %$#@-ing reply, ever – I went the self-publishing route. You know, they were right and my writing needed all kinds of major operations. For example, there has been Nine revisions of this three-headed dog. Hell, when this thing was born, it refused to die and demanded passionate attention.

Well, I gave it that. Certainly being unemployed for years and adopting a focused, hermit-like hermetic lifestyle helped my progress immensely. If I was truly a religious man and this genuinely epic story grows as large as I believe is its right (yeah, it’s personalized), my existential and legitimately physical pain and discomfort might even said to be worth my commitment. Some would say my condition is inflicted upon by the evil I consort with, then I think angels are more likely to do the inflicting. I mean, their whole regimentation is about fighting evil, which is a whole other philosophical and spiritually supernatural quandary.

That whole crucially distracting argument aside, I wanted to show my wished-for rabid fans some rejected cover art for my Ninth Revision. I kept the Eighth Revision artwork with some modifications – i.e. drops of blood signifying the order of the books in the trilogy.

PAZUZU – MANIFESTATION is the first book in the Pazuzu Trilogy. Manifestation seemingly jumps around and doesn’t latch on specific characters but I think readers fail to realize the trilogy is about the namesake character. Pazuzu is nothing but an incorporeal fiend throughout the first book. His story follows the characters the demon rides and influences. The book explains the Shur, the Wall, Capital and illustrates why God has gone away.

After a few revisions and new covers, I decided I’d try and satisfy ornery readers and give them Pazuzu right on there on the cover. I tried to show the vulture-headed ape and his shadow, but folks still didn’t know what they were looking at – which works for me because that’s a defense mechanism of the monsters that manifest and emerge in the trilogy. Theories and experiments aside, I stripped the demon down to his essentials – a beak and wings, and somewhat of a body to hold the pieces together.

The second book is called PAZUZU – EMERGENCE. This one is where Pazuzu emerges. Readers meet him in the flesh as well as dream about our primordial Sumerian Don Juan. C’mon, that’s better than vampires, right? Unless you buy into that whole vampires are demons and vice versa mythology, which is cool. That’s perfectly acceptable and wholly not cute. There’s nothing cute in my Pazuzu Trilogy. If you find something charming and endearing inside then there’s something wrong with you and you shouldn’t have guns or knives.

As you can,  there are not-so subtle changes between this image and the previous one – the wings are lowered. I hoped this composition implies ‘emergence,’ but there is nothing here that states clearly Emergence is the second book in the trilogy. This is why I didn’t want to use any of these images.

The last book is called PAZUZU – ABEYANCE. I get to this book and condemn this whole series of images, and I find nothing titillating about the experience. You professionals are sadists. Me, on the other hand, I won’t hurt you. I certainly won’t encourage your soul toward Hell. I want readers to love my stories. I think you will. I’ll make it so.

And you radical readers who say “I only give an author one chance,” well that’s not truly critical thinking. If you read a book like you’re watching television, that’s just sad. I don’t want readers that refuse to exercise and take hikes with me. There is so much I want to tell you and show you, but you’ve got to come along with me on the trail. Give me feedback and put something out there that you think might help my trek, like say “Matt, stop poking those rattlesnakes with sticks.”

---

Purchase Pazuzu Trilogy Pocket books and Hardcovers at LULU.

The End of Capital

Sounds Socialist, doesn’t it? Relax, you U.S. radical patriots. I’m talking about a city in my trilogy of fantasy-horror books. It’s a walled city where the Chosen people and their military hide from heathen terrorists. Most other Science Fiction stories will call an equivalent city the generic name Capitol. Not me, I’ve got to be complex. Forgive me, I’m desperate for attention. I’ll pander to medical marijuana users, torrent pirates and sell my vote to extremist GOP candidates if they promote my stories.

Capital is the latest bastion the Chosen have built against the ravages of the nomadic terrorists. UnChosen people live with the Chosen here and in other places across the Shur desert. That’s the world in my Pazuzu Trilogy – there is no Earth or Gaia or Terra 3, there is just the waste of the literally Godless Shur. The Godless part is important because that’s a point in the story.

In Manifestation, the beginning of the trilogy, Benedict Ishkott and the Cortras brothers come to Capital. A demon named Pazuzu follows them all invisibly and unknown over Benedict’s shoulder. Pazuzu gets into Dil Cortras but the first book in the trilogy spans multiple locations where the demon has had influence. Toward the end of the story and in Abeyance, heathens have infiltrated the city and fires begin burning everywhere.

The fires conceal the arrival of alien gods and their monsters. The minions are looking for Pazuzu. The living dead alien gods need the demon. The name of the morbid and broken Deus ex machina in this tale is Awarwan. He is a dead spider-like alien god.

The demon Pazuzu is rumored to know how life is conjured in the harsh reality of the Shur desert. The alien gods want this knowledge so that they can finish their chimeras and give them a proper existence in this new world that isn’t merely temporary. Until Pazuzu helps these supernatural invaders, their monsters are confined to the smoke and fires of an Armageddon. The incomplete creatures dissect the anatomy of human beings and collect body parts for their lordly masters.

---

Purchase Pazuzu Trilogy Pocket books and Hardcovers at LULU.

Premature Bibliography

I say premature because I pray my books aren’t stillborn. Most of my books are not published – although I’m lumping all three Pazuzu Trilogy books under the same title. Splitting apart the trilogy will make my unpublished versus self-published ratio 50/50. That seemed a fine point where I could take a breath and see where I’ve been.

I’ve got two groups – my Wister Town stories and the Pazuzu storyline. The stories set in the Midwest revolve around events in a small toenail of town in Southern Wisconsin called Wister Town – except my book Unction. All these books are the evolution of my short, Midwest-themed and loosely related horror stories. Those stories are compiled into two volumes – A Codex of Malevolence and Horrid Tales of Wister Town.

The Pazuzu Trilogy and Gaunt Rainbow share more than a town and mythology – Gaunt Rainbow revisits the fictional world of the Shur desert 30 years after heathens destroy the Chosen’s Capital (that’s not a typo, the walled city is named for money). These are the books I self published because I became convinced no publisher would take a chance on the complicated stories. Nevertheless, this is where I began and where I most clearly outline my universal themes.

The short stories were written to promote my profile as a writer – the little that has done. I only ask folks who read my stuff say something nice and recommend me to friends. That’s all I ask, for now, besides also begging people to buy my books!

Debbie’s Hellmouth
–unpublished–
Word Count Approx. 91,100
Genre Horror

“Debbie Menon has a beautiful, pseudo-Victorian house she must sell, because her soul is held in proxy for that same disowned portal into Hell. Fortunately, she’s not totally helpless – she’s been to Art school.”

 

The Betulha Dohrman Legacy
–unpublished–
Word Count Approx. 88,525
Genre Horror

“The evening The Betulha Dohrman Legacy begins, Janet Drays re-experiences drama with friends that she has avoided all summer. She leaves the Black Bear Charcoal House outside Delavan Wisconsin early and avoids the monkey-pile with her friends and one of their cheating husbands. Before the drama at the bar and restaurant began, her friend Tracy had given Janet the address of a website she might visit. While her friends are likely in jail, Janet investigates the recommendation. When she creates an account at the site’s online genealogy forum, she invites evil into her life. The devil soon walks the purgatory of Wister Town, with the monsters that erupt from the crevasse where a haunted house had once stood, before the cursed place took it’s neighborhood and moved from the Southern Wisconsin city.”

Midwestern Days of Noah
–unpublished–
Word Count Approx. 75,727
Genre Horror
“The Midwestern Days of Noah is a Wister Town story. By that, I mean it shares the regional mythology of the damned Southern Wisconsin invoked in my other stories. I make oblique references to mysterious events for ambiance and mood. The working title of this story was “Our Lord Weathercock,” in which I create a reality without God, who in turn has been replaced with tangible alien gods and demons. This story of my cults, monsters and home-schooled magicians emulate Luke 17:26 in the King James 2000 Bible “And as it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man.”

Well, it is now as it was in the days of Noah in Wister Town, Wisconsin. Years ago, an abandoned house got up and walked out of town – now a Paul Bunyan-like fable that explains a huge, dark crevasse in the center of the small city. The house reportedly took the earth with it and left an impenetrably dark pit in the earth. After that, monsters, witches and cults came to town and drove away the established religions.

Here is where The Midwestern Days of Noah begins – an old retired farmer living in Wister Town is harassed by a coven of would-be teenage witches. His name is Bill De Corbin and the man spends an inexplicably warm winter alone in his small house but with his arthritic hips aching. He calls Caleb Ahlspiess and the boy’s sister and their friends a pubescent coven – they call him “Shitty Bill”, vandalize his yard and steal his keepsake weather vane.

This being Wister Town and the odd old man perpetually feeble, Bill gets it into his head that he needs a monster that will scare away the kids. De Corbin researches Dark Magic at the public library. Meanwhile, Caleb Ahlspiess and his cult gather spells from the Internet. After the kids fail to induce a heart attack and kill old Bill, the story becomes horrific and surreal. Bill does get a monster and the young coven in Wister Town go to his house and confront him. This is the end of them all.”

 

Unction
–unpublished–
Word Count Approx. 75,834
Genre Horror

Synopsis:

“In this icky horror story titled Unction, Brian Tucker kills and mutilates an elderly couple under instructions delivered by faceless nuns in white habits.  He is a resident at the Luna Del Mar manor, a Los Angeles based board-and care-for the mentally ill. Brian masturbates into the brains of the dead people. He believes the couple he’s killed will return to life as zombies, under his control. The nuns had warned the schizophrenic killer he must create zombies and fight an onslaught of demons. Because the murders, Sergeant Jim Suffolk, from the Los Angeles police department, comes to the Luna Del Mar manor. He has been dispatched so he verifies reported murders. Jake Whitehead, an older and overweight homeless man, tells the officer he saw the murderer. Brian had been spotted entering and leaving the scene where the murders occurred, an RV parked across the street outside the facility. Brian Tucker flees to Santa Monica and stays with friends. He is disappointed that the people he’s killed so far haven’t animated.”

 

Pazuzu Book Trilogy
LULU/Smashwords 2009 - Eighth Revision 2012
Genre: Fiction – Horror/Action/Thriller
Word Count(s):

Pazuzu – Manifestation Approx. 90,968
Pazuzu – Emergence Approx. 91,010
Pazuzu – Abeyance Approx. 93,985

Synopsis:

“My Pazuzu Trilogy presumes there is no good, no happy endings – there is no God. Here is the world of the Shur desert. An ocean borders the waste on its northwest side, but there is nothing else. Nomadic heathens have lived in the Shur for generations, waging cold war jihads against their enemies the Chosen.

The Chosen live with the meek UnChosen on oases plagued by heathen terrorism. Chosen and UnChosen share the same religion and petition the Mortal God whom the Chosen tribes had crucified and eviscerated before the heathen jihads began. The death of the Mortal God sparked the conflict based on clan and caste. See, there was One God – the Chosen’s Mortal God and Living God of the heathen are the same entity. Frustrated with unrepentant sinners, that God has abandoned His world.

In His place, alien gods have arrived. Nodding to the forlorn HP Lovecraft, these un-living aliens claim providence. A demon wakes who denies the will of this chaotic pantheon. That demon is Pazuzu and the fiend hides from this world’s new overlords. Pazuzu seeks a mortal body it might possess and walk the Shur in disguise.

The demon finds Benedict Ishkott, a man readers meet face-to-face as he crosses the Shur bareback and without his memory. Benedict is an impractical vessel, so the man and demon come to Capital – as in money and not a typo. Capital is a Chosen monument city surrounded by a polished limestone wall. Drugs, propaganda, exploitation and prejudice have weakened this wall and all sorts of malcontents sneak inside. The disaffected, illegal migrants at Saint Erasmus become the focus of the trilogy.

Here, Pazuzu and Benedict Ishkott find a body the demon can use. At the same time, their actions solicit the attention of the Chosen’s Church and alien gods. This is when heathens announce they have breached the Chosen’s Wall and set Capital afire and the Pazuzu Trilogy reaches its climax.

The story does not end when the Chosen’s Promised Land burns. Instead, readers witness the individual fates of everyone whose lives Pazuzu had personally touched. This is the price paid when evil combats evil in a world where there is no God.”

Gaunt Rainbow
LULU/Smashwords 2009 – Third Revision 2011
Genre: Horror/Fantasy
Word Count Approx. 88,549

Synopsis:

“Gaunt Rainbow is set in a bleak dystopia twenty years after a pivotal event in the war between the Chosen caste and heathens; the destruction of the walled city called Capital. Pamela, a young woman nicknamed “Rainbow”, is cursed to drain life from living beings so that she remains in perfect health. As a girl, a self-proclaimed messiah, a pubescent boy, cured her blindness. Pamela believes the boy also resurrected her after she died in a fire during Capital’s destruction. Her curse began after coming back to life. Pamela goes into the Shur desert to find the missing messiah and hopes he’ll remove her curse.”

 

---

Horrid Tales of Wister Town printed copies and ebooks are available at LULU and Smashwords.

A Bent Nose and Crooked Mind

I was in a major accident in 2007. I don’t remember any of it – any of the accident, that day or the three debilitated weeks after. I was told I had been crossing a street near my neighborhood in Sunland, California on Mother’s Day, May 13th. A white Toyota pickup truck had struck me and sent me into a downtown Los Angeles trauma hospital. A police report confirmed when and where I had been kicked into the air, and who had been driving the vehicle. A witness saw and recalled the event for the police, but I have no memory. Strange, when I remember people telling me about the day, I imagine the truck was red. Here is what the vehicle did to me …

Besides hurting my pride, the accident inflected a subarachnoid hemorrhage brain injury. I was told I was lucky I survived. Still, all I know when I awoke is that I had trouble walking and my nose had been pressed toward the left side of my face. I thought then I needed to get fixed. I’ve always been influenced by ancient, lofty superstitions and I recalled the Scottish stories of the Clan MacLennan and the angsty fate of the deformed Crotair MacGilligorm. Because my own witch’s mark, I elected for surgery in 2008 with the money I had received in settlement for the accident.

I awoke from the strictly cosmetic and elective rhinoplasty with more bruises than I remember I had three weeks after the accident. People tell me I had been in horrible shape – with my head puffed and shaved with metal hoses sticking out and leaking blood. During recovery from the plastic surgery, I recalled I had written the first half of my Pazuzu Trilogy in 2005 and had never done anything with the manuscript. Feeling better, I forgot about it again until I moved back to my home town in Monroe, Wisconsin.

Although nose jobs seem child’s play in Southern California, a very skilled and recognized surgeon in Burbank accomplished exactly as I had anticipated. The man straightened my face and hid the diabolism of the story I had written. As I stated, the original first half of the trilogy slept until I returned to Wisconsin in 2008. There, I had been rejected by dozens of publishers and agents. I self-published my story with LuLu.

Suddenly desperate to tell this story before I died – a reality reinforced upon strangely numb reflection – I published my story despite the conscious, excessive shortcomings of my original drafts. I even went so far and paid to have that manuscript professionally edited at Llumina, which is a relationship that soured because I lost faith in the rather pricey POD publishing house. The story has definitely changed since that ragged year.

I’ve said so before, and I know a good many of you don’t believe me, but I’ve completed the Pazuzu story and have completely rewritten the tale Eight different times. I’ve got other stories, I’d love readers to discover, but this is my passion. This is the illustrated root of my horrible mythology. My Pazuzu Trilogy is an epic story and I hope many, many readers find me and agree.

---

Purchase Pazuzu Trilogy Pocket books and Hardcovers at LULU.