1. At one point, The Assassin’s Prayer was considered by
Showtime for a direct-to-cable movie. Through my agent at the time, I was told that a 5-person board would make the final decision; alas, the vote was 3-2 in favor of not optioning the book and my dreams of premium cable stardom died. It’s probably because I told them I wanted the lead actor to sport a mullet even better than Chuck Norris’ in The Hitman…
2. I wrote “The Killing Question” for no other reason than I wanted to (*spoiler alert*) kill a child molester via shotgun up the ass. I’ve written a lot of violent death scenes in my time, but this still ranks as one of my favorites. I probably need professional help…
3. The Assassin’s Betrayal started out as an action-comedy screenplay titled Killing Guppies. The script had a more Tarintino-esque tone and featured a female psychologist/hit-woman whose gimmick was that she never actually assassinated anyone, but instead used her psych skills to convince them to kill themselves. Hey, I never said all my ideas were gems…
4. Chunks of Hell was originally going to just be called Hell Chunks, with a cover designed to look like a box of kid’s cereal, but with horror imagery. “0% Sugar! 100% Blood!”
5. “Resurrection Bullets” started out as The Crow fan-fiction and was originally called “Hell’s Harvest.”
6. My single biggest influence while writing “Warlock #1: Autofire Blitz” was the movie Commando. None of my quips quite match the classic “Let off some steam, Bennett,” but Locke telling a scumbag bartender, “You look like an elephant’s dick,” gets the job done.
7. Vesper Falls, the fictional town in Gristle, is modeled after the actual town of Vermontville in the Adirondack Mountains, which is where I reside. Vesper Falls is also mentioned in the short story “Gurgles” (featured in Chunks of Hell) and my work-in-progress “Warlock #2: Kill ‘Em All.” Basically, Vesper Falls is my version of Castle Rock…
8. Jack Reece, the vigilante private eye from “The Killing Question,” makes a cameo appearance in “Warlock #1.” There’s a very good chance I’ll have the characters team up somewhere down the road. And I don’t mean “team up” in a Brokeback Mountain kind of way…
9. Despite having co-written several projects together, Derric Miller and I have never met. But if we ever do, we will instantly bond over our mutual hatred of cats.
10. Malakai and his handler meeting in an abandoned church (The Assassin’s Betrayal) was a deliberate homage to the opening scene in John Woo’s The Killer, one of my all-time favorite action movies.
11. The original title of Chunks of Hell was It’s Always Darkest Before You Die. I think it would have been a big hit among Death Row inmates…
12. I never use blasphemous language in my writing. Plenty of other four-letter words get tossed around like candy on Halloween, but you’ll never see “Jesus” or “Christ” used in a profane manner.
13. “Warlock #2: Kill ‘Em All” (currently being written) takes place in the same remote region of the Adirondack Mountains as Gristle. First cannibal mutants, now murderous, meth-cooking biker gangs … no surprise that my books are not endorsed by Adirondack tourism groups.
14. More people have requested a sequel to “The Killing Question” than any of my other stories or books. Something about the smart-ass vigilante private eye apparently resonates with readers. That, or they just want to see if I can top that villain death…
15. The sickest thing I’ve ever written hasn’t been published yet. It involves morbid obesity, deviant copulation, and some of the strangest cats you’ve ever met. You can read all about it if “Mudslingers 2: The Bloodletting” ever sees the light of day … which my wife is hoping never happens.
16. In addition to writing dark, nasty, mega-violent fiction, I also dabble in spiritual essays/meditations. Yeah, there’s kind of this Jekyll & Hyde thing going on in my noggin…
17. The Assassin’s Betrayal was deliberately designed to be both a stand-alone novel and a pseudo-sequel to The Assassin’s Prayer. However, the 3rd book will be a true sequel, tying together the events and characters from both novels. It’s called (for now) The Assassin’s Revenge and at my current writing pace, it should be available somewhere around the year 2027…
18. The events—and locale—of Gristle are referenced in “Cycle of Savagery,” a work-in-progress werewolf novella co-written by me and Derric. Tonally, it falls somewhere between Silver Bullet and Dog Soldiers. If you’ve never seen either, please stop reading this and go rectify your oversight immediately.
19. Tyler Cunningham, the charmingly weird protagonist of fellow Adirondack author Jamie Sheffield’s mystery series, makes a cameo appearance in Gristle. And no, the cannibals do not slurp out his intestines like slimy Lo Mein noodles from a bad Chinese restaurant…
20. Though he doesn’t know it yet, someday I want to co-write an action-comedy with Adam Howe. Or Shane Black. Whichever one returns my calls first…
When you release a new book, you’re supposed to blog about it, right? So that’s what I’m doing. But not in the typical “please buy my book because it’s the greatest thing since auto-reverse cassette players” post. Nah, this time around, I’m just going to chat about what made me decide to write Warlock #1: Autofire Blitz and give some insight into how the character came about.
When I wrapped up The Assassin’s Betrayal, I found myself wanting to write something simpler, shorter, with the emphasis on crazy, over-the-top action. In other words, I wanted to write a Chuck Norris movie. But I wanted it to be splatterpunk gory. My inspiration was the Piccadilly Cowboys, a group of British authors who turned the western genre on its head back in the ‘70s by casting anti-heroes as the protagonists and ramping up the violence to extreme levels. I wanted to be a Piccadilly Cowboy, only in the action genre.
For inspiration, I looked to ‘80s action cinema, the gold standard of “minimal plot, mega-action” entertainment. My primary muse was Commando, mixed with a healthy helping of Rambo. (Some readers have detected a Sin City influence, and while that’s perfectly okay, I’d be lying if I said I thought about that movie even once while writing Warlock.) Simply put, I wanted to create an ‘80s guns ‘n’ guts action flick … but on the written page.
While most action heroes during the Reagan era were righteous, noble warriors, I wanted Damien “Warlock” Locke to be significantly less than a white knight. In my head, Locke is an amalgam of Snake Plissken, Dirty Harry, and Joe Hallenbeck (The Last Boy Scout). Some folks have drawn comparisons to The Executioner, hands-down the most famous action-adventure book series of all time, but truth is, Mack Bolan is a righteous warrior of justice, while Locke is just a smart-mouthed, death-dealing mercenary who sells his lethal skills to whoever can afford his fee (though he is not without his own barebones code that keeps him a sliver above the savages).
As stated above, I wanted this to not only be a violent series, but a graphically violent series. None of this weak, sterilized “the hero fired and the bad guy went down” rated-PG crap. No, I wanted craniums to explode and eyeballs to burst and guts to fly everywhere as bullets ripped apart human bodies. Again, if you’re familiar with the work of the Piccadilly Cowboys, you’ll know what I was gunning for. Warlock was deliberately designed to be ultra-gory and make a lot of splatting noises. If you read Jack Reacher novels and think, “Man, this is some really violent stuff,” then Warlock probably isn’t for you.
In my useless opinion, the modern day men’s action-adventure genre needs more short, punchy novels as well as some good old fashioned guts to go along with all the guns. There was a time when this genre reveled in testosteronic ultraviolence and personally, I would love to see that style of hard-hitting, throat-cutting, brain-blasting action make a comeback. Seriously, “splatter-action” needs to be a thing again.
Can I singlehandedly resurrect the quick-read, graphically-violent action novel? Of course not. But make no mistake, I intend to do my part and even if it never catches on, I’m going to have a blast doing it. A grenade blast, that is … usually after Warlock has rammed it down some bastard’s throat.
I can hear it now (because some have already asked)—a revised edition of a 3 year-old book? Why bother? Surely you could find something better to do with your time, like clean the fish tank or organize your sock drawer.
Traditional wisdom tells authors to never look back, to release their novels into the wild and move on to the next one. Traditional wisdom says tinkering with a previously-published manuscript wastes time better served working on a new project. And traditional wisdom is right … except when it’s not.
Simply put, this was an itch I had to scratch, an itch that kept me from giving new projects my full attention. Until I went back and revisited/revised The Assassin’s Prayer, I wouldn’t be able to really buckle down on a new book. (Or books, actually—Warlock #1: Autofire Blitz and Chunks of Hell: A Horror Anthology. But we’ll talk about those at another time.)
Call me a perfectionist (not that my novel, or anyone’s novel for that matter, is perfect) or accuse me of OCD—I won’t deny either charge—but the fact that I knew I could improve The Assassin’s Prayer gnawed at me. Sure, the book sold like weed at Woodstock when it was first released, but reader feedback and reviews made it clear there were some issues that could easily be remedied with some tidying up of the narrative. It wouldn’t take much effort to make the book better, so why not do so?
Make no mistake, we’re not talking a major overhaul here. For example, a decent chunk of readers dislike, despise, or downright loathe the ending of the novel, but I refuse to change that, even though doing so would probably make the book more commercially viable. (That either makes me a stubborn fool or a damn fool …you decide.)
No, pretty much all I did was trim some of the melancholy fat from my main character’s—Travis Kain—angst. You see, when I set out to write The Assassin’s Prayer, I was determined to give Kain greater emotional depth than the typical action hero (or in this case, antihero), so he’s a bit of a grumpy bastard with more than his fair share of baggage. As some reviewers noted, (in the original version) Kain spent too much time crying in his whiskey.
In this revised edition, those kind of “emo assassin” (to borrow a phrase from my buddy Jack Badelaire) scenes have been scaled back. What used to be a paragraph of internal torment is now just a sentence or two. The story moves faster and Kain—while hardly a sunshine and roses kind of guy—is less sullen and morose. Heck, I think I even let him crack a joke or two this time.
Listen, despite a streamlined narrative and a spiffy new cover, I don’t expect sales to skyrocket, but that’s not why I revamped the book. I revamped it for me, to exorcise that whiny, nagging voice in the back of my brain that kept whispering, “You can make it better.” Because sometimes the only way to make your demons shut the hell up is to do what they tell you.
