Who Wants Me On Their Chest?
Thanks to our newest Final Guy, author extraordinaire and graphic designer (hit him up if you need a killer book cover) Chad Lutzke, we now have brand new Final Guys merch. He gifted us with a surprise shirt featuring each of us this holiday. It was pretty hysterical when we opened up our packages together live on the show last week. It was even funnier when I wore it to all of my Christmas festivities and people would stop and stare and then say, “Wait, is that you?”
Well, if you’ve always wanted my mug on a shirt, sticker, or well, mug, today’s your lucky day!
This beauty comes in an array of colors and sizes. Thrill your friends! Shock your neighbors! Get kicked out of the PTA! Forget MAGA. This is what will unite the country, by jiminey!
We’ve asked Chad to create a shirt that will have all 4 of our images, like the classic Kiss album cover. Until then, why not grab a Jason, Jack or Chad shirt? What we make lack in handsomeness, we more than make up for in silliness.
And I know the holiday season isn’t all happiness and jingle bells for everyone. If you need an almost 2 hour laugh session, I encourage you to check out our Christmas episode where we review the holiday trash classic, Elves.
Do you like FREE BOOKS?
Honestly, this post title is rhetorical. Of course you do! Why else would you be lurking around my blog? We are readers, and we all want book-scented cologne and perfume this Christmas.
I wanted to take some time out of your day to let you know of important changes going forward. In the past, I’ve done quite a bit of book giveaways, posting scads of contests here and on my social media pages.
Going forward, if you want to be in it to win free signed books, ebooks and more, you’ll need to be signed up for my Dark Hunter Newsletter. That’s where I’ll make announcements and draw winners. And trust me, there are going to be a lot of giveaways in 2023! Below are just some of the books that will be in the mix. Trust me, there’s lots more, including books by some of your favorite horror authors.
So, if you’re in the mood to read, sign up for my Dark Hunter Newsletter today and please forward it to anyone else you know who enjoys horror! You’ll be happy to be a newsletter Hellion.
Time to Get Squatchy – BIGFOOT IN THE BRONX Has Arrived!
Believe it or not, it’s pure coincidence that the release of Bigfoot in the Bronx happens to fall on the same day as King Kong vs. Godzilla. I could never have planned it so well. Trust me.
So, who wants to squatch this place up?
The Hunt
It’s hunting season for best friends Shay and Vito. This year, with a bad economy and Shay out of work, it’s more important than ever to bag a deer so they can feed their families. Tucking their truck in their secret spot outside a state park in the Catskills, they settle down, waiting for a deer to come to them.
Discovery
What they get is a giant creature that outruns a speeding deer and savages it with its bare hands and jagged teeth. Someone hidden in the woods shoots it with a tranquilizer dart. Shay knows what the beast at their feet is, and how its discovery can change their lives forever. They load it into their truck and head home for…
The Bronx
The drugged Bigfoot awakens in a cramped shed in Shay’s backyard. Confused, terrified, angry, it breaks loose in the middle of the night, seeking refuge in a nearby cemetery. When the bagpipes of a morning funeral drive it into a killing rage, the carnage has just begun.
Rampage
From playgrounds to golf courses, apartment buildings to subway cars, the bigfoot is on the move – and it’s not happy. Can Shay and Vito find and recapture the beast before it burns the Bronx to the ground?
Digging Into Ghost Mine
After a minor delay, GHOST MINE is only two weeks away. Formerly known as Hell Hole, my little weird western has just about everything you can imagine within its pages. Cowboys, Teddy Roosevelt, Rough Riders, ghost towns, abandoned mines, a love story, mystery, Bigfoot, Black-Eyes kids, ghosts, demons and so much more.
I haven’t written anything like it before or since. What was the inspiration behind this bizarre tale? I opened up about reasons why I chose to head west over at DARK READS . Check it out to get a little behind the scenes insight into how many books come to be.
Click here to read the Ghost Mine origin story!
Disturbing the Peace of Mind – Guest Post by JG Faherty
Like my wife, I’m sure you Hellions need a break from me from time to time. Put your hands together and give a warm welcome for author JG Faherty and by all means, pick up a copy of his latest book, Houses of the Unholy.
I thought long and hard about what to write for my guest post. And I decided rather than talk about what scares me, or why I wrote a certain book, or why does everyone love zombies (or vampires, or clown-faced killers), I would write about what I hope for from the things I write. Most horror writers will say they want to scare their readers, or entertain them, or perhaps maybe even make them think about this social or political issue. And that’s all true to a degree.
But for me, there’s something else.
What I like to write are stories that make you uncomfortable.
There are a lot of ways to do that. You can hit readers over the head with buckets of gore and you can sneak up behind them and give them a jump scare. Keep them at the edge of their seat with non-stop action or be so subtle they don’t even know they’re scared until later that night while they’re lying in bed with the lights off and still thinking about that certain scene in the story.
A lot of horror writers tend to stay within a specific sub-genre. Zombies. Splatter. Extreme. Weird. Vampires. Werewolves. Kaiju. Ghosts. Torture Porn. Suspense. You name it, there’s someone specializing in it. And that’s great. All of us have different tastes, and that shapes what we like to read and what writers like to write.
I’m a little different. I guess you could call me a throwback. I’ve never stayed within the lines of a certain sub-genre, or even a genre at all, unless you consider the broad descriptor of dark fiction. I primarily write horror, but sometimes it drifts into the areas of weird fiction, thrillers, fantasy, and science fiction. I’ve written about supernatural creatures, haunted houses, serial killers, and zombies.
As a child, I discovered horror by reading Poe, Shelley, and Stoker. But I also devoured The Hardy Boys, Jules Verne, HG Wells, and Ray Bradbury. I watched all the classic Universal monster movies but I also never missed the reruns of the sci-fi classics from the 1950s: Them!, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, The Blob. As I got a little older, I learned many of the movies were made from books, so I read the books, too. In my teens, I discovered gore. Faces of Death, I Spit on Your Grave, Motel Hell, Evil Dead, and so many others. In college, I read every horror novel and short story anthology to hit the bookstores, from King and Koontz and Straub to Garton, Skipp, Spector, and McCammon. I went back and ‘discovered’ the authors I’d missed as a kid. Manly Wade Wellman, Karl Edward Wagner. And I also still read sci fi (Alan Dean Foster, James Bliss, Heinlein, etc.).
Over time, as a reader, I came to know what I liked and what I didn’t. When I got to my thirties, I no longer cared for splatter or torture porn. I preferred books that had complex plots, that ratcheted up the suspense chapter after chapter, that sent shivers up your spine because you didn’t know what was going to happen next.
And, when I started writing, I stayed true to that form.
It’s easy to go for the gross out, for the quick disembowelment, the body tossed in the wood chipper. Something like that might make you flinch, or gag. But for me, that kind of scene never stayed with you, and often it ended up more silly than scary.
I wanted to write things that make people keep the lights on at night, not laugh about how someone’s intestines got used to hang their mother.
So I’ve always stuck to the plan that I have no plan. If the story in my head calls for no blood, then there’s no blood. If it calls for buckets, then there are buckets. As long as it’s necessary for the plot. I veer away from the gratuitous, the unnecessary. When it comes to gore, a little can go a long way. I won’t skip on the zombie eating its victim’s organs, I just won’t spend 3 pages describing it. A few sentences ought to suffice, and then let the readers’ imaginations do the rest.
With all that in mind, when it came time to do my latest collection of short stories, Houses of the Unholy, I wanted it to run the gamut from violent to comic, from supernatural to all-too-real, and from straight horror to those places in between genres.
Most of my stories do tend to be ‘classic’ horror; there’s something supernatural, somewhere. It might be the major point of the story or a subplot, but it’s there. Beyond that, I like to think there’s something for everyone here, whatever you happen to enjoy.
I hope that, like the younger me, you’ll read broadly, and maybe discover something new. Something that sends a shiver up your spine and keeps you awake at night.
Something that disturbs your peace of mind.
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A life-long resident of New York’s haunted Hudson Valley, JG Faherty has been a finalist for both the Bram Stoker Award® (The Cure, Ghosts of Coronado Bay) and ITW Thriller Award (The Burning Time), and he is the author of 6 novels, 9 novellas, and more than 60 short stories. His latest collection, Houses of the Unholy, is available now, and it includes a new novella, December Soul. His next novel, Hellrider, comes out in August of 2019. He grew up enthralled with the horror movies and books of the 1950s, 60, 70s, and 80s, which explains a lot. Follow him at http://www.twitter.com/jgfaherty, http://www.facebook.com/jgfaherty, http://www.jgfaherty.com, and http://jgfaherty-blog.blogspot.com/
Hanging With Author, Director and Actor Terry M. West
Terry M. West is living the dream. Or at least my dream. My horror dreams. He’s done just about everything within the horror genre and has a hell of a lot of war stories under his belt. I first came to know him a few years ago, thanks to the magic of social media. We formed an instant mutual appreciation society. I was thrilled to provide the forward to his book, GRUESOME: A GATHERING OF NIGHTMARES.
We had talked for some time about having him on Monster Men, but life and scheduling always got in the way. Despite some technical issues at the start, we finally made it happen! Terry talks about directing Caroline Munro, horror cons and an incredible secret about his start in writing. We did not see that coming. Check out our interview with an all around awesome guy below…
And when you’re done, check out his bestselling story, CAR NEX. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to figure out how to steal Terry’s wicked cool office.
New Winter Release – ANTARCTIC ICE BEASTS
When Severed Press asked me to write a lost world themed book, I put on several layers of coats and a balaclava and zipped my brain down to Antarctica. As a lover of The Thing, I couldn’t wait to strand a cast of characters in a cold, dark and bleak land. Many taps of the keyboard later, ANTARCTIC ICE BEASTS is born!
The ebook is out now, with trade paperback to follow shortly. So, what’s this little tale of winter horror about?
The South Pole in winter is one of the deadliest places on Earth. The seven person crew of the US Freedom Base lives alone in months of utter darkness with no hope of help or rescue. A freak storm batters the walls and threatens to expose them to the deadly cold. All they can do is wait…and pray.
The ground quakes. An alien screech rips through the night. There’s something, or someone, lurking outside. Fists bang on the walls. Each tiny crack in the base spells death by hypothermia.
Untold horrors have come to Freedom Base…and they want in!
SNAG A COPY OF ANTARCTIC ICE BEASTS TODAY!
The Man Eating Iguanas Have Landed!
That’s right, Hellions! JURASSIC FLORIDA is finally here, ready to chew up your e-readers and phones.
The early reviews have been phenomenal. Hey, what better time than the summer to munch on a quick monster mayhem romp? Here’s what some folks have to say:
“Jurassic, Florida is a hell of a romp, too, filled with monsters, gore, and carnage, with the pace cranked up to rapid-fire. There were a few moments that manage to surprise me with just how blackhearted Shea can be.” — Michael Patrick Hicks Reviews
“I highly recommend this fast paced and exciting 5 star read.” — Horror Maiden Book Reviews
“Shea delivers the chomp’n’stomp in epic fashion.” — Sc-Fi & Scary
“Mankind’s on the menu–go get em’, champs! Dinner bell’ s rung!!” — The Haunted Reading Room
This is just the first in my new, One Size Eats All trilogy. Hope it leaves you hungry for more. 🙂
CLICK HERE TO ORDER JURASSIC FLORIDA TODAY!
Catherine Cavendish – WAKING THE ANCIENTS
Spinner of terrifying tales of ghosts and restless spirits, Catherine Cavendish has a new book of creeping dread for fans old and new. Today, I let her haunt my blog with a little something she calls, THE PEDLAR AND THE DEVIL….
I have set a large part of Waking the Ancients in Vienna, Austria where many ghosts and restless spirits walk among the verdant parks and lavish palaces. But Austrian ghosts do not confine themselves to their nation’s imperial capital. They can be found in towns, cities, villages and the depths of the countryside all over this beautiful land.
In the beautiful mountainous region of Tyrol, many legends and myths abound. One curious one involves a spectral game of bowls.
A pedlar became lost on the side of the mountain as darkness fell. Disorientated, he kept going until he came to the ancient ruined castle of Starkenberg. There, exhausted, he decided to take shelter for the night and laid down to sleep in the remains of a great hall. He slept for some hours, waking to hear the clock of a nearby village strike midnight. To his astonishment, as the last chime echoed across the rocks, twelve ghostly figures, clad in full armour, manifested in the room and proceeded to play a game of bowls – only they used skulls instead of balls.
As luck would have it, the pedlar was quite a bowls player himself. In fact he was the champion of his village. Also, being made of sterner stuff, he offered to play each of the spirits in turn. He was quite surprised when his challenge was accepted. One by one he defeated them all and quite expected to be met with anger as a result. Quite the reverse. To his astonishment, the spectral army congratulated him and gave whoops of joy. They told him that now he had beaten them, they could be released from purgatory. As soon as they said this, they vanished, leaving the pedlar alone. He looked all around, trying to discover where they had gone but to no avail. Then, ten more ghostly knights appeared, each through a different door which they locked carefully behind them. They brought the keys to the pedlar and gave them to him saying he must now determine which was the right key for each door.
All the keys and all the doors were identical – or appeared to be. The pedlar accepted the challenge and it took him quite a while but he successfully accomplished the task and the ten ghostly figures thanked him profusely, assuring him that his actions had also released them from purgatory, before they too vanished.
Things were all going a bit too well up to now and the pedlar was feeling delighted with himself. His confidence knew no bounds.
But then the devil himself appeared, in a foul temper. He castigated the pedlar for robbing him of twenty two souls and declared that his soul must be forfeit instead. The brave (or exceptionally foolhardy) pedlar argued and declared he would play the devil one game of bowls to decide whether his soul should be forever damned and belong to Lucifer, or whether he should be allowed to go free.
Once again, the pedlar triumphed and beat his evil counterpart soundly. As soon as the first cock crowed in the morning, the devil launched himself into the air with scorching sulfur breath that burned the grass where he had been. He took off, his massive wings beating the air, leaving the pedlar triumphant.
Needless to say, the pedlar told anyone who was prepared to listen about his extraordinary night on the mountain. No one believed him of course, until they too trekked up to the castle…and saw the burned and withered grass, exactly as the pedlar had described it.
Waking the Ancients
Legacy In Death
Egypt, 1908
University student Lizzie Charters accompanies her mentor, Dr. Emeryk Quintillus, on the archeological dig to uncover Cleopatra’s tomb. Her presence is required for a ceremony conducted by the renowned professor to resurrect Cleopatra’s spirit—inside Lizzie’s body. Quintillus’s success is short-lived, as the Queen of the Nile dies soon after inhabiting her host, leaving Lizzie’s soul adrift . . .
Vienna, 2018
Paula Bancroft’s husband just leased Villa Dürnstein, an estate once owned by Dr. Quintillus. Within the mansion are several paintings and numerous volumes dedicated to Cleopatra. But the archeologist’s interest in the Egyptian empress deviated from scholarly into supernatural, infusing the very foundations of his home with his dark fanaticism. And as inexplicable manifestations rattle Paula’s senses, threatening her very sanity, she uncovers the link between the villa, Quintillus, and a woman named Lizzie Charters.
And a ritual of dark magic that will consume her soul . . .
You can find Waking the Ancients here:
About the Author:
Following a varied career in sales, advertising and career guidance, Catherine Cavendish is now the full-time author of a number of paranormal, ghostly and Gothic horror novels, novellas and short stories. Cat’s novels include the Nemesis of the Gods trilogy – Wrath of the Ancients, Waking the Ancients and Damned by the Ancients, plus The Devil’s Serenade, The Pendle Curse and Saving Grace Devine. She lives with her long-suffering husband, and a black cat who has never forgotten that her species used to be worshipped in ancient Egypt. She sees no reason why that practice should not continue. Cat and her family divide their time between Liverpool and a 260-year-old haunted apartment in North Wales.
You can connect with Cat here:
Pre-Order CREATURE
Just a little excited over here in the Shea shack. Flame Tree Press is now accepting pre-orders for the trade paperback and hardcover editions of my debut novel with them, CREATURE. And, we finally have a release date – September 6, 2018. As we get closer to the big day, I’m sure you’ll be able to pre-order the ebook as well.
Just in case you’re wondering just what the heck this book is about…
The monsters live inside of Kate Woodson. Chronic pain and a host of autoimmune diseases have robbed her of a normal, happy life. Her husband Andrew’s surprise of their dream Maine lake cottage for the summer is the gift of a lifetime. It’s beautiful, remote, idyllic, a place to heal.
But they are not alone.
Something is in the woods, screeching in the darkness, banging on the house, leaving animals for dead. Just like her body, Kate’s cottage becomes her prison. She and Andrew must fight to survive the creature that lurks in the dead of night.
Flame Tree is planning to burst onto the horror scene in a HUGE way. From everything I’d been told, we’re talking epic. Get ready from brand new tales from the likes of Ramsey Campbell, Jonathan Janz, John Everson, Tim Waggoner and so many more. If you’re a reviewer and you want to reserve your ARC, by all means reach out to them. If you’re a reader and want to make sure you get your hands on this sick puppy the day it comes out, pre-order today!
Hunter Shea 