Photos from Killercon V

KillerCon V (Sept 2013) -- a scary-sounding and small-but-professional convention for authors of dark crime, horror and thriller fiction -- was really a blast to attend last weekend. It was my first con West of the Mississippi in a really long while, so it was good to reunite with old friends and to make all sorts of charming and alarming new ones.  My reading and panels were fun, and perhaps I'll share some audio soon.  I also was pleased to sell a lot of copies of my novel, Play Dead, since this book is SET in (a fictionalized version of)…

Skeeter

Read [an archived version of] "Skeeter" -- a short-short "clickable" story posted to [the now defunct] Tapestry. I wrote this goofy thing by messing around on an ipad. Tapestry files were "sequential" stories. To read, click on the screen to forward page by page.

My Favorite Dexter Remakes and Riffs

I'm a big follower of the Showtime TV series Dexter, currently airing its final season. For the past year I've been rescreening the entire run, posting a running series of notes to twitter under hashtag #dexternotes (see the archive in The Nest), and my next personal reading project is to catch up with Lindsay's Dexter book series (the program is a fascinating study in adaptation, as it departs wildly from the books) in preparation for the upcoming release of a new title, ironically called Dexter's Final Cut (releasing end of August 2013 on Kindle and in mid-Sept in hardcover). As…

Onward Christian Scanners

Imagine if Cronenberg had written and directed The Exorcist. In it, Father Damien Karras is not a psy- chiatrist but a psychic, capable of reading thoughts and moving objects with merely his mind. This superpower, he believes, is the Power of Christ, and it compels him to study the art of exorcism under Father Merrin, who trains him to become a "Scanner" -- a psyche-soldier in the Christian Army, capable of not only sensing a sinner's guilt and truly knowing the nature of their crimes, but also able to circumvent confession altogether and directly absolve them, should they genuinely regret…