The Fear County Chronicle #35
TBR Con, thoughts on Moon of the Werewolf, and a Special September sale at RKHORROR!
When you get to be my age (65 this coming November), your bolts start to loosen, and your hinges begin showing more than a little rust. What you never worried about in your 20s or 30s (or even 40s and 50s), begin to creep up on you. I’d been having some high cholesterol numbers two or three months ago, so my doctor upped the dosage on my cholesterol medicine. I had my blood drawn and tested again early last week. The good news: my cholesterol was significantly down. The bad news: my A1C numbers sparked a pre-diabetic diagnosis. Sure, I’ve had some minor issues with high BP and cholesterol, but this news sort of blind-sided me. So, now, I’m on Metformin and a new low carb diet, and I’ll be exercising a lot more than I have. Mrs. Joyce and I used to hike a lot of the state parks here in Tennessee and even did some pretty vigorous hiking in the deserts of New Mexico and Utah back in 2017 and 2018. Then the pandemic hit, and it derailed us big-time. We were lucky to get in a walk down our rural road and back every week or two. Maybe I needed something like this to motivate me, and fighting to keep the dreaded D at bay will motivate you to take better care of yourself more than simply staring in the bathroom mirror and seeing a Southern-fried version Jabba the Hutt staring back at you. But I’m bound and determined to turn this thing around, so I made some positive health changes beginning with day one and, so far, it’s going nicely, and I’ve already lost two or three pounds to start. Of course, with Halloween on the horizon and my craving for candy corn now at the top of my sweet-tooth no-no list, I’m sure my nutritional fortitude will be sorely tested in the coming days. So, wish me luck or say a little prayer for Ol’ Ron as I begin this journey.
TBR CON was a huge success!
On September 6th and 7th, I was honored to be a Guest of Honor (along with Wrath James White and Ryan Harding) at the first annual Tennessee Book & Readers Convention in Knoxville, Tennessee. For its first year, TBR drew a generous crowd of book lovers, and the aisles of authors and vendors were always buzzing and busy. A big thanks to Megan Stockton and her excellent staff for putting on such a wonderful event! I’m really looking forward to being there for 2025.
The Zebra Years: Book Four… Moon of the Werewolf
I’m continuing my series on my publishing years with Zebra Books with a look back at a hirsute favorite… the bestial Moon of the Werewolf.
MOON OF THE WEREWOLF
Original title: UNDERTAKER'S MOON
Publication date: December 1991
Emotion: Confident
So... I was standing on my front porch when I heard the howl.
It was midnight, maybe a little after. I'd been reading most of that night, not writing. I believe it was a book on Irish folklore, although I can't rightfully recall the title. Anyway, my eyes started bothering me and I stepped out on the porch to clear my head and get a breath of fresh air. It was early spring; March I believe. All of the houses on the street were dark... only a streetlight here and there, and a bright, butter-colored moon overhead. I was enjoying the silence and solitude of the hour, when something howled on a tall, wooded hill half a mile away.
It wasn't a dog. Not a coon hound; I’d heard enough blueticks and redbones in my day to know one when I heard one. And it certainly wasn’t a stray mutt either. This was something big and loud. That couldn't be a dog, I thought to myself. There was something disturbing about it; sad, lonesome, almost tormented. I waited in the darkness, ears straining for sound, listening. But it never came again. I have to admit, a shiver ran up my spine. I went back in, walked to my bedroom, and prepared for bed. The folklore book was still open on my pillow. I was midway through a chapter on banshees and beasties. I thought of that lonesome howl in the night, then turned in for the night.
The next morning, I woke up and found a couple of words written on a note
pad I kept beside my bed, just in case inspiration struck at some weird and unexpected hour. Apparently, it had. Sometime between midnight and dawn, I had reached over from my slumber and written 'Irish werewolves".
And that was book number four. Undertaker’s Moon.
Among other subjects, I had always been intensely interested in my Irish heritage and devoured any tome I could find concerning Irish history and folklore. The Kelly family had hailed from the little town of Kiltamagh in County Mayo before immigrating to America and I had always dreamt of going to sweet Erin and walking the green hills and hollows of the place of my ancestry (perhaps someday I actually will.) The thought of combining werewolves, Ireland, and the mortician profession seemed like suitable fodder for a workable and interesting plot. So, I went to work and kept my fingers crossed (if you can do that while typing).
Half of the novel I wrote in the country and the other half in the city; Joyce and I decided to move to Nashville and forge a life there, where employment and opportunities were more plentiful. Four months later the book was in the hands of my agent, and then onward to Zebra. It was released under the generic title Moon of the Werewolf. The cover wasn't bad... a depiction of a moonlit graveyard with a disembodied werewolf head in the foreground. No raised lettering or foil embossment on this one; none of the usual Zebra bells and whistles. It was a decent enough werewolf tale for that time, I reckon, but it sort of came and went without much fanfare. Being that there was no social media to speak of then, I heard absolutely no feedback about the book whatsoever, except for a review or two in Locus and some of the small press horror mags.
I sort of put the werewolf book out of my thoughts and turned my energy on other things. As my novels began to appear on the book racks of drugstores, airport terminals, and bookstore chains like Tower Books, B. Daltons, Waldenbooks, and Books-A- Million, my popularity in the horror genre began to spike. I was invited to submit work to a lot of anthologies around that time... pretty major ones, in fact. Collections like Richard Chizmar’s Cold Blood and The Earth Strikes Back, Joe and Karen Lansdale's Dark at Heart, and Thomas Monteleone’s Borderlands series, as well as mass-market horror anthologies like Shock Rock and Hot Blood. Also, an audio collection of a few of my early small press tales titled Dark Dixie: Tales of Southern Horror was released by California-based Spine-Tingling Press. The following year it would appear on the nominating ballot of the 1992 Grammy Awards for Best Spoken Word or Non-Musical Album. Not a winner, but it was a huge honor to be considered, nevertheless.
So, with some respectable credits beneath my belt, I settled behind the keyboard again and began to search for the inspiration for my third entry in the multi-book deal.
This time it didn’t come with a howl, but a bang.
NEXT TIME: FATHER’S LITTLE HELPER
Get 20% Off through the month of September at RKHORROR!
From now through September 30th, get 20% off your order of books, artwork, and apparel at the RKHORROR online bookstore. Just enter promo code SEPTSCARES at checkout for your discount. Catch up on new releases like Vault of Southern-Fried Horror and Timber Gray, old RK favorites like Fear, Undertaker’s Moon, Blood Kin, Hell Hollow, Hindsight, and more. Or get ready for October with my Halloween story collections, Mister Glow-Bones & Other Halloween Tales and The Halloween Store & Other Tales of All-Hallows Eve (you can even get both in a specially priced combo). Head on over and check it! And, as always, every book comes with a personal inscription and some fun hand drawn RK artwork on the title page!
Well, with all that’s been going on lately, this edition of The Fear County Chronicle is gonna be a short one. Hopefully, I’ll have another one for you at the end of September/beginning of October with some cool Halloween features amid the writing news and shameless self-promotion. Until then, y’all be kind to one another, stay safe, and Many Happy Nightmares!