The Fear County Chronicle #18
As the bone-chilling bite of winter begins to fade, the coming of spring brings fresh writing opportunities, AuthorCon II, and a new Zebra cover autopsy!
Howdy folks! Looks like the old horror hound hasn’t had a chance to laze away on the couch since retirement. Seems like I’m even busier now than I was when I was working full-time and scrambling for just a few minutes here and there to write. I’ve been working on upcoming books like Tales From The Southern Fried Crypt and Fear Eternal, reading ARCs for blurbs, and writing a dark horror folklore story for a special project involving two very talented authors (which I can’t elaborate on at this point in time). So, let’s get into this latest edition of the Chronicle and see what’s going on!
AuthorCon II is on the horizon!
That’s right! It’s almost here! Scares That Care AuthorCon 2 will be taking place in Williamsburg, Virginia the weekend of March 31st through April 2nd. I will be there as a vendor, so search me out and come spend some time (and maybe a dollar or two) at the Southern Fried Horror table. I’ll have my entire inventory of paperbacks and hardcovers available, as well as Southern Fried Horror and Zebra Books Alumni t-shirts. And if you have any RK books from your personal collection that you’d like autographed, please feel free to bring them along. I’ll be more than happy to sign them and add some of my hand-drawn artwork on the title page!
I’ll also be involved in a couple of events at AuthorCon. Here’s what I’ll be doing other than polishing a chair with my hindquarters:
Saturday: Panel. 2:30pm – 3:30pm (Second Floor, Room 17): Golden Years – Jonathan Janz (moderator) talks with Ronald Kelly and Stephen Mark Rainey – veterans of the late 1980s/early 1990s horror boom, and Sherrilyn Kenyon, Maurice Broaddus, Tim Lebbon, Ronald Malfi, Mary SanGiovanni, and Tim Waggoner – veterans of the 2000s horror resurrection – on those golden years, and what possibly lies ahead for the genre.
Saturday: Reading, 4:15pm – 5:00pm (Second Floor, Room 8): Ronald Kelly and Stephen Mark Rainey
I’m really looking forward to being involved in both of these events, especially with my old pal Stephen Mark Rainey. Mark accepted and published many of my early stories for his seminal small press horror magazine Deathrealm: The Land Where Horror Dwells, so it is a genuine honor that we were chosen to represent the older generation of horror authors when it comes to late-80s and early-90s horror publication and history.
Here’s the full Authorcon programing schedule, courtesy of Brian Keene. It’s gonna be a fun time!
Update on Tales from the Southern Fried Crypt!
I was really hoping to have the second installment of my EC Horror Comics-inspired story collection series, Tales from the Southern Fried Crypt, ready and in print in time for AuthorCon 2. But, alas, I’m finishing it a few weeks too late to make that happen. I blame this partly on my own procrastination and partly on wanting to make sure all of the swamp/bayou/voodoo stories were well executed and had a natural flow to the narrative throughout. There were a couple of stories I had basic ideas for going in and it took longer than expected to fully flesh them out and write them to my satisfaction. Also, as with Mister Glow-Bones and Haunt of Southern Fried Fear, this one will also have quite a bit of my artwork throughout. Drawing, inking, and adding the dialogue boxes and balloons to build a retro-style horror comic book page takes a considerable amount of time and, in this book, there will be eleven art pages (thirteen, if you count the two retro comic book advertisement pages in the back). Hopefully, I should have Tales finished for a mid or late March release from Crossroad Press.
RK Audible Audiobooks!
It seems like a lot of folks have been listening to my audiobooks lately, so I thought I’d share what I have available. It wasn’t until I went to Audible and took a long look that I realized I currently have 20 titles available in audio! Here’s a list of all of the audiobooks (with narrators) that Crossroad Press has released since 2012:
Fear, Undertakers Moon, Hell Hollow, The Saga of Dead-Eye Books 1 & 2, The Halloween Store, Season’s Creepings (J. Rodney Turner)
Hindsight, Restless Shadows (Jennifer Nittoso)
Blood Kin (Gary Noon)
Twelve Gauge (Hayden Hunt)
The Dark’Un (Joe Geoffrey)
Timber Gray, Cumberland Furnace (Brad Smith)
The China Doll (Pam Dougherty)
Dark Dixie (Coleman Ford)
Twilight Hankerings (J.C. Hayes)
The Sick Stuff (Jonathan Hall)
Unhinged (Milton Bagby)
Flesh Welder (Wayne June)
Of all my audiobooks, my personal favorites are Fear, Undertaker’s Moon, The Saga of Dead-Eye Books 1 & 2, Hindsight and Restless Shadows. J. Rodney Turner’s authentic Southern narration hits all the right cords as far as my style of Southern Fried Horror is concerned, bringing characters like Jeb Sweeny and Roscoe Ledbetter (Fear), Crom McManus and Ian Danaher (Undertaker’s Moon), and Dead-Eye and Job (The Saga of Dead-Eye) to vibrant life. Jennifer Nittoso does an excellent job portraying Cindy Ann Biggs throughout her fictional lifetime in Hindsight (and its bonus novella, Potter’s Field), and Restless Shadows, the sequel to Hindsight.
If you’re interested in checking out some of my non-horror work, Timber Gray is a traditional western novel set in 1880s Wyoming, while The China Doll (based on a true story my grandmother told me) is a coming-of-age story set during the Great Depression and is appropriate for all ages. Currently, these two are only available in audiobook and ebook formats.
Zebra Books Cover Autopsy: Something Out There
The Zebra Books Cover Autopsy of Fear that I featured in The Fear County Chronicle #16 was so well received, that I’m continuing my introspective on the covers of all eight of my Zebra Books titles, this time examining the striking, but somewhat puzzling, cover of 1991’s Something Out There.
Okay, first off, this was a really weird book. It was sort of a mixture of horror, science fiction, and fantasy with a lot of gruesome, gory scenes and a huge number of things that the Dark’Un and his albino changelings turn into over the course of the book (dinosaurs, ninjas, Frankenstein’s monster, military vehicles, etc.). I sort of pulled all the stops out on my imagination and let it take me (and the story) wherever it wanted to go. It drove the editorial staff at Zebra a little crazy, since they were accustomed to putting strict labels on their product and this one totally threw that notion out the window. However, everyone seemed to like it (my agent was so immersed in reading the first three chapters that he missed his subway train home!), so it was accepted and became my third title with the Big Z.
I received the cover flat a few months before the book’s publication in March of 1991. Several things struck me: some good, some not so good. Let’s take a look at the bad points first. The title had been changed from The Dark’Un to Something Out There, a rather generic nomenclature (one of Zebra’s annoying specialties). I remember there being a short-lived TV series in 1988 called Something Is Out There (sort of a cops versus murderous alien deal). Nothing at all like my Something Out There, but over the years I’ve had folks tell me “Oh, I loved that TV show based off your book!” No, sorry, there was no connection between the two. But, looking back, the mistaken connection between the two may have been beneficial to SOT’s sales, because it was one of my better selling Zebra titles. Maybe people thought it was a novelization of the show, or that the show had been directly taken from the book. It wasn’t, but the confusion between the two may have unintentionally boasted sales.
There was also that big green, half-horned toad/half-Komodo dragon lizard-looking thing cresting the mountain top on the cover. Whatever it was, it wasn’t in the book. The Dark’Un changed into many things during the course of the storyline, but never anything that looked like that. Plus, every creature the Dark’Un morphed into was black and gray in color, not green with red eyes and a bright pink tongue. It was one of those “author applies dismayed face palm” moments.
Alright, now the good points. The misty mountain range, the full moon, and the sky at the top of the front cover were very well done. The embossed silver RONALD KELLY was a nice touch, and the embossed red SOMETHING OUT THERE did its job in catching the potential reader/buyer’s eye.
The back cover was nice. The teaser synopsis was brief and vague, but good enough to promote interest in the storyline. Beneath the blood red SOMETHING OUT THERE was a rather flattering (at least to a young, greenhorn horror writer like me) tagline that read: “A NEW MASTERPIECE OF SPECTACULAR HORROR FROM THE DAZZLING PEN OF RONALD KELLY, AUTHOR OF HINDSIGHT AND PITFALL!” Wow! Masterpiece! Spectacular! Dazzling! I was all aglow. Leave it to mass market copy writers to pump a generous amount of helium up their author’s rear end and lift them directly into the literary stratosphere.
My favorite things about the back cover were the blurbs from Cemetery Dance Magazine (aka Richard Chizmar) and Joe R. Lansdale, which was officially my first honest-to-goodness blurb by a big-name author. I’ll always be grateful to both of these gentlemen for those early endorsements of me and my Southern Fried brand of storytelling.
At a respectable 405 pages, Something Out There was a doorstopper of a book. Its readers seemed to enjoy its wild, roller coaster narrative and the story’s cast of characters. Also, the fact that the monster of the book was more of a protagonist than an antagonist was something out of the ordinary for mass market horror novels of that time. It garnered very nice reviews in publications like Locus, Fangoria, and Mystery Scene as well.
The new edition of The Dark’Un (which contains the bonus novella, “Of Crows and Pale Doves”) is currently available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook.
New Zebra Alumni & Southern Fried Horror shirts at RKHORROR!
I now have large-size Zebra Books Alumni and Southern Fried Horror t-shirts in red and green designs available at my online bookstore, RKHORROR! You can choose from M, L, XL, 2XL, and 3XL sizes (the larger sizes were previously unavailable). I redesigned the Zebra Alumni shirt when I ordered the XL sizes, so that the design fills up the entire front. All shirts are quality black Fruit of the Loom and Gildan shirts. On the Zebra Alumni shirts, I also have a few XS (4) and S (6) child sizes available.
Well, it looks like those pesky flying rattlesnakes are heading out into the night, in search of unsuspecting prey, so now might be a good time to skedaddle! Ol’ Ron will be back in a couple of weeks with more Southern Fried shenanigans and news, maybe a new feature or two. Until then, keep well and strong, and Many Happy Nightmares, y’all!