PROGENY back in print!

 

BACK IN PRINT!

Summary

For man-for-hire, Frank Baldwin, it seems like the perfect job. Enter Mexico, locate missing pop princess, Melony Van Kyle, and return her to her father to collect $100,000. Easy. With his intricate knowledge of Tijuana's seedy and dangerous underworld, Frank should have no problem locating his high-profile target. Still, he can't shake the feeling that something isn't right about his latest gig.

When it becomes apparent that the missing girl may be connected to a death-worshiping Santa Muerte cult, Frank knows he should quit the job. His dreams haunted by visions of a burning Tijuana and a hideous death god, he pushes deeper into the mystery.

When he starts having visions of the dead, he realizes that he's in too deep. There are forces at work in TJ...supernatural forces that proffer only death and damnation.

And these forces have big plans for Frank...

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Blurbs

"Erik Williams' latest is tough, dark, and assured. There's grit and grue to spare. Progeny is an escalator ride straight down into some subbasement of Hell." -Laird Barron

"Crisp dialogue and hair-trigger action make the scenes crackle with tension." -Weston Ochse

"As always, Erik Williams delivers heart-stopping action, clean and stylistic prose, and unforgettable characters - if sometimes flawed and brutal - in Progeny. Blood magic and brutality! Highly recommended." -John Hornor Jacobs, author of This Dark Earth and Southern Gods

"The prose is mean, gritty, relentlessly paced. Readers of Cain and Chandler should feel at home here...well, except for the severed heads, of course. This is the new Hard-Boiled, and Erik Williams has just proven himself its most brutal and self-assured voice." -Joe McKinney

The Muerte Sequence Now Available!

THE MUERTE SEQUENCE

A mosaic novel chronicling one man's lifelong dance with Death—both as her prey and her partner. Haunted by loss from a young age, he finds himself both victim and agent of Santa Muerte. As he navigates a shadowy world of vengeance and justified evil, he grasps for those rare moments of light—fleeting connections with lovers, friends, and family. For in the presence of Death, every human bond carries the bittersweet knowledge that it all ends.

THE MUERTE SEQUENCE spans a lifetime to explore the many guises of that most intimate and coldest stranger: Death herself.

Featuring the novelettes THE REVEREND’S POWDER, CONSECRATED HIGHWAYS, and THIS WAY TO THE GLADIATOR SHOW collected all in one place.

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Qualia Nous Volume 2 and Me

It's with pure delight that I can now tell you my short story "Bilocation in Liminal Space" has been accepted by Michael Bailey for inclusion in Qualia Nous Volume 2. Publication will probably be in 2024 but nothing is firm yet.

There are still a couple of more writers to be added to the ToC but the majority of them are listed right there in the image.  Check it out.  You may recognize a few (other than me).

More to follow.

If you're wondering what to expect from Volume 2, and if you haven't checked out Volume 1, here's the write up:

QUALIA NOUS, winner of the Benjamin Franklin Award and nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in an Anthology, is a literary blend of science fiction and horror. Contains short stories, novelettes, and poetry from established authors and newcomers from around the world. Features Bram Stoker Award winning stories by Usman T. Malik and Rena Mason (both tied for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction), as well as stories by Stephen King, Emily B. Cataneo, Erinn L. Kemper, Patrick Freivald, William F. Nolan, Elizabeth Massie, John R. Little, Gary A. Braunbeck, and many others. 

And to learn more about the antho and the other splendid works published by Written Backwards, check out their site.

Cocaine Bear is Cool and All. But Bigfoot Crank Stomp Take Batshit Crazy to Another Level!!!

"This book gives new meaning to the word OUTRAGEOUS! It's so totally off-the-wall while at the same time so unputdownable that it blew my creative doors off. The whole time I was reading it I was PISSED that I hadn't thought of it."
--EDWARD LEE, author of HAUNTER OF THE THRESHOLD and HEADER

Bigfoot is real and he's addicted to meth!

It should have been so easy. Get in, kill everyone, and take all the money and drugs. That was Russell and Mickey's plan. But the drug den they were raiding in the middle of the woods holds a dark secret chained up in the basement. A beast filled with rage and methamphetamine and tonight it will break loose.

Nothing can stop a sasquatch on a drug-fueled rampage. And before the sun rises, there is going to be a lot of dead cops and junkies.

"[Erik Williams] has an almost Hitchcockian way of knowing when enough is enough, cutting from shameless wallows in gore to neat moments of suggestion, where you get it without having to watch it." -John Skipp, Fangoria

"This book is everything you could possibly want in a book about a rampaging mythical creature looking for his next hit, delivered in compulsively readable style with a real cinematic eye for pacing and exciting scenes. If B movie levels of gore, black humor and action are your thing, this is the book for you." -Blu Gilland, FEARnet

For the B&N crowd: https://bit.ly/3ye5JJ4 Amazon: https://amzn.to/3ZHq1q7 Bookshop: https://bit.ly/3IWOcKf

Cocaine Bear is Good but BFCS is the OG

Also, death metal band Troglodyte's most recent album The Hierarchical Ecological Succession: Welcome to the Food Chain has a track titled "Sasquashed (Bigfoot Crank Stomp)" on it. Yes, that's right, my Bigfoot Crank Stomp inspired a death metal song.  Has Cocaine Bear done that yet?  Didn't think so.

Drive-By Review - Small Town Crime

 

Another movie that slipped under my radar that has everything I like in a movie.

• Crime
• Very flawed protagonist trying to reassemble his life
• Great cast
• Okay writing

I say okay writing because it's just that.  There's nothing memorable about the dialogue or the plot.  Which is good.  Sometimes simple plots and dialogue that can be easily spat out by a good cast are enough.  In this case, both are.

If the plot had been complicated, the movie would've been unwatchable outside of the cast.  They keep it grounded and the simplicity of the plot keeps it moving.  It's an above-average movie to discover on cable or, in my case, streaming.

The biggest weakness of the flick is the two hitmen.  They're not interesting and, for professional killers, they're dumb.  But they're not bumbling dumb.  They're just stupid.  Yet they're not supposed to be, at least the way the film tries to sell them. 

In my opinion, they shouldn't have spoken at all.  It would have stuck to the overall point of the movie; small simple crimes that fall quickly into extreme outcomes.  It would have made them a helluva lot more interesting, too.  All they had to be were mysterious vessels of murder.  

This is my long way of saying they were overwritten.

Also, the parents of the first murder victim had about as much charm as empty chairs.  

Anyway, at about 90 minutes, it's a good watch.

Demon and Guardian Updates

If you're wondering where links and images to my books Demon and Guardian have gone, well, they've been removed for now.

Why?

Because they are no longer for sale.  You see, the rights to both have reverted back to me.  So, the e-books and paperbacks by the original publisher are no longer available.

That doesn't mean new versions won't be available in the future.  It just means they're not available right now.

If you're a publisher and are interested, you can always drop me a line.

More to follow...

Drive-By Review: Low Country: The Murdaugh Dynasty

 

If you're following the murder trial of Alex Murdaugh in South Carolina, you've already got a hint of what this docuseries is about.  I wasn't following the trial and had no idea what to expect since I was completely in the dark on this one.

What I came away with is:

• Fraud and Corruption
• Dark family history of fraud and corruption
• Fraud and Corruption
• Dark family history of potential murder to fully exploit perpetuated fraud
• Murder, Murder, Murder
• And a bunch of other stuff hinted at but not really explored

In short, it's a fucked up family that's been allowed to wield way too much power and influence.  This pretty much happens everywhere where families have been entrenched for a long time.  I'm not saying murder and fraud to this level are always involved.  But if you've lived somewhere long enough, you start to get the feel of the families that have the most influence and, somehow, someone in their family always seems to get away with murder.

What's different about this one is the spoiled kid who was going to get away with murder might have been murdered by his own dad.

Yeah, fucked up.

What I didn't get and what isn't really explored is why the dad may be going out of his way to protect an older brother who also may have been involved in a different murder but was so willing to kill the youngest son and his wife.  The motive doesn't add up, at least how it's presented in this series.

The younger son may have committed drunken boating manslaughter and may have helped cover up the "accident" of another person for insurance money.  The older son was being pointed at for potential involvement in beating a gay schoolmate to death.  The latter seems way worse, all things considered.  Why protect him but murder the other?  Not defending murder.  But we're supposed to believe the dad decided in an opioid haze that the younger son and wife had to die to protect himself?

In short, the series doesn't do a very good job connecting things.  It does do a good job presenting all the misdeeds this family may be tied to.

That being said, it's interesting.  If there were some occult aspects introduced, it'd be like a non-fiction True Detective season.

Drive-By Review - The Last Narc

 

Somehow, I missed this docuseries on Amazon Prime.  Being a fan of true crime, history, untold history, and the Narcos series on Netflix, I have no idea how this one flew under my radar.

Maybe because it's on Amazon Prime and Amazon Prime isn't the best at promoting stuff on Amazon Prime for some reason.

Anyway, I have since watched it and come away with two feelings:

1. Why does anyone believe anything at first glance?  If the government is involved and multiple agencies are involved, you will not get the whole truth up front.  Nor will you get it in any kind of linear narrative.  

If you get the whole story, ever, lucky you.  And yes, I speak from a position of experience with the government so I have some experience in this field.

2.  I don't know why I'm constantly surprised at the level of ties that continue to come up related to Iran-Contra but I shouldn't be anymore.  That is a dark pit that has tragedy written all over it and still, not too many people talk about it like they should.

Anyway, I'm not in the mood to get flagged so I'll just say this is a well done, although overly dramatic in parts when it comes to the slow motion footage of people walking.  It kept me hooked and provided yet another rabbit hole to go down.

Now if someone would only do a good docuseries on Mena, Arkansas.

Drive-By Review - Severance

Hey, it's a New Year! Might as well bring back an old thing I used to do around here called Drive-By  Reviews.  Nothing deep but something worth mentioning.

This week, I finished the first season of Severance on Apple TV+ (and why can't it be simply Apple+?  It's not like everyone watches shit on a TV only anymore).

Anyhoo, I watched Severance.  And dug the hell out of it.

I'm probably late to the party on this one.  But that will be a continuing thing in 2023 for me.  Getting caught up.

Well, I watched Severance because I heard good things and I wanted something cerebral, funny, and not overly depressing.  I didn't expect a mystery series wrapped up in the the trappings of odd spiritualism and cults.  The work place stuff and identity stuff was expected.  But the waffle party with the crazy half-naked people dancing in giant cult masks?  Not so much.

And thank you!

Love it when a show can surprise you.

Anyway, Severance was very enjoyable, well acted, well written, and, although maybe an episode too long, perfectly paced.

That is all.