Guest Blog: Author Justin Gustainis: Haunted Scranton

About a month ago I asked Mr. Gustainis to stop by Sci-Fi Guys and give us a little mouth watering tidbit to warm us up while we waited for the second book in his Haunted Scranton series to come out. But, since it's already been out for a while (I know, Bad Rodney!) consider Mr. Gustainis' guest blog a introduction to the series for those interested.

Welcome to “Haunted Scranton”

My books Hard Spell and Evil Dark (with Known Devil due out next Fall), are set in an alternate universe where supernatural creatures of every sort really exist – and everyone knows it. Although the publisher’s title for the series is “The Occult Crime Unit Investigations” I prefer to call it the “Haunted Scranton” series, since the books are set in and around Scranton, PA – but this is a Scranton with spooks.

The series protagonist (and narrator) is Sgt. Stan Markowski, a veteran detective on the Scranton P.D.’s Occult Crimes Unit. Here’s Stan describing his job: “Being supernatural is legal in Scranton, just like anyplace else. And doing supernatural stuff is also legal – within reason. But if a vamp puts the bite on an unwilling victim, or some witch casts the wrong kind of spell, that’s when they call me.”

I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce you to a few of the people (and some who aren’t, strictly speaking, people) and places in Haunted Scranton.

--Stan’s boss, Lt. McGuire. His wife was kidnapped and murdered by a gang of werewolves, years ago. “McGuire’s a good guy and an okay boss, but there’s a darkness about him that has nothing to so with the fact that he doesn’t see much sunlight. He’s no vigilante – he believes in the law. But God help any supe [cop slang for supernatural creature] who breaks it.”

--Rachel Procter, the Scranton Police Department’s Consulting Witch. One night, Stan visits Rachel’s office, to ask her for a necromancy that she does not want to perform. “Rachel Procter’s about five feet tall and built lean. She’s got auburn hair, smart-looking gray eyes, and a beautiful smile. The smile put in an appearance when I walked into her office, but when I told her what I wanted, it was gone, baby, gone. She was looking at me as if I’d suggested we have three-way sex with a goat some night. A real old, smelly goat.”

--Barney Ghougle (not his real name, but everyone calls him that), a local ghoul and one of Stan’s best informants. “For the latest gossip, a ghoul will put a roomful of Polish grandmothers to shame,” Stan says. To no one’s surprise, Barney’s a mortician. “I hear his funeral home is pretty successful, but I’d never do business with him. I like my relatives to be buried with all their parts intact.”

And if you visit Haunted Scranton, be sure to stop in for a drink (after sundown, naturally) at Renfield’s, the biggest “supe” bar in town. Most nights, you’ll find Elvira tending bar. That’s not her real name, but she’s dressed and made up in a good imitation of a certain TV horror hostess from the West Coast. Stan figures that the cleavage is probably good for tips. Most kinds of drinks are available in Renfield’s, but if you order a Bloody Mary, be sure to specify whether you want it with real blood.

If you get the munchies, Stan recommends Three Witches Bakery. He’s always hearing their commercial jingle on the local radio station, WARD: “Nothing says lovin’ like something from the coven….”

There are a couple of other people who are important in Stan’s life – his daughter, Christine and his partner, Karl Renfer. But I’d rather let you meet them for yourselves – and I hope that, one of these nights, you will.

Guest Blog: Author Chris F. Holm: The New Noir

I recently contacted Chris F. Holm after reading his debut novel from Angry Robot, Dead Harvest, and loved it so much I asked him to stop by The Sci-Fi Guys to share a bit about the genre of noir.

The New Noir

Chris F. Holm

“Noir” is perhaps the slipperiest term in all of literature. That’s in large part due to its muddy origins; our modern use of the term derives from the film noir of the ’40s and ’50s, which in turn borrowed heavily from the bleak crime tales that began cropping up in the U.S. during the Depression. James Cain, author of THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE and DOUBLE INDEMNITY, is widely credited as the creator of the modern roman noir. Before Cain, the term was used to refer to what we’d now call Gothic novels, but afterward, the term took on a life of its own.

Thing is, Cain wasn’t wild about the label, and those classic film noir flicks? Yeah, they weren’t called that then. The title was bestowed upon them by a French critic years after they began popping up in theaters, and the so-called noir canon wasn’t really well-defined until the ’70s, when critics and cinema historians adopted it en masse; before then, most of what we consider film noir were simply melodramas. So really, noir fiction is the result of a decades-long game of telephone that bounced from books to movies and back again, with stops on two continents along the way. (For a modern analog, ask any group of kids what “emo” means. I’ll bet you get a couple dozen different answers, none of which will correctly trace the term back to the hallowed ’80s D.C. hardcore punk scene. But I digress.)

The definition that’s gotten the most traction of late is noir preservationist Eddie Muller’s; he called noir “working-class tragedy,” That ain’t half-bad, but it’s more descriptive of where noir’s been than what noir is. For my money, noir boils down to bleak humanism. It’s all about lousy options, bad decisions, and dire consequences.

But regardless of whose definition you go with, you’ll notice something’s lacking: namely, any mention of genre. That’s because for as much as noir’s assumed to be a subset of crime fiction, it’s more vibe than subgenre. And, as many an enterprising modern writer seems intent on proving, that vibe is one that plays just as well with fantasy and science fiction as it does with crime. Witness William Gibson’s brilliant NEUROMANCER (which, okay, came out a while back, but then Gibson’s always been ahead of the curve), Jeff VanderMeer’s unsettling FINCH, or any number of works put out by my (utterly fantastic) publisher, Angry Robot, by folks like Adam Christopher, Tim Waggoner, and Lauren Beukes.

Or, if you’d prefer, witness my humble entrant in the realm of fantastical noir, DEAD HARVEST.

DEAD HARVEST is the tale of Sam Thornton, a man condemned to collect souls of the damned for all eternity, and ensure they find their way to hell. Sam was collected himself decades ago, after striking a deal with a demon to save his dying wife. When Sam’s dispatched to collect the soul of a young girl accused of slaughtering her family, he comes to believe she’s been framed. So he decides to do something no Collector’s ever done before: he defies hell and sets out to prove her innocence.

Yeah, sure, DEAD HARVEST contains its share of crime. But I’d argue it’s not the crime that makes it noir. What makes it noir is Sam’s predicament – the fact that his choices led him down a path where the only redemption he’ll ever achieve in life is in his own mind, because his fate is long since sealed. What makes it noir is the fact that every option available to him is shit, and absolution’s off the menu.

Of course, I could be wrong. But then, the book is what the book is, regardless of how it’s tagged. And if I’m very, very lucky, maybe twenty years from now, some enterprising historians will lump me and all those other folks together under the moniker of new noir.

Hell, if I’m read that far out, they can call me whatever they’d like.

Guest Blog: Author Michael West: Bringing Poseidon's Children to Life

2012 is going to be a big year for Sci-Fi Guys Book Review. Each month will see several authors either make a guest blog appearance or an interview appearance, which will focus on their new or up and coming titles. This month, and the first guest blog of the year on Sci-Fi Guys, is from author Michael West.

By now readers of this site should be familiar with West's name. Last year he made the Best of 20111 list not once, but twice. He also made the Most Anticipated Releases of 2012 list with his new novel Poseidon's Children, which launches the first book in a four part Urban Fantasy series entitled Legacy of the Gods. With the release of Poseidon's Children just a little over a month away, I thought it only fitting to invite Michael to share a bit of the story behind Poseidon's Children.

So, without further ado, here's Michael West:

Bringing Poseidon’s Children to Life

Or: How the Star Wars of Horror became the Texas Chainsaw Massacre of Urban Fantasy

By Michael West

I had a very vivid, very strange dream. Some dreams fade as soon as you open your eyes. Others stick with you for days. This particular dream has been with me for over twenty years. It involved an ancient stone temple, with odd markings etched into its walls, and a very seductive sea-creature. Most people have fantasies about movie stars and musicians; mine get directed by H.P. Lovecraft.  

Go figure.

Inspired by the visuals of this dream, I set about writing a screenplay. I was still in college at the time, studying film and television, still holding onto my boyhood dream of being the next Steven Spielberg or James Cameron. This was back when computers used huge 5 ¼” floppy discs to store information. I had a case full of them, and in between classes, you could find me in one of the campus computer labs, working on my epic. It was dark, filled with horrible monsters and bloody mayhem, with a touch of Science-Fiction sprinkled throughout; a project that I lovingly described to friends as “the Star Wars of Horror.”

I never finished that script. The more I wrote, the more I realized that the story I wanted to tell was just too large in scope for my meager budget at the time. Instead, I took all the work I’d done and began the task of converting dialogue and stage direction into paragraphs and prose.  

 When I finished the first third of my manuscript, I printed it off in sections using the computer lab’s dot matrix printer (Oh man, I’m really dating myself here!), and like a proud papa, I handed it off to some friends, asking them to offer their critiques. I didn’t have the time or paper to print more than one copy, so this huge ream of paper--about two hundred pages worth--got passed along from one person to another, each one writing me notes along the way.

Then, tragedy struck. Remember those 5 ¼” discs I told you about? Well, I lost them. All of them.  Don’t ask me how. I left them in a classroom, dropped them in a parking lot...to this day, I still have no idea where they are. At the start of the day, I had them, and at the end of the day, they were gone, and with them went my novel-in-progress.  

But at least I still had that hard copy, right?  

Nope. I went back to all of my friends, trying to track it down, but I had no better luck with them than I’d had with those classrooms and parking lots. No one seemed to know where that stack of paper was, and even if they did, nobody wanted to admit that they were the one who lost it.

And so, for a time, I tried to forget about the story and move on.  I mean sure, I could’ve gone back and started the novel all over again from scratch. But let’s be honest, shall we: it’s one thing to have your friends and family give you some bad feedback on a project, but when fate steps in and takes away all known copies of your work, that’s the universe telling you that you just need to stop. At least, that’s what I thought at the time. 

That dream just wouldn’t die, however, and the more I thought about it, the more I talked about it with other people, the more I realized that it was something I would have to tackle again someday. 

In the meantime, I got married. Three years later, my oldest son was born. And three years after that, with another son on the way, a friend from Indiana University unpacked a box of stuff from his college dorm room and found a stack of paper with my name on it.

Poseidon’s Children.  

The prodigal offspring had returned.  

And so I sat down and read the manuscript for the first time in almost a decade. A lot had changed since I’d written it.  In addition to my new family, I now had a computer in my home, and I’d written some short stories, found my voice as an author, a voice that now screamed in agony at the clunky prose and horrible dialogue on display in the faded dot matrix ink on those two-hundred pages. And yet, all those ideas that I’d been toying with over the years were still there, begging me to pick them up and play with them again. 

Over the next year, I rewrote the existing portion of the manuscript and just kept going, finally finishing the story. I weaved in more mythology, loading up the novel with all of those cool ideas that had been crawling around inside my brain. And when I printed it out on my laser printer, the final product was nearly eight hundred pages long and weighed over ten pounds, dwarfing the latest edition of the Indianapolis white pages. 

Obviously, it was in need of some editing. So I did what any professional author would do: I went to said Indianapolis phonebook and looked up “Editor, Books.”  Believe it or not, I found one name. She used to read slush for a New York publisher, but now she edited text books and instructional manuals for corporations. As luck would have it, the idea of working with fiction again excited her, and she agreed to help me whip my manuscript into shape. For the next two years, that’s exactly what we did.  

When we felt we had it ready, I sent it to several publishers. As a writer, you get a story in your head that you’re passionate about, and you just want to tell it in the best way possible. You don’t stop and think about what genre you’re writing in. But, since I considered myself a Horror author, I approached the Horror market first.      

Over and over again, the same response: “We really enjoyed Poseidon’s Children, but we didn’t find it to be scary enough to be Horror.” Based on some of the story elements, they suggested that I try a Science-Fiction publisher instead. And so I took their advice, hoping to have better luck, but finding only further rejection. “We found this to be a fast-paced, enjoyable read,” they told me, “but it’s just too horrific to be part of our Sci-Fi line.” 

So there I was, stuck with a book that everyone liked, but nobody wanted. No one could even agree on what it was! It was dark, that much was certain, and bloody; it had elements of Action Adventure, Mystery, Thriller, Science Fiction, and, of course, Horror. So where should I turn?

Frustrated, I shelved the novel once again, focusing instead on other projects. I published enough short fiction to fill a collection, Skull Full of Kisses, which was published by Graveside Tales, and I wrote two more novels, The Wide Game, also for Graveside, and Cinema of Shadows, which I sold to Seventh Star Press as part of a multiple book deal.  All Horror. 

And still, that dream kept gnawing at me. I loved those characters, that mythology, and I wanted to get it out there.  

I decided to take another stab at Poseidon’s Children. This time, I turned to the other writers of my writing group, Indiana Horror Writers, for suggestions. It was Maurice Broaddus, who was writing his own series of novels at the time, who told me that what I had was clearly Urban Fantasy. I questioned this, thinking that all Fantasy, even Urban Fantasy, had to have wizards and dragons. The more I looked into it, however, the more diverse the genre became. Urban Fantasy could have vampires and werewolves, it could have demons and monsters, even aliens.And the more I read, the more I thought that my novel was a perfect fit.  

I decided to do one final polish. I played up some elements, jettisoned others, and expanded the whole mythology into a series I was now calling The Legacy of the Gods. But I still kept it dark, kept it bloody; in fact, I lovingly described it as “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre of Urban Fantasy.” Satisfied with the finished product, I approached my current publisher, Seventh Star Press, who had released a fair amount of Fantasy and Urban Fantasy before taking on my Indiana-based Horror Series, and I waited nervously for their response. 

When they told me they loved Poseidon’s Children, I was overjoyed, and yet I kept waiting to hear “but it’s not scary enough for this,” or “it’s too Sci-Fi for that.” This time, however, it was just right. They greenlit the entire series and set a release date for March of 2012; more than twenty years after that initial dream.

So now...here we are, on the eve of the novel’s release. Soon my faithful readers will be able to dive into the world I’ve been swimming in alone for so long. In fact, some reviewers already have their copies. "A little more gruesome than most of the Urban Fantasy novels I've read," one of them has already commented.

Oh yes, my work here is done.

King Maker Book Review

Title: King Maker (Book 1): The Knights of Breton Court

Author: Maurice Broaddus

Publisher: Angry Robot

Pages: 400

ISBN: 9780857660527

The legend of King Arthur tells of humanity’s universal desire to see a hero rise, deliver the people from their helpless existence and create a “Camelot”, where all are safe, were the possibilities are endless, and where everyone matters and makes a difference. It also tells how all such utopias are short-lived, must fall, and that chaos must return while the ordinary people wait for the cycle to begin again. (Anyone who flags this as a possible spoiler has much bigger problems culturally than my over-share review.)

The story of hope combined with inevitable tragedy make the King Arthur Legend one of the Greatest Stories Ever Told. As such, it has endured more than its fair share of variations and interpretations on stage, literature, television and movies—a few good and mediocre, and most of them incredibly bad.

The invisible baggage attached to King Maker Book One by Maurice Broaddus cannot be ignored. It’s impossible to approach a new version of the timeless tale without asking, “Do we really need this version?” I’m pleased to report that Maurice Broaddus provides many compelling answers to this question, answers which led me to conclude with a resounding yes.

Broaddus sets his tale among the very real rundown slums of west-side Indianapolis. The homeless huddle under streets that Hoosier natives can point to on a map, but would rarely drive through by choice after dark. While reading this book, I’ve stumbled upon mixed online comments regarding this choice—why not New York or Los Angeles or some other, more recognizable ghetto? I applaud the decision, and not just because I recognize the area he writes about (and clearly, so does he). By refusing to relocate his tale, he reminds the reader that poverty knows no geography. The poor are as equally trapped in Los Angeles as Pittsburgh. To massacre Shakespeare: A gang shooting in any other city would be as dangerous.

With every sentence, Broaddus traps the reader in the slums with his characters. He paints a bleak picture of warring gang members born without a chance, stuck in a school system that’s given up on them. We see kids raised by drug dealers and hookers whose only options are to escape through drugs or to “rise up” through the gang system, only to discover, too late, the lies inherent in those promises.

This is the world of King James White. We begin with the betrayal and fall of his father. Frm there, we’re quickly introduced to the gang and residents of Breton Court and their rival, the crew at the Phoenix apartments. We meet their leaders, Night and Dred, their lieutenants, and the various peddlers, pushers and police caught in the middle. By the time King answers his call to destiny and assembles his posse of “knights” at the modern “round table” (an all-night greasy diner), you can think of few places in greater need of a hero than the modern-day slums of Indianapolis.

The strengths of the novel put a spotlight on what many will consider its weaknesses. King Maker tells a sweeping tale with no less than 20 important characters. In hot, tragic splashes of episodic vignettes, we meet them all, we learn their story. We visit long enough to understand their motivation; we experience their pain and entrapment. In many cases, we learn their fate, and then we move on.

Readers who prefer a more intimate tale, who expect to spend time with our hero King as he broods, ponders and finally accepts his destiny, may be frustrated with this “hit and run” approach. I had my favorite characters: the homeless Merle, King, his girl Lady G. the oddly delightful bigoted police officer Lee and his black partner, the eternally patient and understanding detective Octavia.

Other readers will find much to love and may prefer the company of the ogre twins Machaela and Marshall, or the mysterious and lethal Omarosa, or others, but the result is the same. Your favorites are sharing screen time (page time?) with a large ensemble. Even King occupies less than a quarter of the novel.

I must also admit some frustration with the contrivance of renaming the classic heroes with recognizable variations. Did Guinevere have to be named Lady G, Merlin the Magician “Merle”, along with the similarly dubbed Luther, Lott, and Wayne? But to Broaddus’ credit, he owns the contrivance, and over time, makes the reader see these characters as individuals beyond their archtypes.

This is a world where gangsters kill and mutilate at the first hint of a neighborhood snitch. Where bumbling flunkies meet merciless death in graphic and bloody ways that may traumatize witnesses—that would be the reader. This is a world where the downtrodden pedestrian ducks gunfire on a daily basis, and runs the other way to avoid witnessing an assault.When King and his crew confront the trolls, demons, and dragons, you can absolutely believe an apartment building can be assaulted in broad daylight by a horde of supernatural beasts, and that no one is going to question or even notice the more fantastic elements.

Though not everything works exactly as you might expect, King Maker is a triumph. The book works much better than any jaded reader who has “seen it all before” should have any reason to expect. So while I started Book 1 with doubts, I find myself anxiously awaiting the release of Book 2, and give Book 1 a score of 9 out of 10 TARDISes.

–R.J.

Putting the (s) back into Sci-Fi Guy(s)

In the first post of 2011 I wrote that I would be adding guest bloggers to the site as the year progressed. I'm happy to announce the newest addition to the Sci-Fi Guys family, is RJ Sullivan, author of the novel Haunting Blue. After much discussion, RJ will be offering a monthly review.

For the month of January RJ will be reviewing Maurice Broaddus's King Maker.

Look for it within the next few days.

~Rodney

2011: Steam

(AKA: What are you lookin' at punk!?)

2010 was a rather miasma of a mess here on Sci-Fi Guys, with still trying to figure out how to pace everything, and finding time to actually read and write the reviews for the titles I had chosen. These things are my fault, and for them, I apologize. 2011, with any luck, will turn out to be quite the opposite of 2010.

Sci-Fi Guys is going to be changing a bit here in the new year. I've decided to work with a theme for the site this year. And the theme is: Steampunk!

All throughout 2011, I'll be doing reviews for steampunk fiction, while still reviewing the same types of titles that I reviewed in 2010. I'm not sure how the ratio will work out, but I'm hoping for around an equal amount for both types of reviews.

I'm also going to be focusing more on guest blogs as well. I've got a few ideas floating around that still haven't been put to paper, but look for these as well, as 2011 progresses.

I'm really excited for 2011 here on Sci-Fi Guys Book Review, and I hope you'll keep coming back through out the year to see what we've done next.

Until then, Happy New Year!

~Rodney

Guest Blog: We love it! We can't use it! What is it?

It was a long, strange journey from my final draft of Haunting Blue, my first novel, to its eventual publication through Damnation Books. Nothing proved stranger than the series of rejection letters and emails the book collected during the hectic three years my then-agent (she’s such a sweet woman) sent it off to pretty much every major publisher on the planet, and seeing the various “reasons” for its rejection. What follows is a fictionalized conversation with a character representing all these various publishers.

Pub: Haunting Blue is well-written, tightly plotted, and I couldn’t put it down until I finished. We love it!

Me: So you’re going to publish it?

Pub: We don’t love it THAT much!

Me: Oh, sorry for being presumptuous.

Pub: I love the book, I just don’t love it…for our readers! You understand me?

Me: Yes. Uh….no.

Pub: For us to use it, you’d have to change it.

Me: What parts?

Pub: Well…all of it. We wanted an edgy thriller for young adults.

Me: I can edit the adult language if that’s the….

Pub: No, we can do that. The biggest problem is that it gets too exciting at the end.

Me: I was going for mundane, but I got a bit carried away.

Pub: Look, kid, books with strong female protagonists are flying off the shelves, but then your punk girl’s not girly enough. The tweens won’t relate to her.

Me: You want me to make Blue a girly rebel punk?

Pub: And what’s with all this arguing with the parent? What teenager can relate to that?

Me: When you’re right, you’re right.

Pub: And if you alienate teenagers, who’s going to read it? Our marketing clearly shows that adults won’t read books about teenagers.

Me: What about Carrie and Christine?

Pub: Are you comparing yourself to Stephen King?

Me: I’m sure it would be career suicide to compare myself to Stephen King.

Pub: Besides, this is a supernatural thriller, but all this “stuff” happens before it gets supernatural.

Me: it’s a slow burn. Like Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. The town itself is kind of a character.

Pub: So this is like Ray Bradbury?

Me: I’m sure it would be career suicide to compare myself to Ray Bradbury.

Pub: And what the hell is up with your structure? You swap back and forth between first person and third person. That’s going to confuse the reader!

Me: William Faulkner did it in As I Lay Dying.

Pub: Who? Listen, is this Bill Fauker or Folker or whoever a current bestseller?

Me: I defer to your expertise.

Pub: I was so excited when this hit my desk.  Teenage girl! Monster! Like Stephanie Meyer with a ghost instead of a vampire! Now she knows how to write bestsellers!  Why’d you make that face, kid? Don’t you like Stephanie Meyer?

Me: It would be career suicide to compare myself to Stephanie Meyer, but for a vastly different reason than the other two.

Pub: Look, you’ve written a young adult too dark for tweens, but not dark enough for  horrorreaders, a chick lit novel not particularly girly and a southern gothic that takes place in the Midwest. Who the hell cares about Indiana, anyway? What exactly is this thing you’ve written?

Me: It’s a damn good story, sir. I’m sure we’ll find a terrific home for it elsewhere.

And eventually, my agent punted it back to my control with her regrets, and I found a terrific home for it through Damnation Books. Please enjoy this edgy urban punk chick-lit Midwestern gothic Hardy Boys for Big Kids ghost story novel, also known as Haunting Blue.

R.J. Sullivan and his family live in Heartland Crossing, Indiana, south of Indianapolis. He’s published short fiction in Midnight Graffiti and Strange Weird and Wonderful eZines. He’s composed dozens of articles for local magazines and newspapers, and “ghost” writes newsletter content for several companies. Join the R.J. Sullivan fan community at www.rjsullivanfiction.com