Don’t Miss The Big Giveaway!
Hey all, I’m taking over Tim’s blog for a couple days (thanks Tim!) as part of a month long tour across the ether. I’m passing out treats for the season, namely free copies of my work. I write The Merkabah Rider weird western series (gunslinging Hasid hunting the renegade master who betrayed his mystic Jewish order across the 1880’s Old West) among other things. All this month I’ve put print copies of my stuff up on goodreads, and here I’m gonna give away .pdf copies of Red Sails, which I’ll tell you about in a bit.
I love Halloween (the season). I’ve always loved it. Love the idea of running around all night in a mask, or just dressed in the guise of your favorite persona. I was never really big on the candy, just the going house to house, the being recognized as what I was supposed to be. If the costume was good, you got that recognition. I’ve been a Tusken Raider (this was back before they were mass producing Star Wars costumes and my mom and my cousin sat in the basement making a mask out of paper mache and ace bandages, sewing sackcloth together for a robe, and my dad, God bless him, WELDED me a screen accurate gaffi stick in the garage and lent me real World War II era bandoliers and belts – I won my town’s costume parade that year), the Lone Ranger (complete with a cardboard box Silver), Mad Max (circa Road Warrior), Kwai Chang Cain, A Teenage Werewolf (yeah – Michael Landon – I was a big fan of that movie as a kid), Eric Cord (props to anybody who can remember who that is), and a slew of other things. I never wore a jacket over my costume, no matter how cold it was, and when I was Cain, I walked the streets of Chicago the whole night barefoot. That’s how hardcore into Halloween I was. To some extent I still am, but now I have to live vicariously through my children. The cool thing is, with three of ‘em, I can basically help make three different costumes every year.
I think when I write, I still get that thrill when somebody ‘gets’ me, or recognizes my influences, or the little easter egg references to stuff I enjoy I drop in all my work. There are references to everything from The Lord of The Rings to Solomon Kane and The Shootist in my Merkabah Rider series (and numerous others), and even real life personages. When a reviewer mentioned being delighted that Wyatt Earp’s wife made an appearance in the first book, even thinly disguised under a pretty obscure alias she actually traveled under, that made my day.
So that brings me to Red Sails, a novella I wrote that sounds like geeking out and throwing everything into the pot chop suey style. It’s got pirates, it’s got werewolves, it’s got a vampire, and it’s got cannibals. Yep.
When I think about where Red Sails started, on a car trip with some friends and fellow writers on the way back from San Diego Comic Con, it’s pretty easy to guess the frame my mind was in – full nerd mode.
Basically a friend of mine posited the question, if you had to write a story featuring werewolves, vampires, and zombies, what would you write?
Red Sails and another novella (I know, I cheated by moving the zombies off to another story), Dubaku just popped right into my head, as if it were a memory just waiting to be triggered by the right sequence of words.
Red Sails is about a pair of men in the Age of Sail, a resourceful British marine and prisoner of war, and a Dominican blackfriar who both find themselves floating in the ocean when their Spanish ship bound for New Spain is sunk by a pirate ship with red canvas sails.
The pirates lean over the rail and take pot shots at the surviving Spaniards, blowing them off their makeshift rafts with their muskets and putting enough blood in the water to get the sharks circling.
Then, when this marine and this priest both curse them for the devils they are, their words reach the ear of the pirate captain, who, impressed by their spirit, orders them hauled out of the water and brought below.
There, in the dim cabin, shut out from all sunlight, they meet Absolon Vigoreaux, a wrinkled old bastard in antique clothing, who drinks the blood of the Dominican abbot right on his supper table and spins them a fantastic tale about an immortal bloodsucker who tamed a crew of werewolves, and keeps them sated by choosing a prisoner or two every full moon to set loose on a remote jungle island, to be hunted down for sport by the ravenous wolf men.
Then, after the crew butchers and salts the other priests for the journey, they set out to that very same island, and the marine and the priest quickly become a part of the ruthless captain’s tale.
There are other players too. The natives of Vigoreaux’s favorite island have started a religion around the pirates’ visits, which keeps the people in line for the most part. But when the old chief’s daughter violently rebuff’s the advances of the head priest’s nephew and is cast out into the outer jungle to feed the beast men, she happens upon the marine and the priest, and they hatch a plan to fight back which they must enact before the sun sets and the launches from the red sailed ship strike out for land.
Red Sails doesn’t just come from my unmitigated nerd-ery of course. It comes from my love of Robert E. Howard, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Patrick O’Brian adventures, and old timey pirate movies like Captain Blood and The Black Swan. In fact, if you’re a pirate aficionado, you’ll find references to a couple famous pirates, both real and fictional – even a certain buccaneer with a fear of timepieces, because, yeah, that’s how I roll.
Oh and monsters, sure. Take note though, my werewolves aren’t allergic to silver (that’s a Hollywood invention) and my vampires don’t sparkle in the sun. My Dominican priest isn’t a shiftless pervert and my cannibals, yeah, they’re really cannibals. They eat people. But that doesn’t make them any less heroic (I hope).
So if it’s irony you’re looking for, look elsewhere. This is a straight blood and thunder pulp adventure story. I like to think of it as the sort of thing you might’ve read in Weird Tales back in its heyday.
Anyway, in the spirit of Halloween, I’m offering the first three people to comment here on Tim’s blog a free .pdf copy of Red Sails.
So watch the magic pumpkin.
And Happy Halloween.
