Tag: The Birds

AUTHOR INTERVIEW: C.R. Richards

megHan

Meghan: It’s been a bit since you and I sat down last to talk. Welcome to this year’s Halloween Extravaganza. Thanks for stopping by. What is your favorite part of Halloween?

CRR: I love to read spooky stories year-round, but the special Halloween vibe takes “the scary” to a higher level. There is nothing like curling up under a blanket on a spooky October evening with a gripping ghost story.

Meghan: Do you get scared easily?

CRR: It takes some doing to scare the jaded adult me, but it can be done!

Meghan: What is the scariest movie you’ve ever seen, and why?

CRR: My mom and brother took me to The Omen (1976 version with Gregory Peck) when I was eleven. I remember we were at the drive-in, so I spent most of the movie hiding on the floor of our station wagon. That movie had a profound impact on me. It was the first time I contemplated what Evil was and how it could potentially harm me. I think my mom regretted taking me to see that movie. It gave me screaming nightmares for weeks. I haven’t watched the movie since.

Meghan: Which horror movie murder did you find the most disturbing?

CRR: Slasher movies have made viewers desensitized by fake gore. I feel it is true-to-life murders like the little girl’s killing in The Lovely Bones (2009 film based on the book) that are the most disturbing. It could happen to anyone in any neighborhood.

Meghan: Is there a horror movie you refused to watch because the commercials scared you too much?

CRR: Yes! Paranormal Activity. I don’t know why, but it’s too creepy for me.

Meghan: If you got trapped in one scary movie, which would you choose?

CRR: One of the classic Alfred Hitchcock movies like Psycho or The Birds. I love that era in Hollywood.

Meghan: If you were stuck as the protagonist in any horror movie, which would you choose?

CRR: The Mummy (1999). It would be awesome to hang out with Brendan Fraser.

Meghan: What is your all-time favorite scary monster or creature of the night?

CRR: Dracula. He is the ultimate scary vampire (as they should be. No sparkly vamps, please).

Meghan: What is your favorite Halloween tradition?

CRR: I love handing out candy to the trick-or-treaters. Some of the costumes are so clever.

Meghan: What is your favorite horror or Halloween-themed song?

CRR: The theme from Psycho (1960). It’s immediately recognizable.

Meghan: Which horror novel unsettled you the most?

CRR: There are two classic Occult novels by the same author team that keep me up at night. The First is The Cabinet of Curiosities by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. FBI Agent Pendergast chases a madman who mutilates his victims via dissection. The Second is one of my all-time favorite books, Still Life with Crows.  Killer in a small town who disappears without a trace.

Meghan: What is the creepiest thing that’s ever happened while you were alone?

CRR: I visited Boston several years ago and stayed in an old mill the owner had converted into condos. One night I heard someone slam open the front door. A man’s heavy boots stomped down the hall past my bedroom. I flipped on the light and crept to my sister’s room. We were the only people staying in the condo at the time. The front door was undisturbed, and I couldn’t see any uninvited guests. My sister told me the old mill was supposedly haunted by some workers who’d perished there over 100 years ago.

Meghan: Which unsolved mystery fascinates you the most?

CRR: I am fascinated by the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, CA. Why did Sarah Winchester, widow of the famous rifle’s founder, build a house with stairs going nowhere and room layouts that don’t make sense? Was she really trying to avoid the ghosts of the rifle’s victims? Or was she insane? Visiting the house is on my bucket list.

Meghan: What is the spookiest ghost story that you have ever heard?

CRR: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. It’s a hard one to beat.

Meghan: In a zombie apocalypse, what is your weapon of choice?

CRR: I’d go with a cricket bat as an homage to the movie Shaun of the Dead with Simon Pegg.

Meghan: Okay, let’s have some fun… Would you rather get bitten by a vampire or a werewolf?

CRR: Vampire!

Meghan: Would you rather fight a zombie apocalypse or an alien invasion?

CRR: Let me at those zombies!

Meghan: Would you rather drink zombie juice or eat dead bodies from the graveyard?

CRR: Zombie juice, of course!

Meghan: Would you rather stay at the Poltergeist house or the Amityville house for a week?

CRR: Poltergeist house.

Meghan: Would you rather chew on a bitter melon with chilies or maggot-infested cheese?

CRR: Yuck! I think I’d have to take the melon.

Meghan: Would you rather drink from a witch’s cauldron or lick cotton candy made of spider webs?

CRR: I wouldn’t mind trying the spider web cotton candy if I could add pumpkin spice.

Boo-graphy: C. R. Richards is the award-winning author of The Mutant Casebook Series. Her literary career began as a part-time columnist for a small entertainment newspaper. She wore several hats: food critic, entertainment reviewer, and cranky editor. A lover of horror and dark fantasy stories, she enjoys telling tales of intrigue and adventure. Her most recent literary projects include the new historical dark fantasy thriller The Vengeful Dead and the epic dark fantasy series Heart of The Warrior. She is an affiliate member of the Horror Writers Association.

Author Website
Blog
Twitter
Amazon Author Page
Goodreads Page

The Vengeful Dead
KDP Buy Link

The Dead don’t always rest in peace.

Dunham Raynor is a second-rate psychic traveling with a rundown medicine show. Months after the end of the American Civil War, Dun and his partners head west with dreams of easy wealth. They finally have a chance to make some real money when they cross paths with a murderess in a s small Missouri town. The blackmail job is sure to give their band of swindlers the stake they need to reach San Francisco. But luck is a fickle mistress.

Marked by magic as a youth, Dun isn’t the fake he pretends to be. His mysterious tattoo of an Ouroboros allows him to see and speak with the Dead. When the ghost of a Confederate soldier arfrives with a dire warning about the little town’s imminent destruction, Dun must choose between loyalty and his own skin.

The Undead never forget.

Dun tries to escape his past by traveling west along the Santa Fe Trail, but vicious killers haunt his every step. Their ruthless games turn deadly as Dun’s new traveling companions are brutally slaughtered. Are the supernatural hunters bent on delivering justice, or is the Necromancer holding their leash after revenge? The answer lies in the living Ouroboros embedded in Dun’s chest.

GUEST POST: Thomas Smith

megHan

Halloween via Time Machine – or – How to Haunt a House

When I received the request to write this post I was whisked away in my mental time machine and deposited smack dab in the middle of Halloween in the 1960s.

Bobby “Boris” Pickett was singing his new song, Monster Mash, on the radio. A day or so before the big day itself, televisions all over the country were following the antics of the Peanuts gang in a new TV special: It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown. And in theaters everywhere, there were new movies unlike anything we’d ever seen before, each one guaranteed to make you sleep with a night light:

Night of the Living Dead, The Birds, and Norman Bates as the ultimate mama’s boy in Psycho loomed large on the big screen for those brave enough to keep their eyes open.

And when Halloween finally arrived, a legion of ghosts, goblins, clowns, ballerinas, and hobos came home with bags and plastic jack-o-lanterns filled with apples, oranges, Baby Ruths (regular and minis), Butterfingers (regular and minis), Saf-T-Pops (complete with heavy string loops instead of a stick), Dubble Bubble Gum, Snickers, Milky Ways, Forever Yours Bars, Kraft Caramels, B. B. Bats, wax lips, wax fangs, and boxes of Boston Baked Beans.

And almost every character that wasn’t created at someone’s mother’s sewing machine came from a cardboard box with a cellophane front from either Collegeville, or Ben Cooper. They were the huge Halloween costume companies in the 1950s and 1960s. If you really wanted to be cool, Ben Cooper’s clown, devil, princess, dragon, and spooky monster costumes had flashing lights in the mask. But Collegeville, not to be outdone, had some of the coolest costumes with their Gorilla, Ghoul, Monster, Body Snatcher, and Weird-O, Fink costumes.

Now none of the boxed costumes fit worth a dang, but we didn’t care. A rip here and a patch there (always in the back) and who’s to know? Besides, if you were wearing the Planet of the Apes, Batman, Superman, Hobo, Frankenstein, ghost, and mummy costumes (the very latest and greatest of the day), it was worth it.

Meanwhile, in the middle of all of this Halloween spectacle, my brother and I were waiting in the basement of our house to cap off Halloween in style. We worked for the previous two or three days to get everything just right. Then we went trick-or-treating with the first wave of costumed candy beggars so we could be back in time for the opening of Thomas and Paul’s Haunted Basement.

OK, the title wasn’t terribly original, but for the early 1960s, we were the only game in town (in our particular town at least). We took turns standing in the outdoor entrance to the basement and ushered the unsuspecting costumed customers (admission fee was one candy bar) into a maze of glowing cardboard skeletons, a ghost that moved and floated in the corner of the basement (thanks to an old screen door spring and a string), rubber bats that dropped out of the darkness above onto their victims’ various noggins, a bowl of grapes coated with a little vegetable oil and placed in a black box labeled EYEBALLS with a hole cut out just big enough for a victims hand), a Frankenstein’s monster (each of us in turn, in costume) that would jump out and growl menacingly (as if there’s any other way for the creation of Victor Frankenstein to growl) and watch the guys finch and the girls scream.

Then there was the scary movie.

We would get an 8mm copy of Frankenstein vs The Wolfman from the local Public library (the original movie condensed to approximately five minutes) and coupled with a homemade soundtrack from the Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House record (copied onto a reel-to-reel tape recorder to correspond with the movie scenes), we had the perfect ending to a horrifying (hey, I was nine years old in the 60s) trek through the darkness.

I went trick-or-treating a lot after that. And I’ve been through some really good professionally staged haunted houses. But I’ve gotta be honest.

I’d love to go through Thomas and Paul’s Haunted Basement just one more time.

Boo-graphy:
Thomas is an award-winning writer, essayist, playwright, reporter, TV news producer, and a three-time American Christian Writers Association Writer of the Year. His work has appeared in numerous publications from Writer’s Digest and Exploring Alaska, to The Horror Zine and Cemetery Dance magazine.

He has written for many publishers including Grinning Skull Press, Zondervan, Barnes & Noble Books, Adams Media, Chronicle Books, Borderlands Press, Barbour Publishing, Pocket Books, and Cemetery Dance Publications. Two of his short stories (Mother and Child Reunion and The Heart is a Determined Hunter) have appeared on Tales to Terrify, and his short story, A Rustle of Owls’ Wings, has been adapted for the stage.

Thomas has written jokes for Joan Rivers and his comedy material has been performed on The Tonight Show.

He is also, quite possibly, the only writer in captivity to have been included in collections with Stephen King, and the Rev. Rick Warren in the same week.

And other than author bios, he rarely refers to himself in the third person.

Rarely.

Something Stirs
Ben Chalmers is a successful novelist. His wife, Rachel, is a fledgling artist with a promising career, and their daughter, Stacy, is the joy of their lives. Ben’s novels have made enough money for him to provide a dream home for his family. But there is a force at work-a dark, chilling, ruthless force that has become part of the very fabric of their new home.

A malevolent entity becomes trapped in the wood and stone of the house and it will do whatever it takes to find a way to complete its bloody transference to our world.

Local sheriff, Elizabeth Cantrell, and former pastor-turned-cabinetmaker, Jim Perry, are drawn into the family’s life as the entity manipulates the house with devastating results. And it won’t stop until it gets what it wants. Even if it costs them their faith, their sanity, and their lives.

Monsters
“I killed my parents when I was thirteen years old.”

And now, with the murder of Missy Blake twenty-two years later, it’s time for Jack Greene to finish what he started.

When the co-ed’s mutilated body is found, the police are clueless, but Jack knows what killed the pretty college student; he’s been hunting it for years. The hunt has been going on for too long, though, and Jack wants to end it, but he can’t do it alone. The local police aren’t equipped to handle the monster in their midst, so Jack recruits Major Kelly Langston, and together they set out to rid the world of this murdering creature once and for all.