Books and Authors

As a child there were a few series of books that really jump-started my interest in reading.  One was the series Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators.  In them a group of three young adults had their own investigation group and solved many spooky crimes that took place near there home in Rocky Beach, California.  Another series were the Choose Your Own Adventure and Which Way books.  You were the hero of the story in the books, and you were able to make decisions that altered the outcome of the tale. 

The winner of the contest to win a copy of my chap book “The Collective of Blaque Reach” is Laurel Gittere!  Thanks to all who entered.  I will be contacting all of you to personally thank you for taking the time to enter.   Although I only have one copy of the chap book to send out, I will try to do something special for each of you.

Thanks again,

Matt Cowan

H.P. Lovecraft had several writers he corresponded with regularly.  One of those men was the great Robert Bloch.  Bloch would become best known as the author of Psycho, from which Hitchcock’s revolutionary film was based.  He wrote a number of stories in Lovecraft’s unique world.  The last story Lovecraft published before his death formed the middle segment of a loose trilogy.  Bloch wrote the other two parts.  Part one was “The Shambler From The Stars”.  In it he made the main character a writer of weird fiction from New England searching for diabolical knowledge, which in the end appears to draw him towards imminent death.  Lovecraft wrote part two, “The Haunter of the Dark”, and made the main character a writer named Robert Blake.  Notice any similarities in the name?  The address given for Blake in the story even matches Bloch’s real address at the time.  He in turn killed off the pseudo-Bloch in his story.  Several years later, Bloch wrote the final installment and included Lovecraft, by his name this time, as a character in the tale. It was titled “The Shadow From the Steeple”.  

 Ralph Adams Cram was born in Hampton Falls, New Jersey in1863.  He would go on to become one of America’s premiere architects.  He published multiple books on the subject, but his first was a collection of ghost stories titled Black Spirits and White (1895).  I discovered him in elementary school in a Troll book of haunted house tales.  They were actually retelling of older stories.  It was titled ‘The Strange House’, but

Rich Ristow’s new novelette, Into The Cruel Sea, is about a young woman named Beth who is dealing with several issues.  She has an abusive father, a checked-out mother and a boyfriend Wade, who recently killed his parents before walking into the sea and disappearing.  Wade was always obsessed with the water, even claiming fish spoke to him.  By brutally slaying his parents, he was transformed into something as much fish as man.  He now wants Beth to join him by repeating the ritual.

One of my favorite things to do while on vacation is read horror stories.  If I can find ones themed to the locale we are in, all the better.  This year we stayed at Myrtle Beach.  Seeing the ocean everyday made me select tales on the high seas.  The following take place in such settings. 

SAILING THE DARK SEAS:

Leslie Poles Hartley was born in Whittlesea, Cambridge in the United Kingdom in 1895.  He joined the British Army in 1919, but was sent home after a short stint due to medical problems.  He started his writing career as a fiction reviewer for several magazines, which he continued at for thirty years.  His first published book was a collection of short stories titled Night Fears (1924).  He also published other short story collections of the supernatural, such as