Many thanks to editors Joshua Orr and Erik Gulbrandsen for including my short story "Gate Closes at Dusk" in The Vanishing Point Magazine Issue 3/ Spring 2022.
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1. drag actor away from camera at floor POV
2. track the car traversing lonely road from birds-eye view 3. discover video that documents demise of its characters 4 visit abandoned asylum to prove it's not haunted 5. flee through the dark for majority of runtime 6. say "Wait - did you hear that?" 7. plant cameras throughout house and monitor feeds from basecamp 8. have girl take bath 9. lose sense of time and direction in wilderness 10. zombies Many thanks to Jessica Bell, editor at Vine Leaves Press, for publishing my 50 Give or Take story this month. I'm honored to participate!
Terrible circumstances run rampant in the opening moments of our favorite fables and fairy tales. Take, for instance:
Fables are basically country songs. We meet our most absorbing heroes just after they’ve lost their sweetheart and their dog, and that’s no accident. Their suffering makes us love them and root for them. Their pain motivates them to do the most unexpected, extraordinary things. As we approach the most grimmest of milestones (i.e., half the school year behind us), we've witnessed more horror than we can bear. “Hybrid” classes, onsite participants sitting idle while the facilitator wrestles with tech challenges, online participants catching muffled bits of classroom discussion, paying vague attention. Decreased visibility, wasted time, and deflated content value.
We L&D ditchdiggers know there's a heavy lift to ensure online learners are getting the same educational value that their onsite cousins do. I’ve written previously how the COVID-19 pandemic forced our children’s schools to reconvene in our dining rooms, offering parents front-row seats as teachers grappled to retool their classroom syllabus to a remote audience. And oh. The horror, the horror. Absolutely jazzed to finish my latest novel manuscript, a modern gothic horror piece called I HEART FRANKENSTEIN. For your scientific edification, the monster's anatomy has been dissected below.
The 1-sentence pitch: After Boris Kovacs dumps his ruthless gang to become live-in assistant for a sheltered teen who’s experimenting to revive the dead, he must protect her from their fury even as her dreadful research threatens to everyone first. The girl next door is a mad scientist. Boris would know. He’s her unlucky new assistant. Desperate for money and roof over his head, delinquent BORIS KOVACS becomes personal assistant to VICTORIA BELLAROI, a young woman living alone in a crumbling estate. By day Boris participates in her absurd attempts to revive the dead, and by night he wanders her mansion’s myriad passages, captivated by its bizarre and terrifying secrets. In fact her crazy may be contagious, because Boris swears he saw the armchair skittering down the hall. The more Boris learns about this peculiar girl, who dresses and talks like some lost Dickens character, the deeper he falls under her spell. And the more desperate Victoria’s experiments become. But Bo’s former friends aren’t taking his desertion too well. Particularly GWYN, who wants Boris back and won’t hesitate to seduce or slaughter anyone who get in her way. Aimless as he is brilliant, Boris sees life as a series of chemical reactions, best observed from a safe and cynical distance. But with everyone around him coming to a bloody end, Boris learns there’s no innocent bystanders in the chemistry of love and death. Now he must protect Victoria from the ruthless gang he’s led to her door, if her experiments don’t kill everyone first. |
AuthorPhilip is thinking. Shame on Philip. Archives
April 2022
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