Monthly Newsletter #2 February 2017

Welcome back to my monthly newsletter. A day late, but certainly not a dollar short. I'm still green, so cut me some slack, please! I hope you find some of this interesting, and if you have any feedback it is always welcome. Cheers!


News (fake or otherwise)



I have a number of works in progress at all times. I really wish I could focus on one or two at a time, but I have way too many ideas brewing in my head, and they all want out. In fact, after a recent incident that happened to my wife and I, I have the beginning of a novel in my head. As much as I want to open a new document and type away, I have to restrain myself. This is not easy. So, I'm focusing on two pieces right now. One is the first book in a potential urban fantasy series set right here in San Diego. The working title is The Underground: A Veronica Hensely Story. I took some of the tropes I see in urban fantasy and tried to twist them a bit. I love the story. I'm about 65K words in. The other is a collaboration with Jack Bantry. Think Cronenberg's Shivers with the comedic essence of Return of the Living Dead. We're having fun writing it.

The San Diego Horror Professions, a group of horror authors I roll with here in town, have set up a twitter feed. We all have access and will pop in from time to time to tweet out cool horror stuff. Sure, you'll get tweets of us selling our prose, but we'll dish out some cool and fun surprises too. Follow us HERE.


Cool Read

This month's cool read is Ministry: The Lost Gospels According to Al Jourgensen (with Jon Wiederhorn). I love a good rock bio, and anyone who reads these things knows that the autobiographies are the best, especially when the artist is brutally honest. Uncle Al is nothing if not honest in the telling of his absolutely mad, absurd, drug and alcohol fueled life of debauchery as the front man to the industrial metal band Ministry. Easily one of the best rock bios I've read, right up there with bios by Lemmy, Ozzy, Slash, and Rex Brown.


Featured Fiction

 This month I'm shining a light on my short story "Starving Artist" that was published last year in San Diego Horror Professionals Vol. 1, featuring Ryan C. Thomas, Chad Stroup, David Agranoff, Anthony Travino, Bryan Killian, and myself. My offering is about a woman so drawn to a piece of art on the boardwalk that she has to buy it. When the beach bum who sold her the painting shows up at her door the next day, she finds out that the painting is more of a curse that the exquisite piece of art she just HAD to have. I've had some good feedback on this story. If the horrors of losing control terrify you, then you will probably like it too. You can pick up a digital copy HERE for just a buck.





















Thrift Store Finds

Didn't find much over the past month. My local thrift stores have been weak. The books and records pictured below were from a library book store and a nice old man who's selling records and toy cars locally on the weekend. Nice guy. Used to be a DJ decades ago, so he has an insane pile of records. I've gone through them twice and still there are more buried under tubs of cars and other records. His prices aren't the best, but he's willing to haggle. Some good surf rock from the Champs. Not the most surfy Ventures record, but good nonetheless. Krokus is an unabashed AC/DC ripoff. I hate it. Haven't read either author, so I hope these books are good starting points.

Closing Words

In closing this month's newsletter I would like to let you all know that two of my titles are on sale for .99 cents for another week. If you haven't checked them out already, there's no better time. Reviews are always welcome, whether you liked it or hated it. It means a lot to authors, and apparently the Amazon algorithms.

"Well written, well paced and thoroughly twisted, In Black is sure to please readers of horror and Bizzaro alike." 

- Bryan Killian, author of Welcome to Necropolis and Dust of the Devil's Land

Get In Black HERE.


"Essig brings a fat slice of urban horror combined with his uniquely abstract vision of a hellish world. Endless suffering abounds! For fans of down and dirty horror!"

- Daniel I. Russel, author of Come into Darkness and Mother's Boys

Get Through the In Between, Hell Awaits HERE.

Dark Moon Digest Celebrates Six Years!

It's almost Halloween, and that means a new issue of Dark Moon Digest,from the fine folks at Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing. Number 25, to be exact, and that also marks their six year anniversary. Congratulations to Max Booth III and Lori Michelle for continuing to publish this nifty horror magazine, and to Stan Swanson for starting it all back in 2010.

This issue also marks my first time being published in Dark Moon Digest, along with my cohort in evil, Jack Bantry. Our story "A Lesson in Renegade Filmmaking" follows the budding friendship between an odd video store clerk and a young kid who has a hankering for horror films. The clerk has a lot of knowledge to teach the young kid about the finer points of horror film history, but how much is too much?

I love this story. It's a cool little coming of age tale that incorporates some of my favorite horror movies, and it I feel that it winds the reader up for quite a wallop. This one is for all of you out there with a deep love for classic horror films.

Get your copy straight from the publisher, or from Amazon.

Flashback to B-Movies and Rotten Corpses - Review of Horror Show by Greg Kihn

A young horror fan has a burning question for aging b-movie filmmaker Landis Woodley, a question that has been rumored for over thirty years: Were actual corpses used in the film CADAVER?

In a nutshell, this is the premise surrounding the meat of Greg Kihn's HORROR SHOW, a book that takes the reader back to 1957 and into the lives of a ragtag group of misfits who were involved with Landis Woodley, b-movie filmmaker and Hollywood pariah, and the events that led to the making of Woodley's greatest achievement, CADAVER, as well as the horrific aftermath.

HORROR SHOW is one hell of a book, particularly for those who have a vested interest in old horror films, though I would argue than anyone who digs a good horror yarn will have a good time with this one. There are obvious and unabashed parallels with Ed Wood and his legacy (my guess is that Kihn gleaned a lot off of Tim Burton's excellent movie ED WOOD), but this isn't some kind of wannabe or ripoff. HORROR SHOW is an homage to those wonderfully awful drive-in movies from the fifties and sixties as well as the behind the scenes madness that went into filming those inglorious gems. I happen to be a huge fan of old horror films, so this book was absolutely enthralling. My only complaint would be that I was scratching my head at the end. Seems to me that Kihn left it open for a sequel. I'm not a fan of that sort of ending. Then again, the book was so damn cool that I found myself forgiving the weak ending and immediately ordering the next book Kihn had published at the time, BIG ROCK BEAT. Arrived in the mail the other day. I'm looking forward to reading it.