Take a look here: http://www.amazon.com/Vigilantes-Love-Tales-Dark-Light/dp/0615808603/

In his review of the original edition of the book, T.T. Zuma from HorrorWorld said: “There are several stories in Vigilantes of Love that I would consider not only above average, but superb. Quite simply, they are among the most enjoyable short stories that I have read in the past few years. Everson managed to put an emotional spin into these tales that affected me so deeply that I paused for awhile after reading each one. And it was not because any of these stories were overly intense, in fact, I thought their approach subtle, but still, they managed to pack one heck of a punch.”

Here’s the 10th Anniversary bookcover and full description:

The 10th Anniversary edition of Vigilantes of Love, John Everson’s second book-length collection of tales of short fantasy and the macabre, includes a new preface by the author and six additional stories not present in the original release!

A woman whose life is shaped and doomed by the “Calling of the Moon”…

A girl who learns the secret powers of the “Seven Deadly Seeds”…

A boy who finds that the power of music can open a hidden world thanks to a flute hidden in the attic…

A man who learns the meaning behind the voodoo curse that brings the “Vigilantes of Love” from the hearts of the New Orleans swamps to punish the adulterers under the light of the full moon…

Vigilantes of Love offers these and many more tales of dark magic, the macabre and things that happen when you go one step beyond. Vigilantes of Love was originally issued in 2003 by Chicago-based Twilight Tales, a year before a limited edition of Everson’s first novel, the Bram Stoker Award-winning Covenant, was released. While Everson’s first book of short fiction, Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions, focused on erotic horror, Vigilantes of Love was something of a flip side — this collection offers light and dark fantasy tales, mixed with the occasional slice of horror.

The Dark Arts Books 10th Anniversary edition of Vigilantes of Love is an expanded release that includes six never-before-collected Everson tales — including his first horror publication, “Learning To Build” — alongside Vigilantes of Love‘s original 15 dark fantasy and horror stories. The book includes the voodoo-zombie oriented title story, written especially for the collection, as well as “Calling of the Moon,” which received an Honorable Mention in the Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror anthology, and “Lovesong” a 5th Place winner in the 2000 World Horror Convention Fiction Contest.

To purchase a copy or get more information, visit:   http://www.amazon.com/Vigilantes-Love-Tales-Dark-Light/dp/0615808603/

Ann Arbor:

For such a small town, they had an awful lot of busy brewpubs downtown! Interestingly, I had two different locals tell me that the best brewpub in town was Grizzly Peak, so we hit there for dinner the first night. While the menu looked great, the food we had was lackluster (my potatoes came out nearly cold) and the beer we sampled was thin and flavorless. I thought the Bear Paw Porter was OK, but nothing to return for.

The next night we stopped for a beer at Jolly Pumpkin after a great Mexican dinner across the street. I wish we could have spent more time there! The atmosphere at the Pumpkin was better than Grizzly Peak’s, it  looked like a good menu and a much better mix of taps. As it stood, I only tasted the Siren, a decent amber ale.

The next night for dinner, we went to Arbor Brewing Company, which had good burgers and an excellent Olde Number 33 German Alt. Both Arbor and Jolly Pumpkin feature some pretty arty labels for their bottled beers – I looked at some of the posters of the bottle art on the walls and wanted to hang them in my basement!

Finally, on the last night, as we were heading out of town, we decided to stop at Blue Tractor BBQ and Brewery. And we hit the mother lode. The barbecue was excellent (great cole slaw, tender brisket, a couple of good tableside sauce options) and the beer was quite good as well – I enjoyed their Sudworth Bock, which apparently has won a couple of  World Beer Championship gold medals. That will definitely be my first stop the next time I’m in Ann Arbor!

Calgary:

Another smaller city, I found Calgary to be a pretty big beer town in the couple nights I was there.  On the first night, I just walked across the street from my hotel to The Palomino to have some barbecue (pretty decent) and found several area microbrews on tap.

The next night, I had a couple hours free to walk around, so I mapped out a couple places to check out.

First I stopped at Craft Beer Market, a hip brewpub with over 100 Beers on Tap. I had a bowl of their Cheese/Jalapeno soup, which was phenomenal, paired with an equally pleasing Howe Sound Rail Ale Nut Brown brewed in Squamish, BC.  I could have kept drinking that, but with 100 taps to choose from… I figured I should taste something else. So I had a couple samples of things that didn’t bowl me over, and then  settled on a pint of Central City Red Racer IPA from Surrey, BC which was a nice little IPA – surprisingly drinkable for 80 IBUs.

I pulled the plug then on Craft Beer Market, to check out another place for dinner, but pledged to come back the next night.

I decided on dinner at the Design District Urban Tavern, a really fun gastropub that changes their menu daily.

They have chalkboards on the walls as well as on wheels throughout, so that you really had to look the place over to figure out what you wanted!

They also turned out to have the best Poutine (with roasted jalapenos!) I’ve ever had. I’ve been to Canada quite a few times, but it was only in the past year or two that I finally realized the allure of their Poutine (french fries with cheese curds doused in brown gravy).

The District Burger wasn’t bad either.

They didn’t have a large selection of taps, but their home-brewed Hairy Eyeball, an unfiltered wheat beer, was light and refreshing (and served in a mason jar!)

On my last night in town, I decided to have dinner at Craft Beer Market… but when I got there, I found that every seat in the place was taken! It was mobbed (I can understand why… but I was pretty disappointed!).

Instead, I walked a couple blocks to Hudson’s Canadian Tap House.  The place had a perfect brewpub atmosphere – great bar, some nice booths… but after a couple of appetizers and their Bale House Ale, I’m afraid I wasn’t terribly excited by any of it.

I wrote there for awhile, but then cashed it in because I didn’t want anymore “just ok” beer when there were plenty of options in town. I stopped back at Craft Beer Market, but the mob there was even worse than before — in fact, they pull all the chairs from the bar on Fridays because it’s so crowded!

So then I walked down to Brewsters, a nice brewpub with their own microbrews. They are also physically connected to Beer Revolution, so if you don’t like the house taps at Brewsters, you can walk down the hall and be in another restaurant/bar with essentially the same menu, but a host of microbrew taps. Their taps change so regularly, that the place is outfitted in lighted menus showing what’s on tap that day and how long it’s expected to remain available. Pretty cool system for the hop head!

I wish I’d had more time to explore Calgary – it seemed like a really friendly, homey city – with a rich network of gastropubs and brewhouses!

Every time I’m in Seattle, I have a great experience. Last month, while visiting there on business, I enjoyed a home cooked steak dinner that rivaled anything I’ve ever had in a restaurant. And we ate with a great hilltop view over Puget Sound. Amazing.

The first time I visited the town was probably a decade ago now, and I enjoyed seeing Tanya Donelly play the Showbox Theatre and visiting the famous Crocodile club. I also discovered The Pike Brewery, which I returned to the second time I spent a few days in Seattle on business, in October 2009. On that trip, I got the chance to see Stars’ Amy Milan performing solo at The Triple Door, one of the slickest dinner clubs I’ve ever been in, as well as The Sounds play at the Showbox.

So I was looking forward to perhaps catching some more good music and visiting The Pike again last month when I returned to Seattle for a few days. The music turned out to be missing, but I did discover a couple of new breweries.

On my first night in town, I was in the neighborhood of Elysian Brewery’s Tangletown Bistro, and so I walked a mile and enjoyed a Southwestern dinner there with a pint of their Superfuzz Blood Orange Pale which had a nice zing to it.

I’d been hoping to try their brown ale, which was listed on their website, but didn’t end up being “on” at the tap.

This trip, it turned out that I couldn’t spend a lot of time at The Pike - I stopped in briefly for a pretzel and a pint, but there was nothing particularly grabbing on tap.

I did pick up a bottle of their Space Needle Golden Anniversary 2012 Vintage IPA to sample later. With a 58 IBU, trust me,  it puts hair on your chest quickly.

I didn’t stick around The Pike because I wanted to head down the road to sample things at Pyramid Brewery. Some of their beer is distributed to Chicagoland, so I thought I’d see what their taphouse was like.

It was pretty nice!

A big wide room, since they’re located near the ballpark and obviously get some big crowd traffic. But they had a decent pub menu and a good lineup of homebrewed taps, including some that aren’t bottled. Much to my chagrin, the one I liked the best – Weiss Cream Ale – is only served there.

Here are a couple other shots of Pyramid:

And a few shots from The Pike and Pike’s Market, the hub of Seattle’s downtown, and home of the world famous Pike’s Fish Market:

I remember that because a) I loved the show and b) my mom always insisted that bedtime was about halfway through each episode.

Talk about frustrating!

Yesterday, some forty years later, was a Star Trek “homecoming” for me. Geri and I went to see the new Star Trek “reboot” movie, Into Darkness, and William Shatner was there introducing that, as well as special showings of the original Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan (which the new film borrows elements from, but deftly reshapes into a completely different story).

I almost never will pay to do the autograph/photograph thing, but this? I couldn’t pass up. It was surreal to stand in a line to get a photo taken with “Captain Kirk” as if he was some kind of 82-year-old carnival ride, but, what the hell. This didn’t seem optional to me. I had to do it!

I wish I could have taken my much dog-eared collection of Star Trek novels and episode books with for him to sign; most of those were bought and read (often more than once) when I was in grade school and high school. Some of the price tags on the spines of those books actually say 95¢

But hey… I got my picture with him. What else does a lifelong fan really need? I mean… I met Captain Kirk!

After the picture, we got in line to see Into Darkness — which was phenomenal. A couple years ago I was hugely skeptical when I first heard that they were rebooting the original movie series with new actors. I honestly was never that big of a fan of any of the Star Trek spinoff TV series, though I watched them (Voyager was probably my favorite).  So I figured a new series of films without the original crew would only disappoint. But J.J. Abrams and his team have done an amazing job in both this and the previous film, in capturing the characters of the original, updating them a little, and then spinning brand new plots that maintain a few pieces of the original movie series plots. That way, they tug our heartstrings with the familiar character banter and actions, as well as some familiar events… but also intrigue and entertain us since so much of what they shoot is different from the original movies.  I can’t imagine watching the new movies without the context of the original series… so many of the in-jokes must be lost. But for me, a lifelong fan… they are perfect.

After meeting Shatner, and then watching Into Darkness, we had a third Trek capper to the day. The friends we went to the theater with, Brad and Sandy and their boys, Christian and Levi, just bought a used Star Trek pinball machine. Brad actually got Shatner to sign the backsplash of the machine with a silver Sharpie, right over the image of the Enterprise. Now there’s a cool addition to the basement for a Trekkie! So after the movie, we popped some popcorn and went back to their place to play the table for awhile.

It was a perfect Star Trek day!

You can get Covenant for just 99 cents here.

Or see it on the Gold Box Deal page (towards the bottom) here.

Here’s a description of the novel, which won the Bram Stoker Award for Achievement in a First Novel in 2005 after its original small press release by Delirium Books (it was later reissued in mass market paperback by Leisure Books with a new cover in 2008):

To the residents of the sleepy coastal town of Terrel, the cliffs of Terrel’s Peak are a deadly place, an evil place where terrible things happen. Like a series of mysterious teen suicides over the years, all on the same date. Or other deaths, usually reported as accidents. Could it be a coincidence? Or is there more to it? Reporter Joe Kieran is determined to find the truth. Kieran’s search will lead him deep into the town’s hidden past, a past filled with secrets and horror, and to the ruins of the old lighthouse atop the tragic cliffs. He will uncover rumors and whispered legends — including the legend of the evil entity that lives and waits in the caves below Terrel’s Peak…

What a great way to start a long trip, right? I was obviously pretty excited about the nomination — this is the first time one of my novels has been on the Bram Stoker ballot since Covenant got there in 2004/2005. And Covenant made the ballot (and won) for achievement in a “First Novel”… it didn’t appear in the broader “Superior Achievement in a Novel” category.

I posted about the nomination back when it was announced on Facebook and Twitter, but I ended up traveling for work so much in March (and dealing with a couple of big deadlines), that I never actually got around to acknowledging the honor here on my own blog or website! So I thought I’d post about this today, even though it’s old news in a sense at this point!

The Bram Stoker Awards are given out by the Horror Writers Association (HWA) every year in a number of categories, and this year’s winners will be announced at an awards banquet (which I’ll be attending) in New Orleans in June, 2013. You can see the full ballot on the HWA site. The awards are voted on by all of the Active Members of the HWA, so this really is an award from one’s peers. At this point, all the voting has been completed, but I won’t find out the results for a couple more months. Either way, I’m just really excited and honored by the nomination!

My publisher issued a press release about the award nomination last month and a few days ago, a nice feature on the novel went up over at the KindleBoards.

My local newspaper also did a short article about the nomination, although clearly the copyeditor there didn’t read the article very closely and isn’t familiar with the creator of Dracula – the headline erroneously said that I had “won” the Brom Stroker award! Oh well, perhaps the article convinced a couple people to check the book out anyway.

I know some people read the article because it brought me a letter of congratulations in the mail a few days ago from my State Senator Michael Connelly (an unexpected perk!)

Having NightWhere recognized like this has extra meaning to me because this is the book that I was “afraid” to write for many years. But in 2011, after the dissolution of my previous publisher, I decided to dive in go for it.

NightWhere became my first release last year from the new horror imprint of Samhain Publishing headed up by Don D’Auria, the editor for my first five novels at Leisure Books. Now that Leisure’s 40-year run as a mass market publisher has ended, Samhain has picked up the horror flag, and I’m proud to be part of this new line. (They will be releasing my seventh novel, Violet Eyes, this fall).

NightWhere is an erotic horror novel that I first envisioned over 10 years ago, before I actually finished the final draft of my first novel, Covenant. The extreme and sexual nature of the content kept me from tackling it for a long time. At one point I even considered writing it under a pseudonym. But I’m glad I didn’t — the book has ended up garnering the best reviews of any of my works. Of course, the first leading question in virtually every interview I’ve done for it over the past six months has been “how did you do your research for this…nudge-nudge, wink-wink.” Nobody ever likes to hear the mundane answer — I have a very active imagination!

There are a number of additional publications related to the novel coming over the next few months. A new press in Poland — Radical Press — has licensed the book to issue a translation there, and Festa Verlag in Germany (who will be issuing a translation of Siren as Ligeia this spring) has also licensed the novel for German translation.

Closer to home, Bad Moon Books will be issuing a collectible hardcover edition in a few weeks. I just got the cover art today, and it looks awesome – click on the thumbnail on the right to see it full size!

Bad Moon will start taking pre-orders for the limited hardcover edition in a couple weeks, so if you’re like me, and love having hardcover editions on your bookshelves… stay tuned!

If you prefer audiobooks, Audio Realms will be issuing an audiobook edition of NightWhere sometime later this summer.

I’m also about done with a short novelette related to the NightWhere world, which will likely turn up on Amazon in the near future.

So there’s a lot going on with NightWhere to keep me busy over the next few weeks… while I’m  crossing my fingers and wondering what news the envelope will hold in New Orleans on June 15th!

I’ve never been to South America before, and really didn’t know what to expect. People (and the Internet) insisted that folks in Santiago would have a good smattering of English, since it’s a cosmopolitan city and they’re teaching it now in as a second language in schools. I was hopeful for that, since my second language choice in high school was (foolishly) Latin. Which qualifies me to speak to nobody who is not conversing strongly in English.

The “sure they speak English” thing turned out to be the case… well… not so much! The longest conversation I had with anybody in the city was probably with a waiter who had recently emigrated from Belgium! Even in the most tourist-y areas, trying to ascertain from the waiter whether a beer was light or dark, or a food was spicy or not, turned out to be five-minute conversations, frequently with another waiter called in to help.

The city itself was nice… but really just a semi-modern city. But walking outside and seeing the Andes all around, not to mention a small drainage river from the mountains that ran through the middle of the city, pumped up the “exotic” factor. Well, that and all the foreign words.

The Sheraton Hotel we stayed at was really nice – surrounded by views of the mountains, and featuring a gorgeous pool and bar area. Here are some shots:

We shuttled back and forth every day for six days from the hotel to a convention center about 10-15 minutes away, and midway between, was a really cool area called Patio Bellavista. The place was filled with shops and restaurants and the zoo was located near there. I spent several evenings there, having dinner and doing a little writing, and bought all my souvenirs there as well. One night, I even had the opportunity to watch a local band play:2013-02-28 23.01.25_x264

Over the course of several dinners in Patio Bellavista, my hotel and a couple places in the downtown area near my hotel, I sampled a number of Chilean beers. I must admit, I wasn’t blown away by any… but was interested to note the German influence on a couple of breweries (particularly Kuntsmann). My favorite easy-drinking amber was Mestra, but I really liked the darker richness of Austral Yagan and the heavier, vanilla tinged flavor of Kross’s anniversary brew – 5. I brought home a couple bottles of Yagan home in my suitcase. Not sure what the “special occasion” will be to open them:

One of the best parts of the trip was a brief visit to the seaside town of Valparaiso, an arts-oriented community with a beautiful, hilly setting (it reminded me in places of San Francisco). I took as many pictures there in a couple hours as I did during the entire rest of the week in Santiago!

On the first day and the last day I was in Santiago, I walked through the city streets near the hotel, and shot some pictures of the riverway park area (where they have outdoor gym equipment!) as well as the city buildings and restaurants themselves.

At the end of the week, I was definitely ready to go home, though I had learned how to mentally convert 20,000 Chilean pesos in my head to $40.

I packed my Pisco (a Chilean liquor made from grapes) into my suitcase and had my last Pisco Sour at the airport… and then after an exceptionally long plane ride (with a stop in Miami) I was finally back to home sweet home.

I really wish that she’d called me to say something else. Like ‘could you pick up some milk on your way home.’

I wasn’t Roger Ebert’s friend; I never met him (though honestly, I always wanted to). But he was more of a rock star to me than most rock stars — which is saying something given that I was a music critic for more than 20 years.

Roger Ebert has been an inspiration to me for my entire writing life. He was a critic who was creative, an intellect who was entertaining. He had a heart AND a brain… an a great sense of humor. He was more than the real deal, he was the top of the crop.

When I was an editor at my high school paper in the early ’80s,  I remember following Ebert’s reviews, as well as the columns of his fellow Chicago Sun-Times writers Roger Simon, Robert Feder and Irv Kupcinet. These were the guys I wanted to be when I grew up. Journalists with creativity and passion and a voice who had a picture and a presence — and real personality — in the newspaper every day.

As a journalism student at the University of Illinois, I found that Ebert was a graduate, and, in fact, had been an editor at the same college newspaper that I eventually became a columnist and Special Sections editor for — The Daily Illini (of course, he was there over 20 years before me). When I took my first film classes at the U of I and strayed from my usual music writing to publish my first film reviews in the Daily Illini (of John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness and Prince’s Sign ‘O’ The Times), I thought of Roger Ebert.

When I graduated and became a music critic for Chicagoland’s Star Newspapers (ironically owned by the parent company of The Sun-Times) I was inspired by Ebert, at least in a small way. He was reviewing movies, I was reviewing music. I never had his depth of phrasing or intellect, but in some ways, throughout my twenty years as a music columnist and occasional movie reviewer, I always saw Ebert as one of my inspirations. A fellow Illini who had gone before, and made good. Better than good. He’d become an icon.

Roger Ebert went beyond the page too, launching At The Movies, the first successful movie review television show with the late Gene Siskel. They made Chicago a “center” for criticism; our “guys” were transmitted to the world. What will the world be now, without them both?

The icing on all this was that before he was a nationally lauded critic, Ebert actually scripted a campy film, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, for the legendary Russ Meyer. The only reason I ever watched the movie was Ebert’s credit… but if you’re in the mood for some campy, hippy-period fun, it’s worth a tub of popcorn. I’ll probably be digging that one out in the next couple weeks, as a strange, yet fitting memorial viewing. It’s not art… but it’s entertaining.

I always wanted to go to one of his annual  film festivals held back down in Champaign-Urbana, IL at our alma mater, the University of Illinois, but never did. Now I really wish that I’d found time.

I didn’t always agree with him, but I always respected him. He was an icon for the world, but he was really an inspiration to us newspaper folk back here at home in Chicago.

Today is a sadder day, without his sometimes funny, sometimes warm-hearted, sometimes acerbic take on the world of cinema.

Right now, I think I’m going to go watch a movie on my big screen in the basement. And at the end, I’ll be giving it a Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down that I suppose only Roger will see.

There’s only one review you can give for his life.

Thumbs Up all the way.

Thanks Roger.

I will still always “see you at the movies…”

Amazon.com had been featuring The 13th and Sacrifice at $2.99 throughout January, but I knew when those went off sale at midnight on Jan. 31… things would probably settle down.

Instead… I found that on February 1, Amazon.com took those titles off… but put Siren on their next Kindle 100 promotional list – a perfect “antidote” book, actually, for Valentine’s Day month!

This time though, they plugged my novel into the top promotional sale spot on the SF/F page — and priced it at $0.99. That means that all the Amazon promotional emails that went out today featured Siren‘s bookcover in them!

How awesome is THAT?

It’s been hard to take my eyes away from the Siren page on Amazon for the past 24 hours, as its sales rank gradually climbed from 60,000 to 30,000 to 15,000 to 1,000. This morning, it was in the 400s.

Tonight?

It’s currently the #161 Top-selling book on all of Amazon — and the #1 book in Kindle’s Horror Section!

This is a crazy, amazing thing for me. Back in 2010, Covenant got to #699 on the Amazon charts and sold a couple hundred books, thanks to a .99 cent sale, but that has been the highest I’ve ever gotten, and it was very short-lived.

Since Siren will be featured on the Kindle 100 Books Under $3.99 page all month, it should have strong sales and positioning all month long.

I’m extra happy about this because Siren pretty much got the shaft on its paperback release. A week or two after it hit stores in August 2010, Leisure Books pulled the plug on its entire mass market line — after 40 years of monthly releases! They tried to revamp their line, and Siren was reissued the following summer in trade paperback format… but even that release was gunned down. It was heavily stocked in Borders Books… and less then a month after the “new” Siren hit shelves, Borders declared bankruptcy.

Maybe Amazon should be careful – this book might have a hex!!

But maybe, just maybe, this could finally be my Siren, Ligeia’s year. She’ll even have a translation released in Germany this spring: http://www.festa-verlag.de/ligeia.html

I’m pretty excited about it all, and hope readers will check out the book … and more importantly, enjoy the read!

Since Twilight Tales is no longer around, to celebrate the anniversary, I’ve gone back and retooled the cover, added a new introduction and six more short stories that didn’t end up in the original release and have never been collected in my other fiction collections – “Hair of the Dog,” “Tomatoes,” “Tunnel,” “The Key To Her Heart,” “Why Do You Stay With Him?” and my very first published story, “Learning to Build.”

I know a lot of my readers have copies of the original edition, but might want the new version for the extra content, so for a (very) limited time, you can get the new edition on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and Apple iBooks for just $0.99!

Amazon: www.amazon.com/Vigilantes-of-Love-ebook/dp/B004FEFAIY

Barnes & Noble: www.barnesandnoble.com/w/vigilantes-of-love-john-everson/1006954688

iBookstore: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/vigilantes-of-love/id597240161?ls=1

Kobo: www.kobobooks.com/ebook/Vigilantes-of-Love/book-xJ6O1z7lc0GcPa46UZH3pA/page1.html