The first review of my 2nd novel  SACRIFICE went live today at Famous Monsters of Filmland.

Here’s an excerpt:

The pacing is non-stop, I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough. Just when I thought I’d get a chance to relax Everson kicked it up a notch and threw another atrocity at me…. If you like your horror “razor” sharp, bloody, ominous and dark you will love this book, it is genuinely disturbing.

All I can say is, I hope everyone enjoys the book this much. Check out the full review!

Yesterday, it was announced that the latest title from Dark Arts Books – LIKE A CHINESE TATTOO – was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in an Anthology. Needless to say, Bill Breedlove and myself - the founders of Dark Arts Books - are more than pleased!

The Bram Stoker Awards are awarded every year by the Horror Writers Association for superior achievement in horror.  This year, the Stoker Awards will be handed out during the Stoker Awards Weekend, June 12-14 in Burbank, CA.

We congratulate all the nominees, and especially the authors from TATTOO – Cullen Bunn, JA Konrath, David Thomas Lord and Rick R. Reed.

Yesterday, I turned 43.

I haven’t cared much about birthday parties for a long time, but yesterday — I think I had one of the best ones of my life! It wasn’t really a “party” per se, but rather a movie night with a couple friends that I went to high school with. We’d actually planned to get together a couple weeks ago to watch horror movies, and winter colds intervened.

So instead, Larry and Lisa, and Larry’s brother Lon (that’s a lotta Ls!) came over for pizza, beer and movies last night. Lon makes really cool “monster” cakes as a side business, so he brought me a zombie head cake (naturally, with strawberry cake for brains!).

He also dragged out his five-foot-tall popcorn maker.

I had no idea they made these things for the home, but it was too cool — we set up this carnival-like popcorn maker in the basement TV room, and were scooping boxes of fresh movie-theater-style popcorn out of it all night.

Before the movie marathon, I opened gifts — in the morning, my wife Geri had given me the complete Outer Limits series on DVD (can’t wait to watch those again!) as well as an Erasure CD I wanted, and… a blender (the one I use for the occasional smoothie is pretty much shot). You know you’ve gotten old when someone gives you kitchen appliances for your birthday.

Lon, of course, gave me the cake and Larry and Lisa brought me a bottle of Makers Mark (they know me well!) Shaun really enjoyed the cake - he thought it was pretty funny that the cake was “a monster!”

So after numerous pieces of my favorite pizza (Aurelios - sausage, onion, green peppers, hot giardinerra) we headed to the basement for the movie fest.

We started with a short indie film that I first saw at Dragon*Con last fall — Zombie Love. Nothing says “Happy Birthday” like a zombie musical. Especially a zombie musical where all the dialogue is in couplets.

After that, we got serious and watched the atmospheric Session 9. It’s been a couple years since I first saw it, and I forgot how slow the build is (though it’s a great film!) The movie was the first 2:39:1 aspect film shot in HD Video and is described as “an excercise in creeping dread” - thanks in part to the location which is as much a character in the film as the actors — the abandoned Danvers Mental Institution in Massachusetts. Probably wasn’t quite the right choice for a group movie party, but nobody hated it.

We’d gotten too late of a start to break things up with a game of pool, as we’d hoped, so we dove right into the night’s finale, a complete switch in gears: Zombie Strippers with Jenna Jameson,  Robert Englund (who’s a riot in this) and punk singer Roxy Saint.

The title says it all — it’s kind of like Snakes on a Plane in that sense. When Snakes came out everyone kept saying: “They’re snakes. On a plane. Isn’t that hilarious?”

In this case it’s: “They’re strippers! And they’re zombies! Isn’t that hilarious?”

It was cornball, but funny. And the added “subtext” of being set in “Sartre” Nebraska with Nietzsche-isms sprinkled throughout the script of an otherwise completely throwaway T&A movie was pretty amusing.

So there you have it. A cool birthday the horror way.
I might have to make this an annual thing!

For those who aren’t already subscribed to my John Everson ~ Dark Arts e-Newsletter,  I wanted to let you know — I sent out the March edition of the newsletter this morning, and I’m running a contest for my subscribers to win a free signed copy of SACRIFICE next month when it comes out. There’s also an excerpt from the book available via this month’s newsletter.

If you didn’t get a copy and you want to get in on the contest (or if you’d just like to get the newsletter!) please sign up at http://www.johneverson.com/list.htm.

It’s free, and I do try to give away free stories and promo stuff, as well as news there. I’ll send out a “second run” of the newsletter this weekend for everyone who signs up.

Hope everybody’s having a good March… I’m looking forward to spending my birthday with friends on Saturday, watching horror movies, eating pizza and drinking beer. So life is good!

The countdown clock is back on my home page: there are now less than 60 days until the official release date of my second novel, Sacrifice! If you’re anxious, you can pre-order the book through Amazon, Books A Million, Borders and Barnes & Noble sites — or check in with your favorite bookseller.

Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been getting back in touch with all of the great bookstores that I stopped in last fall to promote Covenant. One by one, I’ve been setting up dates to revisit those stores, as well as some new places. And today, I heard back from the last couple bookstores and can now officially announce the full slate of dates for The Spring Sacrifice World Tour!!!

OK, well… it’s not really a world tour. But I am going to be a couple dozen towns over the course of two months, so if you live near any of the stores on the list, I hope you’ll notch a date on your calendar and come down and say hi!

The tour launches on April 24th in San Diego at Mysterious Galaxy Books. After San Diego, I’ll hit these major cities and some of their suburbs: St. Louis, Springfield, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Louisville, Atlanta, and Los Angeles (actually Burbank). And naturally I’ll be doing a bunch of stops in the Chicagoland area, including Bolingbrook, DeKalb, Downers Grove, LaGrange, Matteson, Naperville, Oak Brook, Orland Park, and Merrillville, IN.

Over the next couple months, before I hit the road, I’ll be proofing the pages for my 3rd novel, The 13th, due out this spring in hardback and this fall in paperback, as well as trying to wrap up work on my fourth novel, Siren, which will be out from Leisure Books next year. It’s going to be a whirlwind spring!

Check out the full information on the dates and places of the Sacrifice Tour here!