Right now, my first novel Covenant is in the Top 10 sellers on Amazon’s Kindle rankings for Horror/Occult. Now there’s a Happy Halloween for this horror author!

Currently my publisher, Leisure Books has Covenant on sale across all the e-platforms for Halloween, so hopefully a lot of new readers will discover the book. Certainly a bunch have checked it out at Amazon over the past couple days:

Covenant on Amazon Kindle Bestsellers

Covenant is also featured in an ad that appears on the front page of Borders’ e-books section; it was pretty cool to log in there the other day and see my cover sitting next to a book by Dean Koontz! Check out the ad they’re running for it here:

Covenant ebook promotion at Borders

The novel is also on sale over at Barnes & Noble, but currently there’s also a nice Halloween Reads push on the B&N site for my latest novel, Siren, and so that book has gotten very close to one of the top 100 Nook sellers over the past few days (I saw it hit #128 on Thursday or Friday, which is the highest any of my books have ever charted!)

Here’s the article they posted on the novel:

I hope folks with e-readers will take advantage of these sales and check the novels out. Me? I’m going out Trick-Or-Treating now, with my son, “Sponge Bob.”

This was a good week for books!

While I was up in Canada for a business trip, I met editor James Roy Daley, who gave me a copy of the new anthology Best New Zombie Tales Vol. 2, which includes a story of mine (“Camille Smiled”, that originally appeared in the Cold Flesh anthology).

Then last night, my copies of the limited hardcover edition of my fourth novel Siren were waiting for me when I got home from work! They look great, and include a couple of interior illustrations from Travis Anthony Soumis, who did the cover art for this edition of Siren, as well as for the limited editions of my novel The 13th and my short fiction collection Needles & Sins. His art seems to work really well with my fiction (thanks Travis!)

Anyone who wants to get a copy of the hardcover edition of Siren, give me a shout.  And members of my mailing list get a discount off the cover price – just email me.

If you’d rather get a copy through the normal channels, you can also order the book from The Horror Mall. There are only 100 copies of this edition, so if you want one, grab it this week!

I’m also holding a contest where the winner gets a free copy of either this limited hardcover of Siren, or one of my last two hardcovers (Creeptych or The 13th). All you have to do to enter is to write a short review of the paperback edition of Siren and post it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, a message board… somewhere online where it will be seen. And just send me the link. Every additional place you post the review counts as a new entry.

I’ll pull the winner this coming week, on Oct. 13. So if you’ve read the paperback of Siren - please enter!

Horror writers are a strange, rare and wonderfully twisted breed.

Ten years ago, I attended my first World Horror Convention in Denver — a total newbie. I didn’t have a book released, and didn’t know anybody in the genre, really, except through e-mail. But I met people there over the course of one weekend that I still call friends today. I think I first met Sephera Giron there. I met Gord Rollo at a World Horror Con a few years later. I probably saw them both last at World Horror Con in Toronto back in 2007, the very same convention where I signed my mass market deal with Leisure Books to issue Covenant and Sacrifice. Ironically, I’m in Toronto again for the first time since then just a few weeks after Leisure Books killed the mass market horror line that all three of us published novels on.

A lot of water and a couple books  have passed over or under the bridge since WHC 2007, and here we are today. I’ve been in Toronto this week on a business trip, and just before I came, I put out the word to the couple people I knew in the area here that I’d be in town. The next thing I knew, a few hours after my plane landed, I was on a tour of the Rue Morgue Magazine “House of Horrors” courtesy of managing editor Monica Kuebler, another horror writer who I’ve met at conventions. Talk about an amazing place to work — Rue Morgue Magazine is put together in a renovated funeral parlor/mortuary, with one room of “pews” where funeral viewings once took place now serving as a film screening room. All of the building’s walls are covered in horror movie posters and memorabilia, and they even sit above a basement where the remnants of a crematorium remain. What better place to produce the premiere magazine of horror?

Monica and I had a great dinner at a little Thai place down the street on Wednesday night, catching up. Then on Thursday, I had dinner with Colum McKnight, a writer and reviewer who founded www.paperbackhorror.com. He’s been amazingly supportive of my work, and it was awesome to meet and talk with him for an evening without the usual push-and-pull of “horror convention” events breaking up the time.

Finally tonight, I’d asked Gord  if he wanted to come on out and have a beer and catch up. We’ve both been caught up in the uncertainty of the current Leisure Books situation, and have talked a lot on email over the past couple years since we last saw each other.

Gord came out to my hotel tonight armed not only with Newcastle (in cans?!?!) and Alexander Keith’s IPA, but with Sephera, and Colum and writer and editor James Roy Daley of Books of the Dead Press in tow. Roy gave me, I think, the very first copy of Best New Zombie Tales Vol. 2 hot off the press since it includes my story “Camille Smiled”… which is pretty damn cool. He also paid me in Canadian cash, which is just as good as money. Or so he told me.

The bunch of us talked music and horror and strange life events and more in my hotel, well armed with beer thanks to Gord, and then decamped to a jazz club for dinner and occasionally acerbic music commentary about the band, but finally had to split up to get the sleep needed to deal with a soon-to-come Monday morning work day.

Naturally, despite having cellphone cams and my own real camera – none of us thought to actually snap a shot of the gathering! So I shot the above picture of the things “left behind”.

Five hours and many beers later, all I can say is that I’m proud to be a horror writer as much for the people I know in this genre as for what I’ve written. The friendship of the people I’ve met over the past 10 years has made me happier than any writing accolade I’ve received. So Gord, Seph, Roy, Colum and Monica – thanks for making a Chicago kid feel at home in Toronto. You guys are the best!

I hope this will not be the only meeting of the Toronto Horror Writer Irregulars!