I have to admit it’s with somewhat mixed emotions that I pack up to go this time around though. Two years ago, in 2008, I did my very first signing to promote the mass market release of Covenant from Leisure Books (at a Borders by Vanderbilt U. in Nashville) on my way down to Dragon*Con.

This year, I should be going down to triumphantly debut Siren, my fourth novel from Leisure, which just came out a month ago. However… at the moment, due to a number of factors, from distributors collapsing , the poor economy, the e-book revolution… Leisure finds itself on the brink. This means that Siren is in fact the company’s last mass market release, and a poorly distributed one at that.

Where do we go from here?  is the question I’m faced with this month as an author. Nevertheless… tomorrow, I drive to Dragon*Con.

The future is so bright, I have to wear shades….

I was pretty psyched this week when Replika, my Polish translation publisher sent me a link to a YouTube performance of my short story “Letting Go”…  in Polish. It sounds great — now if I just understood what the reader was saying

Check the audio reading out now via YouTube. Replika did it to promote the Polish translation edition of my 3rd short fiction collection NEEDLES & SINS, which is being released in Poland this month (the name translates there as IGLY I GRZECHY. (NEEDLES & SINS was originally issued by Necro Publications here in the States in 2007).

John Everson UWOLNIENIE

www.youtube.com

If you read Polish, you can see more about the translation of the book here: http://www.replika.eu/szukaj.php?wyd=0&id3=180&k=&tyt=everson&szuk=1

Tonight I walked through the Tenderloin on the way back to my hotel to pack and leave, and I gotta say, during the whole walk back (aside from the nervous glances at various hookers, drunks and vagrants) I was saying to myself… But… I don’t want to leave. I love this place, with all its blemishes… I love the smell of the air even when it’s flavored by bum piss… and I love the chill of the uncertain fog. I love the bright glare of the sun on the downtown followed an hour later by the dark of the falling clouds.  I love the clash of cultures and the freedom of style.

I didn’t get to go see them this trip, but I love the too-often cool beaches and the endless stretch of the Golden Gate.  And the smell of Eucalyptus trees amid the scent of leftover pot near the Haight.

I love this place. But now it’s very late and in just over five hours, I’ll be off to the airport to go to another place I love (though not nearly so much… don’t be jealous San Franciso!)  Santa Fe.

Here I ate Thai Food and crab. Tomorrow… it will begin a celebration of Southwest. Hot peppers flavor both… but tomorrow, the sun will actually be behind the heat.

I ended my brief stay today with a book signing for SIREN at the Borders on Market Street, and a nightcap at Edinburgh Castle on Geary after a “make it as hot as you can” Thai dinner down the block (they did. Wow.)

For now… it’s good night. But I wanted to capture these thoughts about San Francisco first.  Because I really hate to leave. I love this place.

I’d say it’s “available in bookstores everywhere” as I have with my previous novel releases, however, as it’s turned out… that’s not quite the case. It is available through bookstores everywhere, however, you’ll have to look for this one a little harder than past releases to find it on shelf, and possibly might need to ask your local store to order in a copy for you (or just get it through Amazon.com).

What’s up, you ask? Well, about a week after the book was released, my publisher, Leisure Books, announced that its August releases will be its last books in its mass market format. The move was reported last weekend in the Wall Street Journal, among other publications. The rise of e-books and the shrinking space for actual books in bookstores as stores struggle to find other profitable products (like games and stuffed animals) to sell besides books (thus carving away space formerly given to paperbacks) has led Leisure to end its 35-year long paperback line in favor of e-books and, starting next year after they re-tool their schedule, higher priced Trade Paperback editions.

What does this mean for Siren?

Well… for one thing, I suppose it’s now a somewhat collectible book, since it is both the last Leisure paperback, and there are not tens of thousands of copies out there in the world. The good news is that it also means the book will have an extended life, however.  The mass market edition will be available this fall for as long as copies last, but Leisure will be reissuing the book in the new trade paperback format sometime next year.

I’m really proud of this novel — I think it’s quite a bit different than my past releases, and the initial reviews from readers have been great — there are some comments if you scroll down on this page of the Rue Morgue Magazine message board that are especially positive about the book.

There’s also an interview with me that just went live today on author J.E. Taylor’s site about the novel which you can check out. (You should also check out her novel Survival Games, which I loved!)

I’m hoping that you’ll give SIREN a read, whether you pick up the mass market edition this month, the e-book when it’s out sometime in the next few weeks, the trade paperback edition sometime next year or the limited collector’s hardcover edition (pictured with the green cover at right), that should be issued from Bad Moon Books sometime next month.

If you want a copy of the limited hardcover edition, you can pre-order yours through the link below at The Horror Mall:

http://www.horror-mall.com/SIREN-by-JOHN-EVERSON-limited-edition-hardcover-p-20951.html
If you want a copy of the paperback version, grab it at your local Borders, order it at your Barnes & Noble, or get a copy through Amazon.com while they last!

SIREN CONTEST:
I really want SIREN to find its audience — the readers who will enjoy the book. And readers listen to other readers… hence… this contest. This one’s easy. Read a paperback copy of the book and then post a reader review on the SIREN page here at Amazon.com or on another review site like GoodReads.

Or post reviews on horror message boards like Rue Mortuary, or Shocklines, or HorrorDrive-in.com or Horror World’s The Cellar. Or some other good spot where readers might be intrigued.

I’ll enter you in the contest for every review you post — just send me the links.

What’s the prize?

I will hold a drawing in the first week of October for a personalized signed copy of the limited Bad Moon edition hardcover of SIREN. Or… for a limited Necro edition hardcover of my last novel, THE 13TH. Or… a limited Delirium edition hardcover of my short story collection CREEPTYCH.

Your choice!

Just tell me when you enter what book you’d like to win. If we get enough entries, I’ll give away a copy of each of those books.

I want people to check out SIREN. I hope you’ll help me encourage them to do that. I’ll try to reward you for your efforts!

To enter, just send me an email with a link to your SIREN review(s) at john@johneverson.com.

SIREN TOUR UNDERWAY:
As usual, I’m doing signings in bookstores all over the country to promote the release of SIREN. If you’re near any of these stops,  I hope you’ll drop by one of them and say hi!

I’ve already done signings in the Chicago and northern Indiana area, and in the coming weeks, I’ll be signing in California, New Mexico, Indiana, Georgia, Kentucky and Wisconsin. Here’s the list of currently planned stops in August and September… more are being added every week. I hope to see you on the road in the bookstoresTo see where I’ll be this fall (I’m adding stops every day at the moment) just go to:
http://johneverson.com/wordplay/?page_id=7

If you want to reserve a copy, give me a shout or follow this link to its page on The Horror Mall. I am really excited about this book… it’s a little bit of a departure for me, as it’s the first of my novels NOT to feature demons and ritual sacrifice LOL!

Both the limited edition (green) art and the cover for the Leisure Books mass market paperback edition (blue cover) are gorgeous.  I don’t know who did the art for Leisure, but I’ve already had someone tell me they’d love a lithograph of it.

And the art for the hardcover edition comes from Travis Anthony Soumis, who also did the limited edition art for my novel The 13th and my collection Needles & Sins, both issued by Necro Publications. It’s typically moody and evocative… I love it!

You can pre-order the Leisure paperback on Amazon right now, and the book should be in stores in just over three weeks.  I’ll be debuting it next weekend at Famous Monsters Con in Indianapolis (I’ll have a box of copies straight from the press!)

The hardcover will be available a couple weeks after that (and almost exclusively through online avenues like  The Horror Mall, as there will only be 100 signed and numbered copies).

Here’s a description of the book:

Music can transport you to the depths and heights of emotion. Music can make life worth living. Music can steal your soul. Evan’s soul is dead as he walks the empty Northern California beach every night.

Petrified of the water all his life, he’s never recovered from seeing his son drown in the ocean’s waves. But then one night, he hears a song on the beach. A beautiful, tortuously emotional melody that leads him right to the brink of the surf. That’s when the music ends, and a gorgeous nude woman dives off the black rocks to disappear in the waves. His fears for her safety are allayed when she returns the next night to sing again…only this time, he’s touched by more than her song…

He’s touched by something that won’t let him go…

A few people who have gotten to read pre-release editions of the book have really liked it, and I’m hoping readers in horror, dark fantasy and even paranormal genres will give it a read. Here are a couple of the early comments:

“Siren is a richly lyrical and melancholic meditation on loss and desperate yearning. It is also a superbly effective exercise in soul-ripping terror. Modern horror doesn’t get much better than this”. — Bryan Smith, author of Depraved and The Killing Kind

“With Siren, John Everson brings horror fiction back to its roots: scary, sexy and surprising. His best work yet”! — Jonathan Maberry, multiple Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Wolfman and The Dragon Factory

This weekend, I not only got Ramsey Campbell to sign that well-worn book, I took him and his wife Jenny to dinner on behalf of Hypericon, a Nashville Convention where he was the guest of honor.

You can see much of the gang that accompanied us to that dinner in this pic, which shows Ramsey on the far right, his wife Jenny across, and then me, Rhonda Wilson and Deb Kuhn. I think Derek Tatum actually took this photo since he’s missing from the table.

Not only did I get to introduce the Campbell’s to one of my favorite barbecue restaurants — Jack’s Bar-B-Que — but afterwards, a group of us also took them downtown to the classic strip of honky tonk bars where country, rockabilly, folk and occasionally rock acts ply their tunes in bar after bar, with no cover.

Sitting next to Ramsey with Derek, the Dark/Goth/Horror track planner for Dragon*Con, while watching a country band jam on “Play That Funky Music White Boy” will live as one of the more surreal memories of my life, I suspect.

I actually first saw Ramsey several years ago at the World Horror Convention in Phoenix, but didn’t really get to talk to him at that time. Thanks to the more relaxing, quieter vibe at Hypericon, this time around we not only got to talk and have dinner,  we ended up essentially interviewing each other the next morning, when it turned out that we were the only two panelists on the panel about “Developing Mood and Atmosphere in Fiction.”

It was there that Ramsey told one of the more fascinating stories I’ve heard from an author — of how he actually could read at the age of 18 months, and because of this premature talent, ended up scaring himself sleepless for many nights with an illustrated children’s story that he later sought out as an adult for years in bargain shops until he found an old used copy that he said still gave him the creeps.

But not only did I get the chance to get to know Ramsey Campbell a bit, I also got to talk about fiction “Inspirations” with Sherrilyn Kenyon and David Jack Bell, and did a reading late on Saturday night with Brian Hatcher where I read the prologues of my current novel THE 13TH, and the upcoming SIREN.

The reading actually interrupted another highlight of the con: this year I joined forces with Bryan Smith and his wife Rachael Wise to throw a “Blades, Babes, Booze and Barbecue” bash, riffing off the “girls with knives” covers of our books THE 13TH and THE KILLING KIND.

I brought in some cole slaw, pork, beef (and lots of sauce) from (where else) Jack’s for the bash, as well as a good bottle of Maker’s Mark, while Bryan and Rachael handled the room and beer and Mystery Science Theatre 3000 setup.

Everyone seemed to have a good time and Bryan set up a perfect monster mash on his iPod. Though I have to say — the “Mad Scientist” outfits got hot!

Sunday morning came far too fast, as it always does at a con. By lunchtime I was packed up and starting down the long road home (it’s a good 8-9 hour drive from Nashville to Chicago with rest stops).

Along the way of the weekend, I got to catch up a bit with some other old friends like Jason Sizemore, Elizabeth Donald, Alethea Kontis and David Jack Bell and met some new ones, in particular novelist Eric Wilson, who joined Derek and me for a long discussion of e-books and the music industry (yes, there is a correlation) after my signing on Saturday afternoon.

All in all, it was a great con!

Here are a couple other photos from the weekend:

- Thanks to Deb, Derek and Rhonda for some of these photos.

I cracked the tape open to find a stack of my new mini-hardcover short story collection CREEPTYCH. A three-story collection of “buggy” stories, this book is close to my heart, as it resuscitates the mothballed Delirium hardcover chapbook format (which my novelette FAILURE launched four years ago) and it includes a couple of stories that have been with me awhile, along with a brand new piece that is actually the setup for a novel I hope to write one of these days.

The books turned out great, and I really love the heavy gloss that the press put on the covers — they’re shinier than the past Delirium chaps… a really nice production all the way around. I’ve got a dozen of these to sell to my mailing list or at booksignings, and Delirium still has about that many left for The Horror Mall, so if you want a copy and haven’t ordered one yet, get thee to the Horror Mall, or drop me an email at john@johneverson.com and we’ll get one in your hands!

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Tomorrow I’m driving down with copies of CREEPTYCH to Nashville to guest at Hypericon, a relaxing (not Hyper!)  SF/F/H convention that I first went to last year. Nashville has quickly become one of my favorite towns, and I can’t wait to get back to Jack’s Barbecue (I ate there three days in a row last year)  and that smoky little rockabilly club out on the honky tonk strip (whose name I can never remember.) I need a standup bass in my life again!

While I’ll miss not having pal P.S. Gifford at this year’s con to hang out with (see the  summary post and pix from last year’s con) , I’m really looking forward to returning to Hypericon this year, especially since I’ll have the chance to meet Ramsey Campbell there, and will also be hosting a room party with fellow Leisure Books author Bryan Smith on Saturday night. Bryan and I both have books out right now featuring babes and blades on the covers, so it seemed natural to pair those with a beer and barbecue bash. I’ve pasted the party poster (sans room # and time yet, still to be decided) at right… click on it to see a bigger version.

I’m bringing the Bourbon and the Jack’s Barbecue, so let the sauce roll…

I’ve got a business trip for the weekend to Dallas, and so tomorrow night, May 13th at 6 p.m., I’ll be doing a signing at Texas’ only all horror bookstore, Eerie Books, 205 N. Ballard Street, Wylie, TX, 972-442-9393.

If you’re in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, I hope you’ll stop by.

Today, The Horror Mall unveiled my new short fiction collection CREEPTYCH. I’ve been hinting at this one for awhile (I started writing the final piece for the collection last fall).  

A three-story book focused on things with appetite and a lot of legs, this one is available both as an e-book through Darkside Digital, and as a limited edition hardcover chapbook from Delirium Books. I’m particularly excited about the latter edition, as my novelette FAILURE launched the Delirium Books hardcover chapbook line four years ago, and so far, I’ve created the covers for all the titles in that line (including my new one!)

In addition, as a special teaser, Darkside Digital and The Horror Mall are currently giving away a professional audiobook version of one of the book’s three stories — “Bad Day.” For a limited time, people can download “Bad Day” for free here to listen to on your iPod, or in the car, or whereever: https://www.horror-mall.com/darksidedigital/product.php?productid=20606

Here’s the full description of the book:

Does your skin crawl when you see a spider on the wall or a roach on the kitchen floor? Do you find yourself itching uncontrollably after being touched by a fly or mosquito? Do you ever lie awake half the night because you felt something delicately, carefully crawling across your feet beneath the sheets? Then this Creeptych of three bug-ridden stories is for you!

BAD DAY: Paul Hughes had a really bad day. He lost his job, his wife and then after getting bit by a bug… his life. Compared to what happens to his neighbors after the Luna Roaches come to town, his day wasn’t so bad at all. At least he died…

EARDRUM BUZZ: Wes couldn’t get enough of the music of Eardrum Buzz’s first disc, Misery Machine; the drone of their guitars was hypnotizing. But when he is brought into the band’s inner circle to join The Swarm, he soon has the music within him. Terrifyingly deep within him…

VIOLET LAGOON: When a quartet of co-eds decide to reenact The Blue Lagoon on an abandoned Florida Key, they find more than just sex and sand is on the agenda. Stings turn out to play a part in their weekend as well. Lots and lots of stings. But those were just the beginning of the pain…

If you want to see more info about the full book, check these links:

• The hardcover: https://www.horror-mall.com/deliriumbooks/product.php?productid=20629&cat=0&page=1&featured




• The digital: https://www.horror-mall.com/darksidedigital/product.php?productid=20637&cat=0&page=1&featured




• The audio sampler:   https://www.horror-mall.com/darksidedigital/product.php?productid=20606

The last day of the trip happened to coincide with my birthday,  so I took the opportunity to stay over in the city a few hours on Sunday and walk around a bit and just enjoy my favorite city. (This lollygagging unfortunately meant I got home at 1:30 a.m. early Monday morning, but… it was worth it!)

I got out to San Francisco on Thursday, and after spending a few hours setting up the conference logistics at the hotel, I went out for a walk through North Beach and China Town. I made the mistake of eating dinner at a place called The Pot Sticker (do NOT go there!) where the stickers were mushy and the chicken stringy.  But that mistake was alleviated an hour or so later by my discovery of Edinburgh Castle, a Scottish bar that I’ve never gotten to in all my previous trips there. I spent over three hours there writing, sipping Newcastle and enjoying the ambiance and the ’80s retro DJ.

Friday was all business, though it was capped by an amazing dinner at a French Vietnamese restaurant near Union Square called Le Colonial. If you’re ever in San Francisco, look that one up, because you won’t stumble on it… the entrance is actually off the main street in an alley! Inside though, it was great food and great ambiance!

On Saturday night right after my conference ended, I got out to Borderlands Books, and did a book signing and reading for The 13th with my friend Alice Henderson, author of the novel Voracious (check it out if you haven’t!) After  talking a bit with Alan Beatts and Jude Feldman of Borderlands (and picking up a couple gifts for myself!), I had dinner with Alice and her friends at The Phoenix, an Irish bar across the street; it was nice to catch up again!

When I got back to the hotel, I found the manager had left me a bottle of wine, however, it was a bit late to drink it. I tried to take it on the plane the next day, only to find that you can’t carry on wine, so I gave it to the baggage claim guy. Guess he had a nice dinner drink.

On Sunday, I wandered the Fisherman’s Wharf area, and visited Musee Mecanique, a museum of antique arcade games that one of Alice’s friends had told me about (I’d seen it last year when I was in town, but hadn’t gone inside). I spent an hour there, looking at the old player pianos and boardwalk fortune teller machines. I pegged some tin squirrels with an old BB gun on one game, and looked at some 3D “risque” photos from the 20s through a Viewmaster type device. And I plugged in a quarter to an old “Execution” machine where a door opens to show a tiny man-doll with a rope around his neck, about to be hung. The floor drops out from under him, he drops down, and then the front door closes. That’s it? Hard to believe they used to pay for this 15-second glimpse of the macabre for entertainment! (Of course… they didn’t have many horror movies back then, did they?).

Since it was my birthday, I decided to let a machine tell my horoscope. To play, after you inserted a quarter, you chose your astrological sign, put your hands on the wood and then the mysterious entity within the wooden machine typed on an old manual typwewriter … you could watch the forecast come into being on the paper as the invisible hands typed. At the end, the paper drops into a bin for retrieval. Mine said: “Emotionally you are responsive, but your intellect rules you. You are most appreciated as a mate, when married to an intellectual person whose work you can share, and who is able to use your undoubted talents in their own behalf.”

I said, “Huh. Not bad. Now about that lottery number…”

After Musee Mechanique, I walked over to have lunch on the Pier 39 (and on the way I passed a guy tap dancing to old-school hip-hop! Weird!). I ended up at Fog Harbor Fish House and got a great booth with a view of the bay where I wrote a couple of chapters of The Pumpkin Man novel there while enjoying some chili paste and peppered prawns and crab cakes, along with plenty of Anchor Steam and Makers Mark. The next three hours passed all too fast before I had to head back to the hotel to catch my shuttle to the airport. But the day on the pier (which was hopping with acrobats and performers) was definitely worth it. It was a happy birthday for me!

Here are some of the photos I shot with my phone camera: