Will > Books

Her husband died in the water in 2015, and her son was suffocated with a dry-cleaning bag in 2019.
And now she’s got a chainsaw.

Her husband died in the water in 2015, and her son was suffocated with a dry-cleaning bag in 2019.
And now she’s got a chainsaw.

…this is maybe the one thing I believe in in the whole world: that when it’s your time, you don’t run from it—you stand against it, you keep your eyes open, and you rip and claw your whole way down, hope you can at least be a worthy trophy.

…you know the first one is third person of course, but it’s really tight on Jade. I think when people remember My Heart is a Chainsaw, they always say Jade is a narrator, and that’s always weird to me because she’s like our narrative focus, but she’s not actually the one speaking except for in her “Slasher 101” essays. Then when I figured out I was going to do a sequel and then a trilogy, I realized I’ve got to modulate the delivery throughout these three books.
So what I landed on for doing that was in the second one, it’s going to shatter and splinter into a multivocal thing with a lot of people speaking in Reaper, and a lot of people’s angles. To me, that was kind of set up for missing Jade. Like “This is fun, but I wish we had Jade.” So then in the third one, if I were able to, instead of only letting her speak during the [essays], if the main part of the narrative became her voice, then I was hoping that could feel like a return a little bit. Or it could just be as simple as I knew I was having to say goodbye to Jade and I wanted to hang out with her more. And how better to hang out with her than first person? - from the Paste interview

The third installment of a trilogy always has to up the stakes and kill people we thought couldn’t die. I knew this going in, knew I’d have to do all that. In Chainsaw, Jade was fighting for herself. In Reaper, she was fighting for her friends, for this family she’d cobbled together. In Angel, she’s having to fight for her community—for Proofrock. And of course I had to adhere to Randy’s rules for the third in a trilogy, too. They were very helpful. This is my first time doing this, I mean. I needed a lot of help. - from the Nerd Daily interview

…justice doesn’t extract itself, you’ve got to pull it bloody and pulsing from the chest of whoever wronged you.

There’s probably 12-14 beats of the slasher. You got to have the opening blood sacrifice. You got t have the red herrings, you’ve got to have the third rail body dumps. You’ve got to its like you’re going around a carousel and reaching out and hitting 12 or 14 bells as you go around. You got t hit all those bells for sure. But what I think makes a really good slasher movie is if you’re doing a revenge slasher of a mystery slasher, I guess they get called both, delaying knowledge of who the slasher is. That’s the most pleasurable, such that everything crashes to a head at the reveal when the person pulls their mask off and gives their big speech about I did this because you did this to me, or whatever it is.

The rules in Scream are a basic set to survive any horror film: you can never have sex, you can never drink or do drugs, and never (ever, under any circumstances) say “I’ll be right back”. Ironically, Randy explains these rules during a party, with half the attendees already drunk. Still, they hold some truth: Sidney has sex with Billy, and although she’s later attacked, it’s Billy the one who ultimately dies. Tatum (Rose McGowan) goes to the basement to get more beers and is killed there, and Stu says “I’ll be right back” right after Randy explains the rules, and is later killed (albeit in self-defense) by Sidney. In Scream 2, the rules for a horror sequel are: the body count is always bigger, the death scenes are more elaborate (“more blood, more gore”), and the third rule is not explained in the final cut, although it was revealed in the teaser trailer to be “never, ever, under any circumstances assume the killer is dead”.

A woman wearing a CNN shirt tells a man holding a clipboard to find a way to crop the other crews out of the shot. Adjacent to the riser, CNN has s

A woman wearing a CNN shirt tells a man holding a clipboard to find a way to crop the other crews out of the shot. Adjacent to the riser, CNN has set up the barstool and the table littered with makeup, brushes, and hair products. Lots of hair products. There’s no riser for Entertainment Tonight’s reporter, but there’s a king-sized mirror secured to a step stool. A thick container rests on the top step. It reminds me of the attache case that travels with the president in doomsday movies. A man clacks open the lock, and pulls out the drawer loaded with shadows, blushes, and lipsticks.

Attention is the drug of choice in local news.

Off the Air includes real locations and businesses with special significance. For example, two of my favorite photographers introduced me to Rito's Mexican Food and Harlow's Café. I included Chicago Hamburger Company because the owner allowed me to follow his journey during the first year of the pandemic. He was open and honest during a frightening time, and I appreciated his transparency. Food City chips and salsa are my favorite snack and I made them my main character's favorite. I included the history of the former Phoenix Indian School, which many people may not know about. Three historic buildings remain in what is now Steele Indian School Park. There's a walkway with columns depicting the school's history and a bridge that leads to a garden with Native American poems etched into concrete. It's a jewel in the heart of the city. - from the Los Angeles Public Library interview

I think some people who have never worked in local news do not understand how much the industry has changed and how challenging it is for journalists who care about their communities to earn a decent living and stay in the business for more than a few years.
Local TV, radio, and newspapers do not have the community and corporate support they did when I started. More content is required using fewer resources while facing constant competition from countless websites, streaming services, and social media platforms. - from the Los Angeles Public Library interview

While she may be capable of functioning several levels into the future, her mind is no crystal ball. She may have the ability to visualize dozens o

While she may be capable of functioning several levels into the future, her mind is no crystal ball. She may have the ability to visualize dozens of disparate pieces of information simultaneously, but her brain doesn’t work like in those movies where you see a whole string of letters superimposed on the face of the protagonist as they’re thinking.
Antonia Scott’s mind is more like a jungle, a jungle full of monkeys leaping at top speed from vine to vine, carrying things. Many monkeys and many things, swinging past one another in midair, baring their fangs.
Today, the monkeys are carrying dreadful things, and Antonia is afraid.

Antonia is afraid of almost nothing, apart from herself. Afraid of life, maybe. After all, she relaxes by imagining for three minutes every day how she could kill herself.

There was once a little girl who grew up in a sad, loveless home where the food tasted of ashes and the future was black, she tells herself as she waits.

Kegemteraan is in Malay. In Malay it would mean "the joy of stumbling". The simultaneous feeling of pleasure and grief when you know that you have done something that you shouldn't.
Curious. You know you are wrong but you keep doing it again and again since it hurts but you also enjoy it.

Bakiginin - In Karelian, a language spoken from the Gulf of Finland to the White Sea, it means “the sadness of a wall builder.” The contrast between the need to keep the world away from your life, and the impossibility of doing so.

She has a black belt in lying to herself, and only a yellow one in expressing her reality.

Born in Madrid, Spain on December 16, 1977, Juan Gómez-Jurado, is a Spanish journalist and author. He is a columnist in "La Voz de Galicia" and "ABC", distributed in Spain, and he participates in multiple radio and TV programs. His books have been translated into 42 languages and he is one of the most successful living Spanish authors, along with Javier Sierra and Carlos Ruiz Zafón. His writing has been described by critics as "energetic and cinematographic". He worked in various Spanish media outlets, including 40 Principales, Cadena Ser, Cadena Cope, Radio España, Canal + and ABC, before publishing his debut novel, God's Spy (Espía de Dios) in 200

The GOP is a threat to your freedom, health, wealth, and safety. If they gain control of the federal government they plan on passing a national abo

The GOP is a threat to your freedom, health, wealth, and safety. If they gain control of the federal government they plan on passing a national abortion ban, gutting Medicare, destroying Obamacare, raising taxes on working families, and stealing a lifetime of YOUR Social Security money.

Partisanship creates a convenient shortcut that low-interest and low-information voters can rely on to make their vote decisions, and it colors our entire perception of the political world.

Ordinary people hate losing, or losing out on things we like or think we might like--with more intensity than we like gaining those things. A simpler way to put it is losing makes us feel twice as bad as winning makes us feel good.

think of all elections, big and small, as battles in a much larger and far more consequential electoral war, whose victors will determine the future of this nation.

Senior Fellow, Elections, The Niskanen Center
Rachel Bitecofer is assistant director of the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University, where she teaches classes on political behavior, elections, & political analysis and conducts survey research and elections analysis. Her research has been featured in many media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, NPR, and she is a contracted commentator on CBC Radio. Her book, The Unprecedented 2016 Presidential Election (Palgrave McMillan) is available via Amazon.
Her innovative election forecasting model predicted the 2018 midterms five months before Election Day, far ahead of other forecasting methods. Her forecasting work argues that American elections have become increasingly nationalized and highly predictable; with partisanship serving as an identity-based, dominant vote determinant for all but a small portion of Americans.

Harmony thought about cats as she rolled out of bed and staggered to the bathroom. Her favorite cat was the one that used to get stuck on top of a

Harmony thought about cats as she rolled out of bed and staggered to the bathroom. Her favorite cat was the one that used to get stuck on top of a telephone pole in front of the house where she grew up. At least once a month in the warm weather, she’d hear the neighbor kids yelling, “Cat’s on a pole!” as they gathered around to taunt the poor thing.
Harmony would watch the scene from her kitchen window, and a couple of times she tried to thought-talk the cat down. “Are you out of your mind?” the cat would answer. “They’ll kill me.”

When he was forty-three, he met Judy. By then, construction work had taken second seat to massage therapy, where he discovered he had a gift.
He didn’t understand how it worked; he just knew that when he touched people, his hands grew hot, his heart exploded, the room filled with colors, and sometimes helpers in subtle bodies would instruct him where to touch. And the clients felt better.

[In therapy] I was talking about how I reacted to various people in the office. There was one guy there who wanted an office wifey. I couldn’t stand this guy. Every time he would approach me it was like I was getting slimed with ectoplasm. Etheric gunk would come over me. I wanted to take a shower.

What was extraordinary were her colors—raw red and orange energy around her torso, a deep indigo, bluer than the bottom of the ocean with radiant purple wafting through it vibrating so fast above her head it made him feel faint just to watch it. But watch it he did. How could he not? Her desire was direct and raw.

Betsy Robinson was raised an atheist and went on to make her living as a writer and editor of spiritual subject matter: as managing editor of Spirituality & Health magazine for six and a half years and as an editor of spiritual psychology and books about shamans and traditional healers.

History doesn’t allow itself to be rewritten that easily.

One single night: A house burned down in Tolarp.

History doesn’t allow itself to be rewritten that easily.

One single night: A house burned down in Tolarp. There was someone inside, on the kitchen floor. One instant, a before and after: the stillness before the spark appeared, and the inferno that followed. One single event: That was all it took to redirect the path of a life. Like the filament of a root moving through time.

The world had shown what it was truly capable of. As if a lifeline was suddenly severed, it could take your loved ones away. The world watched without blinking as you fell.

Christoffer Carlsson was born in 1986 on the west coast of Sweden. He holds a PhD in criminology from the University of Stockholm and is one of Sweden’s leading crime experts. Carlsson is the youngest winner of the Best Swedish Crime Novel of the Year, voted by the Swedish Crime Writers’ Academy, and has been a finalist for the prestigious Glass Key award, given to the best Scandinavian crime novel of the year.

It’s close to where he grew up, where he and his brother used to play. And then, halfway through writing the book, his parents sold up and moved away from his childhood home, moving into a flat in town, enjoying their new life on the 13th floor with marvelous views. ‘The novel became some sort of farewell. It was pretty hard. It’s as if part of my past has moved out of reach.’

Nerd Nite is an event usually held at a bar or other public venue where usually two or three presenters share about a topic of personal interest or ex

Nerd Nite is an event usually held at a bar or other public venue where usually two or three presenters share about a topic of personal interest or expertise in a fun-yet-intellectual format while the audience shares a drink. It was started in 2003 by then-graduate student (now East Carolina University professor) Chris Balakrishan at the Midway Cafe in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. In 2006 Nerd Nite spread to New York City, where Matt Wasowski was tasked with expanding the idea globally. - from Wikipedia

Be There and Be Square - Nerd Nite logo

Misophonia can attach itself to any repetitive sound, but the most common ones are things, like chewing, breathing, sniffing, and throat clearing. It can be hard for sufferers to talk about because of how difficult it can be to tell someone politely that the sound of them keeping themselves alive is repulsive to you.

there are approximately 100 trillion microorganisms (mainly bacteria), representing as many as 30,000 different species, living in every crevice, nook, and mucosal cranny of your body that you can imagine.

The oldest monsters are unnamed. Unnamed monsters, Dennis learned before he even knew his own name, were the worst kind of all. When you gave a mon

The oldest monsters are unnamed. Unnamed monsters, Dennis learned before he even knew his own name, were the worst kind of all. When you gave a monster a name, you had it in hand. There, that one was anger. Rage. Sexual abuse. Dennis learned the names of all these before he was four, as items the child psychiatrists crossed off on their checklists. They were looking for answers. They were looking for monsters to blame.
But the worst monster of all? That one was as cold as sleet. He climbed up the hill at night and played with your feet. He washed the tears from your face and cooed like a mother before slashing your heart to ribbons. The worst monster, Dennis knew, was like Satan from the Bible some parents read to you. He came wearing disguises, and no one knew his real name. He pretended to be a lot of things, and the worst thing he pretended to be was love.

…all the boys here were throwaways. It was like being in a giant wastebasket filled with dirty tissues. You knew you were lost.

The idea for the scene depicted on the cover came during a trip to an Oregon beach for a mental health day when she spotted a little boy charging into the water - from the Spokesman (print) interview

Mist struck his face with force, and the wind tore at the institutional shirt he wore…Behind him, signs littered the dunes by the beach road: WARNING: TREACHEROUS CURRENTS. WARNING: HIGH TIDE. WARNING: SHARP DROP-OFFS AND SNEAKER WAVES.

She has ways to be mean where everyone around her stands up and claps. That’s the worst kind of meanness, son. The kind where everyone says it’s for your own good.

“Holding time” is a draconian, punitive method of treatment that sounds nicer than it is. It’s basically a physical and psychological torture that’s designed to break children down to the point of psychological collapse by physically restraining them. Some children have actually suffocated to death by this treatment. The idea is that children will somehow “start fresh” afterward, like rebooting a computer, which of course is not how humans work. If you destroy someone psychologically, they’re not reborn. They’re destroyed. Holding time has been thoroughly rebuked by scientists, and yet somehow it’s still used. - from the ZED interview

In the novel, sleeping giants are massive stone age carvings…But the real sleeping giants are the secret, hidden pains, and anger inside us that can come out in misdirected rage. In my experience, when these sleeping giants are awakened with a cause—especially one driven by white supremacy, misogyny, or other biases— a permission slip to commit harm is signed, sealed, and delivered. - from the Crimereads article

Most crime fiction focuses on the outliers—the outright, obvious sociopaths, usually unexplainably brilliant—or else criminal underworlds, like gangs or drug cartels. This is all interesting stuff. But I think it has the effect of othering violence. It assumes there is a world full of normal people who are blameless, who couldn’t fathom the idea of committing harm even if you suggested it. This creates a false dichotomy, an us vs them that is troubling and honestly, kind of disingenuous.
It’s true, most people don’t go around committing egregious crimes. Not directly, at least. But spend a few hours on a next-door neighbor site and you can see the seething anger that boils into outright discrimination, the rage that leads people to the voter’s ballot to pass even more punitive laws, and elect officials who will do their dirty work for them.These regular, everyday citizens might not be the ones administering the lethal dose, or locking people up, or torturing children, but they are the mass behind the monsters. Collectively, they can become the monster...[but] just as we are capable of everyday evil in the name of good, we are also capable of profound healing, joy, and goodness. - from the Crimereads article

Rene's novels are influenced by her work as a licensed death row investigator. She is the past Chief Investigator for a public defenders and has worked hundreds of cases, including exonerations and helping rape trafficking victims. The survivor of a difficult background, Rene regularly speaks on social justice issues, as well as writing and overcoming trauma.

I had the unpleasant feeling that I was riding straight down a giant throat.

…the woods of Gallacia are as

I had the unpleasant feeling that I was riding straight down a giant throat.

…the woods of Gallacia are as deep and dark as God’s sorrow.

…I recognized the smell of livrit, our beloved national paint thinner, made from lichen, cloudberries, and spite. No Gallacian soldier would be without a bottle, in case we ever need to remember what we’re fighting for. (Mostly the opportunity to be somewhere that has better liquor.)

The greatest city in Gallacia is fine, I suppose, but I didn’t feel the need to linger. Imagine if an architect wanted to re-create Budapest, but on a shoestring budget and without any of the convenient flat bits. While fighting wolves.

The silence didn’t feel peaceful. It felt thick. Like a layer of fuzz on your tongue after a hard night of drinking, which you can’t see or touch but you can damn well taste. There weren’t even any birds singing.

A forty-minute drive from the volcanic Mount Etna, Becchina should have been alive.
Instead, it was the corpse of a town that didn’t even realize i

A forty-minute drive from the volcanic Mount Etna, Becchina should have been alive.
Instead, it was the corpse of a town that didn’t even realize it was already dead.

A low scritching noise caught his attention, and he swung the flashlight beam down to the right, where the natural tunnel and the man-made wall formed a dark and jagged corner. Tiny, putrid-yellow eyes glittered in the shadows.
“Jesus Christ!” Tommy hissed, jerking backward in revulsion as the flashlight beam illuminated the foot-long rat crouched in that corner.
Silent, twitching, the rat stared brazenly up at him, unafraid. It watched him with apparent disdain, as if to let Tommy know that he was the intruder here, not the rat.

The world seemed to be unraveling every day. American culture seemed to be rotting from the inside out, manipulated by an amoral oligarchy whose worst enemy was young people who didn’t want to play their game, and Kate and Tommy were happy to be counted in that category. The irony had not been lost on them, that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had been defined by people leaving the so-called Old World to seek their fortunes in the New World, and now she and Tommy were doing the opposite, seeking new life in the Old World. But they both believed that earlier generations had it right—a slower life, a smaller circle, a focus on home.

The rats are like fingers.
No. That’s not right. Fingers can reach out, can grasp and extend. The rats are not like fingers at all. They are periscopes, like those on submarines, each able to give its captain only a limited view of the world above. From their place below, among the dead, the lost ones can see only as far as the rats can see. But they are patient, and so they wait. And they let the rats run.

A voice crying out. Tommy frowned, wondering if that had been a dream or if it had been what woke him.
The wind gusted, rattling the window in its frame. He listened to see if the cry would come again but heard nothing beyond the sighs and creaks of the old house.

Golden is a monster of an author who got started, and found success, very early. He has a gazillion publications to his credit and an army-size host of teleplay credits from his years writing for Buffy with Joss Whedon, and plenty more. And then there are the comics. You may have heard of Hell Boy, among those. Here is a list of what he has published, from Fiction DB. I personally think he has elves, or more likely, goblins, chained to computers in his basement helping him crank out such volume.