Back Home to Horror

There were delusions, under which I labored for some time, that I was or could be a mainstream writer, with an ever-growing repertoire of genres to consider. Who knows? It may yet happen before long, especially if the Lancelot trilogy catches on and I’m besieged by demands for more in that particular Arthurian vein.

However, the long and the short of it is that I am, at heart, a horror writer. Like the illustrious Mr. King, who has become such an institution that no matter what he writes, it’s labeled as horror when it reaches the shelves, I think that my work will always be reaching into the darkness, and sometimes will not have the benefit of even a flickering match to guide it.

Since finishing “Advent,” “Mind Games,” and “Lancelot,” I’ve experimented with three different styles of storytelling – straight fantasy, science fiction, and even a comedy – and all three efforts have petered out, unfinished. It is to horror that I always return, like the criminal to the scene of the crime, perhaps, but more like the child rushing home to the familiar comforts of his own room.

The latest, coming soon with any luck:

Hostile

It’s April, 1876, and the United States is nearing the celebration to mark its first hundred years as an independent nation. On the frontier, however, the fireworks expected over the summer have more to do with the war against hostile Sioux and Cheyenne Indians than with the upcoming Centennial.

Lieutenant Bart Alders is about to reach the lonely post of Fort Kearny in the Dakota territory, just in time to bid farewell to its garrison as they march off to join General Alfred Terry’s offensive column as they take on Sitting Bull and his warriors. Alders is chagrined to be left behind with a handful of men to watch the women and wait for reinforcements to arrive, and prepares to fight the war against boredom.

Alders, however, is about to find out that there is more than one kind of a hostile out here in the untamed Great Plains, and that there are some evils that have lived in the land for longer than any peoples, whether they are white or red. Something has come out of the timber and found his little post. Something hungry.

Something Hostile.