Thanks for Reading!
Any support, even just giving these posts a read, is always appreciated.
Recent Updates:
2025 was a bigger success than I ever imagined as a debut author. I’m not sure the exact numbers yet, I’ll be figuring everything out this month to release a “yearly report” on my book sales, but I am confident that I managed to sell at least 75 books between all formats. That’s a massive success in my eyes, and more than I expected.
Thanks to everyone who supported my work in 2025. Here’s to another successful year.
Still want to grab my book BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS?
Get the Ebook here: Campfire
Get Paperback and Hardback here: Bookshop.org
A special note on returning to Substack:
If you are viewing this newsletter on the web instead of through your email, you probably noticed that we’re back to Substack after hopscotching around to different places in 2025.
I say BACK on Substack, because this is where my newsletter originated. For a number of reasons, I decided to move away from the platform after using it for a while. However, after a couple of years doing things in a variety of different ways, I’ve decided the best option (for now) is to move back. Kit worked well enough, but often emails ended up in spam. A blind CC email list worked well, but I had no stats to track. It was all a frustration and my domain hosting site is moving away from allowing me to host my own email domain, which means Kit is going to become more frustrating to use. At this point, I have to cut my losses and go somewhere that puts usability first. I don’t have time to keep fiddling with this. My goal is to be a novelist, not a professional newsletter fiddler.
Nothing else is changing, and for those of you who come to this via-email. I just wanted to provide a quick explanation.
Project Progress:
I’m about 75% through the pre-beta reading edits of my horror novella. Editing, etc on Book 2 to Song of Calarine is on hold for a while longer while I polish off some other projects!
Photo of the Pearl River, as seen from River Bend Park along the Natchez Trace in Canton, MS. Photo by the Author.
Recent Fascinations | The Fiction Books that Made Me #7: CHRISTINE
Want to understand what this series is? Go Here
“Come on, big guy. Let’s go for a ride. Let’s cruise.”
I had some hesitation on putting two King novels back to back on this list. Eventually, though, I decided that CHRISTINE couldn’t be left off. While other books eventually surpassed it in their importance to me or my own personal enjoyment of them (this book is only number seven, after all), there is an argument that CHRISTINE is responsible for a great deal of my love for writing and reading. In order to explain why, though, I’ll have to walk all of you through a little biographical aside. Bear with me, I promise it’s going somewhere and it should be interesting. At least, I hope it is.
Throughout my adolescence I spent a lot of time at my paternal grandparent’s house. Both my grandfather and grandmother were big movie and TV people, and a lot of my love for both mediums came from them. However, there was a particularly special happenstance that would come around every once in a while. Occasionally, my dad and I would end up over at their house with just my Grandpa, and for whatever reason we often ended up watching at least some significant stretch of TV together. Often it was some outdoors show, a fishing or hunting TV show, but every once in a while it would be a movie that we caught on local cable. Most of the time, the movie was a western, but every once in a while we ended up watching something that seemed a little out of place. At least, out of place in the context of a decidedly rural and generally conservative household.
One time, when I was around 10 years old, that movie was the 1983 adaptation of CHRISTINE.
Now, to an outsider looking in, this probably feels a little out of left field. However, I PROMISE it wasn’t. There is a long tradition of Hot Rodding and Southeastern car culture that my grandpa passed on to my dad and my dad passed on to me, and that day watching CHRISTINE was a big piece of it. My dad, if I’m remembering right, had seen the movie in the 80s, and my grandpa never had. Obviously, I never had either, but that long and furious (ha ha) Plymouth caught my attention and we ended up watching it.
Now, there’s a couple things I need to get out in the open. Was I too young to watch the Christine movie at 10 years old? Probably. Did it scare me? Not really, the car was evil but not particularly scary. Did it have a huge impact on me as a kid? Oh yes. Not only did it help cement me as a car guy, but it also made me a horror fan. It showed me that Horror wasn’t just scary, it was badass and subversive. To a 10 year old redneck there’s little in life more important than the badass to subversive matrix.
Fast forward a couple years, and the dual combination of my dad’s love for Louis Lamour and my discovery of Stephen King in the school library (THE REGULATORS was my first of his novels, if you haven’t read the first entry of this series) had cemented me as a huge fan of both. Before long, I began ripping through King novels and Lamour westerns as fast as I could get my hands on them. Many of those westerns were my Dad’s, and he bought most of them at Flea Markets (a love for which he got from his mom and passed down to me, I’ll add). One day, I don’t remember exactly the year but I know I would’ve been around 13, he found a mass market paperback of CHRISTINE in a pile of books he was digging through. Somehow, I hadn’t managed to read it yet, despite loving the movie and having become a big fan of King. He handed it to me and, well…
I think it’s safe to say I’ve shown it some love over the years.
I carried that book around in my backpack for years, including my freshman year of college. I’ve read it more than any other King novel, which means I’ve read it more than any other novel on this list. I won’t say it’s perfect (it’s not) or even King’s greatest work (it’s not), but it holds a really important place in my heart. I’ve since bought a new copy, but this one sits on one of my shelves in my day job office. Had my dad not handed me that copy standing in some dusty flea market, it’s likely I would have gotten to it eventually, but who knows. It might’ve been years later, it might not’ve been as formative. It might not have ridden in my backpack for years, might not have become some part of me in the way that only the most cherished books do. I might not have become so deeply in love with the pulpier, more subversive for subversive’s sake side of horror. I doubt my dad remembers any of this, but it’s those throw away moments that often linger with us the most.
As far as the book itself, I don’t have a lot to say. It’s less the content of the story, which is excellent, and more the story of how I came to love it that matters in the context of the series. I will say one thing: CHRISTINE is often cited as one of King’s weaker works, and to those people I say: Chill out. Let’s just take a cruise in an old Plymouth Fury and see where it takes us.
Thanks for reading.
