Chasing the Dead is a sleek bullet of a suspense/horror novel. I know that both of those genres exist independently of each other, but sometimes have elements of the other within them, but this book is first one, then the other in a blend like I haven’t seen before.

I picked the book up because the cover caught my eye. I couldn’t help wondering who was driving that car at night down such a desolate road with the forest all around. From the provocative title, I knew whoever it was couldn’t be out day-tripping – primarily because it’s night. I was also attracted by the brevity of the book. At 250 pages with a generous font instead of tiny type, I knew I could probably get through it in an hour or two. So I added it to the stack I was getting.

At home, still curious, I opened the cover and intended to read a chapter or so just to get the feel of it. I do that a lot and let my subconscious choose the order of the books I read when I don’t have a definite plan.

However, I had definite plans. I’ve got an immense TBR pile. But I read the prologue and remained curious. After all, a prologue doesn’t necessarily tell you how a book is going to read.

On the first page of Chapter 1, I met Susan Young, newly divorced and still not sure why, who’s about to close a major real estate deal, and is just trying to get home to her young daughter through the late-evening traffic. Within six pages, she arrives home and finds her daughter and the nanny aren’t home.

Then she gets the phone call.

The voice of a man she doesn’t know informs her that she has a beautiful daughter, then proceeds to describe her. I was hooked. As a parent, having my child in the hands of a madman would be terrifying.

By the end of the next two chapters, just ten short pages away and I’m suddenly 15% of the way through the novel, Susan is forced to obey the machinations of the evil man who holds the life of her child in his hands.

I was totally stuck at this point. For a first-time author, Schreiber really knows how to keep a reader turning pages. I finally gave up and settled back to just follow the book through to the end. I had no choice. I was held completely in thrall.

In just a few more short chapters, Susan is commanded to dig up a grave. By hand. During the confusion, she inadvertently left the shovel she was told she had to bring. By the time she gets back to her SUV, there’s another body waiting for her that turns her world upside down again.

Schreiber’s story moves relentlessly, till the anticipation becomes an adrenaline-laced blur. The twists and turns come faster and faster, and I can’t really remember when the story jumped from suspense to out-and-out Stephen King style horror because the dread inside me continued to come from the same place. The dread grew larger and larger, though, because what Susan faced seemed to grow exponentially as well.

Although Chasing the Dead isn’t going to change your life or even stay with you long after you finish it, the novel will definitely take you to the darker places of your mind and root around in old fears resurrected from childhood. It’s a fun, fast read that will keep you nailed to the pages as you try to stay up with the whipsaw of obstacles Susan faces as she struggles to save her child.

Now I’ve gotta pick up Schreiber’s new book, Eat the Dead, that just hit the bookshelves. And when I read it, I’m gonna do it at night just for that extra adrenaline spike. I’ll make sure the doors are all locked and the windows are closed first.

Stephen King’s new novel, Duma Key, arrives in stores nation-wide in January 2008. As soon as it was announced, readers began trying to guess what the book would be about. The title itself is highly interesting. My first guess was that the novel would be about a key, like a door key. Or maybe a key on a map. Given the fact that The DaVinci Code seems to still be on everyone’s mind, I had to recognize the fact that perhaps the key – especially when paired with the name Duma, which sounds close to Alexander Dumas – might have some literary bearing. I thought maybe the book would be a literary mystery of sorts.Now that the actual subject matter the book has been released, I find that I was wrong on all counts. The “key” referred to by the book actually turns out to be one of the small islands off the coast of Florida.

And the story sounds even more mysterious than I would have imagined. It sounds like it’s going to be one of those delicious, Twilight Zone-type of tales that King delivers every so often when he’s in the mood.The story also smacks of King’s own life. I love his writing when he veers off into something that could have been carved from his own experiences.

At first blush, Duma Key stands prepared to deliver exactly that.

The protagonist of the book is self-made millionaire Edgar Freemantle, a mover and a shaker in the construction business. While on the job, Edgar gets hurt and crippled. A crane smashes his truck and he loses an arm in the subsequent operations to save his life. Edgars struggles to get rehabilitated and adjust to his life, and I know a lot of what King when through after being struck by a negligent driver has to be in those pages.

Unable to get his life together, Edgar turns on his wife and family. After he attacks her and tries to kill her, his wife asks for a divorce. Edgar divides up his money among his family and seeks counseling. His counselor asks Edgar if there wasn’t something that he used to do that took the edge of during periods of stress. Edgar says that he used to draw. The counselor advises him to do that.

King deserts the familiar bleak countryside of Maine (although Edgar is from Minnesota) and sends his protagonist looking for solace and sanity down in the Florida Keys. Apparently, King has been vacationing down in that area for the last few years and has become quite enamored of it.

Unfortunately for Edgar, he’s a Stephen King character in a Stephen King book. He’s earmarked for weirdness and horrible things. It doesn’t sound like it takes long to happen.

Evidently Duma Key is already filled with restless malevolence just waiting to break loose. The island’s mistress, Elizabeth Eastlake, has been hiding secrets for most of her eighty-some-odd years. Her past, and it has to be a good one filled with evil things and twisted passions – otherwise this wouldn’t be a proper King novel, breaks free and comes to life through Edgar’s paintings.

Of course, the idea of paintings coming to life is old, and King has even touched on it now and again in different places, but the idea is as wonderful now as it ever was. And in the hands of a master storyteller like King, this is going to be one chilling, frightening ride.

King has stated that this novel came to him from the same cloth he used to write the bestseller, Lisey’s Story, and that many of the same themes are once again present. It’s also a big, fat book, totaling nearly 600 pages, according to the Amazon.com listing.

Personally, I can’t wait. Some people prefer the Stephen King that brings evil up from the graveyards and creates unkillable monsters. But I prefer the subtle evil and rich characterizations of his novels like Bag of Bones. I get the sense that this is going to be a book like that.

One thing I do know, the next few months are going to be hard to get through while I’m waiting. The book cover is beautiful and haunting, and I’m going to be thinking about the story a lot. I’m sure other readers will be doing the same thing.

Pulp magazines – periodicals published on paper so poor that pulp debris in the form of wood chips was actually present on many of the pages – had their heyday in the 1930s and 1940s. During those years, they were the most popular form of portable entertainment available. People lined up every month at the newspaper kiosks to get the new editions of their favorite magazines featuring over-the-top heroes like Doc Savage, the Shadow, the Spider, G-8 And His Battle Aces, and others.

The pulp format ran the gamut of genres. The magazines featured adventure, crime, private eyes, romance, mysteries, fantasy, science fiction, and horror. They even specialized with tales of boxing, aerial combat, and sea stories.

Those old pulp tales saw the rise of several authors that became literary lions: Robert E. Howard’s Conan tales started in them, Dashiell Hammett established private eye characters that would later become Sam Spade and Nick and Nora Charles, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote about Tarzan and John Carter of Mars, Raymond Chandler cobbled his first Philip Marlowe novel The Big Sleep from stories he’d sold to Black Mask Magazine, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury got their starts in those pages.

There was nothing like the pulps. But after World War II, when guys came back from war after seeing how harsh the world could truly be, they didn’t want heroes that were squeaky clean. They wanted tales about things that showed the darkness they’d discovered. As the paperback originals (like Mickey Spillane’s novels about two-fisted P. I. Mike Hammer) started coming out, the pulps gradually died till only a handful of science fiction magazines were left.

I grew up reading the paperback reprints of Doc Savage and The Shadow. I loved those stories. Short, compact, tightly written, filled with death, disaster, mayhem, and action, they filled my mind with endless adventure. You just can’t find stuff like that any more.

However, a new publishing venture, Astonishing Adventures Magazine is trying to bring those halcyon days back to old fans as well as new aficionados of this brand of fiction. They’ve published their first magazine as a PDF that they’re giving away for free on their website (www.astonishingadventuresmagazine.blog-city.com) and it’s jam-packed with stories that usually aren’t more than 3500 words long.

The issue features an interview with writer Joe R. Lansdale, whose own novella, “Bubba Ho-Tep” inspired a cult classic film of the same name. And that story could have been spun from the same fabric as so many of the stories during the pulp era. Just to prove that the practitioners of this kind of writing is still out there.

Another interview features Michael Wm. Kaluta, the artist who brought The Shadow to life in the DC comics run of the 1970s that comics fans remember so well.

There are additional features involving a discussion of Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola’s new book, Baltimore and Alec Baldwin’s portrayal of The Shadow in the movie.

And then there are the stories. Some of them are good, and some of them are thin and violent and off-beat. But that was how it was in the pulps. The buyer picked up a magazine and turned the pages to see what the writers delivered.

And did I mention that this one is FREE!?

The editors, John Donald Carlucci and Timothy D. Gallagher, even roll out submissions guidelines for any would-be pulp writers lurking out there. Entertainment and the possibility of having a pulp story you’ve written accepted? Be still my beating heart. They also offer the caveat that they’re partial to stories featuring monkeys.

Hmmm…

This is the kind of thing I’ve been waiting my whole life to write. So I’m going to send them a story or two at some point. In the meantime, when was the last time someone gave you something for free?

Go to the website and get your free copy. Dig in to see what treasures of story or art that you find. And be sure to spread the news to anybody you think might like this kind of material. There’s just not enough of it left in the world.