Three years later

Posted on March 17, 2023 by Bev Vincent

Three years ago this week, I grabbed my laptop and peripherals, important documents and a few personal objects and left my office at the corporate headquarters for the last time, turning my home office into a dual-purpose location. One computer and desk remained for my personal + writing work and a second, set at 90° to the first, became my new day-job workstation.

I haven’t been back since. Well, that’s not entirely true. I did return to pack up everything else in my office, especially my second “kangaroo” sit/stand desk adapter. And I have been back for a few in-person meetings, but no more than half a dozen times and all of those have been within the past year. I don’t miss working in a building in the least.

My wife has also been working from home full time, with the exception of a few meetings on campus, so we have established a nice pattern. We’re just down the hall from each other during the daytime, but have our own dedicated offices for work. We always have breakfast together. Occasionally lunch, too, and we always rendezvous for supper. “Every night is date night” became our running joke.

In the early years, all meals were made at home. During some periods when COVID seemed to be easing, we dined out, although mostly outdoors, which is still our preference. We perfected a number of recipes that became standards in our repertoire. Lots of experiments with homemade pizzas, for example. We did the occasional pickup order from nearby restaurants and experimented with Door Dash. Discovered the joy of ordering groceries online to be delivered to the car. Some of the pandemic rule changes in Texas even let us order drinks to go.

We traveled little. My car battery was the first to give up the ghost from disuse during the first year and, later, my wife’s car battery did the same. We rarely ventured more than a few miles from home, other than some trips to the airport to pick up visitors and a couple of trips to our favorite coastal destination last year. We’ve taken exactly one trip out of state, to visit our daughter and her family about a year ago. That was while the mask mandate was still in place, so we felt reasonably safe, although we wouldn’t say we exactly enjoyed flying, but that ship had sailed (to mix a metaphor) well before COVID.

We were very early adopters of the vaccine, thanks to my wife’s work. We got our first jab at the end of Feb 2021 and we’ve kept up with every booster ever since. Neither of us have caught the virus, to the best of our knowledge. Not yet, anyway. It’ll probably happen at some point, but we’re still being careful. Masks when grocery shopping. Dining outside when possible (the weather in 2023 has been like a roller coaster—I’ve switched between heat and A/C more times than I can count. After a couple of weeks in the eighties, we’re back down to overnight temps in the thirties and forties.

Time does sail on by, doesn’t it? I can’t believe this is my first blog entry of 2023. What have I seen lately? Our most recent film was Living, starring Bill Nighy, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his role as a civil servant who gets bad news and decides to make some changes in his life. It’s a remake of a Kurosawa movie. I also watched Luther: The Fallen Sun, which has a rather pell-mell plot with some gaps but even so-so Luther is great viewing. I also saw All Quiet on the Western Front, a brutal look at trench warfare from the German perspective. David K. Harbour was a hoot in We Have a Ghost, which was much better than I thought it would be based on the trailer. And I quite liked Don’t Worry Darling, which unfortunately suffered from some bad PR.

We loved, loved, loved the first season of Poker Face, and have been known to utter “bullshit” more frequently than in the past. It just kept getting better and better with each episode. I’ve also been binging Columbo and am now caught up to the episodes from the 1990s, which I remember less clearly than most of the earlier ones, ironically. I just discovered that two of those later shows were adaptations of Ed McBain novels. The one I saw recently, “No Time to Die,” is the most un-Columbo of all. Not a murder in sight and Columbo never meets the perp. We’ve been enjoying Dear Edward, which gives us lots to talk about concerning some unwise choices by many of the characters. I also binged through Enemi Public, a Belgian series about a serial killer who is paroled to a monastery in a small town. We’re enjoying the final season of Picard and the new season of Call the Midwife. I also really enjoyed The Last of Us, although I wasn’t at all familiar with the game. I’m also hanging in with the new Night Court, which is still finding its footing. Mostly funny, but occasionally not.

I was reading John Irving’s The Last Chairlift, but I put it aside (it’s 900-ish pages) to read And Then There Were None for the first time in ages (I wanted to study how she handled the book’s viewpoint for something I’m working on) and then decided to jump into Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane. I’ll go back to the Irving at some point, but it is a bit of a slog. Another big book was The Deluge by Stephen Markley, which had some interesting characters and a lot of scary material about climate disasters. I’m reading Fairy Tale to my wife each evening—we have about 150 pages left to go.

Recent and forthcoming short fiction publications:

Plus I wrote the introduction to the Centipede Press edition of The Long Walk, which was a great honor. It’s a gorgeous book.

Recent interviews:

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The Deluge by Stephen Markley

Posted on January 28, 2023 by Bev Vincent

It should come as no surprise that a book about global warming and catastrophic climate change would be called The Deluge. Indeed, over the course of the many years covered by Markley’s novel, there are several instances of weather-related inundation. However, the title actually refers to something else, a flood of a different kind, that won’t be revealed until late in the novel.

And it is a novel, although at times it reads like a future history, as if Markley is reporting on what happens, step by step, year after year, as the world’s climate barrels out of control toward a life-extinguishing event.

This is a big book, full of big ideas, necessitating a large cast of characters. Markley begins the novel in a structure that seems parallel to what Stephen King does in The Stand, a book that has clearly had an influence on him and which appears a number of times in a literary cameo. He introduces readers to the major players with whom they will be spending the next 900 pages and, for quite a while, it’s not clear how any of them will connect. 

First, there’s geologist Tony Pietrus’s treatise on Monte Carlo simulations of clathrate hydrates, special molecules that can encapsulate other molecules (in this case, methane) under certain conditions (at the bottom of the ocean, for example). Previous species-destroying events occurred when the oceans warmed enough for these clathrates to regurgitate their guest molecules into the atmosphere, accelerating the increase in temperature. It’s gripping stuff…if you’re a geologist.

Next come a couple of characters who talk in detail about military bomb disposal techniques. Out of this conversation will come one of the more radical approaches to forcing authorities to sit up and take notice of the oncoming catastrophe. Then Markley introduces an actor who has a random encounter with a woman, both of whom will become important players in the events that follow. Then there’s Ashir “Ash” al-Hasan, the neuro­divergent gay statistician who shifts from computing gambling odds to compiling probabilities about NBA games and ends up becoming a consultant and advisor to high-ranking officials; and Keeper, the impoverished, drug-addicted and disenfranchised man who becomes a patsy for a variety of forces. A Greg Stillson-like zealot emerges, attracting an enormous following due to his charisma and persuasiveness, polarizing the populace.

And, finally, there’s Kate Morris, known as Kate Chaos, who meets a young man named Matt who is working in a fishing camp in Wyoming after graduation while trying to find his footing as a writer. Kate is all in on anything that attracts her interest. She becomes a political/social activist through her organization A Fierce Blue Fire, which eventually becomes powerful enough to influence elections and coerce politicians into taking unpopular stands, with Matt and small inner circle at her side. Rounding out the impressive cast are passing references to such climate-related real-world personalities as Al Gore, Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The COVID-19 pandemic and the January 6 insurrection play a part in proceedings as well.

Dealing with such a large cast can be complicated, but Markley has devised some narrative tricks to help orient readers. Chapters featuring Keeper, for example, are told in second person, and those featuring Ash are epistles. Other chapters are in first person (Matt) or feature injected paragraphs that provide third-party insight into what is happening (Shane, the leader of a terrorist cell called 6Degrees, a reference to the anticipated increase in global tempera­ture).

The book starts in the recent past (Obama era) and plows ahead to 2040, charting one climate crisis after another and the near-futile efforts made by both activists and terrorists to bring about real, meaningful change. Just when it seems like American politicians are about to enact painful but necessary legislation, petty bickering takes over from cooler heads and everyone needs to regroup. It is frustrating (but credible) to see how people are willing to cling to short-term power and influence in the face of the worst environmental crisis to face humanity. It doesn’t help that one of the smartest men in any room, Pietrus, is also a loose canon who regularly insults the very people they’re trying to win over, or that Ash’s white papers often include lengthy digressions about his personal life.

Kate is the novel’s pivotal figure, a polarizing woman who will go to any lengths to get legislation enacted to punish fossil fuel companies and other contributors to climate change. No other contemporary issue (political correctness, gender considerations, Black Lives Matters, equality) is important to her if the world is doomed. She’s willing to cross political aisles to negotiate with people whose fundamental philosophies are anathema to her if they’re willing to support climate-saving legislation. She becomes a popular figure until her other predilections (she is highly sexual and is occasionally caught in what might be considered compromising situations, except they aren’t to her) threaten to derail her political influence.

It’s not a cheerful or optimistic book—it is a dystopia set in times readers will recognize. Often, Markley appears to race to keep up with himself and the changing climate as one disaster after another jeopardizes the very existence of humanity. There are raging wildfires that consume entire cities and states (the Hollywood sign goes up in flames, as does most of the rest of California), hurricanes big enough to fill the Atlantic, inundations that destroy many coastal towns and cities and even some states. Crops fail, persistent heat waves kill legions, prices soar, stock exchanges crash, looting becomes commonplace and a terrorist group shifts from attacking infrastructure to people.

When political maneuvering proves ineffective, even the peaceful activists resort to drastic behavior, including an occupation of Washington, D.C. that brings the government and the country to a standstill. The eventual solution is a bitter pill for everyone to swallow and even it isn’t a guarantee that humanity can survive.

For all his prescience (Markley introduces some interesting virtual reality platforms, for example, and anticipates the recent rise in AI-generated content), his world of the 2030s is remarkably similar to our own. Even many of the product brands he mentions are from the 2020s. However, the amount of research and deep thought that went into this book (Markley says he’s been working on it for over a decade) is mightily impressive. It can be dense and overwhelming (certainly the book could have been streamlined in places), but it may serve its purpose, which is to put readers on notice. This is a work of fiction, but the things Markley details in our near future may well come to pass unless people make radical changes.

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City of Dreams by Don Winslow

Posted on January 8, 2023 by Bev Vincent

At the end of City on Fire, Danny Ryan was on the run from law enforcement and the Moretti crime family, the Rhode Island branch of the mafia. The former believe he killed one of their own, a corrupt FBI agent, and the latter think he made off with a cache of heroin. He takes with him his aging father and his infant son (as did Aeneas, the narrator of The Aeneid), along with a few loyal followers.

Danny actually did shoot FBI agent Jardine, arguably in self defense. As for the millions of dollars worth of heroin, Danny tossed that in the ocean, although few believe him. He and his ragtag gang go west, keeping their heads as low as possible. Danny has very limited resources and no experience raising a toddler. He needs money and he needs to find a way to keep people from wanting to kill him, including the FBI agent who was Jardine’s lover.

The solution to his problems is handed to him on a platter by another government agent. All he has to do is rob a cartel safe house containing untold millions and his legal and fiscal problems will go away. He can pay off any financial obligations the Morettis feel they’re owed and start a new life without constantly looking over his shoulder. Of course, the Mexican cartel won’t be happy about the robbery, but they won’t have any idea who hit them. At least that’s the plan.

Where’s young Ian, Danny’s son, during all this? Danny has, reluctantly, reconnected with his mother, Madeleine McKay, who abandoned him as a boy, leaving his alcoholic, neglectful father to raise him. Madeleine has leveraged her beauty and wiles into an empire of her own in Las Vegas. Little Ian soon has the run of the estate and she looks after the boy while Danny sorts things out.

The life of the idle rich isn’t for Danny, though. He wants to work. The solution to this dilemma comes via a couple of his goons. A former bartender at the Glocca Morra, a Providence pub where the Ryans planned their illegal activities, sold Hollywood producers a movie treatment about the events chronicled in City on Fire. The film has been fast-tracked and the troubled actress cast as Pam Davies, the Helen of Troy who inadvertently ignited the war between the Irish and Italian mobs, thinks this might be her Oscar-winning role. Two of Danny’s henchmen have weaseled their way into the production, first offering their services as consultants and then using their mob skills to leverage a bigger piece of the action. The producers approach Danny to rein his men in. Instead, he becomes directly involved in the production and with the leading lady. He also begins to clear the set of corrupt behavior he recognizes from his former life in Rhode Island. This section of the novel might remind readers of Elmore Leonard’s novel Get Shorty.

Although the gang in Los Angeles is a shadow of its former self, they resent an outsider muscling into their territory. Once again, Danny finds himself in trouble with the mob. His involvement with the movie’s star puts him in a situation reminiscent of choices his now-deceased brother-in-law Liam made that led to their problems back east. He’s smart enough to recognize this, but his solution to the crisis has an unexpected and unintended outcome. In the aftermath, Danny heads to Las Vegas, where he will, no doubt, experience further difficulties in the trilogy’s conclusion, City of Ashes.

As career criminals go, Danny is a pretty decent fellow. He wants to be a good father—better than his old man was, at least—and he’s ready to find love again after the tragic death of his wife. Despite his best intentions, he can’t manage to stay out of trouble, although he manages to find a way back out again each time.

One could argue that Danny rarely solves his own problems but is, rather, the regular benefactor of outside assistance. His estranged mother helped him when he was injured during the Providence gang war and facilitated the deal with the feds that got him free of legal problems. For their part, the feds helped make Danny financially independent. And, when things look dire during a mushroom-fuelled hallucination episode, he once again benefits from just-in-time help from an unexpected source.

Given that Winslow has been inspired by the Greek epics, these frequent deus ex machina episodes are, perhaps, to be expected.

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City on Fire by Don Winslow

Posted on January 2, 2023 by Bev Vincent

The peaceful—occasionally even amicable—relationship between the members of the Irish and Italian families who control much of the crime and labor in Providence, Rhode Island in 1986 is at a crossroads. Members of the older generation of both families are ready to retire. Pasco Ferri, the Italian patriarch, wants to move to Florida and John Murphy, who is showing his age, wants only to dig clams and fish for crabs. The next-in-line of both families are ready to encourage their retirement plans so they can make a name for themselves. 

The Irish are woefully outnumbered by the Italians, who have greater local numbers but also the support of the Mafia network in the nearby large cities. The two factions operate by a longstanding set of rules of engagement. Any slight, real or perceived, requires complex negotiations to come up with a satisfactory method of redress to prevent things from escalating. The Irish almost always lose out in these negotiations, and the gentlemen’s rules implemented by the older leaders are less important to the younger generation.

Danny Ryan never wanted to get embroiled in the life of crime but he fell in love with Terri Murphy and she refused to marry someone whose only ambition was to be a fisherman. He may have married into the Murphy clan, but he’s never been embraced by the business arm of that family, relegated to the second tier as a muscle man who’s never killed anyone. Slightly smarter than the average mobster, he attributes the onset of a gang war to a woman, an outsider named Pam. 

City on Fire draws inspiration from the Greek epics, including The Iliad. Pam Davies is Winslow’s Helen of Troy, the beautiful woman whose kidnapping set off the Trojan War. Pam wasn’t kidnapped, though. She arrives at an annual interfamily clam bake on the arm of Paulie Moretti and soon causes a crisis when she accuses Liam Murphy of groping her. However, when Liam is hospitalized for a severe beating doled out as payback for his unacceptably disrespectful behavior, she leaves Paulie for Liam. This personal affront is enough to start a war. In truth, the kindling had already been prepared and the logs stacked in preparation for a bonfire. Pam was simply the spark that lit the match that set the whole thing ablaze. 

Liam, Danny’s brother-in-law, is the youngest of the Murphy gang. He talks big but lacks motivation, tact and nerve. The only thing he has going for him is good looks. Pam is the book’s real enigma. She remains at Liam’s side even after he devolves into drug addiction and violence, primarily because she understands her part in everything that happened after that night on the beach. Women are mostly relegated to the sidelines in this environment, except for Danny’s long-absent mother, who has her own sphere of power and influence. Although Danny wants nothing to do with her, she steps in to provide assistance after Danny is injured in an ambush-gone-bad.

The press are delighted by the outbreak of violence—it sells newspapers—and the police are willing to let the two factions kill each other so long as they do it in places that won’t disturb ordinary citizens or tourists. After a car bomb and another brutal and very public murder, the authorities send word to tone things down and, for a while, an uneasy truce abides. However, as the two sides jockey for supreme power and internal rifts appear as ambitious men attempt to grab power by removing those who stand in the way, the peace can’t last for long. 

Danny, a new father whose wife is seriously ill, wants to find a way out. A complicated heist plan (including a modern-day Trojan Horse) looks like it might provide him with the means to escape Dogtown (the Irish part of Providence) once and for all. However, there’s no honor among thieves…or anyone else, as it turns out.

In addition to the Greek epics (Danny is modeled after Aeneas, the narrator of The Aeneid), City on Fire (the first book in a trilogy) will remind readers of The Godfather, with its rash of back-and-forth murders. The novel explores themes as old as the Greeks—family, loyalty and honor, and the greatest of these, as it turns out, is loyalty. 

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2022 – Last-Minute Additions

Posted on December 29, 2022 by Bev Vincent

A couple of last-minute additions to my year-end stuff. My new Benjamin Kane story “A Woman Called Rage” appears in the charity anthology The Place Where Everyone’s Name is Fear. The anthology consists of essays, poetry and short fiction. All proceeds go to Planned Parenthood.

I started and finished Michael Connelly’s most recent novel Desert Rose. I would easily add it to my best-of list for 2022. Review to come shortly at Onyx Reviews. I started City on Fire by Don Winslow but won’t finish it this year. We watched The Fabelmans and Spoiler Alert to close out the year.

I am on the last episode of The Peripheral on Amazon Prime, based on the novel of the same name by William Gibson. It, too, would be an easy addition to my best-of list for 2022. It’s quite imaginative, very well produced, has a terrific cast and some wonderful characters. I also finished the first season of the British crime series Guilt on PBS and will dive into the second season on New Year’s Day.

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2022 – A Year in Review – Part 4 – Movies

Posted on December 27, 2022 by Bev Vincent

Either with my wife or by myself, I watched over 70 movies this year. Only a few of them were films I’d seen before, including a few Star Trek movies. I rectified a longstanding oversight and finally saw Blade Runner and I watched Heat for the first time after reading Heat 2.

A few of them were documentaries and a number were foreign films, including the two Midnight Diner movies that it took quite a while to track down. Several were seasonal movies we watched over the past couple of weeks—A Bad Moms Christmas is not our usual fare, but we like all the actors and it was actually quite funny.

Narrowing down the list to a top 12 was a bit of a challenge. To be honest, some of the titles didn’t remind me of anything at all, so I had to Google them to remember what they were about. That said, I was relieved to discover there were none that I have no recollection of whatsoever. Movie titles aren’t always memorable, as it turns out—even the James Bond films sometimes have titles that don’t jar my memory of the films themselves.

Anyhow, here is my top 12 list, in chronological order. I cheated a bit by adding the documentary that makes a terrific companion to Thirteen Lives.

  • Don’t Look Up
  • Nightmare Alley
  • Licorice Pizza
  • Death on the Nile
  • Peace By Chocolate
  • Everything Everywhere All at Once
  • Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
  • Thirteen Lives / The Rescue
  • Pinocchio
  • The Banshees of Inisherin
  • Emily the Criminal
  • Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
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2022 – A Year in Review – Part 3 – TV Series

Posted on December 23, 2022 by Bev Vincent

It’s fair to say I watched a lot of TV this year. There are always the usual network series (Law & Order, The Amazing Race, Survivor, NCIS, Grey’s Anatomy, The Rookie, Blue Bloods) watched weekly. I finished my rewatch of Fringe at the beginning of the year followed by a second viewing of all seven seasons of The Shield. I also binged through the existing seasons of Manifest in preparation for the final season, which was split into two halves, the final half yet to come.

PBS had a few good things on offer: Around the World in Eighty Days, the second season of All Creatures Great and Small, Call the Midwife and the cute crime series Miss Scarlet and the Duke. Some long-running series came to an end: This Is Us, Ozark, Better Call Saul, Killing Eve, The Good Fight, Dead to Me. I finally got around to watching the final season of Homeland, too. Two returning series I’ve always enjoyed are CSI and Criminal Minds.

Lots of British and international crime series, including Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, Borgen, Shetland, Karen Pirie, Grace, Redemption, Sherwood, Deadwater Fell, Deadwind, Borderliner, Miss Sherlock, Good Morning, Verônica and Three Pines.

I started Rings of Power but haven’t gotten beyond the first episode yet. I also need to finish the final season of Westworld before it gets pulled from HBO. We gave up on Season 5 of The Crown after only a couple of episodes and I quit Dahmer after one episode, too. I’ll probably watch The Peripheral over the course of the next week, now that I’m caught up on The White Lotus. I really liked Archive 81, but there won’t be a second season so that’s a shame.

While I enjoyed Andor and the latest season of The Orville and all the Star Treks, none of them were quite as good as the shows that made my top 12 list, which follows—again, in chronological order, not in order of preference.

  1. Yellowjackets (Showtime)
  2. From (Epix)
  3. Severance (Apple TV+)
  4. Barry (HBO Max)
  5. 1883 (Paramount+)
  6. The Old Man (Hulu)
  7. The Bear (Hulu)
  8. Black Bird (Apple TV+)
  9. Kleo (Netflix)
  10. The Patient (Hulu)
  11. Bad Sisters (Apple TV+)
  12. 1899 (Netflix)
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2022 – A Year in Review – Part 2 – Books

Posted on December 21, 2022 by Bev Vincent

I’ve had better reading years. I’m not exactly sure why I had difficulty carving out time to read. A kind of malaise, I guess. When I picked up my iPad, I found myself playing stupid games instead of reading. I’m not a resolution-maker, but if I were, my resolution for 2023 would be to read more and play fewer games. After a number of years of reading almost exclusively on my iPad, I discovered I made better progress with physical books. A lot of what I get are eGalleys, so I can’t always go back to paper, but I will when I can.

I finished something like 37 “books,” although a couple of them on my list (see the complete list here) are more in the novella category. I will probably finish the book I’m currently reading (Swamp Story by Dave Barry) before the end of the year and maybe even get in another book or two during the long weekends ahead. Some of the books I read this year aren’t new, including four by Martha Grimes, one by Haruki Murakami and a couple of Keigo Higashino mysteries.

As I’ve said on any number of occasions, especially during interviews this past year, I’m not much of a list-maker—especially ordered lists of favorites. So, I’m going to trim my list of books finished in 2022 down to my top 12, but they will be in chronological order rather than ranked order. The titles with hyperlinks are ones I reviewed, either at my review site, Onyx Reviews or somewhere else.

Without any further ado:

  1. Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami
  2. Corrections in Ink: A Memoir by Keri Blakinger
  3. Gwendy’s Final Task by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar
  4. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
  5. Fairy Tale by Stephen King
  6. Mr. Breakfast by Jonathan Carroll
  7. Call Me a Cab by Donald E. Westlake
  8. The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias
  9. This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub
  10. Hell and Back by Craig Johnson
  11. The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown by Lawrence Block
  12. A Heart Full of Headstones by Ian Rankin
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2022 – A Year in Review – Part 1 – Publications

Posted on December 20, 2022 by Bev Vincent

Time to look back at the year that will be drawing to a close in less than two weeks and ruminate. Was it a good year? Was it a bad year? One for the history books or one we’d prefer to forget?

All in all, it wasn’t a bad year at all. My wife and I both managed to get through the third year in a row without getting COVID-19, which I hope I’m not jinxing by saying that. We ventured out into the world a little bit more. Took our first flight since 2019. Spent a couple of weekends down at the coast. Dined out at local restaurants—mostly, but not exclusively outdoors, especially not that the temperatures have dropped.

Speaking of which, we’re going to have a hard freeze starting on Thursday night, with temperatures dropping into the mid-teens (-10°C) without getting above freezing until sometime on Saturday. Pretty unusual for southeast Texas, but I think unusual weather is going to be the rule rather than the exception from now on.

My big publishing news for 2022 was the September release of Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of His Work, Life and Influences. To my delight, the book has been very well received and reviewed (I collected many of the reviews on the page at the link above), and a number of translated editions have been commissioned. Two have been released already and at least four more are planned for next year. I have been immensely pleased by the response to the book. Safe to say it exceeded my expectations.

In support of the book, I have done a lot of interviews, both in print and online. Here they all are, in handy bullet form!

That’s not the end, though—I did one podcast interview last weekend and I have another one lined up for the middle of January.

I also published one interview where I was on the other side of the questioning: an interview with Stephen King & Richard Chizmar about Gwendy’s Final Task, published in Fangoria last February.

I published a few essays this year, too.

(The Long Walk intro won’t be published until next month and was written in 2019, but I’m including it here just because it’s so cool.)

It was also a productive year for short fiction publications—quite possibly a record year for me. Here are all the short stories that came out in 2022 (not including translations of previously published stories). They run the gamut from crime to science fiction to horror, a pretty good blend in my humble opinion.

  1. Kane and Averill, Black Cat Weekly #18, January 2022
  2. Kane’s Theory, Low Down Dirty Vote, Volume III: The Color of My Vote, May 2022
  3. Double Play, Summer Bludgeon: An Unsettling Reads Anthology, June 21, 2022
  4. Kane’s Alibi, The Book of Extraordinary Femme Fatale Stories, Mango, July 12, 2022
  5. Date Night, Picnic in the Graveyard, Cemetery Gates Media, 2022
  6. The Unburied Past, The First Line, Vol 24, Issue 2, Summer 2022
  7. Cold Case, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, Vol. 3 No. 4 (#12), 2022
  8. Death Sentence, Black Cat Weekly #51, August 2022
  9. Something Strange, Land of 10000 Crimes, September 2022
  10. A Grave Issue, FOUND: An anthology of found footage horror stories, October 8, 2022
  11. When an Alien Calls, Campfire Macabre Volume 2, Cemetery Gates Media, October 2022
  12. Good Neighbors, Gone, Red Dog Press, November 2022
  13. The Lagrange Point, Fans Are Buried Tales, Crazy 8 Press, November 2022
  14. Life Saver, Still of Winter, Unsettling Reads, December 2022

I have several stories cued up for 2023 already, too.

What comes next? My agent is going to start shopping around a novel in the new year, which is simultaneously thrilling and terrifying. I also plan to write another novella for a follow-up to Dissonant Harmonies, a story that I have been calling “The Dead of Night,” a sort-of sequel to “The Dead of Winter.” I’m also toying with the idea of putting together a mini-collection of four seasonal stories, three of which were published in Unsettling Reads anthologies, the fourth yet to be written.

Beyond that—who knows?

Stay tuned in the coming days for my top X lists of books, TV series and movies, not necessarily in that order.

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Publication Day

Posted on September 13, 2022 by Bev Vincent

Today is publication day for Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of His Work, Life, and Influences. I’m quite pleased with myself that I’m now able to type out that entire title without looking it up, including the serial comma! The title was selected by my editor at Quarto, so it’s taken me a while to “learn” it! The way I remember the order is that, to me, the work is supreme. I’m only interested in the biographical aspect insofar as it influences what King wrote. All those little snapshots that somehow expanded into full-blown novels.

The reviews and reader reactions so far have been gratifying. People really seem to like this book (said in my best Sally Field voice). I hear from my publicist that the first printing is essentially sold out from the publisher and they’ve ordered a second printing pre-publication. That’s great—definitely the first time that’s ever happened to me.

The review below took me by surprise. It’s from something called “The It List” on Yahoo Entertainment, and it’s written by the Editor-in-Chief. You have to scroll down a bit to find it, but it’s possibly the only time my name will be mentioned in an article that leads off by talking about Jon Hamm!

A lot of friends and people I’ve encountered in person and online over the years have helped spread the word about this book far and wide, for which I am deeply appreciative. Shout out to Brian Keene, who mentioned it a few times this morning on Brian Keene Radio—which you should really check out, by the way. Where else will you hear Johnny Cash leading into Prince or Abba leading into Black Sabbath? It’s quite a musical education!

I still have a handful of podcast interviews to do in the next week and a half, and the signing event at Village Books is slated for October 18. It was supposed to be tonight, but the supply chain messed around with us. If you click the link in the first paragraph, you’ll go to a page that talks about the book, has links to interviews, review excerpts, and a list of places where you can buy the book online, including two where you can order signed copies.

It’s been quite a ride so far. Big shout out to Steve Roth, my publicist, who has been enthusiastically and energetically—not to mention effectively—promoting this book far and wide. It makes a huge difference to have someone in your corner like that.

Stay tuned for news about translations. Four are in the works already and I’m hopeful more will be forthcoming now that the book is out in the world.

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