eric nuzum dot com

Transitions

Bodie Interior Shot VIII
Originally uploaded
 by James Marvin Phelps (mandj98)

In between changing diapers at 3 a.m. and working full time, I'm also slowly working through the first round of edits for Bring Me To Heaven. It's absolute torture. I mean, I love the way the book is developing, but I am so ready to be finished and care about other things.

During a stolen few hours yesterday, I was burning through a bunch of notes and moving along well when I came across a one-sentence note that crushed me.

"We need a transition here."

I remember talking with my editor about it. By "transition" he didn't mean a few sentences, he meant a whole story. A bridge from one big scene to the next. Something that stood on its own, but forwarded the story. Answered a few questions.

In other words, it meant work.

Then two words popped into my head: Ryan Grossi.

It was a perfect idea--I'd just write about Ryan Grossi. So last night I hammered this out in one sitting. I know this has no context or set-up, but I don't think you'll need any to read it.

****

I was standing just inside the doorway from my friend Ryan's second floor porch. The doorway led back into a spare bedroom. When I walked through this room moments before to use the bathroom, it was empty. Now there was a faint outline of man laying on a chaise longue. His skin was ashen, hair white, and he just lay there as if he'd been draped over the couch. There were no lights on in the room, so I could barely see his motionless form. It looked like he was floating. Thing was, there was no old man living in Ryan's house. I'd never even heard Ryan ever mention an old man before. The room was empty, then suddenly, he'd just appeared.

This is it, I thought. A real ghost.

I'm going to close my eyes, I said to myself. And if there is a ghost here, I will see it when I open them again.

I opened my eyes.

He was still there.

"Fuck me," I said, not realizing for a moment that I'd actually said it out loud.

I slowly backed out on to the porch and closed the door. I could tell Ryan noticed something was wrong.

"Jesus Christ, Ryan," I whispered. "There is a fucking ghost in your house."

"What?"

"I just saw it, floating above the chaise longue," I said.

"Shut up, douche," he said.

Ryan Grossi was our neighborhood kingpin, enigma, and badass-all after having only lived in our neighborhood for four months. He just suddenly appeared when his family moved to 35th Street. My friend Chris spotted him on his first day living there and within sixteen hours, every kid in the neighborhood knew him, feared him, and wanted to be his best friend, all at once.

The prologue is past

BOOkeh
Originally uploaded by mouseteeff

I haven't been writing as much here as normal lately because I've been struggling over the past two months with edits to my new book Bring Me To Heaven. 

Editing the book makes it seem like finishing the book was the easy part.

While putting together and writing this book, I spent a lot of time in denial that I was, in fact, writing a memoir. Rather than a goofy book about ghosts, it became a story about my own ghosts.

Since coming to this realization, my editor has asked me to consider some structural changes to embrace this clearer direction--including writing a prologue. At first, I was very resistant to the prologue idea.

I've become fairly zealot-like in avoiding the stereotypical weaknesses, pitfalls, cliches, language, and format of contemporary memoirs. Mine is not a typical memoir story, so I've struggled to write an anti-memoir to share it.

I just scrapped my first attempt at an prologue opening. Another goal of editing has been to inject more of my contemporary life into the book--so I began with the origins of a long-running minor argument with my wife. I think it worked very well as an opener to the book, but it kinda sets the wrong tone. It seemed kinda weird to begin a powerful memoir by bitching about where my wife leaves her shoes.

So, instead, I'm opening the book with a screed against zucchini--which feels much better to me.

There is more to the prologue than what I'm sharing, but this is the scrapped opening of the book.

Prologue

My wife and I have exactly and only two issues in our relationship. One a piece.

Oddly, they both involve doors.

Mine is a completely reasonable request that goes unheeded on an almost daily basis. We are, at her request, a “no shoes” house—meaning that outdoor shoes should be removed and not worn around the house. This is not my issue. My issue is where these shoes are located. My wife insists on placing her shoes in front of the entry closet door. This would be fine, except I place my shoes inside the entry closet. Which means that in order to get access to my shoes, I need to move her shoes out of the way. 

I move them six inches. Six inches from where she puts them to the place where I have to move them in order for the closet door to open. And I do this all day long. Every day. 

As you can imagine, I find her one issue with me to be completely ridiculous.

My wife closes doors to the guest room or office or other rooms we aren’t using. Then I come around sometime later and open them again. She closes. I open.

Whenever she gets annoyed to the point of mentioning it to me, she always gets the same response.

“I hate closed doors.”

She closes. I open.

This has been going on for thirteen years.

Recently, and for the first time, she asked me why I hate closed doors.

“Because there could be a ghost there,” I answered.

I had always assumed this was obvious, but like many things we think are obvious, it is very not so.

Now, if any of you allow me to use your restroom during a dinner party you’ve invited me to or find yourself walking down the hallway at my doctor’s office during my yearly physical, please rest assured: I don’t have a problem with all closed doors—just the ones that might have ghosts hiding behind them.

In fact, there are many times I don’t mind closed doors, as long as I know what is on the other side.

The problem is the times that I look at a door—and I can feel something on the other side. Something that shouldn’t be there. I never see it coming when it happens. But at some random moment, I’ll look at a closed door and instantly become overwhelmed with dread—a heavy, thick feeling in my chest that sends cold waves of fear throughout my body.

That’s how I know.

Have I ever seen a ghost? No.

But that doesn’t mean one isn’t there.

Carter 1979 - 2001

close up
Originally uploaded by ericandkatherine

An excerpt:

I don’t care how many calories are in those damn tortillas, I fucking love Chipotle.

I work in the Chinatown district of downtown Washington, DC, which has a ton of restaurants, thus, a ton of tourists. I am equally sympathetic for and appalled by the tendency of people to eat at familiar chains when they travel. On one hand, people are in a strange place and familiar things can provide a welcome anchor. On the other, you have to admit that there is something incredibly lame about traveling to some other place just to eat the same food you could have at home. But people do, in droves.

The only real problem I have with this is that when people travel to DC and decide to go to Chipotle, they are going to my local Chipotle, which means there are always lines down the block at my local Chipotle, which means I never get to go to my local Chipotle.

Every once in awhile when the weather is crap and school is in session, God will smile upon me and there is no line at Chipotle when I walk by. This was one of those days.

Chipotle, like every chain restaurant in DC, is staffed by a collection of disgruntled African-American and Latino youth who, in all truth, run the entire city. If they all just got up and left, the city would cease to function entirely. It’s just one example of how there are two Washington, DCs. There is the Washington of people who work in restaurants, and the Washington of people who eat in those restaurants. There is the Washington of people who own multi-million dollar townhouses, and the Washington of those who build, clean, and maintain those townhouses. Those DC residents that aren’t self-righteous assholes (and there are a handful of us) try to be aware of this and straddle the two worlds as best we can.

When I made it up to the counter at Chipotle, I noticed the cashier, Teshawna, had a huge tattoo on her forearm. It was two interlocking roses and vines surrounding a scroll that read, “Carter,” and below it “1979 – 2001.” She really didn’t seem like she was interested in doing anything other than making change for my steak fajita burrito, but I wanted, so badly, to ask her about the tattoo. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-two herself, which means that she was barely a teenager when Carter died. Was Carter her brother? A cousin or friend? I wanted to know how he died and what his life was like. It is so easy to make assumptions about the deaths of young black men (assuming that Carter was a young black man)—and Carter very well may have lived that cliché—but I was still curious.

More than anything, I wanted to tell her I knew that pain.

It’s very easy to get caught up in your own pain and think it's novel—to go around thinking that the rest of the world is blissfully numb to what you experience. But Teshawna and I aren’t unique, everyone has experienced painful loss. It is the great unifier and equalizer. The haves, the have-nots. The inner-city kids who take the bus to this job they hate and the tourists from Alabama who eat the tacos they make. The K Street lawyers and the average Joes they exploit. They all miss someone or something that’s gone. Joy is part of the human experience, but so is pain. In a balanced life—or even in an unbalanced life—one is meaningless without the presence of the other.

There was a time when I wondered why people got pets. They live for a couple years and then they die. You fall in love with this animal, knowing that in a few years you will suffer through the pain of their death. But as time has gone past, I've learned that the reason people do it is because the hurt is worth it. The love and joy mean so much that it’s worth the absolutely unavoidable grief attached. It’s almost as if the grief is the price you pay for all the happiness.

The same isn’t true of people though. While we are sad when Uncle Bart dies at eighty-seven after suffering four heart attacks and prostate cancer, when someone young dies, we are angry. When someone young dies, we feel we’ve been cheated. When someone says that a young person’s death is “tragic”—I always wonder…to whom? Is it tragic that the dead missed out on the rest of a never-meant-to-happen life or is the tragedy the pain inflicted on those left behind?

When I look at Teshawna’s arm, the real question I want to ask her is if she got that tattoo because she missed Carter so badly or is it because she wanted everyone to know how angry she is? The only thing I know for sure is that now, years after his death, Carter is no longer a brother, cousin, or friend. Carter is gone, Carter is dust.

Now, Carter is a symbol. A symbol of something inside of her. He is her ghost—an icon for her pain or anger or both. Ghosts can be many things. Sometimes they are burned into your memory, sometimes they are burned into your soul, and sometimes they are burned into your arm.

Gettysburg--The final ghost hunt

stick your head here
Originally uploaded by ericandkatherine

There is a multi-million dollar a year industry associated with the Gettysburg battlefield that you wouldn't think of right away. It isn't Civil War uniforms or country crafts or funnel cakes (though Gettysburg traffics a lot of each). It's the ghost tourism industry. And it is mammoth.

Two weeks ago our friend Meghan came along with Katherine and me to Gettysburg to investigate and meet some of the people involved. Katherine sat out the evening's activities (even I can see the lack of wisdom of asking a 5-month pregnant woman to traipse across a dark field at night), opting instead for a restful evening in an air conditioned room watching bad movies.

It was a terribly boring evening, until the last 10 minutes. Despite the lack of activity for the rest of the evening, I still managed to write 14 pages about our adventure.

Photos (sans ghosts) here. Below is a truncated excerpt from our evening:

“You get anything?” some guy asked us while momentarily looking up from his camera.

He was so excited he was almost out of breath. He didn’t even wait for our answer before running behind another boulder and taking another picture. In the dim of our flashlight, I could see him look at his display, shake his head, then start to head off in a different direction.

The hillside was pitch black, yet we could hear voices coming from almost every direction, punctuated with random flashes of light.

The sun sets at 8:19 p.m. in mid-July. The Gettysburg National Military Park closes at 10 p.m. That leaves a little less than two hours of darkness for hundreds of terrified tourists to roam around the park’s six-thousand acres looking for ghosts.

The ghost hunting weapon of choice: Digital cameras. Tourists climb rocks, slink through woods, and slowly creep down paths clicking picture after picture hoping to capture some of the ectoplasm, mist, and strange apparitions thought to be as common as Civil War era bullet fragments. Stand on any high point between dusk and closing time, and the battlefield glows with tiny microbursts of light.

San Diego ghost hunting: a bust!

ghost hunting supplies
Originally uploaded by ericandkatherine

Funny how things work out. When I first started looking for places to visit for my new book Bring Me To Heaven, I knew I would have to make a trip to San Diego to see the infamous Whaley House. If you look on just about any "most haunted places" list, you'll see the Whaley House. So when I knew I'd have a week-long trip scheduled for work this summer, I knew to hold open an evening. Luckily, I was able to arrange a private afterhours tour with the head of the museum (folks will do just about anything to end up in a book).

The place has had a colorful history. At various times in it's 150-year history, the Whaley House was a courthouse, dance hall, general store, school, 150-seat theater, polling place, location of the city’s gallows, a billiards hall, rat-proof granary (which, incidentally, didn’t keep out rats), and home to its primary builder, Thomas Whaley, and his family.

Despite being a small (by today's standards) four bedroom house, the building is rumored to be home to dozens of ghosts. Starting with the spirit of "Yankee" Jim Robinson, a man tried in 1852 for grand larceny and hung in the gallows that stood where the house was later built. 

Many members of the Whaley family themselves are heard walking the halls in the Whaley House, mostly Thomas and his wife Anna. Additionally both are regularly seen standing in the ends of hallways (on several occasions, visitors have seen Thomas shushing them to be quiet). Their daughter Violet is seen in the guest bedroom, where she died after shooting herself (an earlier suicide attempt, when Violet threw herself into a well containing only two feet of water, was not so successful). Another daughter, Anna Amelia is seen roaming the gardens that she loved to tend. Marion Reynolds, a young descendent of the Whaleys, is thought to roam the home, where she died after accidentally eating ant poison. Another young girl is seen in the house, a family friend who supposedly died there after unintentionally strangling herself in a clothes line. There’s even the ghost of a fox terrier that is often seen running through the hallways and, on rare occasion, licking and humping the legs of Whaley House visitors. 

Collectively, these stories make you wonder why anyone would want to live, work, or visit the property, as it seems that being associated with the house guarantees a terrible, awful death there (not to mention an eternity spent roaming the tiny building). Yet to this day, visitors flock there. More than 100,000 of them a year. The Whaley House is one of San Diego’s biggest tourist destinations, right up there with Sea World and the San Diego Zoo. While many come under the guise of its impressively long list of historical firsts, the truth is that most Whaley House visitors come because of its paranormal reputation. People just like me, along with my friends Chantal and Richard, who were also in town at the same time.

What happened? Not a lot. And I don't mean it was like my other hunting adventures where we experienced a lot of spooky things that we could later debunk. We spent a few hours sitting in the dark in one of the most haunted homes in America--and literally nothing happened.

Chantal, being a crafty reporter, located a flier for a ghost-themed tour of Old Town San Diego held late at night, including going into a supposedly haunted restaurant to contact spirits. The guy conducting the tour, Michael, was very nice to us, but again, next to nothing.

Michael does have a Web site for his tour, which includes a bunch of videos of what is supposed to happen on the late night hunt (the videos labeled "11pm tour"), but nothing even remotely close to that happened for us.

Here are some pictures from our afterhours private tour of the Whaley House on Thursday night. And some more with our "Old Town's Most Haunted" ghost hunt on Friday evening. Don't set your expectations too high.

"If I was a dead person, where would I be hiding?"

Getting dark
Originally uploaded by ericandkatherine

I helicoptered into Mansfield, Ohio this weekend (not literally, mind you) to do some work for my new book. I went to spend the night in the old Mansfield Reformatory.

Mansfield was once Ohio's main prison and it's huge--more than 250,000 square feet. It has the largest free-standing cell block in the world--two of them in fact--each six stories high, featuring over 1,100 cells. At one time, Ohio's death row was housed here. More than 200 people died here in the 90 years it was a functioning correction facility.

You've probably seen Mansfield before, as it is regularly used as a movie set. Shawshank Redemption was filmed here, as well as parts of Air Force One and Tango & Cash.

The facility was pretty much abandoned in 1990. Since 1995, a preservation group has maintained the site and conducts tours on Sunday afternoons.

Mansfield is something between a historic ruin and an EPA Superfund site in the making. Lead-paint peels off the walls and ceilings, asbestos and plaster dust are everywhere, rusty metal, missing guardrails, loose stairs and on and on.

It's a challenge to go through in the daytime...but what about at night?

Several times a year a group of the preservationists bring outsiders into the prison to document its supposed paranormal activity. Unlike other paranormal sites, where people feel cold breezes, light touches, or see a floating head or something--Mansfield's interactions with the dead are on a different level. People are grabbed, punched, shoved, and pushed. Things are thrown.

So the deal is that the crew go in with you at 8pm, right before dark, and give you a tour to help get you adjusted. Then they turn off the lights. Then it slowly gets dark. Then you are free to roam the entire prison structure, almost completely unrestricted. Sounds crazy? I know, it is. The gate on the property opens from the inside, so once you walk out, you were done for the night. I, and a handful of brave souls, stayed until 5 a.m.

Now, the point of this is to eventually sell some books, so I shouldn't really tell you what happened to me or the others, but let's just say it was probably the most frightening night of my entire life. Seriously.

The head of the ghost hunt crew took me through in the afternoon so I could see what it looks like, pictures are here (and quite fascinating). I took a few pictures at night (here), but I was far too busy to be snapping photos. Something I normally don't do, but did at Mansfield, was record some video. I shot about an hour's worth. Below is the first video I put together, which should give you a taste of what it was like.

And if you are patient...you can hear a ghost talking at the end of the video!

Very spooky!

Fables

REM backstage pass
Originally uploaded by ericandkatherine

Time for another excerpt from my ever-expanding and hopefully-finished-this-summer memoir Bring Me To Heaven. Since I work on this every day, it only seems appropriate to post excerpts while I'm working (though it won't be out for some time).

While I've been purging junk from the basement, I ran across this backstage pass that made me think to share the following excerpt. (Though, to be clear, the pass isn't connected to the story. The pass came from a tour later that same year.)

This comes from about half-way through the book, where the narrative structure breaks down for about 15 pages and it just becomes a series of small vignettes. At the time, I was pretty close to proverbial "rock bottom," so my life didn't really have a narrative structure at that point--it was just a series of clusterfuck and dumbass antics.

Anyhow, this vignette is pretty self-contained, no set-up required.

"Put question marks on your knees," I said.

He took the stencil, found the question mark, placed it over his knee, and then ran the ink roller over the open stencil. After lifting it away, the left knee of his jeans had a silver question mark. A moment later, the right one had its own question mark as well.

"Why don’t you put an 'E-N-D' down here," I said, pointing to his cuff.

"No words," was his reply.

"Then try this," I said, taking the stencil and roller, and putting "L-M-N-O" and half of a "P" down his right calf.

I looked up and he almost smiled behind his sunglasses.

Seven days earlier I'd received a postcard from the R.E.M. fan club informing me of a string of tour dates that ran through the Midwest. Three days after that I woke up and impulsively decided that I was going to attend as many as I could. I took all the cash I could lay my hands on and took off, with nothing other some clothes, a warm six-pack, and that postcard. Two days later, I’d only managed to get into one show and only had thirty-five dollars left. I knew I needed to get creative.

A force that gives us meaning

Ghost Rider
Originally uploaded by red321

This morning I got out of the shower, looked myself in the mirror, and said out loud, "I can do this. I really think this is possible."

What I was talking about is also the reason I haven't been posting much lately. I'm really struggling with my new book.

Books are one of those things that you aren't entirely sure what they are until you actually create it. So while I set out to write a book about my fear of ghosts (and specifically why I'm scared of ghosts), the book is actually about a lot of things...many of which have nothing to do with ghosts.

More than spirits and spooks, the book (called "Bring Me To Heaven") is about what it means to be haunted.

Right before the holidays, I turned in the first 120 pages, full of ghost-hunting adventures and coordinating stories/memories of me as a young man (read: complete fuck-up). My editors loved it and felt I was on the right path. In all humility, I agreed.

The writing is different for me--really pushing my game forward. It is funny and full of unexpected surprises and twists. The memoir parts are crazy, quite literally. The whole thing unfolds like a novel or a mystery. It is a very literate piece of work, which is new for me. There is symbolism and metaphor and foreshadowing and grown up stuff like that. But it is still pretty entertaining.

It was a good start. But it was also where I hit a brick wall. In the three months before this weekend, I'd only managed to finish nine more pages.

It wasn't that I had writer's block--I don't believe in such a thing. I just realized that in order to make sense out of difficult, embarrassing, and painful memories--it is going to take a lot of work. A lot more work than I had planned.

After struggling over how to tell some of these stories, this past week I finally realized that the best way to bust through would be to simply start writing again. So I did. And it worked. I've done more work in the past four days than I have in the past four months.

Here is something else interesting about this new book. I sold it based on an explanation and an outline--not a single page was written. That's great for me to be able to do that, but eventually I realized I'd have to actually write something. So about a year ago I sat down and started typing.

The story below was the first thing I wrote, though I'm not sure why it was the first thing I wanted to do. It appears about a quarter of the way into the book. It comes at a point where some of the recurring themes emerge, along with many of the repeating literary devices (lots of things in this book are discarded, don't work, or don't function correctly--much like myself during this time of my life).

For some reason, sharing an excerpt from the book makes it feel very real and concrete. So, this seemed like the right time to do this.

The only thing you need to know to make sense of this excerpt is that Laura, the girl in this story, will eventually die (you learn this very early in the book). Jimmy is the drummer in my "band," which was more of a figment in our imagination than anything else--we jammed together one time, but talked about "the band" constantly for almost a year. This story is about the first time all three of us hung out together.

Here it is.

We met Jimmy at the Putt-O-Links, a miniature golf course located at the end of a long strip of abandoned industrial buildings outside of Canton. Each spring the world around Putt-O-Links got smaller and smaller. Shortly after the factories closed, the car dealerships across the street moved. The following year the diner closed. For the past few years, the Putt-O-Links and the ice cream stand next door were the only signs of life for half a mile in any direction. However, that spring, the Putt-O-Links hadn’t opened, nor had the ice cream stand. There were no “going out of business” or “thanks for 30 great years” signs, just tall weeds and a fallen rusty chain that had once closed off the parking lot. It almost looked as if the owners had forgotten it was summertime.

Jimmy didn’t let the Putt-O-Links change of fortune slow him down; he still went golfing there at least three times every week. I knew this because every time I was with him, highlights of his mini-golf exploits were always part of the conversation. He shared his secrets for getting his little pink ball exactly up the middle of the big clowns tongue and how the now stationary windmill blades always screwed up hitting par on the 12th hole. So when I told him I wanted us to hang out with Laura, he immediately suggested Beer Golf.

Waiting out March

March 09 Calendar
Originally uploaded by Matt Schwarz

I'm anxiously watching the last days of March clicking down, wondering which is going to hold my fate.

Seriously.

This past August I spent the better part of a week in Lily Dale, New York. I've written a few (1, 2, 3) previous posts here about my experiences there.

As I wrote in those earlier posts, Lily Dale is a small town in upstate New York that is entirely owned and run by followers of the Spiritualist religion. "Entirely" as in they run all the hotels, restaurants, post office, fire department...everything.

Spiritualists believe that ghosts act as intermediaries between the living and God, often providing advice and guidance to the living.

So, obviously, Lily Dale is an unusual place.

During my first public service on my first day in Lily Dale, a medium named Brenda told me she had a message for me.

"I'm sensing a spirit…a maternal spirit, please…perhaps a mother or grandmother. Is your grandmother on your mother’s side in spirit, please?"

Assuming that "in spirit" was a euphemism for "dead," I responded "Yes."

"Okay, that's it," Brenda said. "Tell me, please, was she a little round in the bottom?"

Now how was I supposed to answer that? My grandmother wasn't really overweight, but she wasn't rail thin, either. Imagine how pissed off my grandmother would be if she traveled back from Grandma Heaven to deliver a message to her oldest grandchild just to arrive as he said, "Oh yeah, Grannie had a huge ass!"

I just shrugged my shoulders and said nothing.

"That's okay," Brenda said. "I feel the spirit that is reaching out to you is definitely Grandma."

Brenda paused for a moment.

"She wants to surround you with light and love right now and let you know that she watches over you and is proud of you," Brenda said. "She knows that you have a job that is difficult and demanding and she is proud that you do this work. She says that you will be given a wonderful opportunity to advance your career, in March. Yes. In March. It will be a good thing, nothing to fear.

"That…that is mostly it…she just wants you to know that she misses you and knows how much you loved her. She wants to leave you with blessings…oh. There is one more thing, please. Grandma wasn't much of a car person, was she, please?" Brenda asked.

"No," I replied.

"Well," Brenda said with a slight chuckle. "Grandma wants you to check your tire pressure over the coming weeks, please."

“My tire pressure?"

"Yes, she says that it is nothing dangerous; just make sure you are watching it carefully to be safe. That’s it. And I leave you with God's light and love."

Then Brenda got a message from some woman's Uncle Floyd and was off in another direction.

Tire pressure? Job opportunity in March?

I drove seven and a half hours to get there, just to have my dead grandmother tell me to watch my tire pressure and wait seven months for good career news? Others came to Lily Dale to connect one more time with the recently departed, find out what will happen to themselves and their loved ones, understand the afterlife and how to prepare for it, and finally figure out where Aunt Myra hid her jewelry. All I got was some car and career advice from a woman who couldn't tell a tire gauge from a meat thermometer…oh, and had been dead for more than twenty years.

Nine days after returning from Lily Dale a few friends and I were on our way to a movie. I was driving and my friend Joe was giving me directions. Bad directions. After turning the wrong way down a street, I attempted a three-point turn to head the other direction. In the middle of my second turn, I bumped up against a curb and heard a loud pop.

A flat tire.

The mechanic later told me it blew because it was only half full.

I should have checked my pressure, he said.

Needless to say, since then I've always wondered what was going to happen in March. Seeing that it is now late on Friday, and there are only two more business days to go, I'm fully expecting that either Monday or Tuesday will be very exciting.

We'll see.

Washington City Paper

Vampire Love
Originally uploaded by iinemi

My favorite writer at the Washington City Paper, Angela Valdez, wrote a post on their blog about me, the current state of my new book, Bring Me to Heaven, and her thoughts on the paperback of The Dead Travel Fast...

Quote:

"...I expected little more than an entertaining gift book. I made this assumption (a bad habit of mine) even though I already knew Nuzum was an intelligent and curious guy. And he had invited me to his birthday party. Also in attendance were: an Elvis impersonator from Potomac and the ashes of Nuzum’s cat. It takes a kind of mischievous fortitude to celebrate a shitty year (death of cat) by serenading your friends with a man in sequins."

[Link]