Eat the Dark - Pimp Kit

Some would call it a press release -- I prefer more direct terms. Tomorrow is the deadline for copy that will actually appear on the book, and this is what I put together for my publicist in anticipation of our October 16th launch.

EAT THE DARK
by
Joe Schreiber

Tanglewood Memorial Hospital is on its final day of operation.

The patients have been relocated, the doors locked down, the staff reduced to a skeleton crew of doctors, nurses and technologists. For Mike Hughes it’s just one final shift as an MRI tech. His wife Sarah and five-year-old son have come by to help him pack his things. Then, only hours before the hospital is to be closed for good, a man is brought in for a scan of the brain.

But he’s not just any man.

He’s Frank Snow, America’s bogeyman, an incarcerated serial killer with a knack for dealing out “devil’s bargains,” the most gruesome and degrading punishment imaginable to his victims.

But that’s not the worst of it.

When Snow gets loose and cuts the power throughout these old halls and stairwells, it soon becomes obvious that escape is the last thing on his mind. He has business here in this place, settling an old score with those unlucky enough to be trapped in here with him. Mike Hughes and his family are here with him, somewhere, in the dark.

There is no escape.

Eat the Dark is a taut, real-time thriller set within cold and empty confines of a place haunted by death, where nowhere is safe, and unspeakable horror is everywhere. Because here in the dark, Frank Snow could be anywhere—and tonight he might just be the devil himself.

"A harrowing, up-all-night read with delicious scares at every turn. Joe Schreiber knows just what terrifies us, and his masterful skills are on full display in Eat the Dark."
-- Tess Gerritsen, author of The Bone Garden

“Eat the Dark is a tight novel of terror. Well written, fast paced, with a grip like a claw. I loved it.”-- Joe R. Lansdale

“One part noir, one part horror, one part uniquely the very talented Joe Schreiber. Dark, chilling, scary - I couldn't put it down.” --Peter Abrahams, author of Nerve Damage and Oblivion

"I didn't just Eat the Dark--I gorged on it. It's a master class in fast-moving, scary-as-sh*t storytelling. With this, only his second novel, Joe Schreiber's just landed on my will-buy-on-sight list. I loved this book." --Duane Swierczynski, author of Severance Package

“A mesmerizing and original horror-thriller that displays Joe Schreiber's first-rate writing prowess, Eat the Dark is full of terrifying scenes of graphic and emotional intensity. It's a brilliantly plotted novel with so many unusual twists and turns that the reader will wish he had a seat belt on to keep him strapped in to his chair."
--Tom Piccirilli, author of The Midnight Road and The Dead Letters

"Reminiscent of Stephen King's early work, Eat the Dark is a terrifying, claustrophobic, bone-chilling, unputdownable masterpiece of suspense fiction. Human monster Frank Snow is a wonderful creation. You'll read this book in one sitting and want to pre-order the next Joe Schreiber novel."
--Jason Starr, author of Twisted City and The Follower



WHAT THE CRITICS ARE SAYING ABOUT JOE SCHREIBER’S AWARD-WINNING FIRST NOVEL, CHASING THE DEAD:

“An efficient, relentless terror-generating machine.”
--New York Times Book Review

“Abandon hope, all readers who enter Schreiber’s taut, scary debut; you’re not going anywhere until you devour every one of its tension-filled pages.”
--Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Remember this debut novelist’s name; you hear it again.”
--Rocky Mountain News

“Brilliantly creepy…utterly readable…impossible to put down.”
--Bookpage

“A tour of The Twilight Zone via Stephen King…taut and razor sharp, it demands to be read with the lights on.”
--James Rollins, New York Times bestselling author of Map of Bones and Black Order

The audio version of Chasing the Dead is the winner of a 2006 Publishers Weekly Listen Up Award.

Eat the Dark is coming October 16, 2007 from Ballantine/Del Rey Books. Rights have already been sold in Germany and in audio to Tantor Media.

The Novel I Was Born to Write

As of right now, I am 18 pages into my new novel.

It is the novel that I was born to write.

I can't believe how awesome this book is going to be. If I do it right -- and execution is everything -- it will be incredible.

I am terrified that somebody else out there is working on exactly the same idea, or something close. As a consequence I am doing my best to make this my own, to make it great, and I just hope and pray nobody else gets this same idea in the next three months, or worse, that they've already had it, and the book is coming out this fall.

If that happens, I will let you know. The title of that post will be: AAARRRRRRGGGH!

Have a good weekend.

Do Blurbs Sell Books?

Sure they do. Is there really any doubt? I know for a fact that I've picked up more than one book because some writer I love has written something snappy and effusive on the back. There's no doubt that getting Stephen King or John Grisham to blurb your book is a Good Thing.

The question is, where do the blurbs come from? Who gets them and how?

For Chasing the Dead, my publisher went out and got some choice quotes from James Rollins and Christopher Golden. Rollins is a big bestselling thriller writer that everybody wants to be, and Chris Golden, besides being a helluva nice guy, is prolific, prize-winning and innovative, and he's got clout. Getting them to endorse my first novel was a huge coup. I got a chance to thank Chris personally at the New York Comic Con, and if I ever meet Rollins, I'll buy him a Knob Creek on the rocks.

With Eat the Dark, I decided to try something different. I started approaching writers myself, asking if they'd be willing to take a look at the advance review copies when they came out. I started with authors whose work I've loved for years--Jason Starr, Peter Abrahams, Joe R. Lansdale, Tom Piccirilli--and included other authors I'd met on tour or online and seemed to be genuinely nice people. I sent them emails and if they seemed open to reading the galley, I mailed copies of the ARCs out myself with handwritten notes mentioning how much I dug their stuff, and how to get in touch if they felt like blurbing.

And I got great results.

"EAT THE DARK is a gripping novel of terror. Well written, fast paced, with a
grip like a claw. I loved it." -- Joe R. Lansdale

"One part noir, one part horror, one part uniquely the very talented Joe Schreiber. Dark, chilling, scary - I couldn't put it down." --Peter Abrahams

Every time one of these messages showed up in my inbox, it made my week. Besides being a great promotional tool, getting blurbs from authors you love is a truly surreal experience, at least for me. I've derived hours of pleasure reading these people's work, they've shaped my worldview and the way I think about stories and writing, and not only did they read my book, they liked it.

So what do you do? First, you say thank you. You let the writer in question know how much it means to you that they took time from their writing and reading and lives, to read your book and say nice things about it. I think in my case it helped that I sent the books out to them myself, because these people get buried with ARCs to blurb and they can't possibly get through them all. If at all possible, you pay back the favor by mentioning the authors and their books to anybody who might be listening.

And you keep your publisher informed. Keith at Ballantine knew which authors I was in contact with and he reminded me gently when the deadline was going to be to get the blurbs on the book jacket. I put together my own version of a press release with all the quotes together with a snappy synopsis of the book and some of the more positive reviews for Chasing the Dead. At Keith's suggestion, I forwarded the press release to David, my publicist at Del Rey, so he can use what he wants to when the review copies go out.

There's obviously no one single thing that sells a book, and you can't quantify the effect of every publicity componant. But blurbs are good things and, unlike author tours and co-op exposure, they don't cost anything. Plus it gives you a good excuse to get in touch with your favorite writers. I highly recommend it.

My Simpsons Fetish

First, a confession.

I haven't actually watched the Simpsons in years. Meaning that I haven't been home on a Sunday night at eight o'clock with the TV tuned to FOX. I have been buying the boxed sets as they come out, and I will probably go see the movie when it comes out in a couple weeks.

But none of that has much to do with my Simpsons fetish. Nor does it have much to do with the fact that my best friend from high school is one of the assistant directors on the show. No, I come before you today to talk about a handful of my other best friends, the most inspiring guys I've never actually met, the writers: John Swartzwelder, George Meyer and peripherally (because to my knowledge they've never actually contributed to the show)--Ian Frazier and Jack Handey.

Every so often I get a bee in my bonnet and start googling these guys and they all seem connected. Try it and see if you agree, but be sure to follow the links. There's a ton of their original material (authorized and otherwise) floating around the web. Handey's "Deep Thoughts" are, of course, what he's most famous for, and they're genius, but if you haven't had the pleasure of reading his equally deserving New Yorker piece, "What I'd Say to the Martians," please, read it now. G'wan. Go ahead. I'll wait.

As for Ian Frazier, well, perhaps the best I can do is just cut and paste this Army Man contribution that I found on Maud Newton's blog:


MY IDEAL WOMAN

I want to describe for you my Ideal Woman. My Ideal Woman has slim hips, powerful thighs, sinewy calves, a narrow waist, a flat stomach with taut lines of muscle, a broad, powerful chest, wide shoulders, bulging biceps, jack-hammer-like forearms, a bull-like neck, and a drooping, veined pecker with a livid, velvety fire-helmet top — an opalescent drop of pre-cum winking at the droop-lipped meatus slit — and two pendulous balls heavy with hot bloatum. Call me a dreamer, if you will, but I believe my Ideal Woman is out there, somewhere, and I’m not going to stop looking until I find her.

If you're not gasping for air at this point, tune up your pacemaker.

Frazier's humor collections, Coyote Vs. Acme and Dating Your Mom, are also ridiculously funny in a way that the rest of us can only stand by and observe with quivering, boxer-moistening awe.

It's no coincidence that Frazier and Handey both contributed to Army Man, the equally legendary mimeographed 'zine produced by future Simpsons guru George Meyer back in the late '80s. (This profile of Meyer is probably one of the best things I've ever read in the New Yorker.) I have to admit, a huge part of my affection for these guys and their show and Meyer in particular stems from the fact that if they weren't busy getting paid millions for their work on network TV, they'd be holed up in cheap apartments with bad wallpaper and antidepressants, glumly amusing each other with exactly this same kind of humor.

Which brings me to John Swartzwelder, in the words of my best friend the assistant director, "arguably the greatest writer in the show's history," recently let go because he was "too expensive" and then rehired as one of ten or so writers for the forthcoming movie. I don't know how dough Swartzwelder actually makes but he's worth every penny. Last night I watched (and immediately rewatched) the seventh season knockout "The Day the Violence Died," in many respects, a perfect episode. Swartzwelder's self-reflexive sense of humor, dead-on satire and a hundred breeds of affectionate and not-so-affectionate homage are all here, all capped off with a cameo by Swartzwelder himself. Virtually every every scene, every line, falls into the category of instant classic, and there are several moments of brilliance so painstakingly detailed that you almost can't believe they exist.

Am I overstating my case? I don't think so. Because like so much of what's proffered on tv, the Simpsons just isn't all that great anymore. How could it be? For a while it was simply the best thing to ever appear on television. How can those standards possibly continue indefinitely? Talent is as common as table salt, but genius is sui generis. You can only stretch it so thin, paint it over so much mediocrity, before the sheen starts to fade. Which is probably why I'm taking my sweet ass time plowing through these old boxed sets of Simpsons episodes. When they're gone, baby, they're gone.

Fortunately, the intrepid viewer will find Swartzwelder's particular brand of reclusive greatness elsewhere. He has written a series of detective novels, the Frank Burly novels, the most recent of which, The Exploding Detective, just came out last March. The cool thing about this is that Amazon will let you read the first chapter or so these books and you can just how much vintage Simpsons awesomeness there is packed in the pages. If, by all accounts, Swartzwelder is happy just to hole up in his house in Malibu (or wherever) and continue to write novels and sell autographed copies on eBay, I'm absolutely satisfied.

Short Stories Make My Brain Go "Sneh."

I used to think it was just The New Yorker.

I get the magazine--my mom subscribes me every Christmas (thanks, Mom!)-- and I read it every week. Some weeks all I get to read is the cartoons, sometimes the Talk of the Town, or Anthony Lane's movie reviews, Atul Gawande's medical essays, Ian Frazier and Jack Handy's humor pieces.

The only thing I can't get through is the fiction. The short stories. For the longest time I thought it was just the fiction editors of the New Yorker, who I've never quite forgiven for rejecting Richard Yates until after his death.

But it turns out I have this problem. I struggle with short fiction. Reading it and writing it. It's a block. And I'm not proud.

Every year or so, I get an idea for a short story. It takes me a long time, and I spend the whole process feeling like a guy trying to open a can of sardines with his teeth. I wrestle and sweat and snarl and drool, all over a paltry twelve pages for the which market is dubious, at best.

That explains why I can't write 'em. But why can't I read 'em? Because I'm an idiot, obviously. Maybe they remind me of my own failings and inabilities and I just can't stand it. But mainly I think the reason is, for me one of the greatest pleasures of reading is the full-immersion reading experience, a prolonged, lunatic, sometimes epic marriage between author and reader. I like the fact that, over the long haul, when a story reaches novel length, all pretense drops away. It's a huge, sprawling, forgiving canvas, and I guess as a reader and writer, that's what I need.

I hesitate to generalize about format because there are so many excellent short stories out there, but maybe that's part of the problem too. Where to start?

Ironically, the last memorable thing I read was Duane Swierczynski's terrific short story in progress, "Sidewalk Tiger." But coming across something like that sometimes seems like discovering a perfect snowflake in a blizzard. So I put the question to you:

What good short stories have you read lately?

Does Being a Parent Make You a Worse Writer?

No.

It's not often I'm able to answer a question so definitively, so let me savor this moment. There are a lot of other grown-up pursuits that parenting does interfere with -- unrestricted travel, going out on a Friday night without giving anybody any notice, leaving rusty chainsaws lying around the living room -- and I'm not going to kid you, it's certainly harder to find time to write.

But let's let the facts speak for themselves, shall we?

Number of novels published or optioned by Hollywood between 1987-2002 (from high school graduation to birth of first child): 1.

Number of novels published or optioned between 2002-2007: 3.

That's a pretty lean string of years back there at the beginning. And relatively speaking, I was a man of leisure. I somehow found the time to live in LA, Martha's Vineyard, Boston, Chicago, Portland; I read Nabokov and watched Tartovsky movies. And while I wouldn't necessarily describe what I wrote at the time as "crap," there was probably a certain, shall we say, laxity of intent. It wasn't the work of a man with mouths to feed other than his own. Does this mean that "commercial" writing is better than "artistic" writing? I wouldn't know. The last artistic thing I wrote was a love note to Stacy Van Oosterhout back when I was a sophomore in college trying desperately to get laid. And you don't want to know how well that worked.

I guess I would have to say that my writing lacked focus for a long time. There are plenty of people who would say it still does, but this isn't their blog, is it? No, it's mine, and I say that having kids forces you to focus on certain real-world practicalities that can tighten soft writing and firm up aimless prose. When you have to justify the time you take away from your very young children, you tend to, first of all, make the decision, is this really what I want to do? And second, you do a whole lot less screwing around, searching for the perfect phrase, rewriting Chapter One. In short, you get on with it.

And when you're writing genre fiction, that turns out to be a good thing.

Does Being a Writer Make You a Worse Parent?

Over the last forty-eight hours I've come to the end of a new draft of my novel in progress, The Black Wing. This stage of the process is always marked with a kind of fevered desperation where I steal every available second to write and rewrite, getting up earlier, sometimes three in the morning, then crashing hard at seven or eight. I triple my coffee intake, I wander the house clutching my laptop to my gut like some kind of bizarre prosethetic device, looking for a quiet corner.

And I neglect my kids.

I already know how tough it is doing three jobs--a day job, parenting, and trying to write a good book a year. The question that I pose today is, how tough is it to be the child of such a person. In short, does being a writer make you a worse parent?

From my three-year-old, Veda: "Yes!"

Me: "Why?"

Veda: "We wait and wait and wait for you to play with us and all you do is write!"

From my more circumspect five-year-old, Jack: "Well, Joe, it's not like you're a bad parent." (Yes, he really calls me Joe, he has for years, we have struggled long and hard to correct this practice and have him call me "Daddy" and it simply doesn't take. And yes, he really talks like this.) "You're a great parent actually."

But the fact is, as much as I'd like to believe my son, I think Veda's more right about this than Jack is. Because, dammit, I know I am a bad parent when I write, or at least when I hit this particular part of the process.

Let us speak plainly of these things. If parenthood is death to Self, then writing is the very zombification of Self, whereby Self comes exploding back from its premature burial, vengeful and id-driven and frothing at the mouth, a starved and irresponsible beast which cannot, under any circumstances, be left in charge of the kids.

Because it will eat the kids. It will leave the scissors out and forget the sunblock and leave the door open so the cat gets out because all it wants to do is get back to the story and finish that fucker. And that's only the colorful part of it. The even worse part happens because, as a parent, you can't really allow this to occur...your children need you to perform certain unavoidable tasks such as feeding them and making sure they get to swim class on time and (God help you) telling them bedtime stories, and in these moments, when pressed into action, the just-let-me-finish-the-book part of yourself provides what must be the blandest, most pathetic, anemic, bloodless version of parenting available. This, friends, is the muzak of parenting, the Cuba Gooding Jr. of parenting, the veritable non-dairy-whipped-topping of parenting.

And the kids can tell.

Fortunately, this nadir of the outward soul doesn't happen all the time. Although it may seem to others (my wife, for example) that I am perpetually going through it, it doesn't really get this bad until crunch time, whereupon I do my level best to get through it as quickly and painlessly as possible, so that -- in the end -- I may be my normal, cheerful self again, until the next time that a gigantic slab of narrative requires my relatively undivided attention.

Sometimes I fantasize about a small tidy motel room (for some reason I always picture it on the edge of a gorgeous Southwestern desert, the way Pixar rendered it in Cars) where I could sit with my laptop and push through these last few days without any interruption but the whir of the air conditioner to disturb me, but even in those moments I know I couldn't last. I would miss my wife and kids, even if it meant coming out to provide them with the ersatz kind of fatherhood skills that are all I can muster on those days.

Tomorrow: Does Being a Parent Make You a Worse Writer?

Flying Out to Cali with 500 Candy Bars

It's on the web, so it must be true...

In three weeks I'll be at the San Diego Comic Con, signing free advance copies of Eat the Dark and handing out such cool swag as Eat the Dark chocolate bars and pocket penlights at the Ballantine/Del Rey booth. My family will be there too because I promised my kids they'd see a lot of bizarre creatures, horrific monstrosities and erotic extraterrestrials.

Also, some people in costumes.

On Friday afternoon, I'll be appearing on this panel: 1:30-2:30 Kill Your Darlings—Writers of mystery and suspense discuss the satisfaction in (fictionally) killing victims who provide the world with a wealth of suspects and alibis through their daily behavior. Try not to draw the authors' attention as F. Paul Wilson (Repairman Jack novels); David Morrell (Captain America: The Chosen); Max Allan Collins (A Killing in Comics); Richard Morgan (TH1TRE3N); Josh Conviser (Echelon); Joe Schreiber (Chasing the Dead) and Elizabeth Forrest (At Twilight's Fall) plan their next victims. Moderated by Maryelizabeth Hart of Mysterious Galaxy. Room 4

Free books, free chocolate, San Diego, comics and me running my gums on the topic of murder and mayhem...think you can make it?

Bang!

I got five days off work leading up the 4th of July. Spent it trying to pretend like I didn't need antibiotics for the raging sinus infection that makes me feel like I've been snorting Jack Daniels. Sat out on my back porch in a beer and Sudafed stupor, sweating my balls off and cranking out pages on The Black Wing rewrite.

Was it awesome? You bet!

Sweetening the pot immeasurably was this awesome new Eat the Dark blurb that came from neo noir master Jason Starr:

"Reminiscent of Stephen King's early work, Eat the Dark is a terrifying, claustrophobic, bone-chilling, unputdownable masterpiece of suspense fiction. Human monster Frank Snow is a wonderful creation. You'll read this book in one sitting and want to pre-order the next Joe Schreiber novel."
Jason Starr, author of The Follower

Getting blurbed by Jason is a special pleasure because he's been one my favorite writers for years, somebody whose work I never miss. If you haven't checked out his work -- Twisted City, Hard Feelings and Tough Luck are some of my favorites -- do yourself a favor. He's one of the best out there, a total original, and his stuff is absolutely harrowing.

Sunday Night Blues

It’s Sunday again.

Three Sundays since The Sopranos ended.

Three weeks since the cable went away.

Sometime back in the wilds of 2005, my wife locked us into some kind of low introductory rate with Comcast. I don’t know the amount; I just know that it made cable affordable to us right around the time that free “on-demand” programming was introduced in our area. Suddenly I was able to watch crappy old horror movies on IFC’s late-night Grindhouse venue, and weird old foreign vampire movies from the ‘60s, and Roger Corman flicks, and my wife could watch HGTV and the cooking channel. The kids watched Noggin and PBS Kids, and once, by accident, five unforgettable minutes of Eight Legged Freaks. If I delved deeply enough into the on-demand menu I could even, through some bizarre programming quirk, watch badly edited versions of the Flash-animated internet shorts that I wrote seven long years ago for Heavy.com, called “Behind the Music that Sucks" -- to date, the only work of mine I've ever seen on TV.

And then there was Sunday night HBO.

Not since high school, when I stayed up watching shows like Moonlighting, grooving to Al Jarreau’s theme music and wanting to be as cool as David Addison, have I so looked forward to a night of television. Sunday on HBO was the one night of the week that the kids absolutely had to be in bed, lights out and no more requests for water or stories or songs, by nine o’clock on the dot. Any further chatter from upstairs was roundly ignored. My corporeal self faded away and I became nothing more than a pair of eyes and ears, a brain and a hand with a glass of vodka and a wedge of lime in it. If it was summer, the air conditioning was on, and we sat on the floor watching Deadwood, Entourage and The Sopranos. Never in that order, though; Christina's observation that Entourage was like the perfect dessert after Deadwood was absolutely accurate.

It was the golden age of television.

And then, a little at a time, it died.

First David Milch went away. Then, inevitably, David Chase followed suit. The following day, the good people at Comcast discovered that we’d been enjoying a six-month introductory rate for over a year and a half, and a pleasant man in a black T-shirt dropped by the house to collect our cable box.

Now we get six channels.

I watch none of them.

Well, that’s not exactly true. We still get the Food Network, and if my wife is watching Nigella Lawson, I am physically incapable of looking away, which I suspect this will be the case as long as I’m able to draw air without the aid of a respirator. But otherwise I spend a lot of time poking around the fridge and wondering what’s on Starz. Bearing in mind, of course, that there was never anything on Starz when we had cable, but now that it’s gone, I feel like somebody took a precise surgical instrument and cored out a small bit of my heart.

I know it’s a good thing. I have a novel to finish. My kids are staying up later these days. I know that there are too many books to read, and nothing that good lasts forever. But on Sunday nights, when dusk comes over the backyard, the barbecue grill is dragged in, the kids are in bed and there’s cold beer in the freezer, I find myself missing that odd static HBO intro and the voice intoning, “And now, the HBO original series…” that, despite how brief a role it played in my evenings, somehow marked me as deeply as the shows I watched in junior high.

Take that, Al Jarreau.