RED RIGHT HAND

Claire held the gun in her left hand, the blood in her right.

“You ready?” Arson wanted to know.

She just sat there. Arson was always like that. Impatient. He never stopped moving. Like now. His fingers tap-tap-tapping against the steering wheel of the Ford Roadster he’d stolen up in Bakersfield, gun-oil gleaming on fingernails that danced in the afternoon sunlight.

Arson’s fingers were scarred. He wasn’t worried about any blood. As far as he was concerned, any blood spilled today would belong to someone else.

And that seemed more than a likely possibility. They’d stopped to talk about the job one last time before they pulled it. There was a little town up ahead called Fiddler, and in that town was a bank that Arson had cased a couple days ago. He said it would be easy pickings, because the town didn’t have any law worth worrying about.

But Claire wasn’t worried about the law. She was worried about something else.(more)

10 TIPS FROM MR. FOX & MR. PARTRIDGE

A few years ago, Subterranean Press published my collection, Mr. Fox and Other Feral Tales. If the title seems a little familiar, it should—the original Roadkill Press edition of Mr. Fox was my first book way back when in 1992, and it brought me my first Bram Stoker award.

But the SubPress edition of Mr. Fox was a different animal. The subtitle told the story: A Collection/A Recollection/A Writer’s Handbook. Or, to put it another way, there were stories in the book—the seven tales from the original edition, plus eleven other early stories and an excerpt from an unfinished novel—and there were memories, too... (more)