Blog Archives
Trust, Deception, and Survival
Ghost Town follows a former intelligence operative who finds himself involved in a covert military experiment near the abandoned town of Ehrenberg, Arizona. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I began writing Ghost Town while finishing graduate film school at UCLA in the late 1970s. Influenced by Robert Ludlum, Jason Bourne-style espionage, and the Cold War, I imagined a dissatisfied intelligence operative confronting something far beyond his training in an isolated ghost town. Originally titled Desert Dreams, the novel evolved through many rewrites into a story that alternates between the present-day mystery and the events that shaped the protagonist’s (Richard Hart) life, revealing how his past prepared him for the impossible. Maybe I was cramming in too many concepts, but I was also intrigued by the military running a time experiment and how they could still be doing that in the present day to influence events. If they could change one thing in the past, could they do it again on a small, isolated scale?
The novel explores how fear, violence, and manipulation can distort people’s judgment. What interested you about examining human behavior under those conditions?
Setting the story during the Cold War, I was fascinated by how intelligent, well-trained people could make terrible decisions under pressure. Espionage isn’t just about gadgets and secret missions—it’s about trust, deception, and survival. I wanted to see how ordinary people would respond when the rules they depended on suddenly disappeared.
Which scenes proved especially difficult—or especially rewarding—to write?
The most rewarding scenes were those in the ghost town, where mystery gradually gave way to discovery. The most difficult part was balancing two stories at once—the unfolding present-day mystery and the protagonist’s past—so they complemented each other and steadily built toward the conclusion. The relationship between Hart, Honey, and Boon was a unique balancing act because each had a different view of what was happening in those three days. It was a challenge to mix the paranormal with a sense of horror in this “literary fusion” of high-tech contrasting with life over 100 years ago, where the disenchanted agent did not have access to any of the customary tools he would have at his disposal in the present time.
If readers leave the novel debating one question, what do you hope it will be?
I hope they might ask themselves, “What would I have done?” It is a story about survival and illusion and giving in to the illusion or sticking with reality and trying to understand what is really happening. Every character is forced to make difficult choices with incomplete information. If readers find themselves debating those decisions long after they finish the book, then I feel the story has succeeded.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Finalist, Eric Hoffer Book Awards
Brilliant but burned-out CIA operative Richard Hart has a midlife crisis. He wants out of the intelligence game for good…
A CIA operative. A black-site time experiment. A ghost town that shouldn’t exist.
Three strangers. Three days. Trapped 100 years in the past — and hunted by the dead.
🏆 Winner, American Fiction Awards Finalist, Eric Hoffer Book Awards
Burned-out CIA operative Richard Hart wants out of the intelligence game for good. But a career-ending rendezvous goes wrong, and he’s thrown into a military time-travel experiment gone catastrophically sideways — trapped in a desert ghost town, hunted by ghost riders and desperadoes, with no way home…
Essentials Vol. 2
Essentials, Volume Two picks up Harris Pax’s journey through a universe where reality has become unmoored from objective rules and increasingly responsive to consciousness, memory, and desire. Harris and Buttons travel between failing stations and self-contained worlds, trying to establish a safe zone before existence fragments beyond repair. Along the way, Harris confronts the people he couldn’t save, the family he neglected, and the suspicion that his heroic mission may be another expression of his need for control. Buttons’s presence gives the story warmth and momentum. She’s both his companion and an interdimensional consciousness living inside a borrowed body, which makes their growing intimacy inseparable from the knowledge that her physical life is temporary.
The book is especially interested in the difference between saving people and truly sharing a life with them. Harris can cross realities, solve impossible problems, and glimpse other minds, yet ordinary emotional openness remains difficult for him. That conflict becomes literal when he and Buttons enter a collective consciousness, a visually abstract space where thoughts form bodies and private fears become part of the landscape. Their connection offers Harris the complete understanding he’s always wanted, but it also asks whether intimacy requires surrendering individuality. The sequence is strange, tender, and unusually honest about the appeal of disappearing into another person. Their decision to return to separate lives carries real weight because they choose unfinished responsibility over permanent escape.
This volume reminded me of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, particularly in the way each new realm has its own visual language and philosophical argument. One section becomes a whimsical airborne adventure starring a teenage captain and her robot companion. Another resembles an illustrated religious fable filled with angels, gods, and acts of creation. Later chapters dissolve conventional panels into typography, symbols, negative space, and overlapping voices. The changing artists make those transitions feel purposeful. Like Gaiman, Luke Arnold and Chris “Doc” Wyatt use fantasy worlds to externalize private conflicts, but Essentials brings a more openly science-fictional vocabulary to questions about grief, loneliness, identity, and belief. Even its playful realities are connected to the central question of whether an imagined world has meaning when it’s built only for its creator.
The conflict with Angel brings those ideas together especially well. Angel can create elaborate realities within realities, but Buttons challenges the value of a paradise that treats other lives as disposable or unreal. Their argument turns world-building into an ethical responsibility. The volume occasionally moves so quickly between genres and perspectives that some supporting stories feel compressed, yet that abundance is also part of its personality. Essentials, Volume Two is an emotionally ambitious graphic novel about people learning that connection involves risk, limits, and the willingness to return when escape would be easier. It expands the series’ cosmology while giving Harris a more personal reason to keep fighting, and its closing movement leaves the story poised between fragile hope and the danger of turning belief into certainty.
Pages: 184 | ISBN : 978-1964226217
Mad Dog Morgan
Mad Dog Morgan is a supernatural horror graphic novel that blends occult horror, haunted-house fiction, and the bruising spectacle of professional wrestling. Mitch “Mad Dog” Morgan is a washed-up wrestler carrying years of addiction, humiliation, and regret when he enters a house that feeds on wounded people. Watching from nearby is Hilda, a sharp, wheelchair-using young woman who can see the house and hear the souls trapped inside it. Their stories gradually converge, turning the book from a grim character study into a dark fantasy wrestling graphic novel with a surprisingly heartfelt partnership at its center.
Morgan is compelling because his physical strength exists alongside a deep belief that he’s already wasted his life. His history in the ring, his abusive childhood, and his dependence on alcohol all shape the choices he makes without reducing him to a collection of problems. Hilda brings a different kind of toughness. She’s observant, strategic, funny, and willing to confront Morgan when he starts slipping into self-pity. Their growing trust gives the supernatural violence emotional weight, especially as Morgan begins to recognize that the house’s monsters are people whose suffering has been twisted against them.
Maxi Dallo’s artwork gives the horror comics storytelling a filthy, restless energy. Heavy shadows and scratchy lines make rooms feel damp, unstable, and faintly alive, while Patricio Delpeche’s purples, greens, oranges, and violent reds push the imagery toward fever-dream territory. Wrestling moves are staged with satisfying force, but the most memorable sequences often involve warped bodies, staring eyes, living shadows, and layouts that fracture as Morgan’s sense of reality collapses. The house feels less like a setting and more like a patient predator, which suits the book’s mix of psychological horror and body horror.
Mad Dog Morgan is about what happens when pain becomes an identity, and what it takes to loosen its grip. It’s raw, profane, grotesque, and often funny, with tenderness arriving through practical acts of loyalty. Readers who enjoy supernatural horror graphic novels, dark fantasy comics, wrestling drama, and stories about damaged people choosing to help one another will find plenty to dig into here. The book hits hard, but its real strength comes from the empathy behind every blow.
Pages: 184 | ISBN : 978-1964226224
Essentials Vol. 1
Essentials, Volume 1 is a graphic novel about the instability of reality and the emotional logic people use to survive it. Its central figure, Harris Pax, is a brilliant but isolated physicist who discovers that the laws governing the universe have begun to fail. He retreats into a fortified bunker, carrying only a small pink suitcase filled with three childhood toys: Snuggles, Buttons, and Lucy. When these figures awaken as manifestations of higher-dimensional consciousness, Harris is drawn into a journey through fractured realities, each shaped by the memories, desires, and unresolved pain of the people inhabiting it.
The book’s strongest achievement is its use of science-fiction scale to examine intimate questions about grief, attachment, and responsibility. Harris initially understands the crisis as a mathematical problem, but the story repeatedly places him among people whose lives can’t be reduced to equations. In an early parallel narrative, parents risk themselves to preserve their daughter’s childhood during a zombie outbreak, insisting, “Because I’m not talking about survival. I’m talking about life!” That distinction becomes the volume’s guiding principle. Essentials aren’t merely the objects required to remain alive. They’re the people, memories, promises, and imaginative worlds that make survival meaningful.
The shifting artists give each reality a distinctive visual identity while preserving the story’s emotional continuity. Grounded scenes use restrained palettes and familiar panel structures, while alternate worlds expand into saturated color, warped perspective, collage, and abstraction. These changes aren’t ornamental. They communicate how consciousness reshapes experience, and they allow Harris’s internal conflict to become physically visible. The three toys provide humor and friction, but their exaggerated personalities also function as parts of Harris’s divided psyche, confronting his arrogance, loneliness, fear of death, and neglected relationships. The volume grows increasingly surreal without losing its human center.
The narrative is ambitious, energetic, and emotionally direct, though its rapid movement between realities sometimes compresses supporting characters and leaves parts of its cosmology deliberately unsettled. That openness suits a first volume, particularly because the book’s primary resolution is psychological. Harris begins by believing that his intelligence can place him outside ordinary human vulnerability. By the end, he’s forced to recognize that isolation is another form of surrender and that connection carries obligations as well as comfort. Essentials is ultimately a vivid, thoughtful meditation on what a person chooses to carry when everything familiar begins to disappear.
Pages: 176 | ISBN : 978-1964226002
Ultimate Test of Faith
Eclipse: The Silence of Heaven centers on a warrior known as the Holy Avenger who faces a city that has mistaken silence for divine judgment. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The entire novel started with one historical fact. I was reading about the volcanic winter of 536 AD, when the sun was dimmed for roughly eighteen months. Historians have called it one of the worst times to be alive. Crops failed, famine spread, disease followed, and entire civilizations struggled to survive.
My first thought was, “What a perfect time for vampires to thrive.”
But as I dug deeper into the period, I realized something even more interesting. Religion was at the center of everyday life. People looked to God for answers, protection, and hope. When the sun disappeared and the world seemed to be falling apart, I started wondering how people would react if they believed Heaven had simply gone silent.
Some would lose their faith. Others would cling to it even more fiercely. Then I added vampires to the equation, creatures that had suddenly inherited a world without sunlight, and it became the ultimate test of faith. What happens when everything you believe about God, good, and evil is challenged by the impossible?
That’s where Eclipse was born. The historical event gave me the setting, but the characters and their responses to that silence became the heart of the story. It’s a novel about faith, doubt, sacrifice, and the choices people make when they can no longer tell whether Heaven is watching.
The novel explores what people do when they believe their prayers go unanswered. Why did that idea become the emotional center of the story?
I think everyone has experienced a moment where they’ve prayed for something and the answer never seemed to come. Whether you’re religious or not, we’ve all had times when we’ve wondered if anyone was listening.
In 536 AD, people didn’t have science to explain why the sun disappeared. Their faith was their foundation. They looked to God for meaning, protection, and hope. When the world descended into famine, plague, and darkness, I couldn’t help but wonder how they reconciled that with everything they believed.
That’s why unanswered prayer became the emotional center of Eclipse. Every major character responds to Heaven’s silence differently. Some lose their faith. Some become angry. Some convince themselves God has abandoned them. Others continue believing even when they have every reason not to.
Then I introduced vampires into that world. They don’t just threaten people’s lives. They challenge everything people believe about God, good, evil, and salvation. The monsters become the external conflict, but the real battle is happening inside each character.
Which aspect of Veyne’s character proved the most difficult to write?
Veyne was by far the most difficult character to write because I wanted his relationship with faith to feel authentic. It would have been easy to make him either completely lose his faith or remain unwavering from beginning to end. Real life usually isn’t that simple.
At his core, Veyne is still Brother Sebastian. That part of him never truly disappears. He’s a man who has witnessed unimaginable horror, carries tremendous guilt, and questions God more than once, but he never completely abandons the man he once was.
Finding that balance was the hardest part. I wanted readers to understand why he struggled without ever feeling like he had become someone else. His doubts are real, his anger is real, but so is the compassion, humility, and sense of duty that defined Brother Sebastian from the beginning.
I think that’s what makes him relatable. Faith isn’t the absence of doubt. Sometimes it’s choosing to keep moving forward even when you don’t understand why God seems silent. That, more than anything, is Veyne’s journey.
How do you see Eclipse fitting within the tradition of religious horror?
I think Eclipse fits within religious horror, but it approaches the genre from a different direction. A lot of religious horror focuses on possession, demons, or the conflict between good and evil through the lens of the Church. Those stories can be fantastic, but I wanted to explore something different.
In Eclipse, the horror doesn’t begin with evil. It begins with silence. The greatest fear isn’t that God doesn’t exist. It’s that He does, but He isn’t answering.
I also wanted faith to be more than a backdrop. It’s the emotional foundation of the novel. Every major character has a different relationship with God, and the darkness exposes who they really are. Some lose hope, some become consumed by fear, and others discover a faith they never knew they had.
The vampires are certainly the monsters of the story, but they’re also a way of asking much bigger questions about suffering, sacrifice, redemption, and what it means to keep believing when everything around you suggests you’ve been abandoned.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Amazon
For centuries, Sanctum Eterna has stood as the last fortress of divine order. Its towering cathedrals, sacred covenants, and ancient vows have kept darkness at bay—or so its people believed.
Then the eclipse arrives.
As the kingdom descends into chaos, Veyne, a battle-hardened hunter burdened by doubt, is drawn into a war older than history itself. Across the battlefield stands Seraphine, once destined to become humanity’s salvation, now transformed into the most feared force the world has ever known after betrayal shattered everything she believed. Behind them both waits Kharion, an ancient being determined to erase the boundary between heaven and oblivion.
Haunted by forgotten prophecies, cursed bloodlines, sacred relics, and impossible choices, heroes and monsters collide in a breathtaking struggle where loyalty is tested, faith is broken, and redemption comes at an unimaginable cost.
Rich with gothic atmosphere, unforgettable characters, and cinematic action, Eclipse blends dark fantasy, supernatural horror, epic battles, and emotional storytelling into an unforgettable reading experience.
Perfect for readers who enjoy:
Dark epic fantasy
Gothic fantasy
Supernatural horror
Religious mythology
Vampire fiction
Monster hunters
Grimdark fantasy
Character-driven fantasy
Dark romance undertones
High-stakes fantasy adventures
When heaven falls silent…
Who will remain?
Two Destinations
13: Stone Corners and Other Stories is a collection of ghost stories rooted in memory, family, guilt, faith, and the strange comfort of being scared on purpose. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I used to split my time between writing lyrics, and songs, and stories. My songs were well-received (the other bandmates liked them, and a few got on the St. Louis radio). So, I wondered what the difference was between my songwriting and my failed fiction writing. There were a few reasons: the lyrics were concise, had a good rhythm, and hit with emotion, whereas my fiction meandered and often didn’t connect. The goal was to make my fiction more like my songwriting: to the point, playful with the rhythm, and to pack an emotional punch.
Adding to that goal would be what to write or which genre to explore. As a teen and a young adult, I had tried fantasy (which was derivative and boring) and science fiction (which wasn’t very plausible). In college, I tried creative writing and realized I had a lot of maturing to do in order to write convincing fiction, so I gravitated to alternative rock and roll music, which gave me immediate satisfaction and feedback. However, that lifestyle wasn’t too healthy to maintain without serious deliberating habits.
In my first try at sobriety at age thirty-five, I decided to write a ghost story and use the lessons learned in my songwriting. I made a Ghost Emotion list, which would be the kind of things that might linger after death and feed a ghost: lust, murder, betrayal, despair, coveting, guarding someone or guarding against something, etc.
“Night At the Black Orpheum” was my first ghost story and the first story I wrote that I thought was publishable. From there, it was finding the seeds for a ghost story and mixing the reality with something weird.
At some point, I decided to name the collection under the umbrella title of 13 and all the connotations that number brings, though, for me, the number thirteen has some personal connections.
Are any of the locations featured in your book inspired by places you’ve known in real life?
Several, as it turns out. Some are first-hand experiences, such as ghost tours in the Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. That is the weirdest and most haunted place that I have been to. At the Meridian Coffee House in Alton, Illinois, I experienced orbs (quite a lot of that activity) and saw second-hand evidence of other manifestations. A nightmare about my grandparents’ huge basement inspired “A Sort of Homecoming.” In this dream, there were secret doors in closets that led to secret rooms that I had never explored. Taking the house as a metaphor for the mind, I used it to make a story of hidden secrets. “Blue Harvest” was a second-hand story told to me by my band-mates who all went to a haunted barn where there had been a mass killing by a deranged father (I had to leave early that night and was not present). Two of my bandmates gave me some details, but the third refused to talk and quit the band soon afterwards. A little later, I went to his house, and he told me his version of the events, which provided the climax for the story. He had been so upset by what he had seen that he eventually became a Christian preacher.
Faith is woven naturally into many of these stories. How important was it to treat spiritual belief as an active part of the supernatural rather than simply a background detail?
My upbringing in a Christian home instilled a belief in an afterlife with two destinations. As a history student, I read a lot about the Egyptian and Greek beliefs and depictions of the afterlife. As a reader, I discovered that the best ghost literature hinged on one important fact: the people in the stories believed in the phenomena happening to them in order to understand it, combat it, or resolve it. At some point, after watching ghost documentaries, reading nonfiction accounts of hauntings, and watching debunkers, I came to the conclusions that there could be four assumptions: one, it’s just in our imaginations (but if I can project ghosts, I wish I could learn how to project so many other things like money and gold); two, it’s all real like people say they’ve experienced (which tends to make people very uncomfortable); three, it’s not real, but seems real due to magnetic fields or some kind of local force in the environment that acts upon our brain and causes the projection to manifest; or four, this phenomena is real and can only interact in our section of reality by using certain electrical wavelengths or light spectrums and has other attributes beyond our knowing.
I am open-minded to the phenomenon. I can’t explain away everything I’ve seen, or heard, or felt other than it’s beyond me. Even as a believing Christian, can a spirit be seen, or is it actually the spirit of the deceased or something nastier? There are such stories in the Bible. Jesus was a demon hunter. They sure didn’t like it when He came to town.
Are there other haunted places or family stories waiting to be explored?
Yes, I am working on a companion collection of tales for a future 13 collection. One other tale that I posted on Substack involves a visit to the St. Augustine Lighthouse. My wife wanted to visit; I’ve never been to a lighthouse, and I love historical places. But I had no idea of the ghost activity there and only learned about it when two workers told me about it. A third worker knew their stories but was a skeptic. He said, “I’m only a skeptic because I have never seen a ghost. I would love to see a ghost and be proven wrong.” Well, there you are: that became the seed for a story.
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Built on Unconditional Love
The Devil Inside follows a father and daughter pulled into a haunting tied to H.H. Holmes, where ledgers, mirrors, and breathing pages reveal that evil survives through memory and the stories that keep rewriting it. What inspired you to reimagine H.H. Holmes?
H.H. Holmes has always fascinated me because he’s one of history’s most infamous serial killers, but most books about him simply retell the crimes we already know. I wanted to explore something different. I started asking myself, What if Holmes never really disappeared? What if death wasn’t the end for him? What if he found a way to rebuild his Murder Castle and continue his work through memory, obsession, and the people drawn to him? That “what if” became the foundation of the novel. Rather than writing another historical thriller, I wanted to blend real history with supernatural horror and create a story where Holmes becomes something far more terrifying than a man. You could say I wanted to bring him back to life.
The novel uses recurring images of ink, ledgers, gold script, ash, and breathing architecture. How did those motifs develop as you wrote the story?
Those images grew naturally as I explored the idea that evil leaves traces behind. Holmes wasn’t just collecting victims in my version of the story. He was preserving them. The ledgers became a way of recording souls, the ink represented memory refusing to fade, and the gold script symbolized temptation because it always appeared beautiful before revealing something horrific. Even the house itself became a living participant in the story. I wanted the building to feel as though it remembered every victim and every secret, almost as if the walls were breathing alongside the people trapped inside. Those recurring images helped tie the supernatural elements together while reinforcing the idea that some horrors never truly disappear because they simply wait to be remembered. As I continued writing, those motifs took on a life of their own and became another way of showing that the past is never truly gone. It lingers, waiting for someone to uncover it.
Julie and Frank’s relationship gives the horror a strong emotional center. How important was that father-daughter bond to the novel’s structure?
For me, it was the heart of the novel. Horror is always more powerful when readers genuinely care about the people facing it. Frank approaches everything as a scientist who believes there must be a logical explanation, while Julie is forced to experience things that defy reason. Their relationship creates a balance between skepticism and belief, but more importantly, it’s built on unconditional love. No matter how frightening the haunting becomes, Frank never stops trying to protect his daughter. That emotional bond gives the story its humanity and raises the stakes because the battle isn’t just about surviving evil. It’s about a father refusing to lose his child to it.
What do you hope readers are still thinking about after they turn the final page of The Devil Inside?
I hope readers walk away wondering where evil really comes from. Is it something we create, something we inherit, or something that survives because we continue telling its story? The Devil Inside asks whether monsters die with their bodies or whether they continue to exist through memory, fear, and obsession. More than anything, I hope readers are left questioning the things we choose to remember and the things we desperately try to forget because sometimes those are the stories that refuse to stay buried.
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What begins as a haunting becomes something far more disturbing: a legacy of obsession born in the shadow of Chicago’s Murder Castle, where a killer learned to turn flesh into data and memory into machinery. As the past reasserts itself through hidden ledgers, buried tunnels, and recorded breaths, Julie is drawn into a design that refuses to end.
To break the cycle, she must descend into places where light cannot reach, where history does not stay buried and the Devil is no longer a man, but an idea that survives through memory, ritual, and inheritance.
The Devil Inside Me is a gothic, slow-burn psychological horror novel that blends possession, historical evil, and emotional dread. Elegant, unsettling, and relentless, it explores temptation, redemption, and the terrifying cost of remembering what was never meant to survive.
13: Stone Corners and Other Stories
13: Stone Corners and Other Stories is a ghost story collection built around houses, basements, churches, bars, old stages, graveyards, orchards, and the emotional leftovers people carry into those places. Jeffrey Cummins frames the number thirteen as personal, spiritual, and spooky, writing in the foreword, “It haunts me pleasantly enough. It is nothing to fear.” That line fits the whole book: these stories are frightening, but they’re also deeply interested in memory, family, guilt, faith, and the strange comfort of being scared on purpose.
The collection has a strong sense of place. “A Sort of Homecoming” turns a grandparent’s house into a map of the mind, with rooms, closets, and basements holding old dread. “Lethe Home” returns to that basement in a tighter, sharper childhood nightmare. “Stone Corners” expands the book’s world through Kelley and Mercury Branscombe, whose supernatural sensitivity turns an old home into a spiritual battleground. The stories often feel like someone telling you what happened late at night, after everyone else has gone quiet.
Cummins’ horror is very physical. Floorboards wobble, doors slam, beetles crawl, shadows gather in corners, and the dead don’t stay politely symbolic. At the same time, the supernatural usually points back to something human: a mother’s fear in “Tearing at Holes,” a town’s buried violence in “Haunting My Hometown,” temptation and bravado in “Blue Harvest,” or grief and music in “Night at the Black Orpheum.” Even when the book goes big, as in “The Day the Ghost Walks,” with Shakespearean theater and old debts among actors, it still comes back to the same question: what do the living owe the dead?
Faith runs through the collection in a direct and sincere way. Scripture, prayer, forgiveness, and spiritual warfare aren’t decorative here. They’re part of how characters understand fear and how they push back against it. That gives stories like “Ghostproof” and “Church of the Holy Spook” a distinctive personality, where the haunted house story and the testimony sit side by side. Cummins also has a fondness for rough-edged, conversational narration, mixing dread with jokes, domestic detail, and working-class memory.
What makes the book engaging is the way it treats ghost stories as something close to home. These aren’t just tales about apparitions. They’re about places that remember, people who can’t quite shake the past, and fear that keeps looking for a door back in. Near the end of the foreword, Cummins writes, “All I really have to do to find one is fall asleep.” That’s the book in one sentence: intimate, haunted, personal, and always listening for something moving in the dark.
Pages: 467 | ASIN : B0FLB6NHNP
