bullets”. Stan is a law enforcement officer in the American town of Scranton, a detective in the Supernatural Crimes Investigation Unit. Scranton happens to be the intersection point for “at least ten different ley lines” and therefore a magnet for the assorted supernaturals who have been living publicly in The States ever since the Second World War. Apart from that and the related fact that the local SWAT team is not what you think, but actually “Sacred Weapons and Tactics”, Stan is very much like every other hard-bitten and world-weary detective you’ve come across: a man with a dry sense of humour, a penchant for witty one liners, married to the job and with unresolved domestic issues. Hard Spell is the first investigation for the Occult Crimes Unit. A second investigation is promised in the forthcoming Evil Dark, but in the meantime Hard Spell is a page turning, stand-alone story with thrills, tension, blood and humour and a satisfying conclusion to a complex plot. There’s a new player in Scranton who’s prepared to stop at nothing to get what he wants. The bloody trail he’s leaving behind him is pretty obvious, but the difficulty lies in finding out who he is, where he’s going next and what it is, exactly, that he does want. Markowski and his partner could well be the only things between him and it, provided they can work out what the “it” is. If you like detective procedurals, have a weakness for supernatural horror and paranormal buddy stories and enjoy a well-written, fast-paced tale, Hard Spell is a must read. By J.S.Watts Cat in My Brain: Why I’m Self-Publishing My Next Book By Alan Spencer A Lucio Fulci movie convinced me to self-publish my fifth novel, Cider Mill Vampires. Seriously, it’s true - and I’m not trying to say Lucio Fulci and I are in the same league together. I love his movies, plain and simple. So I was up late one night watching Cat in the Brain. This is the film where Fulci is living out scenes directly from his previous horror movies and facing off with cruel murderers and psychos. He soon questions whether he’s losing his mind, or if it’s someone else playing games with him. This was later in the man’s career when his health was declining, and he had meagre funds to bring his cinematic visions to the screen. Honestly, I hated Cat in the Brain the first time I watched it. I thought it was cheap, and without the other clips used excessively from his previous films, there wasn’t much to it. But the night I decided to self-publish
my next book, I was watching this movie and I got the joke. Fulci’s joke, I mean. He’s making fun of himself, and it’s hilarious when you look at it from that viewpoint. This movie got the gerbil in my head moving, and I’ll tell you why. I tried to put myself in Fulci’s shoes for a moment. He had little money to make this film. He didn’t have a huge movie studio backing him up. It wasn’t well-received when it came out, yet as of recently, it’s been re-released and looks better than ever, and people pay good money to buy the DVD, including myself. So instead of the movie business, I thought about the book business and my writing. Do bigger publishers see my novels and overlook them for the same reasons a major studio overlooked Fulci’s later films? Do mainstream publishers read over my submission packages with storylines involving vampires using cider presses to excuse people of their blood, or a murder mystery involving power tool wielding zombies, and think no way in hell am I publishing this guy? Of course they do! So you’re thinking I’m quitting and throwing in the towel with this self-publishing idea. I’m not giving up the good fight, I promise. Publishing is different these days with e-books, declining book sales, print-on-demand publishers, and increasing competition among many other authors writing in the same genre, many of which who probably are better than you. An even bigger hurdle to jump are those publishers that actually take unsolicited manuscripts. They might take on three to four new writers a year, if that many. It’s a very slim margin. Your book could be great (or it could be crap, let’s be honest), and it might be turned away for various other reasons that have nothing to do with quality or merit. Writing’s a business. It takes solid marketing and promotion to get a book to take off - and sometimes even that’s not enough. If you’re a writer, I’m sure you’ve been put through the ringer with rejections and close calls many times like anyone else. It’s part of the game. So Fulci’s movie got me thinking about the bigger picture. Do I keep submitting novels to bigger publishers and wait them out, or do I work with what I have in the meantime, just like a struggling Fulci did in the later stages of his career? My book might not have a team of editors reading through it or a fierce marketing campaign budget, but damn it, I’m putting it out there for the world to see. For those readers who think I’m taking the easy way out, I’ll tell you why that’s not true. My real plan, long-term, is to keep doing all of it. I’ll keep submitting to bigger presses, and every once in a while when the time is right, I’ll self-publish a book. No matter how it goes down, I want to stay