In the fall of 1994, I quit Stephen King cold turkey.  Mid-book, I threw up my hands (and the book) in frustration. “That’s it! I’m done with Stephen King!”  And I brought the book back to the library unread.
 
 
 Oh sure, I would later gobble up all the movies and “television events” I could get my hands on, like a reformed junkie sneaking back to the old digs for a little taste. I couldn’t miss out on The Stand, The Shawshank Redemption, Storm of the Century, The Green Mile, and Rose Red, not when everyone else was enjoying them. But for ten years, I never read another word the Master of Horror wrote.
 
 
 I read plays, I read mysteries, I read transgressive fiction and the classics. I read literally dozens of screenwriting books (more on that later).

'It’s hard to think of a single work by any author which really inspired me when I was still trying to pick my way through writing. I was always an avid reader and a moviegoer.

I started out reading horror when I was relatively young, and I remember trying to read The Stand when I was around thirteen. Couldn’t finish it, plus it was my dad’s book and needless to say, he wouldn’t have approved of me reading that at such a young age. Which is not to say my parents are conservative, they just believe in such things as age limits. 

I suppose the one work which had the biggest impact on me in my formative period was .... 

Johnny the Homicidal Maniac was a short lived comic that ran seven issues through Slave Labor Graphics from 1995 – 1997. Oh. My. Eris. I first read this series, gathered now in the Director’s Cut, when I was a 14-year-old, shithead rock n roller who thought she was Hells Angels-tough because of fire-engine-red hair and basement punk shows.

I was not tough. I’m still not tough. I’m nice. But even nice people have daydreams about ripping out the intestines of those around them when they’re at the mall or stuck in traffic, am I right? I’m right. Don’t want to light yer partner’s face on fire for not unloading the dishwasher AGAIN, but need some sort of violent action? Read Johnny the Homicidal Maniac.

A cop-out, I know, but I gotta make this plural—narrowing it down to a single book just doesn't seem honest or fair in my case.

I started out on comic books and The Hardy Boys and then I read all the Erle Stanley Gardner mysteries and the Agatha Christie books.  Somewhere in there I also read everything Jules Verne wrote and all the Edgar Rice Burroughs books, both Tarzan and science-fiction.  Lost on Venus stands out most in my mind.  How appropriate I'd end up living right next to Tarzana.  

I grew up in a small town in Kansas, a great place to grow up but also a great place to dream about OTHER PLACES far more interesting.  To me, horror was schlocky Hammer movies and cheap B-fare, which I LOVED, incidentally!  I laughed my way through hundreds of those films, and still find myself arguing that horror is just comedy gone messy most of the time.  We had two movie theaters and a drive-in, all of which changed programs three times a week, so don't cry for me.  TV was more limited (1 channel!), but boy, do I remember the Twilight Zone!  And the fact that Rod Serling was an actual writer and possibly coolest adult I had ever seen made an impression, I guarantee you, and no doubt influenced my career choice.

The Turn of the Screw was the first horror book that put it all together for me:  great writing, great literature, terrific characters (including a narrator who maybe isn't telling the truth to the reader!) and a couple of shocks that made me jump right out of my seat.  I read the book the first year of college (thanks, English Department, University of Kansas), which was about the time I realized with great wonder and astonishment that maybe I, too, could be a writer, which was a couple of years before realizing with even more wonder and astonishment that maybe I, too, could be involved in making movies, as well!

Dave Eisenstark (aka Burford Hauser) has been writing professionally and working in the film industry in various capacities for more years than he actually remembers. Nine of his feature film scripts have been produced, including the award-winning comedy Monkey Love (starring Jeremy Renner) and the horror classic Creepozoids.  

Like film producer George Lucas, Dave graduated with a degree from USC Cinema; unlike Mr. Lucas, everything else.

Dave's first novel, The Video Killer, is probably vile, tasteless trash, but possibly amusing, and currently available from Spanking Pulp Press. 

http://spankingpulppress.com/books/video-killer/

Dave lives in Los Angeles with his wife, a production sound mixer on major motion pictures. His daughter resides in the San Francisco Bay area and speaks both English and Chinese for some unknown reason. Yes, he has pets, who asked not to be mentioned.

For all things "Dave," go here:

http://DaveEisenstark.com

WANNABE MUSIC-VIDEO director Johnny Tone believes his next-door neighbor, Laura Causely - beautiful, suicidal, and just released from a mental institution — is his ticket to Hollywood. 
ONCE A professional dancer, Laura had the moves Johnny craved, and for her part, she’s convinced he could rescue her from her controlling sister, good-for-nothing brother-in-law, and the demons that scream in her head. 
LAURA IS not the first pretty young thing to fall under Johnny's spell. What happened to those old flames was a secret horror but she had her own bloody past to obliterate. 
ONLY ONE of them can survive. 
WHO WINS in a fair fight, the psychopath or the sociopath? 

I've always loved horror movies and horror fiction, going back even before I learned how to read. I remember my Uncle Donald and his box of EC comics, which he shared with me despite my mother's admonition, "Don't show him that trash! You'll ruin his brain!" Too late, too late. I was probably 4 or 5 at the time, and I came to love those comics filled with the walking dead, vampires, and gruesome death.

In 1985 I was trapped in a supermarket with nightmarish monsters lurking outside and maniacal zealot running loose inside. In some ways, I never came back from that experience.

This adventure took place in “The Mist,” a novella in Stephen King’s collection Skeleton Crew. Other stories featured a carnivorous oil slick, an auto-cannibalistic surgeon, and a demonized cymbal monkey. Each of these was fun and frightening, but “The Mist” was the one that never let me go.

It’s a good question – what book made me? What book shaped my tastes and sent me headlong into a frenzy of horror, adventure, myths and monsters?

Over the years I have nominated many books as being my favorites – The John Carter of Mars series, Jurassic Park, Campbell’s Who Goes There, Alien, The Time Machine and Koontz’s Phantoms. But a book that always stayed with me, and made me a fan of the writer forever was Charnel House by Graham Masterton.

There are many books and stories that shape each of us, particularly those of us who create with words.  I remember my mother giving me an anthology of horror stories when I was 7-8 years-old, and there being a story by H.P. Lovecraft—I don’t remember which one, though sense it was one of the Silver Key stories—that wrapped its ambience around me and took me to a place I could not believe one could travel via words.  

I also remember her books on UFOs, the Psychic Sciences, Ghosts, the Supernatural… 

I remember some odd little action/mystery books that teased me with visions of Morocco, perhaps a precursor to my love of the work of William S. Burroughs.

The book that made me want to write horror was Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. I was 12 when the book really started to take off and my 6th grade teacher Mr. Flener even read us a few of the sotries in class. I was already pretty well primed to enjoy horror because I had a pretty steady diet of it at home. Everything horror Z-A grade had gone across our TV Aliens, Class of Nukem High, Silver Bullet, Swamp Thing, Nightmare on Elm Street, Critters, Gremlins just tons of films, many of them on The Big Chuck and Little John Show or Elvira Mistress of the Dark. Horror was practically a part of my DNA at this point. 

To be 100% honest, folks, if I really had to pick just one “book that made me,” well…Keith Deininger stole mine. I mean, I wrote Queen’s Blood (featured in Angelic Knight’s Manifesto UF and my own Queen & Other Stories, released this month) with Jack Sawyer and the Territories in mind. Or maybe Keith’s off the hook. I love a good time-travel piece, and another story from my collection, The Bad Place, has drawn the occasional comparison to King’s The Langoliers