 Long Answer: I went out west looking for work, headed to Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, where all the oil is. This town became world famous when it caught on fire. (I swear I was gone by that time.) When I was there, a map in the library showed a hundred dots on a topographic map where there were 1.) Currently burning and out-of-control forest fires, 2.) Where there were forest fires that were being fought, and 3.) Where there once were forest fires, but which had been put out by fire crews. In June I’d be sitting on the back porch of the house where I rented a room and the air was hazy with smoke and the overwhelming smell was of a thick campfire. When it wasn’t being threatening with fire, Fort Mac was almost exclusively a working town, twenty-four hours a day. You worked and slept then worked again, and made better money than you would anywhere in Canada. People from all over the world were there; I lived with Ethiopians and a racist Californian, and worked with South Africans and Estonians. Seriously: the WORLD was there, and still is. I rented a room in a house with ten other people. You need to be seriously rich to own a home there, or even to rent an entire bachelor apartment yourself. The prices are insane, and the city is still a town, not knowing how to accommodate so many people. There are three men for every women. The bus routes change frequently, and if you don’t like it, complain to the mayor, whoever that is, the bus drivers will snap back at you. If you miss a bus it will take an hour for it to return, and you may freeze by that time. Summer is July; the rest is winter. In my little room I was lucky to have my own standup shower. I bought a microwave and only bought food that could be cooked in one. I had no TV, internet, movies – not even a ping-pong table. (Though one of my new housemates invited me to sit next to him on the couch when the lights went out, but I declined the offer.) I worked five days a week, plus overtime of three to four hours on the weekends, both Saturday and Sunday. I was there for the money, nothing else. Still, I needed some form of entertainment. There was a library. It was very well-stocked, better than many libraries I’ve been in. In general, I read everything. Sometimes I want to exercise my brain, so I read complex literature, then when I want to relax my brain, I read pulp. Love them both and can’t read either one too much without wanting the other. After finishing the Journals of Andre Gide, I picked up some horror novels. I needed trashy, pulpy, crazy stories that didn’t start slowly with mom, dad and the two-point-five kids living a happy life until something evil comes for a visit. It was during this time that I categorized horror into two basic types: 1.) Normal people who have something abnormal happen to them, and 2.) Abnormal people who have something even more abnormal happen to them. Having only read a few horror novels by that time, I didn’t know a damn thing about the genre. Didn’t know there were types of horror: that Stephen King does not write the same horror as Edward Lee, and vice versa. I brought home a shopping bag of books on each visit to the library, flipping through them, liking some, not in the mood for others. Then I read Bryan Smith’s Depraved. And I thought: you sick son-of-a-bitch, how can you write such wonderful filth! I didn’t think readers or publishers would dare want something so gory and grotesque. I had only been exposed to sanitized, happy horror novels that I was told were scary. The visceral is in Smith’s work – blood and guts and puke and fucking and killing with imagination and strange rusty killing devices. I read all the Smith they had, then picked anything which had a nice schlocky cover with raised lettering and pictures. Still love those more than the ethereal pseudo-pre-Raphaelite book covers that make you think you’re picking up the next Jane Austin. If Charles Bukowski or William S. Burroughs wrote horror … they don’t win awards, but they’re pretty fun to read. I like to read fun horror, and Smith and Edward Lee showed me that such a thing existed. I didn’t know what grindhouse was when I was in Fort Mac. Back then, there were only three horror writers: King, Koontz and Saul. Had no idea there were more. Anyway, I started writing my first horror novel in that town because I had nothing to do. When life is boring and you’re confined to home (this written during a Covid lockdown), writer’s will write. Boredom is a great reason to start writing a novel; Tolstoy didn’t have the internet, after all. I made a decision to be a horror writer in that smoky northern town. Try living in a town that catches on fire every year and tell me you wouldn’t want to write horror too. I like to drive and see how horrific and weird the world really is. My eyes have been tuned to see horror now, ever since that summer in The Mac.  Nurse Stitch has her mouth sewn shut and her memory erased. John Doe has undergone 'nightmare surgery', his memory also erased, replaced by crippling trauma and delusions. Mahmoud Farouz is a captured insurgent from Iraq who is going to be used by a special Black Op organization to make America feel fear again. When these three prisoners of a secret underground torture facility band together to escape, they cannot realize that not only has their torture been orchestrated, but so too will be their path to freedom.. Or Purchase a copy direct from Necro Publications by clicking here  Rob Bliss writes horror. He was born in Canada in 1969. He has had 100 stories published in 30 online magazines. He has also published 17 more novels, novellas, and short story collections on Amazon. Necro Publications has published three of his novels, with a fourth released in January, 2021. Website: https://robbliss.weebly.com/ Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/Rob-Bliss/e/B07VL1TQ1R?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1&qid=1610743021&sr=8-1 Goodreads Profile: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/19496667.Rob_Bliss Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rob.bliss.779/ Twitter: @BlissRob   Comments are closed.
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