Grace Among the Dead, Chapter 2: “Retreat to Hidden Farm” as Read by the Croaky-Voiced Author

After so long looking for the best height and angle
on my webcam, it occurred to me to use the mic
and stand I employ for simple audio.

I’ve been sitting on the audio for this since the beginning of February. That’s how much I hate dealing with MovieMaker software, even if I am working with a template I established with the first chapter. Frankly, I think I’m better off just reading into the webcam. Anyway....

For those new to THE SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER, this second chapter of my second book finds Derek Grace and his stowaway from town, Kim, arriving at Grace’s hideout on the far edge of the Colorado Springs metro area. Through flashback, we learn the respective fates of Grace’s wife and children as the living dead have established themselves as apex predators atop the food chain. 

“Darkness on the Edge of Town” was irresistible to me as a subtitle, because that’s exactly where Derek Grace is in this chapter: in darkness, on the edge of town. He finds no new purpose in life with the needy stowaway. He knows he has to move on. But where? Moreover, for what? Grace’s world has ended. Is a new life possible, even desirable, in this New Weird Order?

Grace Among the Dead is a novel “of Love and Redemption, the Living Dead and a Monster Truck” and we’re going to get a lot darker in the chapters to come before we completely lose the prefix on Derek Grace's anti-hero status. Meanwhile, if you haven’t heard the first chapter, you can click here for that. If you want to read the series from the beginning, the magic and wonder of Bleeding Kansas is available to you here.





THE SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER, GRACE AMONG THE DEAD,
Copyright © 2014, 2017 by L. Roy Aiken. All rights reserved.

FULL First Chapter of GRACE AMONG THE DEAD as Read Aloud by Yours Truly

Barely in time for the Twelfth Day of Christmas comes my first post of 2017. I’d had a New Year’s greeting recorded, but I wasn’t crazy about it. Today’s master plan was to record the first chapters of each book—Bleeding Kansas, Grace Among the Dead, and the as-yet unpublished The Wrong Kind of Dead—with the idea of adding to each until I had the complete set recorded. Instead, I pushed through and recorded the entirety of the first chapter of Grace Among the Dead, “Drugstore Cowpunching.”




There’s so much more I could do with this, especially in regards to the voice acting, but I don’t want the perfect to become the enemy of the good, as it so often does with my projects. I’ll simply keep adding chapters. Maybe I’ll do the first full chapter of another book tomorrow. 

I don’t know. Right now, I just want to drink some beer and figure out what I’m going to do from here. I’ve been meaning to do this YouTube thing for years now. Today was the first day in two years I’ve actually gotten meaningful work out of this microphone.

So, Merry Twelfth Night and Happy New Year 2017. Let this be the inauspicious beginning to something really auspicious. And don’t forget to buy the books, if you haven’t already.

The Introduction to Ray Bradbury’s THE OCTOBER COUNTRY, as Read by Yours Truly

This was more work than I care to admit for a 31-second piece. The audio was easy enough. Making a video with Windows Movie Maker and getting it uploaded to YouTube—alas, I have a lot to learn. Worse, the only way I’m going to learn is through further suffering. 

Oh, well, as a wise Cenobyte once said, tears are a waste of good suffering. I need to set aside a regular media day and just knock out one audio track after another and fight with the video later. 

But not today. I’m done. Let’s take a trip to the country. It should do wonders for the nerves.

Flannery O’Connor Reads “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”

Flannery O’Connor: Southern writer,
devout Catholic. As with Shirley Jackson
in her unflinching prose, the horror
is in the humanity.

Only here on my blog will you find Flannery O’Connor taking her rightful place as a Woman in Horror during Women in Horror Month. That’s because O’Connor has been ghettoized in that most loathed and avoided of ghettos, Literary Fiction. Only old-school English majors like myself would know anything about her.

As an English major, I can say there’s no defending that ghetto, nor any blame for people properly hating it. But don’t throw out Flannery O’Connor with the dull, tepid bathwater of American Litra-chure. Let O’Connor’s tale of a family’s encounter with a serial killer and his gang settle the argument.
For more details on the recording, and some quotes about O’Connor as an author, the Open Culture post from which I poached this recording is here.

The Opening to Shirley Jackson’s Dark Masterpiece, THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, as Read by Yours Truly

Got your Women in Horror right HERE!

No gimmicks, no trendy boosh-wah political agendas.
Just clear, no-bullshit writing about how bad
it can get when...oh, read her books, already! 

Seriously, we’re halfway through Women in Horror Month and this is the first mention anyone I know has made of the writer of “The Lottery,” and the definitive haunted house story, The Haunting of Hill House. That’s not right, people. That’s not right at all.

So, by way of kicking off my You Tube channel, let me introduce you to one of the greatest horror writers you’ve likely never heard of. South Park paid homage to her most famous short story, but how many of you have read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House? This is the opening paragraph:




In case you need a “cool” factor here and Stephen King talking up Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House as the best haunted house story ever doesn’t do it for you, consider that hotshot fantasy film director Guillermo del Toro chose Hill House as one of the books he would “curate” for Penguin Classics. So find out what the director of Pan’s Labyrinth knows that you don’t. (I’m not linking to the Amazon page because Amazon doesn’t do the affiliate program here in Colorado. Sorry.)