Horror, Thrillers, Arts & Entertainment - Fiction
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Overview
You’re an underpaid civil servant who dreams of chucking it all to become a famous author. You live with your overbearing mother who always seems to interrupt when you’re writing a key scene. Who always wants to know why you haven’t brought home a nice girl.
What you really are is a writer. A brilliant one, too, though like any writer, you sometimes have a dry spell. Your imagination is dark, your inspiration the terrible things that can happen to a young woman traveling alone . . . .
Suddenly, success! You win a magazine contest—first prize is publication for your terrifying short story about a horrible murder on an underground train. A director wants to make a movie of your award-winning story and wants your input on the script. A pretty young journalist seems to be taking a personal interest in you and your career.
Except.
The family of a girl murdered on the underground threatens to sue you and the magazine for glorifying the grisly details of their daughter’s death, despite your insistence that you didn’t read the news coverage of the murder. The magazine asks you to supply a different story.
The film director wants you to make a few changes in your story. Especially with the lawsuit hanging over everyone’s head.
The journalist’s interest turns out to merely be professional.
You’ve been fired.
And, worst of all, your imagination has run dry. You don’t have another story in you.
You’ll just have to kill someone new . . .
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Editorials
Publishers Weekly
Campbell provides a memorably ghoulish answer to the cliche question about where horror writers get their ideas in this suspenseful skin-crawler. Mersey Mouth magazine hopes to promote a local author through its fiction contest and believes it has found him in Dudley Smith, whose story submission vividly recounts a grisly subway murder. What they don't know is that the tale is more truth than fiction: Dudley, a secret psychopath, has for years been writing up his unsolved crimes as splatter thrillers for his own amusement. Enabled by a doting mother and egged on by oblivious publishers, Dudley immerses himself in his "Mr. Killogram" character and spends much of the story setting up editor Patricia Martingale as his next victim. Campbell deftly laces the grim events with subtle insights on the author's responsibility to his characters and the public's appetite for exploitation, which help make this one of his better nonsupernatural shockers. (June) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.Book Details
Published
April 1, 2007
Publisher
Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC
Pages
400
ISBN
9781429910835