The OED got it wrong this year, folks. Find out why “frenzied leap into the abyss of our collective hopes" suits our crumbling civilization much better. Thanks to Real Pants and Gregg Murray for giving this heartfelt rant a home.
15 Dec 2018
The working title for this hallucinatory piece of flash about an unhinged suburban voyeur was Cold Chicken and Monarch Butterflies. Hence the cold chicken and Monarch butterflies. Recorded live, and as crappily as always, at Prozak Kafeneio in Nicosia on 28 November 2018.
29 Nov 2018
"When the first explorers saw this country, they saw it just like us. In a canoe."
Burt Reynolds
They sure did, Burt.
07 Sep 2018
If I was a fat dictator posing in a supermarket with a bunch of freaks while the rest of my country starved, I’d get a better fucking hat.
02 Sep 2018
“I had a dream the other night about the wrath of khan. Except, in the scene where khan is stuffing his psionic earwig into Chekov’s ear, there’s a sudden close-up of the earwig and it has the face of Nic Cage."
It isn’t often that you get to collaborate with two of the greatest living Nic Cage authorities. So when Professor Andy Rogers at Georgia Perimeter College (do you remember the pilot for the Bob Ross biopic that aired on Public Access TV in Hibbing, Minnesota, the one where Ross is dressed in chocolate pudding and uses machetes instead of paint brushes?) and poet/Lord Littlebrook scholar Gregg Murray suggested a piece about Cage’s latest hobbies at Real Pants, I got right on it.
The Cage Collection started off as a weird dream. Then it was a literary correspondence. What it eventually became was the first scholarly treatment on freak Nic Cage appearances in paintings and photographs through the ages, including The Thyroidal Breastfeeding Madonna Cage, Nosferatu Cage, and Chicago Nationals legend Joe Tinker Cage.
07 Sep 2018
I’ll be at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, Virginia, this August teaching two special workshops on story development. We’re going to have fun experimenting with Kurt Vonnegut’s story shapes, reading some of my favorite stories, like Larry Brown’s Samaritans and Raymond Carver’s Neighbors, and plotting and writing some stories of our own.
If you’re in our neck of the woods in August, drop by. If not, look for a new run of Story Craft courses in Nicosia at Write CY’s new digs in Pallouriotissa starting Spring 2019. Hit the button to find out more.
05 Jul 2018
A man who needs no introduction, but who is going to get one anyway.
15 May 2018
Limited edition digital print by Tug Wells captures child actor Shia LaBeouf in his prime, with an eagle and a chorus line of sexy little people. Use it as a desktop screensaver, a laminated placemat, or a 60x30 cm wall poster for adventurous corporate office spaces. Price: $3.99 $1.99.
18 Apr 2018
The Dillo World Tour makes its first stop at Prozak Kafeneio Thursday March 29, 2018. I’ll be reading a short selection and signing books. James “The Destroying Angel” Mackay will be there to enforce your attention. Thanks to Orestes for the venue, Rock the Dog for that freakshow of a cover, and to Ron Earl Phillips at Shotgun Honey, and Eric Campbell and Lance Wright at Down and Out Books, for making this possible.
12 Mar 2018
Vladimir Putin launches cock into space. Trump inspects.
10 Mar 2018
Another hipster erotic thriller? Seriously?
Actually, The Bad Sister is like no other hipster erotic thriller you’ve ever read. It’s steaminess is so perversely contagious you will likely end up pleasuring yourself in shame — and then diving right back in.
But only for two days.
Because that’s how long it should take you to read The Bad Sister, two protracted and vigorous — yet blissful — bursts of intense reading on the toilet or on the job.
Now, for a limited time only, unlock a freebie excerpt of the only hipster erotic thriller to feature a pair of female twins who can give each other orgasms telepathically. Click here to get your smut.
Scroll down for the official Bad Sister FAQ.
1. ON THE SCOVILLE SCALE, JUST HOW SPICY IS THE BAD SISTER?
Good question. But we don’t want to mix that kind of spice with this kind of spice. Let’s just say any novel about telepathic orgasms is bound to be sizzling.
2. IS THERE ROUGH SEX INVOLVED?
Not the kind you’re thinking of. This is an erotic novel and has plenty of “slick members" and “glistening entrances," but no truly revolting sexual aberrations, except for the final scene, which will make you hate me forever.
3. WHAT IF I BUY THE BAD SISTER FOR MY TEENAGE NEPHEW? WILL I GET SUED?
I wouldn’t recommend it. Maybe. And don’t blame me.
4. CAN I MAIL A CHECK TO YOU TO BUY MY COPY?
No.
5. IS THERE A SEX SCENE WITH SELENA GOMEZ AND JUSTIN BIEBER IN THIS BOOK?
There is no sex scene with Gomez or Bieber, but for a fee I will add one to your copy of The Bad Sister. Venmo me $15. Use the code name Uncle Bob.
6. HOW DO YOU “GET INSIDE THE HEAD” OF YOUR FEMALE CHARACTERS?
How do you know I’m not a woman?
7. WILL THERE BE A BAD SISTER 2?
There may very well be. And it will star Billy Bob Thorton.
8. WHAT IF I’M READING THIS BOOK AT WORK, LIKE YOU SAID, AND I GET THE URGE TO RELIEVE MYSELF?
Don’t be coy. Many years ago when I had a job stacking books at a university library, I worked with a guy who did just that. He said it actually woke him up. So, if you’re at work and sneaking in a few pages of smut, please relieve yourself. Just not in the company of your coworkers. Find a quiet corner of the office or a handsome potted plant and indulge your erotic passions in semi-private.
9. CAN YOU ADD A SCENE WITH A UNICORN?
Are you turned on by unicorn sex? Please visit Chuck Tingle.
10. DO YOU SUPPORT PRACTICING THE SEXUAL ACTS YOU WRITE ABOUT?
Absolutely. I would rather discover and practice a mildly perverse and/or novel sexual act than save a whole family of helpless humpback whales from a tsunami.
11. YOU’VE REALLY MADE ME HOT. HOW CAN I READ A CHAPTER?
Ask nicely: max@maxsheridan.com.
Multimedia: Thomas Allen
23 Feb 2018
You’re a 60-year-old vet and and you left your wife and a solid pension 10 years ago because the ghosts in your head wouldn’t let you be. Life’s simpler when you forget. Work, beer, whisky, sleep.
Until you end up at the wrong bar on the wrong night and everything you’ve been running from blindsides you like a Greyhound. The next thing you know you’re in a cheap motel room off the Interstate with two grade-A psychopaths using a knife you swore you’d never touch again.
The Herat Handshake is live in Switchblade Magazine Issue 4. 14 raw stories, plenty of bad juju.
14 Jan 2018
If Christmas came and went and you weren’t sure you wanted to send a novel about a teenage character obsessed by roadkill to your loved ones, you can get a taste of Dillo in OWK zine Volume 7, where they just adore roadkill and all sorts of over-the-top violence.
You can also wait for the print version of Volume 7, which will be available at all fine purveyors of literature in Nicosia, i.e. Prozak Kafeneio, in a few days.
04 Jan 2018
Dillo slides onto your bookshelf bloody.
It’s not the blood dripping from that supremely pulpy sawed-off finger by Rock the Dog. It’s just that Dillo was kicked around awhile before it found its home at Shotgun Honey, now an imprint of Down and Out Books. And, sure, its author has gone along for the ride.
But it got there and for that I have to thank Ron Earl Phillips at Shotgun Honey for deciding to publish it with Eric Campbell and Lance Wright at Down and Out Books.
Rock the Dog spent the hottest days of the summer of 2017 working over, I believe, 17 versions of the cover. The work paid off. No matter what you think of the book, the cover will be stuck to the inside of your brainpan until someone scrapes it off with a blowtorch.
I’d like to thank Andy Rogers and Deb Hull, who have been reading my stuff before I was reading my stuff. Seven years ago Andy — then the fiction editor of the Chattahoochee Review — sent me a really nice email out of the blue about a story I’d submitted. The story got rejected, but Andy’s encouragement has kept this boat afloat since then. We’ve even worked together on a script for an absurdist Wall Street shark thriller.
I’d like to thank Nat Sobel for his generous advice at the beginning of my crime rampage. It helped me get Dillo in the shape it is in now. Todd Robinson at Thuglit helped me early on by publishing two of my first psychopath stories. Tom Pitts has been unbelievably generous since I sent my first piece of flash fiction to Out of the Gutter in 2014, and he’s one of my favorite crime writers. If you haven’t read Hustle, what are you waiting for?
I’d like to thank Jack Getze for his thoughtful words on Dillo and for his advice on writing. That advice is now taped to the wall of my office. I was lucky enough to have Alec Cizak and Joshua Corin, two more writers I admire, read the MS and write blurbs.
Evan Lambert has read the early drafts of every book I’ve ever written, and for that I owe him many beers I can’t buy him, being an ocean and a sea away.
Finally, I’d like to thank my wife, Theopisti, for putting up with me since Austin and through all our adventures since.
Thanks, baby.
14 Dec 2017
A passive husband finally decides to build his dream addition. But the construction crew he allows onto his property quickly takes over his life — down to the last cent in his savings account, which he shares with his possibly bisexual wife.
Find Space is the Final Frontier in Issue 64 of The Café Irreal.
Many thanks to Alice Whittenburg and G.S. Evans, who have been manning The Café Irreal since the days of hotmail.
03 Nov 2017
It’s been about two years since this piece was accepted, but Richard Peabody’s mammoth two-volume 40th Anniversary Issue has finally hit the press. Peabody has been publishing Gargoyle Magazine since 1976, without hiatus. He’ll finally be taking one this year. I hope the NEA is around when he gets back. Which is a good reason to get your copy of Gargoyle today.
Another good reason is that inside you’ll find at least one story dealing with all the following pressing issues: the boulder scene from Effren C. Piñon’s 1983 classic The Killing of Satan, pupu platters and tinnitus, death by scrotal ring explosion, and extended families who disappear inside refrigerator box death traps. Get your copy here.
02 May 2017
“People who checked into L’Hotel du Frisson always checked each other out, too.”
Will Viharo
If the words “fevered imagination” mean anything to you, you’ll have to rethink them after you read Freaks That Carry Your Luggage Up to the Room, the second half of Will Viharo’s Thrillville Pulp Fiction Collection Vol. 1 Double Feature. Tiki Bizarro probably doesn’t work to categorize this strange, fluid-gushing book. Not even Shapeshifting Tiki Bizarro Porn Death Trip would prepare you for Freaks.
After a shaky opening chapter — there was a lot of information crammed into the first few pages — I couldn’t stop reading, and I’m still not sure why. It wasn’t because I liked the characters. You weren’t supposed to. It wasn’t because the sentences made you gasp.
I guess what it was, was a little like being trapped inside what I’d always imagined my own warped brain might look like. Except Viharo’s brain was leaking out onto the pages. He was actually writing it down. What it was was a liberation. A beautiful, filthy, fucking liberation.
After that first chapter, when you’re dropped headfirst into the weirdness, the novella picks up at a reckless pace with the demented plot lines self-propagating seamlessly. The story just gets weirder, and the weirder it gets, the more sense it makes. It glues itself together like all the jizz and blood sticking to the sheets of L’ Hotel du Frisson.
The overall effect is indeed, as the subtitle says, a nightmare. A seedy, self-imploding, funhouse nightmare.
Plus all your old favorites: Mexican porn queens, Chet Baker, Art Pepper, grindhouse flicks, old horror movies, heart-shaped asses.
And cock-sucking vampires and weregirls who transform upon orgasm.
And don’t forget the Mantis Man, a voodoo priest and an old friend of John Cassavetes.
Oh, and a dwarf. Of course, a goddamn diabolical dwarf with a warty penis!
The list could go on, and it does — somewhere in the back of my head, now a permanent inmate of L’ Hotel du Frisson.
I loved this book, and would read it again in a second. If I do, I’ll make sure to put on Yma Sumac and prepare a two-foot-tall Martini.
07 Jan 2017
Paul Lee Covey is a faded musician with a ghost in his closet that comes back to haunt him. This story came out in October 2016 in Crimespree Magazine #64. Wrote it in DC back in the summer of 2014.
02 Jan 2017
In a recurring dream of yours, you’re chased by a tango instructor with the face of a rat and little stubby legs. You call him Rat Man and Dancing Rat Man and the Rat Dancer. Yesterday, you told me you were convinced I was the Rat Man.
Why?
Recorded live at Prozak Kafeneio.
23 Dec 2016
Lost and Found was a “found newspaper headline” exercise that somehow ended up a story about a top-secret sex toy of mammoth proportions stolen from Vladimir Putin by Donald Trump. It appeared in the New Paper Project in December 2016. Here’s a PDF version courtesy of Omiros Panagides. (The typo on the second page is courtesy of me.)
18 Dec 2016
What’s going to happen when a Good Samaritan saves your life by murdering another man in front of your eyes?
Nothing good.
This tale is dedicated to Dominic Cabot, who actually does nice things for no reason. Special thanks to Jack Getze at Spinetingler Magazine for finally accepting one of my stories.
Available in Spinetingler Magazine now.
Photo: Harut Movsisyan
12 Sep 2016
I hear this short and very filthy tale was written to be submitted to a lowlife crime editor as a joke. That may or may not be true.
I know for a fact it was partly inspired by a YouTube video of an unwholesome paraphilia hitherto unknown to the author.
That’s all I know. Find Mud Hustler live at Hobart Pulp as part of editor Jess Stoner’s 2015 Erotica Week.
30 Oct 2015
What do you do if you lose a psychopath’s dog? If you’re Little Johnny Stuckey, you steal a suitcase and try to pawn it and make enough money to buy a new one. Except, if you’re Little Johnny Stuckey, nothing you do ever turns out like you planned it.
Read Pawned in Crime Factory’s jumbo-sized Issue 17.
28 Feb 2015