Apocalyptic Epics and Killer Crime Thrillers by Robert Chazz Chute
Wow. This is cool. Goodreads is a great site for readers to find books they’ll enjoy. (And, I hope, my books are in the To Enjoy list.)
I was slow to get on board but now I love it.
Find books you’ve read, books you want to read, rate books and write reviews. I found it especially fun to zip through and rate some of the books in my library, just to revisit what my brain had already eaten.
Check out my site on Goodreads. (Yes, I had fun with the bio.)
Or just jump to buying it on Amazon.
Or you could, I suppose, go on with your life thinking that your world does not revolve around my dark tales of suspense.
You could, theoretically, pass this by and believe that you could do without fulfilling my petty desires.
But we both know that’s not true. (Er…right?)
Also, the ebook is only 99 cents.Â
My friend Jeff Bennington hosted my essay on unreasonable belief and spreading the word about your passion.
Things  to consider for Halloween:1. If you’re too old to go out begging for heart disease, convince your kids they might be allergic to nuts. There’s so much hysteria…excuse me…”awareness” at school that your precious children will gladly give up the Oh Henrys without a fight. You’re implicitly threatening them with asphyxiation and a horrible death, after all. The rest of the year, you have to be much less subtle in threatening your children with asphyxiation and horrible death.
2. You want diabetes. You’re using Halloween to speed your way to your sexy, blind amputee fetish. I understand. But if you’re too old to go out and beg for dependency on an insulin syringe, at least put a lot of effort into the costume if you want candy from me. Occasionally some older teens will show up at the door on Halloween and they don’t have a costume at all. “Sullen, entitled teen” is not a costume. Do that and I’m going to have to see your tits before I give up the candy. (“Show me them titties!” so weirded out that bunch of seventeen-year-old boys last year, they probably gave up on trick or treating altogether. You’re welcome.)
3. And goths? You dress like that every day. Not a costume. Show up all smiley and “Up with people!” and I’ll reconsider. Or “Show me them titties!”
4. Slutty costumes. I’m no prude. Hell, I wrote three books with “sex” in the title. Still, Halloween used to be about scaring small children. When did the costume store turn into competition for a Stag Shop? It’s not that I object to sexy nurses, sexy firefighters and sexy veterinarians experimenting with animal husbandry. (I’m especially in favour of sexy nurses. In fact, I think that should be the rule whenever anyone goes to the hospital. Give those leukaemia kids extra motivation to make it!) But slutty is all the costume shop offers! How am I to terrify small children and haunt their nightmares? (Come to think of it, if I squeeze my ass into the sexy veterinarian’s costume, that might do the job.)
5. I’m sorry, but I cannot accept any representation from the Twilight series as an acceptable costume. If you’re going to go vampire, it’s classic Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Buffy or nothing. Edward is more emo whiner than vampire. Show up as Spike and you get extra candy bars. In a more perfect world, Buffy the Vampire Slayer would never have ended. Ever. And Joss Whedon would rule the earth as a benevolent dictator and the economy would be based on comedy-horror-dramatic entertainment alone and the world’s hungry would be catered to at the craft services table. Sigh.
6. Homemade costumes score more points and therefore earn you more candy. Mr. Miyagi made Daniel a costume with a shower curtain for the Halloween dance so he could hide from the Cobra Kai gang and that rocked. Then Mr. Miyagi beat the shit out of Cobra Kais that same night, which rocked harder. When I beat up local teenagers, people say it’s “wrong.” What is that?
7. The ninja thing? It’s over. It died when Sho Kosugi killed it with the movie Pray for Death in 1985. Let. It. Go.
8. To you, does Halloween mean throwing eggs and toilet papering houses and soaping windows and petty acts of vandalism? I feel for you, little buddy. For me, Halloween means shooting vandals with a double-barrelled .12 gauge filled with rock salt and then burying you alive in the local cemetery à la The Bride in Kill Bill Volume II. We’re misunderstood is what we are.
9. It’s Halloween. Don’t give out an apple or toothbrushes or pencils. This is about Death. Honor the holiday properly. You see all those pretty fallen leaves? Death is everywhere and we laugh at mortality by walking around the neighbourhood dressed as the ghosts we will all be someday too soon! We stomp and crunch the pretty orange, red and yellow leaves and tell ourselves that drying up and blowing away and dying means nothing! Nothing, GODDAMNIT! Ahem…excuse me. I seem to have something in my eye…
10. And finally, this Halloween is a great time to rob a bank. The economy’s lousy and let’s face it, the bank robbed you first. This Halloween falls on a weekday, so grab a mask (I like the V for Vendetta mask and cape), roll on down to your local bank close to closing time, and do the logical thing to feed your family and buy a new iPhone. (It’s so worth the risk because you can talk to the new iPhone and it will talk back, thus severing any need for human contact, friendship and all that icky interaction your family insists upon.) Have another costume ready in the getaway car to switch into and to throw off the cops. This strategy works best if you’re a midget so you can blend in with the early evening toddler crowd dressed up as princesses and doggies and pumpkins.
You’re welcome.
No one seems to acknowledge luck in the making of their success. Every bonehead who wins Survivor calls themselves brilliant at the finale, but everyone knows the truth. Each winner could have been tossed off the island many times, forced to shamble along the Walk of Shame. As Douglas MacArthur said, “In war, you win or lose, live or die – and the difference is just an eyelash.” It’s true for everything else, too. We’re to all as brilliant as we’d like to think. (Corollary: Often we lose, but that doesn’t mean we suck as human beings, either, so cheer up.)
Daughter #1 saw an old newspaper story about me on the wall and asked if that was my proudest moment.
“Nah. You and your brother are my biggest accomplishments.” Yes, this is the obligatory answer, but it’s also true.
“What’s next?”
“Conning your mother into thinking I was the best she could do.”
Long story short: I went for a walk a long time ago at the University of Ottawa. Had I turned right or left at just the wrong time, The Saint/Hottie/She Who Must Be Obeyed and I would never have gotten together. I didn’t know it then, but I had one shot that fateful night. What if I’d gone east instead of west? What if I’d waited another hour or not gone out at all? I often think how easily things could have gone another way. I’m sure I would have ended up in Toronto anyhow, but I’d probably still be there now in an awful job paying alimony to a couple of angry ex-wives.
“What’s your next biggest accomplishment?” Daughter #1 persisted.
At this point, I started to panic that she was looking for a list of ten or something insurmountable like that. “Uh…early in my career, back when I was a healer, I got a woman out of a wheelchair.”
“Why aren’t you still doing that since you were so good at it?”
Kids. They sure make you sweat. “I think…” I said, having no idea what I’d say next, “that just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you have to do it forever.” Also, being a healer is outlawed by my alternative health profession. I found that I was constrained by my profession as a massage therapist to a more technical approach since my return to Ontario. I peaked early and did my very best work in the first four years of practice when I wasn’t under The Man’s thumb. It chafes, that gap between the ineffable and the bureaucratic. That work was right at the right time, but that suit doesn’t fit anymore. I’ve changed and so has the profession of massage therapy in 20 years. I haven’t liked where it’s been going and needed to break out.
I need to assert my indie-pendance. And here I am starting Ex Parte Press and writing books and putting them out there and being the real me.
But that suggests I planned something. I didn’t plan anything. I fell into things. I succumbed. More decisions were forced upon me than I made proactively. In short, I lucked out.
I have been following my heart and writing for free or writing for very little for some time. Thank Zeus I didn’t send out any of my novels and get accepted somewhere. I might have gotten locked in prematurely to a bad deal with a publisher. Now is a great time to be a writer and get on the self-publishing train. I wasn’t waiting in any conscious way. My career path is not strategic. I just kept writing books without submitting them, preparing for forming this company and publishing my stuff on my own. I didn’t know I was preparing for the future. I was just answering my heart’s call.
That’s how I fell into being a healer, too. Now I’m falling into this soft place where I hide in my basement bunker and write or type (and sometimes I don’t know which of those things I’m doing.) I hope the luck will be the good kind again.
Obi-Wan didn’t believe in luck. But he was a suicidal Jedi who couldn’t manage to kill a guy he chopped up and left to die by a lake of fire. Who cares what that loser thinks? If you’re going to kill Darth Vader, you better have the guts to finish the job!
I used to be entranced, like a deer in Time’s headlights, with the idea of “paying dues.”
People in positions of power, older people, and a lot of losers used that phrase a lot. In case you’re wondering, I fell into the category of loser because I believed it. A lot of people denigrate the “kids” in the Occupy Wall Street protests. We’re told twenty-year-olds don’t have fully developed brains and when we’re young we don’t know the ways of the world. Well, fuck that. A bunch of twenty to twenty-five-year-olds were largely responsible for getting Apollo rockets into space. The young may not know the ways of the world, but they have adult responsibilities. Very young people are killing for their nations, going to jail, getting executed and being kept down by the established order. No wonder they’re pissed. (Thankfully, after the young led the charge, many much older people are recognizing they, too, are the 99% and have joined in the cause and lent their experience from the sixties civil rights struggle.)
If you’re young, don’t wait for someone else’s approval to follow your heart’s desire. Take action. If you’re old, please don’t dampen their enthusiasm with caution. (You probably didn’t. A bunch of you went to war.) Being young is risky and it’s the perfect time to risk more, not less. When I was in my twenties, I did a lot of low-level grunt work in newspapers and magazines and books. I once went to a job interview where the publisher told me I wouldn’t get to have an opinion for seven years. He figured it would take that long before I would be worthy to even utter a single opinion. Really. I told him I guessed I’d just go to med school. At least there they let you start saving lives much earlier in the learning process.
I believe in learning. But I believe in learning by doing. For instance, I went to journalism school for four years, but two weeks on the job at a daily newspaper pretty much equalled those four expensive years. University, for me, was not ultimately about getting a marketable skill. It was to enjoy myself for four years while delaying entry into the workforce. And no wonder. Look what awaited me. Grunt jobs where some self-regarding asshole tells you that you don’t get to have an opinion until you’re thirty-three.
Life is short. We don’t have time for delays. We think of Einstein as a much-lauded old man, but he came up with the theory of relativity when he was young and surprisingly sexed up. The brilliant people I know now in their forties were just as bright and ready to contribute in their twenties. Young people change the world while older people often try to keep things the same. (Not all old people, but there’s an easily recognized pattern there.) Instead of being active mentors, many mid-level managers try to dampen youthful energy in the name of systems and organization. Meanwhile, the CEO started the company out of his parents’ garage when he was seventeen and packed full of that same creative enthusiasm for innovation.
Sadly, in my twenties, I wasn’t one of the strong ones. I believed the lies that respected established power and past accomplishment more than new, personal and future accomplishment. I was told to wait and I did. I kept apprenticing while a young Kevin Smith went out and took risks and made movies and a young Neil Gaiman wrote comics.
I’m writing full-time now. I wish I’d started younger. I wish I had a time machine. (I’d also stop myself from buying parachute pants. That was also a terrible mistake.)
The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago.
The next best time? Today.
Poeticule Bay, Maine is a familiar, summer place. It looks safe, but you don’t want to live here.
If you did, nasty secrets would open up, enfold and swallow you.
They’ll get you like they got me.
It’s not too late for you. Lock your car doors, roll up the windows. Don’t look back. Drive fast.
It’s a tribute to familial love that I am still alive. My parents must have been awfully tempted to drown me in a bathtub and start over with a new kid who wasn’t so…”saucy” was Mom’s word for it. As in, “I don’t need any of your sauce!” My problem was that they lived in Middleton, Nova Scotia and I hated living there. I wasn’t too shy about saying that life would begin once I escaped, either. Bright lights and the big city beckoned me away from my small town and telling people about my escape plans didn’t endear me to anyone.
I was reminded what a colossal pain in the ass I was when I attended Bonnie Burnard’s reading of Suddenly at London’s Central Library last night. In a sidebar after the reading, the author said she saw her fiction as a defence against common prejudices about small town life. Truthfully? It sounded to me like she wrote an awfully boring book to assert that small towns aren’t boring. Of course, all small towns aren’t boring to everyone. Before I started writing books, I was the author of (much of) my teenage drama and trauma. I wasn’t interested in sports. I did and do make new friends about as easily as Samoa launches rockets to Mars. The world I could see on my television seemed to be where most of the good stuff was happening. The world I could see around me in small town, Nova Scotia was the heart of drudgery: work I despised lifting heavy things in a dark warehouse; a school in the ’80s with a ’50s set of ethics; mowing lawns and cleaning out the garage over and over. There were some elements that were great. It wasn’t all bad. But the way my brain works, I remember the bad with an eidetic memory. Worst, for me, was dealing with authority and having no alternative but to be told what to do. I was not good at being a powerless kid. If I’d joined the military, I’d be the guy who goes nuts one day and lobs grenades into the officers’ mess.
And yet, I return to the scene of the crimes again and again through works of imagination. The substitute for my hometown in Nova Scotia is a place called Poeticule Bay, Maine. In writing about home, I burn it down, repeatedly. I curse it and blame it and cast aspersions. But through fiction’s lens, I can see now that my hometown was not a boring place. Since plot is all about conflict, a small town is often a good setting for dark stories. Some quirky residents with twangy accents should have gone to jail. The guy who owned the gas station wouldn’t serve blacks. The kid next to me in math class was killed in a stupid hunting accident. The Atlantic drowned a schoolmate and almost killed two more when the Bay of Fundy’s tide filled a seaside cave. My father’s store was burgled several times and we did call the police, but not before we headed down to the store on our own armed with shotguns, half hoping we’d catch the thieves first. A childhood playmate grew up to be, at 16, the school’s tough (and nearly the only) black kid. He didn’t make it to 18. He was crushed under a car he’d been racing. At the funeral, the kids who’d been with him — I wouldn’t call them friends — all signed the label of an empty bottle of vodka. Drunk, they handed it to his brokenhearted mother at the graveside. There was no shortage of awful, real-life stories.
Conflicts and intrigue among a small population who stick their noses into each other’s business: That’s what a small town is. Mostly familiar strangers and a few friends vivisect each other’s lives in claustrophobic proximity…or in my case, captivity. I soaked up all the stories. I don’t report them. I don’t retell history in my fiction. But I do draw on the sensibility (and lack of good sense) I saw around me to craft new disturbing, twisty and twisted stories.
It’s no surprise the theme that often emerges from my fiction is Escape. When I wrote my short story, The Dangerous Kind (available now on Smashwords, soon to be on the Kindle for only 99 cents, by the way), I was writing about home. Geographically, Poeticule Bay, Maine resembles the village where our cottage was: Greenfield, Nova Scotia. Some characters are composites from my hometown of Middleton, Nova Scotia. I felt trapped and impatient and I yearned for adventure in far away places. So does my protagonist. Joe is young, but we think much alike. When I was Joe’s age, I wanted to go somewhere no one knew who I was so I could begin again, scrubbed of the known and fresh for new possibilities.
Am I fair to Middleton? No, but that’s not my job. I’m not a journalist anymore. I’m a fiction writer. Living in Middleton was difficult for me, though, speaking fairly now, I might have felt the same wanderlust no matter where I was. And I wasn’t alone. Very few of my high school classmates stayed around Middleton. They spread out and went where the jobs were. Middleton is largely a retirement community now and the town that I skewer again and again in fiction only exists in my memory and imagination.
I’m keeping the old town alive, if only to kill it repeatedly. Is my fiction my psychotherapy? No, I don’t believe that. That’s too easy a conclusion to jump to and it demeans the work. We all have childhood trauma and everyone struggles against the biting bonds of our childhood era. Unfair things are done to children. Assaults we would never tolerate as adults are commonplace (though, I hope, at least a little less so now.) We’re all in a big hurry to grow up. Middleton became my Poeticule Bay because that’s where the drama is. I know the terrain. I’ve scouted it and know the actors on my stage. Anybody who didn’t fit where they were and survives high school, wherever they grew up, has enough rich stories on which to draw for the rest of their lives.
This isn’t an apology. It’s an explanation. For good and bad, my childhood experiences in a small town in Nova Scotia formed me and continue to inspire more stories from Poeticule Bay.