An Impulsive Excerpt
Plus, A Cover Reveal
The Impulse blew in on the autumn wind and whispered dark nothings through the dying leaves.
Slater Mars awoke, his dark cabin encasing him like a cage of shadows. He sat up in bed, and the moth-eaten comforter slid to the floor, landing with a muted thump. His nighttime erection throbbed like a subwoofer as he swung his legs off the edge of his bed and strode across the floor.
The blackness around him adjusted to a bluish gray, making the familiar shapes of the room into slightly more visible impressions. All the while, his ears tingled and faintly buzzed with the echoes of something whispered, something screamed; a dark, singular purpose after too many days of cyclical mundanity.
It was the same Impulse heard by a six-year-old boy in middle America right before he murdered his older sister. It had carried another boy on a bloody path from the bottom of a lake to the bowels of hell. It had driven a devout church lady to kill her husband with an electric knife, right before she slaughtered all nine of her children.
Now, it moved Slater from the confines of his cabin all the way to his work shed. The tools that hung on hooks and lay across the workbench—once objects of routine and daily toil—were now the technologies of Slater’s new bloody destiny.
The old had been made new.
He was an angel of death for the new age, imbued with a darkness as old as creation itself.
He took the axe off the wall and walked to the edge of the mountain. Every light twinkling below represented a life fit for his blade.
The whispers of the Impulse alchemized into one simple, singular command:
No flesh shall be spared.
I wrote the above 295 words by hand on Sunday morning with an old-school techno mix playing in my headphones. A few nights before that, my buddy Shane McKenzie told me I should try my hand at writing a slasher for my next book.
It’s actually kind of surprising I haven’t tried that already: when I was a teenager, I watched the big three slasher franchises over and over. I loved watching Jason, Michael, and Freddy doing their thing, and paradoxically, I also loved watching them get their comeuppance in the end. For some reason, even though all of them perform evil acts, Freddy was the only one I considered evil by nature. Going by the lore of each respective franchise, I suppose that makes sense. Jason is acting out of a warped sense of misplaced anger. Michael was beholden to a curse (in my head, the Thorn curse was canon). Freddy Krueger was just a nasty child killer, even before he became a dream demon.
I didn’t just enjoy the big three either. I dug some of the offbeat ones, like Sleepaway Camp, Madman, The Burning, Terror Train, Graduation Day—movies that admittedly don’t feel as offbeat or obscure in the era of streaming.
I saw Freddy vs Jason on the big screen on opening night (and then in the theaters two more times). I bought Hatchet and Laid to Rest without seeing either of them to find out if they were any good. I got a kick out of Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, and marveled at the three-dimensional, literally eye-popping effects in the remake of My Bloody Valentine. I grew to love Rob Zombie’s remake of Halloween and its sequel because I respect the hell out of the fact that he tried something new, and I cried at the end of The Final Girls when I caught it in the theater because it felt like coming home.
(Yes, I fully realize how weird it is to feel wistful and nostalgic about a film genre centered around inventive depictions of murder.)
And yet, I’ve never written a pure slasher. Sure, I’ve written stuff that’s come close, like the currently out-of-print Cruel Summer and a few short stories, but I’ve never written a novella or novel that follows the slasher formula. Perhaps I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to do anything new or interesting. Maybe I still am.
Fear’s a funny thing, though. Sometimes, it can paralyze you, but other times, it can motivate you to try something different.
The above passage was written with the love I have for the slasher genre coursing through me. My knowledge was there, too, informing it. I’m sure you caught the Easter eggs for Friday the 13th and Halloween.
I can take this piece a lot of different ways, and I spent most of Sunday trying to decide which direction to take. I still have no idea, but I like what I wrote, which, at this stage, feels like a damn blessing, and that’s just going to have to be enough. At least until I write the next page. And the one after that. And the next two hundred or so after that.
I don’t know if I’ll be serializing this book here on Substack or anything (I might - I’m just not sure), but I felt compelled to share that brief excerpt with y’all today. I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope I figure out what the hell comes next. My guess is I need to outline. Even if I later ignore or discard it, mapping a book is a good cheat code for writing an early draft. Something noncommittal that won’t hurt so badly to change.
In case you missed it on Facebook or Notes, I figured I’d share the cover to my next book Goddamn Graveyard Zombies in this newsletter. We’ve still got another round of edits and some formatting to do, but it should be out in the world a lot sooner than expected. Here’s the cover:
And here’s the back cover copy:
Splatterpunk Award winner Lucas Mangum is back with a brand-new novella of fast-paced, gory horror.
Villano and Iyana want their wedding to be special, something that fits their unique personalities. That's why they chose their town's historical Lazarus Cemetery as the venue.
But their special ceremony has some uninvited guests.
When toxic ooze spills into a nearby well, the dead rise to crash the wedding with an insatiable hunger for brains.
Now, the young lovers and their friends must fight for survival in a struggle that leads them below the cemetery where the town's dark secrets await them.
Goddamn Graveyard Zombies is an old-school romp through the cemetery infused with twenty-first century nihilism.
There's no escape, not even in death.
Watch for a preorder link in the near future.
Currently reading: A Dark Matter and Floating Dragon, both by Peter Straub.
Currently watching: Still rewatching Lost. We’re almost finished the fifth season, and I have no idea why people turned against this show the way they did. Maybe they resented knowing it was coming to an end.
I also caught Sinners and I Saw the TV Glow. Both were incredibly special, each for its own reason. The former perfectly balanced the fun and poignancy that make the horror genre special. The latter left me absolutely gutted. Watch them both!