The Haunting of House
Part one of Machina
Machina is a three volume horror/fantasy epic that will destroy every concept of reality you ever had.
Amiable, yuppie lawyer Jimmie Cohen travels to upstate New York to see to the dispensation of a will. He is about to have the most bizarre encounter of his life, and it all comes down to one simple question: Can a house be ‘alive?’
This simple question, with its dire consequence, is about to turn Jimmy Cohen’s world upside down. ‘House,’ just like a big, faithful puppy dog, is going to follow Jimmy home.
Home, a dilapidated apartment house filled with the most bizarre tenants: an amazon who studies Kung Fu, A Korean whose plants grow into the walls, a sculptor making an army of sculpts, and a crippled boy and his garbage can mother in the room at the end of the hall.
And gangsters and crooked lawyers and…and a murder plot complicated by ghosts.
And on top of all this chaos, like a surfer in a maelstrom, is the fellow who is making it all happen…Oscar Trevant.
A mage a mystic, a seer, a prophet, Oscar made House live, and he is about to make a man out of Jimmy.
Where this Bizarre Tale Came From…
I have written short stories, quite a few, but they usually end up relegated to the cobwebs of my computer.
I just can’t take the time to market properly. By the time I get the first of a thousand rejection slips I am on to the next project, and the next and the next.
It always amazes me how slow the writing game is; how slow the thought processes of publishers are.
Anyway, I wrote a short story. Started to put it aside, and suddenly had a thought. I stared at the paper it was written on, felt a niggling way back in the soul, and thought: ‘There’s more.’
So I made the short story chapter one, and set out to find what it was I had left undone.
A few hundred pages later I came up for air. I had completed ‘The Haunting of House.’
I started to relegate that work to the dust bins of computerland, and, suddenly, I had a thought: ‘This isn’t done.’
What followed was months of twelve hour days, locked in a room, only coming out to eat, and that fast.
In writing the Machine series I began crying. I had heard of this phenomena, it was apparently pretty well known in a writing circle in New York: if a writer is crying, don’t bother him (her).
So I cried, couldn’t stop, sobbed my heart out, couldn’t even see the F-in’ keys for the tears splattering on them, and when I was done I knew I had written the almighty classic. It could be compared to Frankenstein, or The Call of Cthulhu, I am Legend, Dorian Gray, The Stand…The Stand.
The Stand, by Stephen King is, in my opinion, the greatest horror story ever written. Interestingly, as I was writing Machina I kept thinking of The Stand, thinking: ‘I want it to be that good!’
So, that’s the story behind the opus that wrenched my F-in’ heart to pieces.
You can find out more by clicking on this Amazon link…
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