F Paul Wilson - Tor/Forge Blog

Why I Can’t Stop Writing Weird Books

June 17, 2021June 17, 2021admin2 Comments

New York Times bestselling author F. Paul Wilson has always written weird books, and he plans to keep it that way. Read about what inspires him to write, and get excited for his newest stand-alone thriller novel Double Threat, on sale June 29th, 2021!

By F. Paul Wilson

Years ago I remember an interviewer asking Stephen King something like: “Why do you write this kind of stuff?” His answer: “What makes you think I have a choice?”

I pumped a fist, saying, “Yes! Perfect!”

Because his answer was so, so true. We don’t choose our genres. As with so many other things, we come prewired for certain kinds of fiction. The genres choose us.

Me? I’m wired for horror and the weird.

The first inkling I had that I was born for the weird and horror was when seven-year-old me saw the trailer for The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. It opened with an atomic explosion, glimpses of this saurian monster in the arctic, and then scenes of a huge dinosaur rampaging through downtown Manhattan – the city just a few miles away across the Hudson from our North Jersey home, the place where my father worked.

You’ve seen the face-hugger from Alien? That was little me against the TV screen. I had to see this movie. My fellow second graders thought it would be cool to go, but I felt as if my life depended on it. My folks, however, said no. This was summer and polio season (the Salk vaccine would not be available for two years yet) and no way were they letting me sit in a stuffy theater crowded with other kids. (Shades of the COVID pandemic, right?) When I threw a fit they asked me if I was really willing to risk ending up in an iron lung just to see some monster movie? My “Yes!” was instantaneous.

But they held firm until I came up with a work-around: a drive-in theater. So my father relented and took me and my brother one night to the Toms River Drive-In where I watched breathlessly, totally captured. I even sympathized with the poor misunderstood rhedosaurus. I was hooked for life.

When I started writing (and collecting rejection slips), I wrote science fiction instead of horror. The market for my first love, horror fiction, did not exist in the 70s. Yes, you could occasionally sell an original horror tale to Bob Lowndes’s reprint magazines (which both King and I did in our early years) or now and then to one of the men’s magazines, and of course you had Stu Schiff’s Whispers, but a prozine specializing in horror did not exist. An Ira Levin or a William Peter Blatty could publish a major horror novel, but they were exceptions to the publishing zeitgeist back then.

So I settled for my second love. SF has weird elements, true, but not enough to fully satisfy me. I kept sneaking in horror wherever I could. My first sale to John Campbell’s Analog (“Ratman”) included a scene with a man eaten alive by rats. And certainly “The Tery” in Dell’s Binary Stars novella series was loaded with horror.

But by the end of the 70s, King’s successes with novels like Carrie, ’Salem’s Lot, and The Stand had opened the door and proved to publishers that people out there wanted to read horror. I decided it was my turn. By that time I’d had three SF novels published in hardcover and paperback. I’d learned the ropes. Time to tackle horror.

I looked at the field and saw how most people were doing variations on Carrie and ‘Salem’s Lot – small-town, narrow-focus horror. I did then what became a recurring approach to my storytelling: Check out what everyone else is doing, then turn it on its head. Instead of telling another small-town story, I decided to go widescreen, travel back to 1941 and set my tale against the backdrop of impending world war. I’d been reading a lot of Robert Ludlum and liked the paranoia/trust-no-one motifs weaving through his novels. I’d also developed a love of cosmic horror. Someone once said the international thriller had a one-night stand with cosmic horror and conceived The Keep. I can’t argue with that. It became an international bestseller and the source of an incomprehensible film by Michael Mann. It hasn’t been out of print since.

By the mid-80s I’d made something of a name for myself in horror with The Keep and The Tomb hitting the NY Times and other bestseller lists. That was when I began getting the kind of questions that reporter asked King: What drives you to write this weird stuff? I never had a good answer until I heard King’s. That became my answer as well: I don’t have a choice.

Friends and family were a little more direct, especially my mother who was put off by the Grand-Guignol grotesqueries of Black Wind and Reborn and Reprisal. “When are you going to write something nice?” she’d say.

Nice? Really, Mom?

So I tried to do nice. Once. I truly did. If you’ve read Crisscross, you know what a dark book it is. If you haven’t, let’s just say I pushed the anti-hero motif to the limit with my guy Jack, making him commit coldblooded first-degree murder (okay, the victim was a sadistic, murderous sleazeball, but still) and frame another killer for it. I finished it in 2003 and needed an anodyne for all the darkness and violence I’d just committed to paper.

So I decided to write a light, cozy mystery about a young female family doctor practicing in a small suburb of Baltimore. She and her deputy sheriff pal – her old high-school crush – would investigate a suspicious death and, after suitable red herrings, identify the murderer. It came in at a sleek 75 thousand words… and simply didn’t work. At least not for me. Something was missing. So I put it aside and moved on to the next Repairman Jack novel on my contract.

I retired from my own medical practice just in time to go into lockdown for the COVID pandemic. With all that extra time on my hands, I pulled out my old cozy and reread it. After sitting on my hard drive for nearly two decades… it still didn’t work. So I added a ghost with a dark secret and voila! It all came together. I liked it so much I wrote a sequel which, before I realized it, took an even darker turn.

This proved to me that I can’t write without a weird element. I’m not wired for straight, mimetic fiction. I need some element unavailable in the real world to get my head into it and start the juices flowing.

Like my latest, Double Threat: It starts off weird in its opening scene as some strange thingy drops off a cave ceiling onto a con artist’s head; things grow progressively weirder as Daley finds she’s sharing her body with a mouthy symbiote whose moral standards exceed her own (which, admittedly, isn’t saying much). And it zooms off the weirdness graph when she’s murdered.

So now when I hear something like, “Why don’t you write something nice?” I refer them to Tina Turner’s intro to Proud Mary.

You know, every now and then I think you might like to hear something from us nice and easy. But there’s just one thing. You see, we never ever do nothing nice, easy.

That’s me. Don’t expect nice and easy from me. Ain’t gonna happen. Can’t help it. I wasn’t born that way.

Pre-order Double Threat—available on June 29, 2021!

Excerpts / What's New

$2.99 eBook Sale: June 2021

June 1, 2021May 2, 2024Rachel Taylor

Summer is approaching and you know what that means. That’s right, SUMMER SALES! Check out what books you can grab for the entire month of June here.

Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente

Koschei the Deathless is to Russian folklore what devils or wicked witches are to European culture: a menacing, evil figure; the villain of countless stories which have been passed on through story and text for generations. But Koschei has never before been seen through the eyes of Catherynne Valente, whose modernized and transformed take on the legend brings the action to modern times, spanning many of the great developments of Russian history in the twentieth century.

Panacea by F. Paul Wilson

Medical examiner Laura Fanning has two charred corpses and no answers. Both bear a mysterious tattoo but exhibit no known cause of death. Their only connection to one another is a string of puzzling miracle cures. Her preliminary investigation points to a cult in the possession of the fabled panacea—the substance that can cure all ills—but that’s impossible….

Skullsword by Brian Staveley

Pyrre Lakatur is not, to her mind, an assassin, not a murderer—she is a priestess. At least, she will be once she passes her final trial. The problem isn’t the killing. The problem, rather, is love. For to complete her trial, Pyrre has ten days to kill the seven people enumerated in an ancient song, including “the one who made your mind and body sing with love / who will not come again.” Pyrre isn’t sure she’s ever been in love. And if she fails to find someone who can draw such passion from her, or fails to kill that someone, her order will give her to their god, the God of Death. Pyrre’s not afraid to die, but she hates to fail, and so, as her trial is set to begin, she returns to the city of her birth in the hope of finding love . . . and ending it on the edge of her sword.

Wild Cards X: Double Solitaire edited by George R. R. Martin, written by Melinda M. Snodgrass

Aboard his grandfather’s spaceship and fleeing the violent turmoil between jokers, aces, and nats that his vicious ambition spawned, Blaise is headed for a new conquest: the planet Takis. Dr. Tachyon is left behind… but he’s lost more than his only way of returning to his homeworld. Blaise has stolen his body, as well—leaving Tach trapped in the pregnant body of a teenage runaway.

Excerpts / What's New

Excerpt: Double Threat by F. Paul Wilson

April 19, 2021March 29, 2024admin

Double Threat is a new stand-alone thriller from New York Times bestselling author F. Paul Wilson.

Daley has a problem. Her 26-year life so far has been unconventional, to say the least, but now she’s got this voice in her head. It claims to be a separate entity that’s going to be sharing her body from now on. At first she thinks she’s losing her grip on reality, then considers the possibility that maybe she really has been invaded – but by what? Medical tests turn up nothing, yet the voice persists… and won’t stop talking!

When she finally she accepts the reality that she has a symbiont, she discovers that together they can cure people of the incurable.

Maybe hosting a symbiont isn’t such a bad thing.

She retreats to a remote town in the southwest desert to hone her healing skills. But there she runs afoul of the Pendry clan, leaders of an obscure cult that worships the Visitors who inhabited the area millions of years ago. They plan to bring them back but believe Daley is the prophesied “Duad” who will undo all the cult’s efforts. She must be eliminated.

You know things are bad when the voice in your head is the only one you can trust.

Double Threat will be available on June 29, 2021. Please enjoy the following excerpt!

WEDNESDAY—FEBRUARY 18

1

The very idea of hiding in a cave gave Daley the deep creeps.

This one was shallow, basically a cleft in the rocks, maybe twenty feet deep. She’d done an inspection using the mini Maglite she always carried on her key chain and found nothing but a grayish mossy patch on the ceiling. Lichen, maybe? She’d heard the term but had no clear idea of what lichen was, except that it wasn’t going to bite her. She’d been more concerned about finding some of the more disgusting things that liked to make their home in desert caves. Bats, for one. And rattlesnakes. And scorpions. Probably tarantulas too.

None of those, thank you. But just the thought of them . . .

She shuddered but stayed put. She needed this cave. At least for the moment. At least until she was sure a certain SUV full of angry Coachella hausfraus had given up on finding her. What was the saying? Hell hath no fury like a woman scammed? Something like that.

Miles away in the sandy valley below, the glittery blue of the stagnant and stinky Salton Sea dominated the view. Not high desert out there—low, low desert, with not a Joshua tree or saguaro in sight.

She studied the expanse of sand between her perch and the palm-tree farm that bordered the highway, looking for a dust cloud, the telltale sign of an approaching vehicle. But as she watched, she couldn’t resist repeated glances over her shoulder. The cave was empty. She’d checked. So why this feeling she wasn’t alone?

No dust cloud in sight out there yet, so Daley did another quick check of the interior with her mini Mag. But just like before: nada except for the lichen patch. A crazy idea that it had moved wormed into her head but she laughed it off and went back on watch.

Not her first time running the car-raffle game, but those pissed-off marks might make it her last if they caught up with her.

The game was simplicity itself: She rented a space where she could display the brand-new sports car—also rented but no one knew that. This time out she’d brought along a fire-red Mazda Miata. They go for less than 30K but look soooo sexy. As usual, a carefully chosen Talbot’s wardrobe combined with her wide blue eyes and innocent twenty-six-year-old face made the raffle tickets sell like Girl Scout cookies outside a cannabis store.

The lure was winning off the books. If you win a car worth thirty grand, it’s the same as winning an equal amount in a casino: The IRS and the governor want their cut. And you’ve got to cover that in cash, which, depending on your tax bracket, can add up. Daley’s lure was to keep the lottery under the table, which meant winner take all. To some extent—in some folks more than others—everyone has a little larceny in their soul. Nothing like appealing to the dark side to add a little spice to the game.

Then comes the drawing. Daley had found that Wednesday tended to be a good day for this. The usual process is to take the winner to the display space and present him or her with a junker, explaining how the raffle’s backer had, well, backed out, and this is the best Daley could do. When the winner squawks, Daley makes amends by refunding the price of the winner’s raffle ticket plus a little extra to compensate for the inconvenience. The winner walks away disappointed but not angry—after all, they got back their investment and then some—and Daley walks away with the proceeds from all the losing tickets.

But in today’s case, the winner—Amber Seabolt by name— returned with a crowd of her angry friends who all wanted refunds plus compensation. Well, Daley wasn’t having any of that, so she’d been forced to beat a hasty retreat—in the junker Jeep, of all things. She’d raced south along the 86. Being a state highway instead of an interstate, it has stoplights here and there along the way. Her pursuers stayed close behind until she beat them through the light at the Avenue 66 intersection. While Amber and her posse waited for the cross traffic to pass, Daley increased her lead.

Somewhere south of Desert Shores she spotted a side road on the right through a palm-tree farm. Side path was more like it, running parallel to a drainage ditch. Once clear of the palms she shot off into the desert toward the hills, going totally off-road into the Santa Rosa Mountains. Of course, that was where the old Jeep started coughing and wheezing and losing power. She’d rented it from a garage in Indio—the cheapest thing they had—and it looked like she’d got her money’s worth.

With the Jeep bucking and making death rattles, she spotted a group of major boulders and pulled in behind them before the thing died. Farther up the slope she spied this cave, its curved, oblong entrance looking like a toothless grin. The shadowed interior offered shade and a long view of the valley—early warning of trouble approaching. She’d accepted that offer.

Still no sign of pursuit. She’d lost them. Yay for me. But she’d also stuck herself in the middle of nowhere with a dead junker. She seriously doubted she could get an Uber or Lyft to drive out here and take her back to her own car in Coachella, which meant she was going to have to walk to some outpost of civilization along the shore of the Salton.

And that brought up the recurring question of whether these games were worth it. Just because she’d been raised by a grifter family, did she think she had to avoid the straight life?

Maybe. And maybe not.

Not like she hadn’t tried straight jobs. Once she’d ditched high school and struck out on her own, she’d found herself honest work. But nothing she tried paid more than minimum wage, mostly because she lacked marketable skills—legally marketable skills. Even if they paid her more, she invariably found herself, after only a few weeks on the job, ready to jump off a building from boredom.

That was her problem. Everything bored her, including most people. High school had bored her so deeply she couldn’t even consider college.

Because nothing—absolutely nothing in this screwed-up world— gave her a jolt of satisfaction that came even close to walking away from a game with someone else’s money in her pocket.

She supposed it was in her blood. Certainly in her upbringing. After her father’s murder, his extended family—“the Family”— insisted on raising her. They were all lower-lip-deep in grift. They believed in scamming rather than schooling. So, while her mom was out working a legit job as a grocery cashier—she wasn’t part of the Family—her daughter was having her left leg tied up behind her with her foot nestled against her butt and being put out on the street with an older cousin to beg for money for this poor little amputee. When she got older, she graduated to the big sister of the amputee. She was also dragged along as a cute little prop when her uncles would go door to door finding customers for their driveway-coating scams because, really, would a con man bring his daughter along? Little Stanka—yeah, her given name—also learned to pick pockets and rifle through an unwatched handbag in a shopping cart.

No guilt. Her mother tried to instill some sense of right and wrong into her life, but the vast majority of her extended family— virtually everyone else she knew in the world—took it for granted that grift was life. And so it became second nature for little Stanka, and carried over to grown-up Stanka.

With the sun sinking behind her and shadows of the Santa Rosa peaks starting to creep across the desert before her, Daley figured she’d better get moving.

But as she rose she felt something slap against the top of her head.

She screamed—couldn’t help it, screamed like a little girl and ran out of the cave frantically slapping at her head. Something flat and oblong and slightly fuzzy there. The lichen patch? Still running / dancing / hopping in a circle, she gouged at it, trying to work a finger under an edge and peel it off but it was stuck fast to her hair—glued to her head. She screamed again as her scalp began to burn, like something was seeping into her.

Then her vision blurred and her legs went soft. She dropped to her knees. As she swayed there, still clutching at her scalp, her vision cleared and she was no longer looking at a desert. The Salton Sea had expanded to a huge lake or small sea that ran as far north and south as she could see, and lapped at the Chocolate Mountains to the east. Something huge roiled the water as it glided beneath the surface.

And then everything faded to black.

THURSDAY—FEBRUARY 19

1

Daley awoke in the dark with her face in the dirt.

Where—? What—? Why was she—?

It came back to her: racing through the desert, the cave, the thing on her scalp—

“Oh, shit!”

She rolled over and clawed at the top of her head. That thing, that lichen thing or whatever it was, was still stuck to her.

“Oh-shit-oh-shit-oh-shit-oh-shit! ”

Wait . . . no, not so stuck. She hadn’t been able to budge it before but now it felt loose, ready to fall off. She peeled it away and tossed it aside. Good rid—

No, wait. She might need it. The thing had poisoned her or drugged her—done something to knock her out cold for . . . for how long? Across the valley, the eastern sky behind the Chocolate Mountains was growing pale.

Almost dawn? Had she been out cold all night? God, she was thirsty. The time . . . Where was her phone? In her bag . . . but where was her bag? In the cave . . . but where was—?

All right, stop. Get a grip.

She was scattering. She needed to take a breath and get it together. Which she did.

Starlight and predawn glow revealed the black grin of the cave a dozen feet behind her. She stumbled up the slope to the mouth where she made out the lump of her shoulder bag. Stretching, she snatched it to her without going inside. A quick rummage found her keys and mini Maglite.

Okay. Now she had some control of the situation. The flashlight helped her find the thing that had attacked her, although now it didn’t look like lichen or moss. An oblong shape, maybe five inches long, wider in the middle, tapering at both ends. Like a mini Nerf football someone had ironed flat and painted gray.

Though it looked dead as could be, Daley didn’t want to touch it. She flashed her beam around, looking for a stick, and found instead a short length of two-by-four, nailed to a square of plywood. She flipped it over to reveal a sign with faded red letters.

STAY OUT! DANGER!

“Now you tell me?”

But danger from what? What was this thing? She felt pretty good now. In fact, except for the thirst, she felt fine. But how had it knocked her out? She knew she’d have to find out.

Using the sign like a spatula, she scooped it up and picked her way down the hillside to the Jeep. She dumped the sign and the thingy in the rear, then tried to start the engine. Lots of clunky whining noises sounding like forget-it-forget-it-forget-it but not a hint of combustion.

She stepped out and looked around. Down in the valley she spotted the lights of Desert Shores. Two choices: Start walking now and risk breaking her ankle or worse in a rattlesnake hole, or spend a few hours in the Jeep and start hoofing it at dawn.

But off to her right . . . a light. She watched it for a moment or two but saw no movement. Stay with the Jeep or check it out? With thirst pushing her, the latter seemed like the best option at the moment, so she headed that way.

Pre-order Double Threat—available on June 29, 2021!

eBook Deals / Lists / What's New

$2.99 eBook Sale: October 2020

October 1, 2020May 2, 2024Rachel Taylor

There’s a hint of fall in the air and we are SO excited for all the thrilling reads we have to offer this month with our down-priced ebooks! Check out which ones you can snag for only $2.99 throughout the entire month of October below.

Alone with the Horrors by Ramsey Campbell

Three decades into his career, Ramsey Campbell paused to review his body of short fiction and selected the stories that were, to his mind, the very best of his works. Alone With the Horrors collects nearly forty tales from the first thirty years of Campbell’s writing. Included here are “In the Bag,” which won the British Fantasy Award, and two World Fantasy Award-winning stories, “The Chimney” and the classic “Mackintosh Willy.”

The Toll by Cherie Priest

Titus and Melanie Bell are on their honeymoon and have reservations in the Okefenokee Swamp cabins for a canoeing trip. But shortly before they reach their destination, the road narrows into a rickety bridge with old stone pilings, with room for only one car. Much later, Titus wakes up lying in the middle of the road, no bridge in sight. Melanie is missing. When he calls the police, they tell him there is no such bridge on Route 177 . . .

Hell House by Richard Matheson

Rolf Rudolph Deutsch is going die. But when Deutsch starts thinking seriously about his impending death, he offers to pay a physicist and two mediums $100,000 each to establish the facts of life after death. Dr. Lionel Barrett, the physicist, accompanied by the mediums, travel to the Belasco House in Maine. For one night, Barrett and his colleagues investigate the Belasco House and learn exactly why the townfolks refer to it as the Hell House.

HEX by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a seventeenth century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Everybody knows that her eyes may never be opened or the consequences will be too terrible to bear. The elders of Black Spring have virtually quarantined the town by using high-tech surveillance to prevent their curse from spreading. Frustrated with being kept in lockdown, the town’s teenagers decide to break their strict regulations but, in so doing, they send the town spiraling into dark, medieval practices of the distant past.

The Mothman Prophecies by John A. Keel

West Virginia, 1966. For thirteen months the town of Point Pleasant is gripped by a real-life nightmare culminating in a tragedy that makes headlines around the world. Strange occurrences and sightings, including a bizarre winged apparition that becomes known as the Mothman, trouble this ordinary American community. Mysterious lights are seen moving across the sky. Domestic animals are found slaughtered and mutilated. And journalist John Keel, arriving to investigate the freakish events, soon finds himself an integral part of an eerie and unfathomable mystery.

The Keep by F. Paul Wilson

“Something is murdering my men.” Thus reads the message received from a Nazi commander stationed in a small castle high in the remote Transylvanian Alps. Invisible and silent, the enemy selects one victim per night, leaving the bloodless and mutilated corpses behind to terrify its future victims. When an elite SS extermination squad is dispatched to solve the problem, the men find something that’s both powerful and terrifying.

Dark Harvest by Norman Partridge

Halloween, 1963. They call him the October Boy, or Ol’ Hacksaw Face, or Sawtooth Jack. Whatever the name, everybody in this small Midwestern town knows who he is. How he rises from the cornfields every Halloween, a butcher knife in his hand, and makes his way toward town, where gangs of teenage boys eagerly await their chance to confront the legendary nightmare. Both the hunter and the hunted, the October Boy is the prize in an annual rite of life and death.

Legion by William Peter Blatty

A young boy is found horribly murdered in a mock crucifixion. Is the murderer the elderly woman who witnessed the crime? A neurologist who can no longer bear the pain life inflicts on its victims? A psychiatrist with a macabre sense of humor and a guilty secret? A mysterious mental patient, locked in silent isolation? Lieutenant Kinderman follows a bewildering trail that links all these people, confronting a new enigma at every turn even as more murders surface.

I Am Not A Serial Killer by Dan Wells

Dead bodies are normal to John. He likes them, actually. They don’t demand or expect the empathy he’s unable to offer. Perhaps that’s what gives him the objectivity to recognize that there’s something different about the body the police have just found behind the Wash-n-Dry Laundromat—and to appreciate what that difference means. Now, for the first time, John has to confront a danger outside himself, a threat he can’t control, a menace to everything and everyone he would love, if only he could.

Queen by Timothy Zahn

Nicole Hammond is a Sibyl, a special human that has the ability to communicate with a strange alien ship called the Fyrantha. However, Nicole and all other sentient creatures are caught up in a war for control between two competing factions. Now, the street-kid turned rebel leader has a plan that would restore freedom to all who have been shanghaied by the strange ship.

The Family Plot by Cherie Priest

From Cherie Priest, author of the enormously successful Boneshaker, The Family Plot is a haunted house story for the ages—atmospheric, scary, and strange, with a modern gothic sensibility that’s every bit as fresh as it is frightening.

The First Days by Rhiannon Frater

The morning that the world ends, Katie is getting ready for court and housewife Jenni is taking care of her family. Less than two hours later, they are fleeing for their lives from a zombie horde. Thrown together by circumstance, Jenni and Katie become a powerful zombie-killing partnership, mowing down zombies as they rescue Jenni’s stepson, Jason, from an infected campground.

Nightflyers & Other Stories by George R. R. Martin

On a voyage toward the boundaries of the known universe, nine misfit academics seek out first contact with a shadowy alien race. But another enigma is the Nightflyer itself, a cybernetic wonder with an elusive captain no one has ever seen in the flesh. Soon, however, the crew discovers that their greatest mystery – and most dangerous threat – is an unexpected force wielding a thirst for blood and terror….

Stranded by Bracken MacLeod

Badly battered by an apocalyptic storm, the crew of the Arctic Promise find themselves in increasingly dire circumstances as they sail blindly into unfamiliar waters and an ominously thickening fog. Without functioning navigation or communication equipment, they are lost and completely alone. One by one, the men fall prey to a mysterious illness. Deckhand Noah Cabot leads the last of the able-bodied crew on a journey across the ice and into an uncertain future where they must fight for their lives against the elements, the ghosts of the past and, ultimately, themselves.

The House of Cthulhu by Brian Lumley

The fabled riches of the House of Cthulhu draw thieves and warriors from throughout the civilized-and uncivilized lands, but none escape with so much as a single gemstone, for they discover that Cthulhu’s House is not a temple but a dwelling-place. Surely the Elder God lives there still, waiting for an unwary person to open the portal between his world and ours . . . .

The Five by Robert McCammon

As they move through the American Southwest on what might be their final tour together, the band members come to the attention of a damaged Iraq war veteran, and their lives are changed forever. This is a riveting account of violence, terror, and pursuit set against a credible, immensely detailed rock and roll backdrop. It is also a moving meditation on loyalty and friendship.

Author Features

At the Crossroads of Crichton and Lovecraft

January 10, 2018May 16, 2024torforge

F. Paul Wilson interviewed by Heather Graham

I’m thrilled to interview F. Paul Wilson. I have been in love with his work for years. In his new offering, Paul has given us an incredible work—and, if it shows the same brilliance as novels written by Michael Crichton, it’s because F. Paul Wilson is also a medical doctor, a man who has studied every new discovery in the field while compassionately treating patients. There’s a note of knowledge and veracity to his story, and those traveling through the scenes this master has created see vividly in the mind’s eye the world of Wilson’s characters. He kindly answered many questions for me, and so, I’m ‘thrilled’ to present this interview.

HEATHER GRAHAM: Despite the title, I’m going to assume The God Gene isn’t a religious book.

PAUL WILSON: Good assumption. It’s best described as a science thriller.

HG: I know it’s a sequel to Panacea, but is it a direct continuation, or something entirely new?

FPW: Both. Rick and Laura are back. After a rocky start in Panacea, the two of them are tentatively exploring a relationship. Laura is being sent a dose of the panacea every so often, so that’s still on the table, but everything takes a backseat when Rick’s older brother drops off the face of the Earth.

HG: So, as they say, “This time it’s personal.”

FPW: Correct. Rick is estranged from his family – hasn’t contacted them in years. When he joined the CIA, he was designated the official Black Sheep of the clan. But he and Laura learn that his brother Keith, an evolutionary zoologist, didn’t simply wander off one day. He first destroyed all the genetic sequencing he had done on a mysterious little primate he’d discovered in Mozambique, then liquidated all his assets and transferred them offshore. The mystery primate died suddenly and, on the day before Keith disappeared, he threw its ashes into the Long Island Sound. All coincidence? I don’t think so.

HG: Obviously he found something in that primate’s genome that he didn’t want to share. The “god gene” of the title?

FPW: Let’s define “god gene.” Two “god genes” exist in the real world: one type is from Dean Hamer’s book postulating a genetic basis for spiritual beliefs. The other, the one I adopted, refers to the genes that make us human, that sparked the brain developments that allowed us to leave all the other primates in the intellectual dust.

HG: So there are real “god genes?”

FPW: So-called. Real genes like miR-941, exclusive to the human genome, appeared seemingly out of nowhere a million or two years ago – popped out of our “junk DNA” and started coding. These pop-ups enhanced our neurotransmitters and brain development. Believers point to a human-exclusive gene like miR-941 as evidence of God affecting evolution. A God Gene.

HG: I’m going to assume – because of your title – that Rick’s brother found one of these god genes in that little primate.

FPW: That’s what everyone assumes. But it doesn’t explain his bizarre behavior. Though startling, the discovery would be a cause for further exploration rather than panicked flight. Keith had to have found something else – something unnerving enough to make him obliterate all evidence of his discovery and disappear. But what? That’s the mystery Rick and Laura must solve. Their search takes them to East Africa and Madagascar, and to a place no humans have ever been before. They wind up on the edge of human evolutionary science.

HG: A hard-science mystery-thriller.

FPW: As one of my early readers said, “Very Crichtonish.” It hadn’t been my intention when I set out, but The God Gene edged me into Crichton country.

HG: Not a bad place to be.

FPW: Not a bad place at all. I’ve always been something of a science geek, and I cut my writer’s teeth on SF.

HG: A long time ago.

FPW: Quite. Back when the Permian Extinction was still a fond memory. But the science in The God Gene is barely fiction. I make up my own “god gene” – one instrumental in sparking human creativity – but it could very well be real.

HG: The ads say The God Gene is part of “the ICE sequence.” What does that mean?

FPW: Damned if I know. Okay, seriously, when I told the publisher I was planning a third book with Rick and Laura, they wanted a name for the series. Rick has some strange ideas. He believes that the human level of sapience is so rare that when it occurs it attracts attention, and as a result we are all under the scrutiny of (to quote Wells) “intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic.” Rick calls them “ICE” – Intrusive Cosmic Entities – and believes they have long meddled with humanity from behind the scenes. ICE never manifest in the books, they’re simply posited as a possible explanation for some odd goings on.

HG: Sounds a bit Lovecraftian.

FPW: Because it is. The God Gene stands at the crossroads of Crichton and Lovecraft. You’d expect that to be an awkward place, but when you look carefully at Lovecraft’s fiction, much of it, deep down, is really SF. Again, not what I consciously set out to do, but now that it’s done and I look back, it works. Somehow it works just fine.

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Follow F. Paul Wilson online on his website, Twitter, and Facebook.
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New Releases

New Releases: 1/2/18

January 2, 2018May 2, 2024torforge

Happy New Release Day! Here’s what went on sale today.

The God Gene by F. Paul Wilson

A million or so years ago, a gene designated hsa-mir-3998 appeared as if by magic from the junk DNA of the hominids who eventually evolved into Homo sapiens. It became a key player in brain development—specifically creativity—and laymen started calling it “the God Gene.” Keith had been tracking this gene through the evolutionary tree, and was excited by an odd blue-eyed primate he brought back from East Africa. But immediately after running the creature’s genetic code, he destroyed all the results and vanished.

Metaltown by Kristen Simmons

The rules of Metaltown are simple: Work hard, keep your head down, and watch your back. You look out for number one, and no one knows that better than Ty. She’s been surviving on the factory line as long as she can remember. But now Ty has Colin. She’s no longer alone; it’s the two of them against the world. That’s something even a town this brutal can’t take away from her. Until it does.

NEW IN PAPERBACK

The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi

Game of Shadows by Erika Lewis

Jericho’s Road and Hard Trail to Follow by Elmer Kelton

The Skill of Our Hands by Steven Brust and Skyler White

Valley of the Shadow by Ralph Peters

NEW IN MANGA

Alice & Zoroku Vol. 3 Story and art by Tetsuya Imai

Dreamin’ Sun Vol. 5 Story and art by Ichigo Takano

Hatsune Miku Presents: Hachune Miku’s Everyday Vocaloid Paradise Vol. 2 Story and art by Ontama

Excerpts

Excerpt: The God Gene by F. Paul Wilson

November 30, 2017March 20, 2024torforge

Rick’s brother, Keith, a prominent zoologist at NYU, walks out of his office one day and disappears. The only clue they have are his brother’s book, which mentions “the God Gene.”

A million or so years ago, a gene designated hsa-mir-3998 appeared as if by magic from the junk DNA of the hominids who eventually evolved into Homo sapiens. It became a key player in brain development—specifically creativity—and laymen started calling it “the God Gene.” Keith had been tracking this gene through the evolutionary tree, and was excited by an odd blue-eyed primate he brought back from East Africa. But immediately after running the creature’s genetic code, he destroyed all the results and vanished.

Rick and Laura’s search takes them to an uncharted island in the Mozambique Channel, home of the dapis—blue-eyed primates whose DNA hides a world-shattering secret. In a globe-spanning mixture of science, mystery and adventure reminiscent of Michael Crichton, The God Gene takes you to the edge of evolutionary theory and beyond…way beyond.

The God Gene will be available on January 2nd. Please enjoy this excerpt.

1 DAPI ISLAND

Amaury gazed up at the sheer lava wall of the mysterious little island and could only pray that the rest of this trip went as smoothly as these first two days. The waters of the channel had been placid, the current gentle, and the John Deere engine had purred like a kitten. Bakari and Razi, who often fought as only brothers can, behaved themselves. Even Jeukens had relaxed enough to exchange a few words with them—not that they cared to have much to do with an Afrikaner. The brothers spoke Portuguese, Ronga—they were Shangaans, a Bantu tribe—and could manage some very broken English. So English, by default, became the Sorcière’s lingua franca.

Its anchor had found firm footing about a hundred yards from the western shore and the ship bobbed gently in the current. Amaury and Bakari were rowing the inflatable fifteen-foot raft he’d brought along. The cargo: the ladders and the tents.

As they approached the shore, Jeukens and Razi waded out to their knees and pulled them the rest of the way in.

“The ladders,” Jeukens said, scowling. “At last, the ladders. We should have brought them first.”

So anxious to climb up and over that wall.

“And if we had, where would you be now? We would lose you to those monkeys when we need every available hand to haul our equipment to the other side.”

“I am not part of your crew.”

Amaury had anticipated this moment. Jeukens had been a client on the first trip out here. As the man who had chartered Amaury’s boat, he’d had major say in the Sorcière’s course. But on this trip he was a passenger, with no say. With Bakari and Razi watching and listening, this had to be settled here and now, once and for all. The Shangaans’ father had fought in the Mozambican civil war against South African–funded forces. He’d lost a leg to a land mine. They were naturally suspicious of foreigners. Neither Amaury nor Jeukens were natives, but Amaury’s color was on his side, and he had to show the brothers that not only was he their boss, but the white man’s boss as well.

“Ah, but in many ways you are crew. And I am your captain—onboard, and ashore while we are here. We need—what is the English expression?—a pecking order. Yes, a pecking order if things are to run smoothly. Bakari and Razi understand that. You said you did too.”

Jeukens looked as if he were about to make an angry retort. His teeth were clenched, as were his fists. But he stood silent for a moment, then he spoke.

“You are right, of course. I … I apologize. ‘Impatience does become a dog that’s mad.’”

“Yet another quote, monsieur?”

“Shakespeare. Antony and Cleopatra.”

Amaury had never read it, but at least he’d heard of Shakespeare.

“You agree that I am your captain?”

The Afrikaner nodded stiffly. “I agree.”

“Then apology accepted,” he said, surprised how easy it had been.

Of course, he knew Jeukens did not mean a word of it. But, at least on the surface, a proper chain of command had been established. He glanced at the brothers, who seemed satisfied.

“I have never been known for my patience,” Jeukens added. “And you must understand that this island is completely unexplored. For all we know, we are the first humans ever to set foot on it. Who knows what wonders wait on the other side of that wall?”

Amaury winked at Bakari and Razi. “You are thinking maybe dinosaurs, monsieur?”

The brothers laughed and elbowed each other.

“Do not make light of this, Captain Laffite. Something of enormous importance awaits on the other side of that wall.”

Yes, Amaury thought. A fortune in cutesy creatures.

“We shall know soon enough, monsieur.”

Bakari and Razi unloaded the two extension ladders, each expandable to twenty-four feet, and carried them to the base of the wall. As they stretched one of them to its full length, Amaury inspected the nearly vertical lava. After the Afrikaner’s brief trip ashore on their first voyage, Jeukens had said the wall was not climbable. Amaury had taken him at his word and was glad of it. The lava was peppered with tiny pocks, worn almost smooth by eons of wind and weather. The vegetation that studded its surface clung precariously, offering no useful handholds.

Ladders were the only way up.

The brothers leaned an extended ladder against the wall with its top rung ending just shy of the rim. Jeukens stepped toward it but Razi was quicker, darting in front of him and clambering up the rungs like one of the primates Amaury intended to capture.

With Bakari steadying the ladder from below, Razi hoisted himself up to the rim and rose to his feet. For a few seconds he stood with hands on hips, staring into the caldera, then he turned, wide-eyed, and began babbling in Ronga. Amaury had picked up some Ronga during his years in Mozambique, but Razi was rattling too fast for him to understand.

“What did he say?” he asked Bakari in Portuguese.

“He says it’s full of trees.”

Excellent. Many trees meant many primates.

Jeukens reached again for the ladder up but Bakari blocked him.

“Capitão first.”

Ah, yes. The pecking order. Normally Amaury would have allowed Jeukens to go, but because of the Afrikaner’s earlier challenge, he grabbed the rungs and ascended.

Soon enough, though, all four of them were standing on the rim, staring in fascination at the canopy of green. Well, three of them, at least. Jeukens seemed more interested in an area about ninety degrees to their left along the circular rim.

“Do you see something we do not, mon ami?”

Jeukens stiffened, then relaxed. “Just looking for signs of the primates.”

Why over there? he wondered. Why not directly below? Did the Afrikaner know something he was not sharing?

“And?”

“No sign of a single one yet.”

“Let us hope that changes once we are inside … which should not be too difficult to reach.”

The inner slope of the wall was much gentler than the outside, with larger vegetation, even a small tree here and there making itself at home on the incline. The climb down looked easy, but it appeared to be a lot farther than twenty feet.

They began the arduous task of hauling up all the supplies and equipment—food, water, tents, Coleman stove, all the traps, and one cage—on ropes. The task was made somewhat easier by using the second ladder as a skid, but with no shade on the rim, and no clouds to shield them from the blazing tropical sun, they’d all soon soaked through their shirts.

By early afternoon, everything was arranged on the rim. Razi broke out bottles of water and protein bars. As they rested and let the westerly breeze cool them, Amaury felt a nudge. He glanced up to see a grinning Bakari pointing toward the caldera.

Amaury almost dropped his water bottle.

The leafy canopy was alive with little blue-eyed primates, clinging to the swaying upper branches as they stared at the newcomers. Some were as close as twenty-five feet.

“These are the lemurs we trap?” Bakari said.

No, not lemurs, but Amaury didn’t correct him—at least not yet. People all over the world were going to make that mistake. And that would be fine at first. The eyes would sell them. But Amaury would also whisper that his little pets were being intensely studied because they were suspected of being the missing link. If Jeukens ever published the connection, excellent! If not, so what? The mere possibility that someone might own the missing link would drive up the price.

Soon all four humans were staring back, though Jeukens seemed the least impressed.

“How many you see?” Razi said.

Bakari waggled his finger in the air in a show of counting. “Many hundred.”

“And they don’t seem the least bit afraid,” Amaury said.

“Why should they be?” Jeukens said with a shrug. “We don’t pose any obvious threat.”

Razi grinned. “Not yet.”

Jeukens waved his arm over the canopy. “Right now they’re kings of their little castle. I’ll bet they have no predators on this island.”

“No big cats or snakes?” Amaury said.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they killed them off ages ago.”

“Killed? They are little monkeys.”

“They’re also smart and adaptable.”

A group of five primates—three males and a female with a baby clinging to her back—cautiously moved to within a dozen feet. Bakari broke off a piece of his protein bar and tossed it their way in a high, gentle arc. The one with the baby snagged it out of the air with a one-handed catch. She sniffed the fragment, took a tiny test bite, then screeched. It must have been a happy screech because the other three immediately began fighting for it.

“This is going to be easy, mes amis,” Amaury said, raising his palm. “So easy!”

He and the brothers exchanged high-fives while Jeukens simply stared at the creatures.

“We’re back in the lemur business!” Razi said in Portuguese.

“Lemurs?” Jeukens said. “Did he say ‘lemurs’?”

“Yes. They are called the same in English and Portuguese.”

“They are not lemurs,” Jeukens said. “You know that.”

“Then what?” Bakari said. “Big eyes…”

Amaury shrugged. “No one knows.”

“What we call them?” Razi said.

“I propose we call them dapis,” Jeukens said. “They resemble an extinct species called adapiform primates. We can shorten that to dapi. That is, if no one objects.”

Dapi … Amaury liked it. Easy to say and easy to spell meant easy to sell. A cute little name for a cute little creature. Perfect.

“Dapi it is.”

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New Releases / What's New

New Releases: 5/30/17

May 30, 2017May 10, 2024torforge

Here’s what went on sale today!

A Scourge of Vipers by Bruce DeSilva

To solve Rhode Island’s budget crisis, the state’s colorful governor, Attila the Nun, wants to legalize sports gambling; but her plan has unexpected consequences. Organized crime, professional sports leagues, and others who have a lot to lose—or gain—if gambling is made legal flood the state with money to buy the votes of state legislators.

False Hearts by Laura Lam

Raised in the closed cult of Mana’s Hearth and denied access to modern technology, conjoined sisters Taema and Tila dream of a life beyond the walls of the compound. When the heart they share begins to fail, the twins escape to San Francisco, where they are surgically separated and given new artificial hearts. From then on they pursue lives beyond anything they could have previously imagined.

Mormama by Kit Reed

Dell Duval has been living on the street since his accident. He can’t remember who he was or where he came from. All he has is a tattered note in his pocket with an address for the Ellis house, a sprawling, ancient residence in Jacksonville. He doesn’t know why he’s been sent here. In the house, Lane and her son Theo have returned to the ancient family home—their last resort. The old house is ruled by an equally ancient trio of tyrannical aunts, who want to preserve everything. Nothing should ever leave the house, including Lane.

Something about the house isn’t right. Things happen to the men and boys living there. There are forces at work one of which visits Theo each night—Mormama, one mama too many.

Night Magic by Jenna Black

Philadelphia is locked in the grip of an evil magic that transforms its streets into a nightmare landscape the minute the sun sets each night. While most of the city hunkers down and hopes to survive the long winter nights, Becket Walker is roaming the darkened streets having the time of her life.

Once, the guilt of having inadvertently let the night magic into the city—and of having killed her onetime best friend—had threatened to destroy her. But now she’s been Nightstruck, and all her grief and guilt and terror have been swept away—along with her conscience.

The Wheel of Time Companion by Robert Jordan and Harriet McDougal

Over the course of fifteen books and millions of words, the world that Jordan created grew in depth and complexity. However, only a fraction of what Jordan imagined ended up on the page, the rest going into his personal files.

Now The Wheel of Time Companion sheds light on some of the most intriguing aspects of the world, including biographies and motivations of many characters that never made it into the books, but helped bring Jordan’s world to life.

NEW FROM TOR.COM:

Lightning in the Blood by Marie Brennan

Once, there was a call—a binding—and so, a woman appeared, present in body but absent in knowledge of her past self.

Making the ultimate journey of rediscovery was not without its own pitfalls—or rewards—and now Ree, a roaming Archeron, spirit of legend and time and physically now bound to her current form, has yet to fully uncover her true identity.

NEW IN PAPERBACK:

Blood of Tyrants by Ken Shufeldt

The Dinosaur Knights by Victor Milan

Panacea by F. Paul Wilson

NEW IN MANGA:

The Disappearance of Hatsune Miku Story by Muya Agami and cosMo@BousouP; Art by Yunagi

The High School Life of a Fudanshi Vol. 1 Story and art by Michinoku Atami

eBook Deals

Sims eBook is Now on Sale for $2.99

July 8, 2016May 13, 2024torforge

The ebook edition of F. Paul Wilson’s Sims is on sale for only $2.99!*

About Sims: Sims takes place in the very near future, when the science of genetics is fulfilling its vaunted potential. It’s a world where genetically transmitted diseases are being eliminated. A world where dangerous or boring manual labor is gradually being transferred to “sims,” genetically altered chimps who occupy a gray zone between simian and human. The chief innovator in this world is SimGen, which owns the patent on the sim genome and has begun leasing the creatures worldwide.

But SimGen is not quite what it seems. It has secrets . . . secrets beyond patents and proprietary processes . . . secrets it will go to any lengths to protect. Sims explores this brave new world as it is turned upside down and torn apart when lawyer Patrick Sullivan decides to try to unionize the sims.

Right now, as you read these words, some company somewhere in the world is toying with the chimp genome. That is not fiction, it is fact. Sims is a science thriller that will come true. One way or another.

Buy Sims today:

Sale ends July 29th

New Releases

New Releases: 7/5/16

July 5, 2016May 10, 2024torforge

Here’s what went on sale today!

The Dinosaur Knights by Victor Milán

Paradise is a sprawling, diverse, often cruel world where humans reside but dinosaurs predominate: wildlife, monsters, beasts of burden, and of war. Armored knights ride dinosaurs to battle legions of war-trained Triceratops and their upstart peasant crews. Karyl Bogomirsky is one such knight who has chosen to rally those who seek a way from the path of war and madness. The fact that the Empire has announced a religious crusade against this peaceful kingdom, the people who just wish to live in peace anathema, and they all are to be converted or destroyed doesn’t help him one bit. Things really turn to mud when the dreaded Grey Angels, fabled ancient weapons of the Gods who created Paradise in the first place come on the scene after almost a millennia. Everyone thought that they were fables used to scare children. They are very much real.

And they have come to rid the world of sin…including all the humans who manifest those vices.

Panacea by F. Paul Wilson

Medical examiner Laura Hanning has two charred corpses and no answers. Both bear a mysterious tattoo but exhibit no known cause of death. Their only connection to one another is a string of puzzling miracle cures. Her preliminary investigation points to a cult in the possession of the fabled panacea–the substance that can cure all ills–but that’s impossible.

A reclusive, terminally ill billionaire hires Laura to research the possibility of the panacea. The billionaire’s own body guard, Rick Hayden, a mercenary who isn’t who he pretends to be, has to keep her alive as they race to find the legendary panacea before the agents of 536 can destroy it.

NOW IN PAPERBACK:

The Dragon Lantern by Alan Gratz

The Dragon Lantern is the second book in the League of Seven series! Archie Dent is convinced that he and his friends Hachi and Fergus are the first three members of a new League of Seven: a group of heroes who come together to fight the Mangleborn whenever the monsters arise to destroy humanity. His belief is put to the test when they are forced to undertake separate missions. Archie and his faithful Tik-Tok servant Mr. Rivets pursue a shapeshifting girl who has stolen the Dragon Lantern, an ancient artifact with mysterious powers. And Hachi and Fergus travel to New Orleans to find Madame Blavatsky, the only person who knows the circumstances surrounding the death of Hachi’s father.

In the course of their adventures the three heroes meet potential candidates to join their League. At the same time, they learn deep-rooted secrets that could destroy the League forever. . . .

Unbreakable by W. C. Bauers

The colonists of the planet Montana are accustomed to being ignored. Situated in the buffer zone between two rival human empires, their world is a backwater: remote, provincial, independently minded. Even as a provisional member of the Republic of Aligned Worlds, Montana merits little consideration—until it becomes the flashpoint in an impending interstellar war.

NEW IN MANGA:

Battle Rabbits Vol. 1 Story by Amemiya Yuki; Art by Ichihara Yukino

A Centaur’s Life Vol. 9 Story & Art by Kei Murayama

See upcoming releases.

Pre-order Double Threat—available on June 29, 2021!

WEDNESDAY—FEBRUARY 18

1

THURSDAY—FEBRUARY 19

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Pre-order Double Threat—available on June 29, 2021!

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DAPI ISLAND

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Sims eBook is Now on Sale for $2.99

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