Zombie Jam

Tue, 24 May 2005 10:26:57 +0300

Zombie Jam is a festival of the living dead, featuring Schow's previously uncollected short fiction from zombie anthologies near and far, including the elusive pseudonymous works of alter ego Chan McConnell. It features the splatterpunk classic "Jerry's Kids Meet Wormboy" in its original un-cut form, an exhaustive introduction to the world where the dead not only walk, but eat too damned much, and a brand-new wrapup detailing the Zombie Apocalypse.

Stories included in this collection:
Blossom
Incursion
DON'T/ WALK
Infection
Jerry's Kids Meet Wormboy
Epidemic
Dying Words
Assimilation

Havoc Swims Jaded

Mon, 09 Mar 2015 21:40:15 +0200

Havoc Swims Jaded? What the hell kind of title is that? What does it mean? It sounds vaguely...threatening, doesn't it? Havoc reigns, as a Hallowe'en Horror Night goes horribly wrong, and its featured creatures turn out to be the real thing. Meanwhile, a slimy Lovecraftian monstrosity deals with its daily routine of punching a clock to raise, well, havoc. Havoc ensues, as a time-displaced trio of friends find themselves lost in a trackless desert zone where there are no signposts up ahead at twilight. As your friendly TV remote control displays disturbing new functions. As changing your body image becomes as simple as donning a zip-up human suit. These and other dark tales of modern disturbance await the pleasure of your discomfiture. You will find, as Peter Straub said, that "Here, all of Schow's glittering weapons are sharper than ever before."

Stories included in this collection:
THE ABSOLUTE LAST OF THE ULTRA-SPOOKY, SUPER-SCARY HALLOWE'EN HORROR...

A Little Aqua Book of Creature Tails

Sun, 31 Jan 2021 09:27:09 +0200

The first volume of Little Books Series II is A Little Aqua Book of Creature Tales by David J. Schow! If you were a fan and collector of the original series of Little Books, you will definitely want these!

From the author's afterword: "There are a lot of strange references in this modest collection — everything from second-run art moviehouses to VHS rental stores — that will seem quaintly outdated to the modern reader. To me, in retrospect, the stories themselves seem almost wistful, romanticized but not nostalgic, since they were of their time and should not be tampered with to make them smell contemporary when they are not. Very little exploding-head splat aesthetic here. 'Monsters are what you'll find; the old-school creatures, and a possible answer to the question: Well, what happened to them after?'"

Included in this collection:
"One for the Horrors"
"Last Call for the Sons of Shock"
"(Melodrama)"
"Gills"

Crypt Orchids

Tue, 24 May 2016 10:26:56 +0300

Crime. Psychos. Trashed relationships. Tainted love. Murder. Sinister plots. Evil connivances. Men in Suits with a Plan.

Bizarre flap copy.

Not to mention hustlers, losers, cutthroats, gun fetishists, homicidal hitchhikers, demented road-hogs, serial killer impersonators, government torturers, and a Ripper named Jack.

Vaudevillians (shudder).

Welcome to Crypt Orchids, where you'll also meet a cantankerous celebrity man-fish, a horror movie host who deals in the real thing, an innocent victim of a TV test screening, persnickety aliens with testicle-heads, a werewolf with a prosthetic paw, a Mikey who does, in fact, hate everything, a hit man named Mister Bart, and a temperamental geezer with a lot to say about the environment and skinning people alive.
Crypt Orchids, is a collection of short stories by award-winning multi media author David J. Schow, a gathering of foreboding fiction that grabs the cutting edge barehanded, damns the spray of...

Eye

Thu, 24 May 2001 10:26:58 +0300

You might perceive it as an unblinking scrutiny of such topical issues as sex, obsession, idol worship, penny miracles, policing the birthrate, breast implants, mysterious phone calls in the dead of night, pornography, eternal youth, and the price of devotion. With whom — or what — are you really crawling into bed, in the dark?

Or you might view it as a phantasmagoric kaleidoscope of sex, monsters, empaths, telepaths, aliens, peewee crime kingpins, otherworldly lovers, sentient art, UFOs, "rectosonics", and Mexican wrestling.

You could behold this book's contents as a spectacle of serial love, hot and cold lust, betrayal, and relationships seen from both ends of the telescope. Or a long, hard look into killers, from inside their POV and out, murder, mayhem, death, and things worse than death.

Or you could stop reading this hard sell and start eyeballing the thirteen stories that comprise this collection — Eye.

Unhasped
2¢...

Schow Stories: The Complete Short Fiction

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 08:06:25 +0200

Scanned, converted, re-formatted, proofed, custom title page, custom book cover and eBook creation by Jerry

The Shaft

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 10:54:56 +0200

The Kenilworth Arms is a mongrel apartment building in down-town Chicago, built and re-built, its rooms divided and sub-divided; in some ways it seems to have a strange life of its own - a very strange life.
Jonathan is a commercial artist, running to the city after a bad relationship; Cruz is a drug dealer running from an accidental death in Miami; Jamaica is a prostitute, running from her life. They could not have chosen a worse place to run to.
When the deaths begin, they go almost unnoticed, so deep in degradation is the apartment block steeped. But the Kenilworth Arms and its horrific occupant need blood for their survival, and the trickle soon becomes a flood. In Chicago there are many ways of death - as Jonathan, Cruz and Jamaica are about to find out...

***

'Schow is the chap who first coined the term splatterpunk, and his second novel is every bit as splattery and punkish as his first.'
-The Times

'Pumped up with manic intensity and shoved right into your face. It works.'
-Locus

'It's raw, it's rough, and it's not for wimps... A damn fine book.'
-Afraid Magazine

Gun Work

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 10:54:58 +0200

From Publishers Weekly

Genre hopping seems to suit horror writer Schow (Havoc Swims Jaded) as he lets out all the stops in this high-caliber action story. It's no exaggeration to say that Barney has a more intimate relationship with guns than he does with any human, living or dead. That's why Mexicans call him el hombre de las armas, the gunman. It's also why old army buddy Carl Ledbetter drags him into a messy situation when Carl's fiancée, Erica, is kidnapped in Mexico City. At the prearranged money drop things start to go awry, and eventually a badly beaten, mutilated, shotup and half-starved Barney emerges, determined to get revenge on the kidnappers and anyone else who gets in his way. This is a gory, fast-paced pulp tour de force in the classic style. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Barney, a gunman, moves “between the spaces of the ordinary world of people,” limiting his physical and emotional exposure. But when Carl, an Iraq war buddy, calls him for help—Carl’s fiancée has been kidnapped in Mexico City—Barney ignores his better judgment to go play hero. Events turn ass-over-teakettle wrong, and Barney wants revenge. Fortunately, it’s nothing a little surgical modification, highly modified weaponry, and a few bullet-happy buddies can’t fix. Schow, a versatile novelist (Havoc Swims Jaded, 2006) and screenwriter (The Crow, 1994), eschews his usual splatterpunk for a pulpy bulletfest that, while not horror, still features plenty of splatter. A double-crossing dame haunts the book, but this is really all about the guys and their guns. Barney leads his crew on a revenge mission that is one part Peckinpah, one part A-Team, and two barrels of triple-aught buckshot. But Barney is no Mack Bolan. Schow’s craftsmanlike prose propels a plot that follows its own peculiar rhythms. Readers who like the smell of cordite in the morning will want to pull the trigger on this purchase. --Keir Graff

Black Leather Required

Mon, 14 Nov 1994 10:54:57 +0200

David J. Schow's short stories have been regularly selected for over twenty-five volumes of "Year's Best" anthologies across three decades and have won the World Fantasy Award, the ultra-rare Dimension Award from Twilight Zone magazine, plus a 2002 International Horror Guild Award for his collection of Fangoria columns, Wild Hairs. Black Leather Required collects thirteen of Schow's short stories and includes an intro by John Farris. The stories included in this collection are: The Shaft
Sedalia
A Week in the Unlife
Scoop Makes a Swirly
Kamikaze Butterflies
Beggar's Banquet, with Summer Sausage
Pitt Night at the Lewistone Boneyard
Jerry's Kids Meet Wormboy
Life Partner
Last Call for the Sons of Shock
Where the Heart Was
Sand Sculpture
Bad Guy Hats

Upgunned

Fri, 14 Nov 2014 10:54:58 +0200

A riveting Hitchcockian thriller from the screenwriter of THE CROW.

Elias McCabe is having one hell of a night: He gets kidnapped at gunpoint by a professional hit man and is forced to shoot blackmail photos of a prominent politician. Things go wrong with the shoot... very wrong. When the night is over, Elias is scared to death ... and ten thousand dollars richer.

If he keeps his mouth shut.

But he doesn't — and now the hit man has targeted him for payback.

As a desperate amateur in the games of death, Elias is up against a seasoned pro. As his entire life slides into the abyss, he has to stay alive by inventing new ways, moment-by-moment, to avoid, misdirect, and finally confront his ever-more-determined murderer as corpses and collateral damage stack up coast-to-coast in their wake.

Internecine

Sun, 14 Nov 2010 10:54:57 +0200

Lost Angels

Wed, 14 Nov 1990 10:54:59 +0300

Everyone wants to be good in bed ... but what if it's the bed that makes you good?It's said the dead live on in our memories, but what if only the dead remember you?What if the most infernal dealmaker in creation visited Hollywood, where everyone's a dealmaker, to get a little help from his friends?The answers aren't what you'd expect, but then again, these aren't the sort of questions asked by your average writer of horror fiction.In Lost Angels, David Schow pushes the envelope of his already far-reaching talent, forsaking horror's usual melodrama in favor of penetrating character studies and profound examinations of the human condition. Lost angels are victims of the rigors of love in the City of Night. Los Angeles is where love is found, earned, stolen, sought, regained . . . and ultimately lost again. Features an Introduction by Richard Christian Matheson and an Afterword written especially for this edition. Also includes a brand-new short story, "Calendar Girl".

Seeing Red

Wed, 14 Nov 1990 10:54:58 +0300

Brain-scorching review hyperbole!
Pithy critical commentary!
Big-name blurb mongering!
Hardcore buy-or-die sales pitch hysteria!You'll find none of that in Seeing Red, David J. Schow's very first collection of short stories, back in print for the first time in nearly ten years. It features the World Fantasy Award-winning story, "Red Light," the Twilight Zone Magazine prize-winner "Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You," plus eleven more tales as startling, as disturbing, as provocative and unnerving. Between these covers you'll also find an introduction by best-selling fantasist T.E.D. Klein, and "Crimson Hindsight," a brand-new Afterword written especially for this edition.

Bullets of Rain

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 10:54:58 +0200

Widowed architect Arthur Latimer has become a recluse in his own home: a storm-proof fortress that doubles as a shrine to his dead wife. But the outside world beckons in the form of a bizarre party downbeach. Now, just as the biggest hurricane ever to hit the Pacific Northwest rolls in with deadly force, Art is subjected to intrusions from his past and invasions from the present. And soon he begins to doubt everything he sees or thinks he already knows. And soon you may too. Genre: Psychological thriller. *** From Publishers Weekly Storms raging outdoors and in the mind of the protagonist create a maelstrom of menace in this sinuous psychological thriller by Schow (The Kill Riff, The Shaft). A whopper of a hurricane is barreling up the California coast, and renegade architect Art Latimer is planning to ride it out and test the structural integrity of his self-designed dream home. At the same time, he's struggling to batten down powerful feelings about his wife, Lorelle, whose death two years before sent him into an emotional tailspin. As the storm intensifies, a string of peculiar experiences suggest that the foundations of his reality are wobbling. He finds an old bottle washed up on the beach containing a cryptic message that speaks eerily to him. Then he's visited by a long-lost friend who mysteriously disappears without a trace from the premises. Meanwhile, a wild house party is underway down the beach and host Price, a steely manipulator who employs drugs and humiliation to control his guests, schemes to use the storm as cover for playing sinister mind games with Art. Schow works suspenseful sleight-of-hand with his story elements, skillfully underplaying the significance of clues and deftly managing character viewpoints to direct what the reader sees. His kinetic orchestration of events-action sequences, moments of moving intimacy and the richly symbolic tempest outside-and vivid hardboiled prose push the plot to a thunderclap climax that in less assured hands would seem farfetched but here is a measure of coolly calculated audacity. *** From Booklist Schow is a recognized name in the horror field, credited with coining the term splatterpunk and probably best known for his screenplay of the cult film The Crow. (This may be part of the reason this novel often seems more like a screen treatment than a full-bodied piece of fiction.) Evoking both John Fowles' The Magus and Ed Woods' Glen or Glenda (but leaning heavily toward campy schlock rather than higbrow lit), Schow experiments with the concepts of sexual identity, personality disintegration, and megalomania. A recluse living near the ocean gets mixed up in a confrontation with a bunch of people from a nearby house who have been fed a cocktail of mind-altering drugs. There's also a hurricane brewing. It's all fairly predictable with the exception of a gender switch involving the main character. On the plus side, the writing is generally smooth, the dark-and-stormy-night settings are well crafted, and the characters are interesting if not always believable. Schow doesn't quite make this odd book work, but his considerable following will want to see for themselves. *** "A jagged nightmare spiked with charm, melancholy, and vicious intelligence." -Michael Marshall Smith, author of Only Forward "Bullets of Rain is a highly original, boldly conceived psychological thriller observed with the rapt eye and assassin's sting of the artist as fer-de-lance." -John Farris, author of The Fury and the Power "David Schow's Bullets of Rain is a thriller, a literary metaphor, and one dark speeding bullet of a novel. Edgy, insightful, and fearless, it's a book I couldn't put down." -Joe R. Lansdale, Edgar Award-winning author of A Fine Dark Line "In Bullets of Rain, David J. Schow has given us his boldest, most audacious fiction to date. Here, all of Schow's glittering weapons are sharper than ever before." -Peter Straub

David J. Schow - Free Library Land Online - Biographies & Memoirs