The Boatman’s Daughter, by Andy Davidson

When her father died, Miranda Crabtree ended up inheriting his profession; transporting drugs up and down the kudzu-choked Prosper River in an aluminum johnboat for an insane bayou preacher and his partner, the lecherous town sheriff. There’s a swamp witch, a boy who’s not quite all boy, a little girl with a clandestine past, and an esoteric ritual that threatens to shred the bonds of the natural world. This is a supernatural crime fiction with a Texarkana lean, and a strong nod to Cormac McCarthy. I fell deeply in love with this novel, and experienced the greatest / worst heartache when it was all over.

The Sun Down Motel, by Simone St. James

Every year, I yell at myself for not reading enough work from women. I promised to do better in last year’s Spoopy List, and while I managed to double last year’s count, I still feel like I’m not getting enough horror from women in my diet. I don’t know if it’s a genre specific issue in that we don’t have many women putting out horror novels, an issue with publishing houses not marketing women well enough, or if I just have a fucking brain tumor, but this is something that consistently bothers me. I typically select what I’m going to read from what’s getting buzz on Twitter, what my favorite authors are reading, and from online reviews, so if you find yourself in one of those categories, THIS IS ME BEGGING YOU TO PROMOTE MORE WOMEN.

With that out of the way, Simone St. James’s New York Time Bestselling effort takes place in 1982 and 2017 simultaneously. In 1982, Viv Delaney takes a job at the Sun Down Motel in a town called Fell in order to save up enough money to move to New York City. She disappears during one of her shifts, and is never seen or heard from again. In 2017, Viv’s niece Carly Kirk travels to Fell and takes a job at the still running Sun Down Motel in the hopes that she can solve the mystery of her presumably late aunt’s disappearance. The narration toggles back and forth between Viv and Carly, and commands the reader’s total attention with the care and precision of an author who truly cares about the arc of their characters lives. Like The Boatman’s Daughter, The Sun Down Motel is a expertly wrought supernatural crime thriller that deserves your eyes and dollars.

The Queen’s Road by R. S. Belcher

If you’re a longtime reader of the Spoopy List, you’ve seen this dude pop up here on more than one occasion. I love me some R. S. Belcher. The Queen’s Road is an Audible Original from the creator of The Six-Gun Tarot, The Brotherhood of the Wheel, and Nightwise. In it we meet a man named Ramon Cosa, a man living a very unfulfilling life as a convenience store clerk while taking care of his addict mother. Once day he comes across a dying man in a vintage Ford Galaxie who offers him a strange ring, after which nothing in Ramon’s life will ever be the same. This is definitely more of a science fiction read, but I decided to include it in the Spoopy List for those of you looking for a read (er, listen) that isn’t going to give them a fright stroke.

Terminus by Peter Clines

What can I say about Peter Clines that I haven’t already said about Peter Clines over multiple Spoopy Lists? He was born in Cape Neddick, so I already feel like I have to Stan a fellow New Englander from down the road. Better still, this dude has serious chops in the dark science fiction space, and routinely makes my nerd boner stand at attention with works like The Fold, 14, Paradox Bound (if you’re reading this Peter, for the love of Harry Pritchard, give me a sequel), and The Eerie Adventures of the Lycanthrope Robinson Crusoe. If you pick up Terminus and like what it, I heartily recommend you jump on the rest of his shit posthaste.

Terminus takes place in the same universe as The Fold and 14, and follows the paths of three characters – Chase, Murdoch (not altogether human) and Anne – all looking to escape their respective pasts, and embrace futures of their own design. They all end up on a lost island that’s not on any map, and that’s when the Lovecraftian cosmic horror really kicks into fifth gear. Old Ones, alternate realities, deformed cultists, secret machines keeping the world from being devoured by  – I’ll stop there. Terminus is a twisty, turny, exciting ride that keeps you buckled in until the very end, fits snugly within the known Peter Clines multiverse, and is well worth the price of admission.

Mystery Walk by Robert McCammon

Raise your hand if you’re an unapologetic Robert McCammon superfan! You might remember Robert from last year’s Spoopy List, in which I included his entire Matthew Corbett series, to which I am loyal in an almost manic NXIVM cultist kind of way. He is an incredibly accomplished and prolific author, and he’s responsible for inspiring countless fledgling novelists to give it a go for themselves. If they made Robert McCammon posters, I’d have one hanging in my home office.

Mystery Walk is Robert McCammon’s 36743475890th excellent novel, and it centers on two young men with very special gifts. Billy Creekmore, a half Chocktaw boy from Alabama who can help the spirits of the dead pass over, and Wayne Falconer, the son of a fire breathing Southern evangelist with the power to heal. Both are soon set on a crash course with each other when an ancient evil presence makes itself known to them through shared dreams, and one of them decides to partner up with it. It’s a wonderful coming of age story as told with Robert McCammon’s trademark character development, pacing, and tension building (there are moments in this book where I felt I needed to eat a gummy to get rid of the manufactured anxiety I was experiencing), and a great way to introduce yourself to the master himself. If you end up liking this, I recommend starting on the Matthew Corbet series, or go with Swan Song, which is my favorite thing McCammon has ever done.

Junkyard Cats by Faith Hunter

This is about as YA science fiction / dark fantasy as it gets, folks. Junkyard Cats is the first in a new series from Faith Hunter that will transport you to the glory days of your junior high school library, where a world of unread literary treasures was just waiting for you to check them out, bring them home, and tear through them over a 3:00 pm bowl of Rice Chex. We have Shining Smith, the story’s reluctant heroine. We have bug aliens. We have humans evolving strangely due to otherworldly presences. We have sentient computers. We have cats. CATS, god damn it! It’s a story that’ll be great for the whole family. Junkyard Cats is the Frosted Mini Wheats of this year’s Spoopy List. The adult in me appreciates the author’s craft, but the kid in me just loves the fucking cats.

The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher

“Then I made faces like the faces on the rocks, and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones, and I lay down flat on the ground like the dead ones.”

Did that spook you right the fuck out, even without context? It’s an excerpt from Arthur Machen’s 1904 short story The White People, which T. Kingfisher has lovingly borrowed for the creation of her very, very good folklore horror novel The Twisted Ones. Our protagonist Mouse is tasked by her father to clean out her dead grandmother’s hoarder house in the rural wilds of North Carolina, so she takes her gassy dog along for the ride. She discovers her grandmother’s strange journal midway through the cleaning project (I know, the age-old lost manuscript trope can get a little tired, but it’s great here), and the contents seem like the scrawling of a madwoman. You know, until shit from the journal starts happening to Mouse. This novel is a fairy tale gone horribly awry in the best possible way. It’s funny, heartwarming, and downright chilling in equal measures.

The Twisted Ones almost made it on last year’s Spoopy List, but I wasn’t able to finish it in time for my publishing deadline. Very excited to be able to recommend it now.

Growing Things and Other Stories by Paul Tremblay

Paul Tremblay made it on the Spoopy List twice this year, which really shouldn’t surprise anyone, least of all me. It’s been a great year for the veteran author in terms of successful releases, including Growing Things, a collection of Tremblay’s short stories. If you’re familiar with Tremblay, you’re well aware of his occasionally maddening tightrope act between the supernatural and the psychological. Nowhere better is this talent better showcased than in A Head Full of Ghosts and The Cabin and the End of the World, but you get even more of the same WAIT IS IT AN ACTUAL MONSTER OR IS THIS DUDE FUCKING CRAZY here in Growing Things. Nineteen Snapshots of Dennisport was superbly done and will absolutely wreck you if you experienced a challenging upbringing, The Thirteenth Temple involves a character from A Head Full of Ghosts, and Her Red Right Hand is a fucking Hellboy story, which is surprised the ever-loving dogshit out of me.

Grim, devastating, unresolving. These are the tools of Tremblay’s trade. Only proceed with Growing Things if you’re willing to peer into the void within yourself.

Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky

Hoo doggy, did this one push some private childhood pain points for me. Kate grabs her son Christopher and hits the road to escape her abusive husband. The two eventually find themselves in Mill Grove, a cute little community in rural Pennsylvania. Everything goes great, until one day, when Christopher straight up vanishes. The entire town searches for him for six whole days until he stumbles out of the woods, completely unharmed. The only problem is that Christopher is now different. Christopher has a voice in his head, and it’s telling him to build a treehouse in the woods before Christmas, or everyone in town is going to die.

The Ceremonies by T.E.D. Klein

Here we have an oldie, and god damn it, it’s also a goodie. Originally published in 1984 (when it won a British Fantasy Award for Best First Novel), The Ceremonies was recently fully corrected by T.E.D. Cline, and adapted into an audio book in June of 2019. An ancient evil is taking great pains to make everything is aligned just right in order to invoke a series of timeless ceremonies which will bring an end to the world. This is a fascinating read, mixing the concepts of rural paranoia, cosmic horror, and good ol’ ham-fisted 80s social commentary. Pick it up if you feel like taking a stroll though horror’s yesteryear.

Full Throttle by Joe Hill

Joe Hill came out with a new collection of short stories, and you guys aren’t going to believe this, but it’s really good. Alright, I’ll drop the sarcasm. Of course it’s fucking amazing. Hill’s short story game is nearly unparalleled (If you haven’t read 20^th Century Ghosts yet, do so after this one), and there’s nothing in Full Throttle that even comes close to disappointing the reader. Much like investing in toilet paper or booze, clicking “buy now” on this collection is the safest bet going, and guaranteed to net you a tidy ROI. If you get the audio version, you’ll be treated to celebrity narrators such as Neil Gaiman, Wil Wheaton, Kate Mulgrew, Ashleigh Cummings, and Zachary Quinto (who actually does a lot of great audio book narration outside of this particular project).

My favorite out of the bunch? Oh man, it’s definitely Faun. Faun needs to be adapted into a screenplay like yesterd – ah, it looks like Netflix already secured those rights in February of ’19. Niiiiiiiiice.

Gideon Falls by Image Comics, Jeff Lemire

I used my time during lockdown to get back into comics, which have always been near and dear to my heart. I struck up a curated monthly shipment from Jetpack Comics, who have done an absolutely incredible job easing me back into the piping hot waters of the comic industry. This was how I was introduced to Gideon Falls, a series from Image Comics (Spawn, et al) that is the brainchild of the same team responsible for Old Man Logan. In Gideon Falls, we follow the independent storylines of a Catholic priest with a dark past and a conspiracy theory obsessed man who both become wrapped up in the hunt for a mysterious black barn that somehow keeps appearing and disappearing, and is said to be responsible for numerous deaths. I was instantly drawn to the bleak storyline and supernatural elements of Gideon Falls, as well as the almost brutalist art and robust, honest dialog courtesy of Jeff Lemire. This is the kind of work that makes me seriously consider adapting some of my stuff for this medium, and especially for Image, whose risk-taking in publishing atypical content is very appealing to me.

As of this writing there are four collected editions available for purchase, but the fifth one should be popping out of the oven on November 25^th of this year.

The Call of Cthulu by Francois Baranger

It’s a fucking coffee table book! Seriously! I mean, it’s my recommendation list. I can put whatever I want on it.

I’ve excitedly followed Francois Baranger and his depictions of Lovecraftian settings for the past several years. In this offering, Baranger’s illustrated adaptation of The Call of Cthulu is just plain gorgeous; too gorgeous to leave stuffed in a bookcase. You’ll never guess where I keep my copy.

It’s on my coffee table, dummy. How was that not your first guess?

The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

This isn’t a horror novel, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t the scariest entry in this year’s Spoopy List. The 1974 Pulitzer prize winning Denial of Death is Canadian philosopher Ernest Becker’s treatise on how humanity is forever distracting themselves from thoughts about mortality. Our busy lives, our packed schedules, our endless scrolling, our…our…book recommendation lists. All are just obstacles we place in in between ourselves and the fact that we’re all going to die. It is the realist thing I’ve ever read, and it terrifies the fuck out of me. I’d like to treat The Denial of Death like that Paqui One Chip Challenge thing, in which I dared people to read it just so I can watch the lights go out in their eyes, but it’s honestly so god damned important to keep in mind every day. It’s something that horror dances around, but never quite puts such a no-bullshit emphasis on it. We’re all going to die, we don’t know what happens when we die, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it. Yay!

It all started with an iPhone.

I’d been a staunch supporter of Androids for the better part of a decade; boasting about their far-reaching capabilities while simultaneously shitting all over iPhones and, more specifically, Apple fanboys. Nothing rattled my monkey cage more than the stereotypical Apple stan, sipping an overly-complicated coffee concoction as he made sure every living soul in the coffee shop was aware he was clacking away on the latest MacBook Pro. I giggled without end when a botched update would render a friend’s iPhone useless. “YOURS DOESN’T WORK OH WOW THAT’S SO WEIRD MY SAMSUNG WORKS JUST FINE.” I’d never owned an iPhone in my life. I’d never even bothered to experiment with a friend’s iPhone in my life. I was so obnoxiously sure of myself that I never bothered to give myself a real-life understanding of how the other half lived.

I was perfectly content in my self-assured, pretentious little tech bubble all the way up until my Droid stopped working as well as I thought it should given its astronomical price tag, and our carrier started reducing their quality of service. When the screen on my fully-insured Note 8 cracked, and I was told I’d still have to drop $400+ for a refurbished replacement (not even a new one!), my wife Jess and I decided it was time to switch carriers. When it came time to pick out our phones, instead of immediately picking out the latest and greatest Androids, I did some research, and realized the new iPhones had some amazing specs, and a seemingly endless list of positive reviews to match. After being offered a BOGO deal on the iPhone 10, Jess and I had a long talk about the pros and cons, and ultimately decided to dive headfirst into the Apple pool.

We were immediately floored by the quality, speed, UI and design of our new phones. Leaning how to navigate iOS (our biggest fear) turned out to be a breeze, and within minutes we were using our phones with the ease of old pros. I was absolutely in love with my iPhone 10 XS Max, and I was feeling really, truly, tremendously stupid about the years I spent demonizing those little miracle machines.

That got me thinking. For whatever reason (but probably due to some brand of personal insecurity), I’d spent the lion’s share of my life making fun of things I’ve never experienced before. What else was I completely wrong about? What else have I been ridiculing my entire life without having ever tried? What else was I missing out on? I started making a list, and within minutes I was flipping to a fresh notebook page for more room.

…High end coffee. Yoga. Hobby conventions. Tabletop role playing games. Hiking. Meditation. Writing seminars. Crossfit. Gardening. Learning a new language. Cycling. Woodworking. Skinny jeans. Doomsday prepping. Skydiving. Therapy. Snowshoeing. Hunting. Fishing. Geocaching. HAM radios. Scuba diving. Metal detecting. Antiquing. WWE fandom. Stand Up Paddleboarding. Model building. Racquetball. Disc golf. Sailing. Falconry. Improv. Food canning. Surfing. Fencing…

I wasn’t naïve enough to think everything I was writing down would turn out to be something I enjoyed (read: if I end up liking sailing I’ll assume aliens are editing my brain in my sleep), but I’d never truly know until I tried them out, and processed my experiences like I do everything else – by writing. Thus, I began the herculean effort to better my willfully ignorant ass, and the “Was I Wrong About It All These Years?” blog series was born.

***

DIVINE ASSHOLERY; THE GENESIS OF MY HATRED OF HIKING

Hiking, or “expensive walking” as I’ve always called it, has been an area of contention for me since my early teens. Once upon a time, my best friends were members of a church youth group, and I would tag along with them on certain events despite not identifying as Christian because, at that age, hanging out with your teeny-bopper clique is infinitely more important than your negative thoughts about organized religion. You’d sit through a bullshit sermon from some Uncle Joey sweater-wearing “I’m not stuffy like those other pastors” pastor if it meant chilling with the homies for a few extra hours every week.

One of these youth group excursions was a mountain biking trip, where Rev. CoolDude McGoo accidentally took us up an advanced hiking trail, forcing us to carry our heavy bikes up sheer rock faces in a freezing downpour. We were lost and shivering on the mountain for hours without any rain gear or supplies before my friends and finally split from the pack, despite the pastor’s bellowing protests. We found our way down the mountain using an old logging trail as the evening sky darkened to night, knocked on a stranger’s door at the bottom, called the pastor’s cellphone to tell him how to get the rest of the group back to safety, and drank hot tea in a dry garage while we waited for the church van to arrive.

Instead of being hailed as heroes for using our wits to save the group from certain disaster, we were admonished for disobeying the pastor, who called our parents to make sure we were properly punished. It did not go as he planned. My mother lectured the pastor for needlessly putting a group of children in danger. My best friend’s father, a polite, professional British man, called him an asshole and hung up. 

Shortly after the trip, a letter was mailed to my house saying I was no longer welcome at youth group because my faith in god wasn’t strong enough, and because I was a bad influence on the other kids. Not only was my simple childhood view of church as an inclusive, joyful, meaningful experience for people of all walks of life torn from me, but my love of mountain biking and hiking and experiencing nature on the trail in general was as well. The weekend nights spent in backyard tents trickled to a halt. My subscription to Mountain Bike Action was never renewed. I traded my two-wheeled chromoly steed in for a skateboard, swapped my Nike ACG Moabbs out for a pair of olive green Simples, and that was that. Goodbye, Missy Giove. Hello, Gino Ianucci.

My low-grade personal beef with hiking morphed into more of a public gripe compulsion once humanity entered the age of the social media influencer. Endless pics featuring models in top-end activewear looking out over grand vistas with braindead platitudes captions like “Being yourself is the most beautiful thing you can be” were like a rusty cheese grater on my soul. I was convinced nobody actually liked hiking; that people only did it because those kinds of posts generate loads of likes and shares, and that was because Americans live such sedentary lifestyles that they look up to those beautiful people doing active things in a natural environment entirely unfamiliar to them.

An entire industry has popped up around the fact that you can shame regular people into believing their life sucks with a handful of artfully crafted social media posts, and that buying shit through an affiliate link will make their life better. It’s fucking stupid and I hate it, but influencers wouldn’t be generating billions of dollars if the depressing psychology behind it all wasn’t bedrock solid.

Still, I didn’t have to like it, and I ragged on friends and family and total strangers for sinking mortgage payment sized amounts of cash into hiking and camping gear, and spending their weekends snapping pictures of themselves posing like their favorite nature-faking Instagram hustlers.

When hiking materialized on my list of things I make fun of without giving a fair chance, and I found myself at the end of snowboarding season with no real workout regimen planned outside of the Peloton bike in my basement, I decided I’d eat my words and go for my first hike in a quarter-century. I’d pick a smaller, rinky-dink mountain I could be in and out of in an hour. Best case scenario: I’d end up loving it, and it would give me a reason to spend more time in a part of New Hampshire I’m absolutely in love with. Worst case scenario: It would make for a funny write-up. Win win.

PREPARING FOR THE BIG DAY

Being largely out of the loop when it comes to gear, I still knew I’d need a solid pair of boots, and after spending way too much time researching them, I settled on a pair of Merrell Men’s Moab 2 Mid Gtx hiking boots. They’re waterproof, they protect your ankles, and I already knew they’d be comfortable right out of the box, as I’ve owned many pairs of Merrell sneakers over the years. This wasn’t a terribly difficult purchase to justify, as I live in New England, where it is constantly pissing and shitting rain, snow, hail, locusts, roofing nails, meteorites, etc. Even if hiking didn’t work out, I’d always find a use for them.

Then I contacted my good buddy Micah, the preeminent hiking guru of my social circle. On top of being an arborist and the owner/operator of Heartwood Tree Company, the dude bags peaks like Omar bags stash houses; with frightening regularity and precision. Not only would he know what gear I’d need to be safe and comfortable on the mountain, but he’d probably join me on the hike as well.

“Tucks”, or Tuckerman Ravine, is widely known as the birthplace of extreme skiing in North America, and has claimed many lives over the years. It’s located near the peak of Mount Washington, which is the highest peak in the northeast, and has claimed an absolute metric shit ton of lives over the years (over 150 souls lost since 1849). It holds the world record for highest recorded wind speed not affiliated with a tornado or tropical cyclone, and the weather up there changes drastically and often. Many people die from exposure on Mount Washington, even in the dog days of summer. It offers some of the most difficult hiking and mountain climbing experiences in the entire country, so much so that people who regularly hike 14,000’ mountains out west have left complaints online about the difficulty of our stout ‘lil 6,288 foot leviathan of unending despair.

And apparently city slicker Mike with his 30 lbs. of extra chub and his struggling 3-month cigarette free lungs were about to climb it.

Oh. Great.

I was clearly going to need more than just hiking boots in order to get through this alive. Thankfully, Micah shot me a link to a list of things I should bring for the journey, and also made recommendations for light, calorie dense foods, and other items that would help make the day hike as stress-free as possible.

I picked up this L.L. Bean day pack, these trekking poles, these hiking pants (the waists run super small, so size up at least once), these hiking socks, this waterproof parka, and a brand new polyester/wool Columbia hiking sweater at Savers for a cool $9. Everything else I brought, like this pair of micro-spikes, these water bottles, this headlamp, this first aid kit, this multitool I gave out as groomsmen gifts at my wedding 9,000 years ago, this LifeStraw, and this mega dope Stanley flask (as if I wasn’t going to rip a snort or six of bourbon at the top) I already owned. When it was all said and done, I was about $250 in, all for an activity I wasn’t even sure I liked doing. I hadn’t even set foot on a trail and alarm bells were already ringing in the treasury.

I could hear my almost supernaturally observant wife’s voice in echoing around in the back of my head. This is what you do. You get obsessive over things, invest a ton of time and money into them, and then abandon them a handful of months later for something else. I’m not saying it’s good or bad, but this is your pattern. Christ, is that what all of this is? Is my defining characteristic that I senselessly entertain every fleeting whim my dreaming caveman brain cooks up? After some introspection, I decided a man can only be so emotionally honest before he starts talking himself out of everything he really wants to do, and that any kind of perseverance requires a certain level of self-deception. Willfully ignorant, I pressed forward.

As the days passed and we got closer to the day of the hike, I compulsively researched hiking gear, second guessed the purchases I made, organized and reorganized my day pack, and sent Micah a torrent of obnoxious texts requesting his advice. To his credit, he never one told me to shut the fuck up and chill out. Sure, I was excited to get on the mountain, but there was a nervous, almost frantic energy to how I was preparing, and I attribute that to the fact that I was attempting my first exploratory hike on such a burly mountain. I was also afraid I was inviting a very experienced hiker along, only to make him wait for me as I slowly wheezed my fat ass up the trail.  I finally wore myself down, decided I was as prepared as I could possibly be, and left the rest up to the gods.

THE DAY OF THE HIKE

My alarm was set for 5:30 am the morning of the hike, but I got out of bed at 4:47 am because my two unruly cats decided they wanted to use my face as a UFC octagon. I changed into the clothes I’d set aside the night before, made myself a strong cup of coffee, packed up the car, kissed my sleeping wife on the forehead, and waited for Micah to arrive.

We hit the road heading north around 6:30ish, and after a couple pit stops for food, last minute trail provisions and a couple of post-coffee pee breaks, made it to the AMC Joe Dodge Lodge in Pinkham Notch by roughly 8:00 am. The weather, while sunny and warm at home, was twenty-degrees colder and overcast with an occasional spitting rain shower at the base of Mount Washington. A thick fog rolled over the mountain, spurred on by high winds that seemed to develop out of nowhere. Despite the conditions, the parking lot was jammed full of people strapping skis and snowboards to their packs, and getting situated for the trek up. The chill in the air was enough for me to throw a puffy red vest on over my new hiking sweater, slip on some light gloves, and swap my baseball cap out for a warmer winter hat. I adjusted my trekking poles, cinched tight the straps on my day pack, and we headed up to the trailhead.

I don’t think we even made it a thousand feet up the muddy, craggy trail before my heart was pounding, my breathing became labored, and I stopped to take my puffy vest off and switch back to a cooler baseball cap. I’d already broken into a sweat and I could still see the parking lot through the trees. A quick flash of self-preservation lazily arced across the landscape of my frenzied mind like a comet. Quit now, before you get yourself hurt and stranded on this dumb fucking rock. Apologize to Micah for wasting his time, and take him out day drinking in North Conway to repay him for the trouble. He’ll understand. Before I could argue with my fight-or-flight lizard brain, I realized my body had already started back up the trail without me having any input regarding the matter. OK. I guess we’re really doing this.

Micah, being Micah, decided we’d forego the easier, more heavily traveled trail to Tuckerman for the Lion Head winter route in order to see some off the beaten path views and to avoid the crowds. Mike, being Mike, had no idea what this meant, and blindly trusted his Sherpa to get him to the summit in one piece.

It didn’t take long before I started to see why people loved this hiking shit.

Lush vegetation. Wildlife everywhere. Waterfalls like you see on the covers of crappy grocery store fantasy paperbacks. Oh look, a cool little wooden bridge in the middle of fucking nowhere. This is awesome. Wait, is that snow ahead?

Yes, that was most certainly snow ahead. Crusty, dirty, half-melted snow. We stopped and stretched our silicon micro-spikes over our hiking boots and proceeded up the trail. “You lose a lot of energy without these things on because you slip at the end of every step.” Boy was Micah right. I originally bought micro-spikes to help me snowblow my steep driveway in the winter (some of you are already aware of my track record with icy driveways), but had never taken them out of the box until this trip. I was grateful for all of the gear I took on the hike, but my cheapo micro-spikes ended up being the real MVPs of the day. They worked great in muddy portions of the trail and over slippery boulders, too. I’ll definitely be stashing a pair in my car for dire winter emergencies, like navigating the occasionally icy parking lot of my favorite bar in the entire world.

Most of the hike to Tuckerman Ravine looked exactly like this. Overcast, foggy, chilly. We traveled slowly over slushy snowpack that was riddled with icy runoff streams underneath, so we had to use our trekking poles like probes, and skirt around problem areas so we didn’t punch through and dunk our legs. Of course, that didn’t stop Ol’ Tenderfoot Boulerice here from punching through and dunking his legs multiple times over the course of the trip.

Now here is where things got a little more interesting, and by “a little more interesting” I mean “legitimately terrifying”. As we made a turn to continue on the Lion Head winter trail, Micah said “OK, you’re going to want to stay on the monorail here. Otherwise you’ll sink right through the snow up to your dick.”  I had no idea what he meant by this, but I learned very quickly. A monorail is a trail condition in which the compacted, icy snow from people walking on the trail all winter melts far slower than the loose snow around it, creating a long ribbon of raised tightrope that ends up being the only safe part of the trail you can walk on. Wandering a little to the left or right of the monorail immediately resulted in me post-holing right through the snow all the way to my crotch. You could see how this could get dangerous very quickly, as a rock or downed tree in the right place under that snow could easily snap a leg, leaving you stranded and waiting many hours for help…if it came at all.

Some portions of the Lion Head trail monorail were totally mellow and easy to traverse. Others portions were entirely crumbled by the feet that came before us, forcing me to stumble sideways and take my chances in the deep, loose snow which bookended our course. Even more portions hugged the trail as the angle of it violently increased upward toward the peak, demanding I scramble up the narrow strip of ice using my hands and feet for purchase. My gloves became soaked almost instantly (note to self: pick up waterproof glove liners).

We eventually came to a semi-sheer, moss peppered rock face, glistening with fresh runoff near the top of a particularly steep part of the trail. Micah effortlessly scrambled up it like some kind of pony-tailed orangutan, and gave me instructions regarding how to do the same.

“Plenty of good hand and footholds here. Just use those and you’ll be fine.”

“No way, dude”, I said as I felt the weight of my overstuffed pack on my shoulders, and eyed what would have undoubtedly been a bone-shattering tumble down to the switchback below. “This is some straight-up Cliffhanger shit.”

Without a stitch of shame, I bitched out. I didn’t feel bad about it then, and I still don’t now. I’m aware of my limits in life, especially the physical ones. They are many in number, and this was definitely one of them.

“Is it smooth going after this slippery death rock, or is it just more slippery death rocks? Isn’t there an easier way up?!”

Unable to determine if there was indeed a smoother trail ahead after the rocks, we both decided to backtrack to the Lion Head trail sign several hundred yards down, and then take the easier, more Mike friendly route up to Tuckerman Ravine.  Micah explained to me that the trail was so difficult because the snowpack, with all of its convenient traction, had all but melted away there, leaving nothing but bald rock and slick, exposed tree roots in its wake.

On the way down, we encountered a large group of Canadian hikers heading up on the same trail. We stepped to the side to allow them passage (UNSPOKEN TRAIL RULE: People coming up have the right of way), and noticed that, aside from one woman near the very back in micro-spikes and a sensible rain shell, every single member of their group was woefully unprepared for the mountain. Bald-treaded sneakers. Shorty socks. Sweatpants. Cotton t-shirts. Jeans. These guys were the poster-children of what not to bring or do on a hike. After having sweated and stressed about the things I needed for the day trek, it was unbelievable to see so many people winging it up the trail in nothing but casual street wear.

“Allo, allo”, a blonde woman in her mid-30s at the head of the pack hailed Micah and I in a thick Quebecois accent. We answered in kind. 

“Is safe to head up, yes?”

We explained to her how the two of us with our trekking poles and micro-spikes and trail-ready footwear and wool clothing and medical supplies decided it was smarter for us to take a different route, so it would probably be smart for them to do the same.

“OK, thank you!” She smiled as she hauled right by us. We watched as the ill-prepared caravan of Canucks marched up the trail, offering the occasional nod of recognition or weird French snort of disapproval as they passed.

“Is that common?” I asked Micah as he picked up some litter left by the group several hundred feet down the trail and stuffed it into his pack.

“Oh yeah. You wouldn’t believe how common that is. They’re everywhere, especially in the warmer months, and they’re almost never properly prepared. You know how you always hear stories about people getting hurt and killed up here? It’s nearly always people like that who think the conditions at the base are the same all the way up to the top.”

After ten minutes or so, we reached the Lion Head trail sign and made our way up the heavily-switchbacked route to the top. A sustained and high-pitched scream echoed through the dense forest that surrounded us.

“You hear that?” Micah asked.

I nodded yes.

“One of those Canadians just broke a leg up there. I’d bet money on it.”

Mortified, I asked if we should head back up to see if they needed help, but we decided there would be little we could do that their group of 20+ hikers couldn’t do themselves.

We marched onward, taking periodic water breaks, a quick stop to nosh on some beef jerky from our packs (side note: I always buy a bag of beef jerky for road trips, and this somehow tastes way better on a trail than it does in a car), and encountering small groups of red-faced hikers lugging their heavy skis and snowboards toward their ultimate destination of risky springtime glory and the very last tracks of the season. It was here that Micah introduced the concept of “active recovery” to me. Instead of coming to a full stop, you just walk really slowly, regaining your wind while still gaining ground. This ended up saving my delirious ass during the last leg of our journey, as I was huffing and puffing and sweating through all of my layers by that point. Even Micah was breathing a little heavier toward the end, which helped me feel like less of a fat failure.

And then, suddenly and without fanfare, we’d arrived at the base of Tuckerman Ravine. I did it. Holy shit, I actually did it.

Folks of all ages stood around Hermit Lake Shelter #6, where caretakers of Tuckerman Ravine live, educate hikers and campers, and occasionally act as first responders for injured skiers and snowboarders. Seeing as it was a rather overcast, cruddy day with poor snow conditions, I wasn’t expecting to see a party at the top of the trail, but I’d clearly underestimated the perseverance of the average New Englander looking to take in the last bumpy spring runs before their ski boots come off for the year.

When I say “party”, I literally mean party. Look at these animals.

Micah and I swapped out some of our sweaty layers, ate some more food, and I broke out my trusty bourbon flask while I took 900 terrible selfies to commemorate my having completed a hike that, judging by the size and diversity of the crowd at the base of the headwall, just about any average human being can do. Still, I wasn’t about to let that rob me of my baseless self-congratulating.

For a moment, Micah and I debated hiking the measly mile up to the peak of Mount Washington (he’d gotten his wife and her friend to do the same thing a while back), but ultimately decided against it because we hadn’t brought enough auxiliary gear with us to account for every conceivable variable along the way. Instead, we packed up our crap and meandered our way down the main Tuckerman trail, which turns out to be WAY EASIER GOING THAN THE BACKWARDS ASSED ROUTE WE TOOK UP. That fucker Micah clearly wanted me to earn my bourbon.

We eventually made it to the bottom of the trail, got back in my car, and I took us to Fiesta Jalisco for a late lunch and oversized margaritas before heading home.

WAS I WRONG ABOUT IT ALL THESE YEARS? YES.

If you have any semblance of ego, it’s never perfectly easy to admit you’re wrong about something, especially if you’ve spent decades being woefully, aggressively wrong about it. I clearly had a bad experience with it that ended up hard-coding a distaste for hiking into my personality, but after trying it again as an adult, the responsibility for owning up to my own bullshit ultimately falls on me. I was way wrong about hiking. It’s super fun, it allows me to stay connected to the Mount Washington Valley outside of snowboarding season, and I’m already organizing my next hike with Micah. Jess even says she wants to give it a shot now, so the potential for having a little built-in hiking crew to organize trips with is already there. I’m always bitching about losing weight, and I don’t think it will be remotely possible for me to carry a spare tire if I make hiking a regular activity. Hell, I’ve even subscribed to Backpacker Magazine. I’m all in. Hiking is great.

One extra bonus thing I wasn’t expecting to enjoy about hiking was the conversation. That isn’t to say I don’t enjoy conversation, but I honestly didn’t think I’d be capable of it as I slogged my way up and down a mountain. It annoys me to no end when people try to talk to me when I’m running, as I typically need every shred of my focus concentrated on not collapsing from a stroke in the middle of the street. I figured hiking would be the same way. We remained fairly quiet on the way up, but ended up having a genuinely great talk on the meandering trek down to the base lodge. For decades I’ve considered Micah to be a really good friend of mine, but as many of you can surely attest to, adulthood tends to create gulfs of space and time in which communication with the people you care about just doesn’t happen as much as it should. On top of the hike being a goofy premise for me to write about (and clearly great for exercise as evidenced by the gallons of sweat I left on the trail), it gave us a chance to catch up with each other without the modern distractions of phones and laptops and televisions, and I’m looking forward to more of that on the hikes to come.

As an official act of contrition, I will strike an acrobatic yoga pose on my next mountain peak with some cloying basic bitch HomeGoods wall art slogan like “Live, laugh, love.”

EDIT: Mt. Major, 6/1/19. A promise is a promise.

I was about to walk upstairs and put some clothes away, when I discovered that, in my haste to open every window in the house on an incredibly rare seventy-degree day in February, I’d accidentally opened a window without a screen. For most people this wouldn’t be a problem, but my special needs cat Charlie is forever housebound due to his abject inability to do normal cat things (read: he thinks my dog is his dad/mom/brother, and has once tried to nurse from his nipple), and in a town where long forgotten “HAVE YOU SEEN FLUFFY?” printouts are stapled to every ninth tree as sun bleached reminders of nature’s cruelty, he would not last an hour in the coyote-saturated wilderness surrounding my property.

Panicking, I scoured every room for Charlie, but couldn’t find him. I threw my headphones off, sending an Audible compilation of Robert E. Howard’s short stories clattering to my kitchen floor, and bolted outside as fast as my legs would allow, trudging through the knee deep snow and bellowing his name. Nothing.

Shortly after that, I began to lose my shit.

I thought of how upset it would make my wife if Charlie was gone forever; how awful it would be to come across his flattened little body on a random drive down the rural dirt road that leads to our house. My mind darted to a future scene in which we discussed how long we should wait before we adopt a new cat, because getting one too quickly would seem like an insult to the one we just buried. For a second I even thought “Oh man, I’m definitely not snowboarding this weekend“, and then instantly reprimanded myself for being so selfish. It’s weird how our reptilian brains shift attention from one benign topic to another during a crisis in an attempt to keep us doing whatever we need to do without seizing up from anxiety and fear.

*trudge trudge trudge* “CHAARRRRLIIEEEEE!!! COME HERE COO COO KITTY!!!” *trudge trudge trudge* “COME HERE, LITTLE BUDDY!!!” *trudge trudge trudge* “EVERYTHING’S GOING TO BE OK!!!”

But was it?

There was no sign of Charlie anywhere, and the last vestiges of crucial daylight almost seemed to drain from the sky in double-time. Again with nature’s cruelty.

After thoroughly soaking my feet and jeans in the melting expanses of snow in my yard, I sprinted back inside to grab my dog Rodney, hoping the cat would maybe come for his milkless surrogate father, and found Charlie standing on the kitchen table, patiently staring at me as if I were some kind of sweaty palmed, over-reactionary alarmist, which I undoubtedly was, and am, and will most likely be forever.

I exhaled, gave Charlie a pat on his head, shook off my slush-laden sneakers, reached into the fridge for a cold beer, and finally closed this malicious asshole of a window that is clearly trying to tear my family apart.

We now have FOUR hour-long episodes of The Michael Boulerice Show podcast uploaded for your listening pleasure. My wife and Chuck and I are definitely having a blast with this new, completely unscripted project of ours, and despite our inexperience, we’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback. You can find it on iTunes, Google Play and Soundcloud (links below).

iTunes

Google Play

Soundcloud

The equipment is wired up. The levels are dialed in. The music has been composed. The candles are lit. The Riunite is on ice. My body is ready.

Episode one of The Michael Boulerice Show will be recorded this Sunday. If you own a business and/or are in charge of marketing for a business, and you’re looking for ways to promote it that aren’t totally boring, Write me at info@michaelboulerice.com for an ad rate sheet.

7:00 am this morning: A middle-aged man with long silver hair rolled down the driver’s side window of his equally silver Toyota Echo to talk to me. I pulled my headphones out and held them in the hand that wasn’t wrapped around Rodney’s leash.

I’ve been terrible with road directions my entire life, and I suffer a mild panic attack every time a stranger asks me for them. My brain just isn’t built to understand how maps work. I regularly get lost in the town I grew up in. Despite every fiber of my being wanting to divulge this fact to passers-by in need of help, I always stop and pretend I know what I’m talking about. I think I’m more afraid of someone thinking I’m retarded at first glance, than I am of attempting to give directions and actually proving I’m retarded. Nine times out of ten I can be useful. The tenth time, though? Not so much.

“Can you tell me how to get to Walker Bungalow?”

“I’m sorry, what was the name of that street again? I’ve never heard of it before.”

Speaking slowly as if I was wearing a helmet and bib, “Waaaaalker…Buuuungalooooow.”

“No, I have no idea, and I live in this neighborhood.”

*rolls eyes* “Alright, well how about Little Harbor Road? Sagamore? I’m trying to visit a yard sale.”

“Oh, I can get you to Sagamore. Take a left down this street, follow it to the end. Cross it and you’re on Sagamore.”

“So I take a left, go straight and then cross the street?”

“Yep.”

“Left, straight, cross.”

“…yeah.” This was becoming less of a friendly stop, and more of a police interrogation.

No thank you, nothing. The man rolled up his window and drove away. I muttered “weirdo” under my breath and continued my walk. As I rounded the corner, the man was parked in the middle of the road, with his window down once again.

Furiously, “GOD DAMN IT, THE BRIDGE IS OUT!!!”

Pangs of guilt and anxiety ran up and down my chest. In my rush to help the man as best as I could and get him away from me, I completely blanked out about the bridge reconstruction project taking place smack dab in the middle of the directions I just gave him. “Shit, I’m sorry. I haven’t had a cup of coffee yet. Here, what you want to do is — ”

The man shook his head in disapproval and rolled his eyes like a petulant child for the second time. Seeing this, my anxiety and frustration slowly twisted themselves into a coping mechanism braid of irrational anger. I stopped talking, and silently stared at him for several seconds. It was all I could do to make known my disapproval of his attitude, without telling him he should spend his garage sale money on a TomTom, and hurling a plastic grocery bag filled with Rodney’s steaming shit through his open window. I already felt bad for accidentally giving the guy bad directions, but his expressed entitlement to good directions threw me for a loop, and set my mind to its endless task of analyzing everyday situations that desperately don’t need analyzing.

[Where is this guy coming from? Why is he giving me grief first thing in the morning? How can someone be so angry this early in the day? What’s with the salt and pepper Jonathan Taylor Thomas haircut? Is this guy a serial killer who preys on early birds that fail his quizzes? What kind of garage sale starts at 7:00 am, and why would someone be in such a rush to get there? Is he some kind of American Pickers guy? Is this the white trash version of Indiana Jones? Is he going to replace a commemorative Elvis Presley dinette set with a sack of nickles, and pray he doesn’t get crushed by a giant boulder?]

The man registered the look on my face, took a deep breath, and then rolled his finger in the almost cinematic “keep it moving” gesture.

“…Go all the way down this street, take a right. Go straight until you hit Summer Street. Take a right, and Miller will be directly across the intersection. Miller becomes Sagamore. It’s kind of roundabout, but it will get you around the bridge work.”

“Jesus Christ.” The man rolled his window up one last time, reversed and chirped his tires as he accelerated in the direction he first approached, his parting “ASSHOLE!” salutation muffled by the whine of his 1.5 liter economy motor.

“Eh, you’re probably right about that one. Come on, Rodney. Let’s go home and get you some breakfast.”

*crinkle crinkle crinkle*

My eyes pried themselves open from a deeply satisfying and much needed sleep. The bedroom was pitch black, save for a ghostly blue hue in the windows that my groggy brain recognized as the harbinger of an autumn sunrise. “Late morning”, I half-grumbled, half-thought to myself as I listened in the darkness, wanting to determine if the noise was a part of the waking world, and not the dreaming one.

*crinkle crinkle crinkle*

There it was again, cutting through the silence of the wee hours of rural New Hampshire like a knife forged from raw obnoxiousness; even managing to slice its way through the series of running fans I’d set up as a deterrent before Jess and I crawled into bed that night.

*crinkle crinkle crinkle*

It was our cat Charlie, of course. I almost wished it was a four-hundred-pound serial killer holding a machete in one hand, and trying to open a foil Pop Tarts pouch with the other, because at least in that scenario there would be some kind of release from Charlie’s incessant nocturnal carousing after I’d been dismembered. But no, it was just Charlie. Again. Waking me up in the middle of the night for the third week straight. I checked my watch. 4:03 am.

*crinkle crinkle crinkle*

Charlie was suffering through his annual bout of frustrated depression that comes around every fall, when we have to finally close his favorite sitting windows in the house at night to keep the cold out. This was the fourth year we’ve had Charlie, and the fourth fall we’ve scrambled for ways to keep him from waking us up, including our poor dog Rodney, who is more often than not the victim of Charlie’s spiteful taunting once the lights go out this time of year.

Extended play time at night to tire him out? Nope. Melatonin laced treats before bed? Those only worked until he built up a tolerance to them. Not letting him in the bedroom? That would probably work, if we were willing to go to sleep with ear plugs in to keep the scratching from bothering us, and settle for a having bedroom door that looked like a family of panthers had been trying to make love to it, but that wasn’t reasonable. Nothing worked, really. In the end, we just suffered with dignity for a month or two, until Charlie settled into an agreeable lethargic winter mode. The end, however, was still weeks away.

I propped myself up on my elbows, and tried to make out what Charlie was chewing on. Something plastic, for sure. A wrapper? My eyes began to adjust to the darkness as I scanned it for movement, a hint of light glittering in a yellow eye, or off a discarded body soap package. Anything to help triangulate where the crinkling was coming from.

“Maybe I woke up at the tail end of it this time”, I thought as I waited for the noise again; silence once again flooding the bedroom, so total that I could hear my heart beating faintly in my ears, and the gentle breathing of my wife sleeping next to me.

I lay back down, allowed my eyes to close, and exhaled. The cat must have given up, and gone back to sleep. He —

*CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE*

I rifled the sheets off of myself as if the house were on fire, and made a beeline for the back of the bedroom. No cat, nothing. I managed to stub my toe on the FitBit bath scale I’d left back there, because I demanded it was too fancy to keep in the bathroom, like a normal, well-adjusted person would have insisted on. Not wanting to wake Jess up, I let out a pained groan through teeth clenched around a dental night guard, and tip-toed out of the bedroom.

*crinkle crinkle crinkle*

As soon as I was in the hallway, I could make out the outline of Charlie’s body in the darkness. I stalked toward the cat until I was a few feet away from him. He’d pulled the crinkly plastic packaging from Jess’s Halloween costume out of the bathroom trash, and had decided two hours before our alarm was due to go off was a great time to start gnawing on it. I ripped it away from him, and almost threw back into the trash, before realizing that he would most likely just fish it out once I’d gotten warm and comfortable in bed again, so I threw the packaging into the stand-up shower, where he couldn’t reach it.

I crawled back into bed, threw the blessedly still-warm sheets over my body, allowed my head to sink heavily into my pillow, closed my eyes, and listened to my breathing get slower, and slower, and slower.

***

***

***

*crinkle*

The noise reached me, even in my drifting fugue state of consciousness, but I refused it. Like a wilfully ignorant adult unwilling to watch a news source that refuses to confirm their inherent biases, I decided the noise wasn’t a noise at all. It did not exist. It was only the ghost of a noise I’d killed just minutes prior, and it was just echoing through my mind a few more times before it went to its final resting place. That’s all.

*crinkle crinkle*

My bloodshot eyes flickered open once more, this time stinging with sleeplessness. I checked my watch again. 4:28 am. I turned over to look at my wife for confirmation that the noise I was hearing was real, but she was sleeping as soundly as Grandpa on the couch after Thanksgiving dinner. Sleeping easily and through anything is her mutant ability. If the X-Men were real, Professor X would recruit her, make her a pajama uniform, and rename her “Sleepy Jean Grey”. The responsibility of battle with our spiteful, defiant cat was going to be mine, and mine alone.

*CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE FUCK YOU AND FUCK YOUR SLEEP CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE*

The sheets were cast off again, my feet hit the floor, and I was off to hunt for Charlie and his demonic instruments of torture. The hunt only lasted several seconds, as he was sitting right where I found him the first time; in the upstairs hallway. This time he had the crinkly cap wrapper for a bottle of Market Basket brand mouthwash I’d bought earlier that day between his paws. Again, it came from the bathroom trash. Again, I stole his toy from him, and threw it into the stand-up shower, along with the costume packaging. Charlie just stared at me, as if I was the meanest human being in the world. It was a stare that, if it had been delivered by a human boy, would have said “You’re not my real dad!”, and was almost always followed by the child scrambling up a set of stairs and slamming a door.

I plopped back into bed a little too hard, which was enough to jostle Jess out of cryogenic storage.

“What’s going on?”

“The cat.”

“Why are you playing with your phone?”

“I can’t sleep, babe. I’ve been trying to get Charlie to cut the shit for half an hour now.”

“You have a problem with that phone.”

“The phone isn’t the problem. The cat pulling things out of the trash and playing Blue Man Group with them at 4:00 am is the problem.”

“Ugh. Why don’t you just kick Rodney out? The dog was sleeping soundly on his bed on the floor of our bedroom.

“I’m not doing that.”

“Why not? The cat is only playing up here because the dog is up here. If you kick him out and shut the door, problem solved.”

This made all the sense in the world, and it was absolutely true. Charlie is obsessed with Rodney, and would not just follow him downstairs, but to the ends of the earth, to hell, and probably even to a Vietnamese cat meat processing facility. I could finally go back to sleep, and wake up refreshed. Jess’s logic was, as usual, infallible. It did not, however, trump the absurd sense of moral responsibility I project onto my pets.

“The dog didn’t do anything wrong. I’d feel bad kicking him out just because his brother is being an asshole.”

“You are ridiculous.”

“I know.”

With that, Jess turned around, and fell back to sleep almost instantly.

I put my phone back on the nightstand, crossed my hands over my chest, and stared through the skylight above my head at the rapidly lightening sky. Sunrise was imminent, and I was nowhere near being able to fall back asleep. After a few minutes, I checked my phone again. 5:03 am. I debated giving up on sleep altogether, crawling out of bed, and starting my work day an hour early, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. That would mean Charlie won; that I was powerless to thwart my own cat’s bad behavior, and I couldn’t look people in the eye if I let a ten pound bag of furry hate get the best of a [redacted] pound bag of adult male human being.

No, I was going to stay in my bed until our respective alarms went off. That’s how you show Charlie his efforts were futile. That’s how you show Charlie you don’t negotiate with terrorists.

My eyes closed of their own volition. The rhythm of my breathing lulled my overactive brain into a state of serenity. My consciousness floated out of my skylight, and out through the trees, into the pre-dawn sky, and past the blackout curtains of reality.

***

***

***

*YELP!*

Rodney suddenly shot up, as if somebody lit a firecracker under his rear end. I bolted awake, my heart pounding. The dog panted and paced around in a circle, revealing a suddenly sleepy eyed Charlie, purring like a Harley Davidson, wanting to snuggle up to his unwilling brother after an exhausting night of wanton feline fuckery.

Without warning, Rodney jumped up on the bed, circled several times, and plopped down in the protection of my leg nook, shaking the entire bed with enough force to make Jess shift in her sleep. The cat remained on the floor out of sight, but circled around the footprint of the bed over and over again, like some kind of purring shark. Rodney looked nervously over the lip of the bed, keeping an eye on the pint sized bully below. I let loose a litany of whispered curse words that have no business being strung together in that particular order. My watch read 5:57 am.

I stared back up through the skylight once more, defeated. I was broken. The corpse of hope lay splayed in front of me. Charlie won. Charlie was always going to win.

***

The next thing I knew, overcast morning light was streaming through the bedroom windows, and I could hear Jess brushing her teeth in the bathroom. I picked up my phone, and realized it was 7:00 am. Despite Charlie’s best efforts, I’d accidentally managed to steal an hour of sleep for myself, which could hardly be construed as a victory, but at least it meant they day might be salvageable with some extra coffee and a well-placed power nap.

“Morning!” Jess walked into the bedroom in her pink bathrobe.

“Morning.”

“How are you feeling?”

“That cat is no longer allowed to sleep during the day”, I grumbled as I flicked through my news feeds for the morning headlines. “If I’m awake, he’s awake. If I catch him sleeping during the day, I’m dumping a glass of water on his head. I will Abu Ghraib the fuck out of him. Charlie will sleep through the night if it kills me…or him.”

Jess laughed, and continued getting ready for the day. I stumbled downstairs, and brought a cup of coffee into my office, ready to stitch together words as best as my sleep deprived brain would allow. After a while, I kissed Jess goodbye, and she whisked herself off to work.

I drank a second cup of coffee, and contemplated a third, before deciding a long shower would wake me up more efficiently, and without the hassle of heart palpitations. I walked upstairs, turned the shower on, and let it run for a while so it would get nice and hot. I then disrobed, opened the shower door, and stepped inside.

[This is the part of the story where the reader remembers that Mike used the stand-up shower as a cat-proof crinkly trash receptacle at 4:00 am; a fact Mike somehow managed to forget in the four hours between when he was originally awaken, and when he turned the shower on.]

My foot made contact with the wet, slippery costume packaging, instantly sending me sprawling backwards in the shower. The shower handle slammed into my shoulder blade like a baseball bat (if you’re curious about what kind of noise that forces out of a person, it sounds a lot like “FUUUUNNHHHHGGHHHHH!!!”).

With the wind freshly knocked out of me, I crumpled to my knees on the shower floor, which managed to twist the shower handle all the way over to the “boil a potato” setting (if you’re curious about what kind of noise that forces out of a person, it sounds a lot like “EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEFFFFFFFFFF!!!”).

I scrambled to turn the water off, and then spent the next minute panting for breath with my back aching; water dripping off of my scalded pink skin, and pattering onto the crinkly costume packaging beneath me.

I laughed; not the laugh of a good-natured man letting a bad experience wash off of him. It was the maniacal laugh of man on the verge of sleep deprived, pain amplified temporary insanity. It was the tortured cackle of a man who just internalized the futility of his existence.

Charlie won again. Charlie was always going to win.

Somebody asks me for an audiobook recommendation at least once a week, probably because everybody knows I’m a total junkie for them. I do plenty of physical reading as well, but when I’m in the car on a long drive, doing super mundane chores around the house, or throwing the Kong football for my collie 18,387 times until he’s tired, they’re perfect.

I figured Facebook would be a great place to list all of the books in my Audible library that I’ve listened to in 2016 so far, and a great time to list them as well with Halloween just around the corner, because almost all of them can be placed in the horror / science fiction / thriller genre. I love that shit.

Here they are, in order of oldest to most recently listened to:

***

Locke & Key, by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez (more like a radio play than an audiobook, but INCREDIBLE nonetheless. I’m relistening to this as we speak because my Audible credits don’t re-up until Sunday, and it’s that good)

John Dies at the End, by David Wong

Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline

Finders Keepers, by Stephen King

The Fold, by Peter Clines (This guy is going some really cool shit. Very science heavy, if you’re into that thing)

14, by Peter Clines

The Passage, by Justin Cronin (This is a great trilogy. Start with this one first)

The Twelve, by Justin Cronin

Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy (Absolutely brutal. Will make you want to crawl into a dark corner with a bottle and denounce humanity forever)

The Annihilation Score, by Charles Stross (The Laundry Files is a guilty pleasure of mine. It’s like James Bond meets Lovecraft meets awkward British comedy. Also a little tech heavy.)

Hyperion, by Dan Simmons (The Hyperion Cantos was something I read when I was eleven or so, and I wanted to revisit it. Definitely more fantasy than anything else, but I’m very fond of it)

The Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons

Endymion, by Dan Simmons

The Rise of Endymion, by Dan Simmons

This Book is Full of Spiders, by David Wong

Lovecraft’s Monsters, by Ellen Datlow and Neil Gaiman (If you’ve ever read Lovecraft before, this compilation of short stories from assorted authors will stuff eldritch horrors up your butt, but in a good way)

Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits, by David Wong

Sacrament, by Clive Barker

On a Pale Horse, by Piers Anthony

Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman

Summer of Night, by Dan Simmons (This one gave me the creeps in a way I haven’t felt since I was a kid, and I was scared of basically everything. Very Stand By Me and It-esque.)

The Winter People, by Jennifer McMahon (Rural Vermont spookiness)

A Winter Haunting, by Dan Simmons (Sequel to Summer of Night)

The Chimes, by Charles Dickens

The City of Mirrors, by Justin Cronin

End of Watch, by Stephen King

The Nightmare Stacks, by Charles Stross

A Head Full of Ghosts, by Paul Tremblay (This one is a total head fuck. Exorcism / possession type of material, but updated and awesome)

The Border, by Robert McCammon (Apocalyptic aliens shit)

The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete first edition, by Joel Richards (a regrettable purchase)

Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch (Blew my god damned mind. Time travel paradox shit. I’ve recommended this to about a hundred people by now)

They Thirst, by Robert McCammon

The Elementals, by Michael McDowell (Creepy house haunting story)

The Last Tribe, by Brad Manuel (don’t get this one; awful. One of the only audiobooks I’ve ever returned)

Haunted, by Chuck Palahniuk

Song of Kali, by Dan Simmons

Lunar Park, by Bret Easton Ellis (Another head fuck. Is the author crazy? Is he sane? You’ll ask yourself this the entire time. This dude also wrote American Psycho.)

Burnt Offerings, by Robert Marasco (Haunted house in rural New York, reminiscent of The Shining and Amityville)

Speaks the Nightbird, Robert McCammon (Historical fiction based in colonial southeastern America. Ridiculously good.)

Here I am reading a chapter from The Adventures of KungFu Mike and the Magic Sunglasses at the anniversary event for Long Story Short, with the theme of “I’ll never do that again.”  I’ll get either better video or a higher-quality audio feed directly from the mic when it becomes available later on.

Michael tests out a chapter from his next book at the “finding your voice” themed Long Story Short event at 3S Artspace in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. His wife (vertically, ugh) filmed from the audience, but professionally recorded video and high quality audio versions of this performance should be available shortly.